Revolutions - 8.8- The Bloody Week

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

The last week of May 1871 was indeed a very bloody week.  Sponsor link: Audible.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 8.8, the Bloody Week. Welcome to the final episode of our short series on the Paris Commune. As you may have gathered, both from the short duration of the series and the title of this final episode, you could probably gather that it is not going to end well for the Paris Commune. But before we get going, I want to give you one final. update on the fundraiser. Those of you who purchased books from my library, those went out at the end of last week and should be arriving or maybe have already arrived on your doorsteps. As for the t-shirts,

there was a minor delay on those, but the printer now has the order. The shirts are being printed and should start being mailed out next week. So if you're wondering if yours got lost in the mail, it hasn't, at least not yet. And then finally, let me just say one last time, how grateful I am for the support. It has really helped us to make this move to Paris with a bit more peace of mind, and in return, I will keep cranking out episodes of revolutions, and while I'm at it, go write the best damn book about the Marquis de Lafayette that I possibly can. Okay, so let's take one last deep breath and dive back into the late spring of 1871. We left off last time with the perpetual chaos and repeated reorganizations of the Paris Commune,

as the leadership attempted to run the city of Paris, advance a revolutionary social agenda, and prepare for a civil war against the government in Versailles. The seven weeks of the Paris Commune sought four different executive governments and five different commanders-in-chief of the military. This was all accompanied by a constant divergence of priorities, abrupt changes in course, and a revolving door among the leadership. By the middle of May, though, the structure of the Paris Commune was a five-man committee of public safety, ostensibly invested with total dictatorial power,

with Louis Charles Delacluse as the War Commissioner, the de facto commander-in-chief of the commune's forces. Now, there was some indication that maybe the members of the commune were getting their act together. The minority of 23, who had walked out of the communal council, in part because they had opposed the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, later admitted that they had been focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time, and within a few days of their walkout on May the 15th, most of them returned to the council and were welcomed with open arms. Now, in contrast to the wobbly dysfunction of the commune, there was a pretty well-organized counter-revolutionary government in Versailles,

led by Adolf Tier. A government had a clear command structure and a singular goal, defeat the commune and bring Paris to a state of total subjugation. Whatever differences the leaders in Versailles had among themselves, and there were plenty of differences. Just about everyone agreed that crushing Paris was, for the moment, the most important issue on the table. Now, Tier and his ministers were of course motivated by their own ideological program, and a belief that the city of Paris had to submit to the national government. They were also being prodded by the Germans. Tierre had signed a final peace treaty with the German Empire on May the 10th, in part to help further expedite the

release of prisoners of war, who Tierre promised to use to bring Paris to heal. Now, technically, part of that peace treaty stipulated that France could not have a large standing army, but Bismarck decided to make it German policy to look the other way as 200,000 soldiers mustered in and around Versailles. But he leaned on Tier to get moving, or the Germans might start to feel responsible for maintaining the social order in Paris. And the last thing Tierre wanted was for the Germans to start Marse. marching west again. So with all of that said, it should come as no surprise that Tierre did not listen to the last-minute attempts of summon Paris to broker a peaceful compromise. A delegation of the

Paris mayors was still trying to work out a deal to halt any unnecessary bloodshed, based on the idea that all Paris really wanted was a degree of autonomous self-government. But Tierre said flat out, I am not listening to this. And nor, frankly, would the communards have listened, because they wanted more than autonomous self-government. They wanted the social revolution, and so they were as unlikely to agree to that deal as Tierre was. On top of the mayors of Paris, the Central Committee of the National Guard was also worried about what would happen when the Versailles Army breached the walls, and they proposed dissolving both the National Assembly in Versailles and the communal council in Paris, and then holding new national elections to try to create some kind of compromise assembly. But for sure,

neither side wanted to listen to that. The only settlement Tierra would accept was the unconditional surrender of Paris. The only settlement the commune would accept was the recognition of their political sovereignty. And so, it would be guns at dawn. Now, though the commune was starting to unify, due to the fact that it was now going to be guns at dawn, at the same time, they still indulged in their unhealthy habit of continuously not focusing on what was really important. For example, on the fateful day of May the 21st, 1871, which, as we're about to see, is indeed a very fateful day, the leaders of the commune were not focused on organizing a proper defense of the city in the wake of the fault of Fort Isay, nor on making sure fortifications were secure, barricades were built, cannons were in good working order, ammunition and supplies properly distributed, nor were they planning how to organize and coordinate a single defense of the city. No, they opened their session on May the 21st by bringing forward General Clusore, who had spent most of April as commander-in-chief of the commune's forces,

but who had been arrested for alleged crimes, and the communal council now planned to spend the day discussing what those crimes might be and how he might be punished. Meanwhile, in the southwest corner of the city, the Versailles Army was at that very moment pouring into Paris. So the communal council was here not just reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic that day. They were holding a meeting to discuss how to punish a guy who had rearranged the deck chairs, just as the Titanic was hitting the iceberg. So while the communal council was meeting

to discuss the fate of Cloussoray, a civil engineer who lived in the west end of Paris, and who was no friend of the commune, went out for a stroll. While on this stroll, he noticed that the National Guard, who were supposed to be defending the gate at Pondageux, remember that was the gate Tierre had identified. as the weakest point in the Paris fortifications, well, there were nowhere to be found. And this guy didn't know if this was incompetent management by the officers or cowardice of the men or some kind of strategic plan. But the bottom line was that the gate was undefended. So he mounted the wall and waved a white flag. A major from the Versailles Army came forward and

listened to this guy's story and then ordered a little reconnaissance and it turns out that it was true. This wasn't a trap or anything. The walls. The gate was just deserted. So while General McMahon and Adolf Tierre had been bracing for and preparing for a tough battle to actually fight their way into Paris, they were instead presented with an anticlimactic victory. But they wasted no time exploiting their good fortune. Within hours, 60,000 troops marched through the gate and started fanning out. They secured control of two other gates into the city, the Sanclu and Versailles gates,

and then spread out over the western sections of Paris, the rich suburban districts where the upper middle class and richer Parisians made their home. And in these initial hours, they found themselves fully welcomed as liberators, rather than attacked as invaders. So this is a pretty fatal disaster for the commune. But when the messenger rushed in to report that you guys, the army has entered the city, like I said, they were busy prosecuting Clusole for his alleged crimes and misconduct. The assembled members of the commune sat in stunned silence when they got. the news. And then they rushed into a chaotic competition to see who could talk over who the loudest.

But there was no denying now that the only thing that mattered was the physical defense of Paris. But I got to tell you, by that point, it was already too late. That which would doom the commune was already done. And they could not undo it. For example, the short-lived war commissioner, Rocell, the guy who had succeeded, Clucere had ordered additional barricades constructed to form an interior ring of defense, but the National Guard had barely even started construction on those barricades. Instead, what would happen is that rather than defending a single coordinated line, each neighborhood constructed their own local barricades to defend their own local neighborhoods.

But this local focus, which was one of the social hallmarks of the commune, left every National Guard brigade isolated from every other brigade. For another thing, though Delacluse and the Committee of Public Safety were ostensibly all-powerful, in reality they had neither the authority nor the means of communication to try to coordinate a single defense, rather than let these dozens of individual defenses play out. So now that the fighting is about to start, there was no way to get the men guarding one neighborhood that was not under attack, to go reinforce a neighborhood that was under attack. The men just refused to budge from their own barricades.

All the Versailles Army really had to do was surround each neighborhood in turn, snuff it out, and then move on to the next one, always enjoying massive numerical advantages and never really being threatened by a serious counterattack. This left everyone making their own individual, glorious last stands. And that is all that they would ever do. Now, the initial defense of the west end of Paris was coordinated by a Polish emigrate general named Yaroswaf Dumbrae. who scrambled to organize some kind of way to stop the Versailles' armies advance. But in the tried and true tradition of the commune, he was soon accused of treacherously allowing the Versailles army to win, and he had to dodge accusations of treason as he ran around on the front lines trying to stave off inevitable defeat.

Fighting in the streets a few days later, General Dombrovsky was hit by a fatal bullet wound, and as he lay dying, his last words were allegedly, do they still think I'm a traitor? Meanwhile, the Versailles Army was able to execute its own strategy all but unopposed, and that strategy was to slowly and methodically worked their way from southwest to northeast, along the way securing control of each strategic point in Paris before moving on. Now, lots of rumors were flying around that the whole city had been booby-trapped with explosives and mines, and so the Versailles Army never moved very fast, but it was an inexorable envelopment that they began on May the 21st.

and they had an easier time of it than previous armies who had tried to enter Paris had because they were the first army to get to take advantage of the new street layout that had been blasted by Ostman over the previous 20 years. It wasn't just that the large boulevards that now crisscrossed the city were much larger and harder to barricade, it was also that it was easier to move around existing barricades and either flank them or come at them from behind, which most of the National Guard companies had apparently never really considered. So the only hope that the commune had was if Paris rose up as one to expel the army. And Delacluse, for all his inexperience in military affairs, at least understood the power of mass

mobilization. So Paris woke up on the morning of Monday, May the 22nd, to posters being thrown up all over the city that sent citizens to arms. And the short accompanying text was simple. It said, no more generals, no more fancy uniforms, no more disunity. Everyone right now, right at this moment, needs to flood into the streets and man the barricades. But it just kind of didn't happen. Remember, over the past few weeks, morale and the National Guard had been plummeting. The infighting among the leadership, the orders coming in from every which way, the coming out to muster each morning and discovering that a few more of your comrades had decided not to show up. it's estimated that at most 20,000 armed men and women came out to man the barricades on May the 22nd.

Probably it was more like 15,000. That was all that was left of the close to 400,000 who had been enrolled in the National Guard during the siege of Paris. While this last little Communard army mobilized, the Versailles Army spent the morning of May the 22nd, slowly but surely making its way north and east. One corps soon reached and commanded the Chom de Mars and the Ecole Militaire. Another swung up north, secured the area around the Arc de Triumph, upon which they then flew the tricolor in, well, triumph, and then they advanced to take the train station of San Lazare. Even further to the north, a unit moved on the Park Monseu, where one of the National Guard companies who was supposed to be holding it got confused and opened fire on another company of National Guardsmen by mistake. This friendly fire debacle forced the communards to abandon the area and retreat east.

The first really heavy fighting, though, came at the Twilery Palace, where the entire palace complex was held by just 300 National Guardsmen with 30 cannons backing them up. They were attacked from both the northeast and from the south, just across the Sen, roundabout where the Muzé d'Orsay is presently located. And though outnumbered, this small company of guardsmen managed to hold their ground in what became an all-day artillery duel. The next day of the Bloody Week, Tuesday, May the 23rd, opened with the Versailles troops advancing all the way to where this all began,

the heights of Montmartre. The cannons were still there, and they still needed to be taken back. The communards had barricaded the base of the hill facing west, but this is one of those moments where they were not prepared to be attacked from all sides, and as units of the army approached them from head on, a whole separate corps marched their way along the northern wall of the city, marching well past Montmartre, and approaching the commune-art position from the northeast,

which the defending national guardsmen were not at all prepared for. In fact, it doesn't really appear that they were prepared for much of anything, and in one of those small ironies of history, the canons of Montmartre that had been so symbolic of everything, they were the trigger point for the whole revolution. They were basically at this point not fit, for use. They had not been maintained. They had not been cleaned or serviced in weeks. They had just been kind of sitting there. And so when it came time to use them, not as a symbol, but as an actual

weapon, they weren't in any shape to actually fire. Enveloped now from multiple sides. The communard defenders fought for as long as they could, and then most of them retreated. About 40, however, were captured, and there would be no mercy for those captured by the Versailles Army during the Bloody Week. It's kind of why it's called the Bloody Week. The 40 captured fighters, a mix of men and women, were marched down to the building where those two generals, La Comte and Clement Tomé had been murdered by the mob on March the 18th. The 40 prisoners were lined up against the wall, and they were shot. The tricolor was then raised over Montmartre. Now, this losing fight, though, does give me the opportunity to tell you about one of the most

recognizable members of the Paris Commune, who I have managed to sorely neglect until just now. It's long overdue. That is Louise Michel, the Red Virgin of Montre. Louise Michel was born in 1830 in northwestern France. She was the illegitimate daughter of a housemate and raised by her grandparents. But her grandparents ensured that she got a decent education, and Michelle wound up finding her calling as a teacher. Always something of a rebel and a libertine. She founded a very progressive and very controversial school in Paris in 1865, and when she got into Paris,

she fell in with the radical political set, associating with Blancissts and steeping herself in the principles of anarchism. Joining many of the most radical women's clubs, she became one of the founders of a form of anarcho-feminism that sought to advance the theories of social justice beyond the traditional male-female social roles that were still emphasized in the writings of guys like Prudon. Always finding herself on the most radical and aggressive edge of any group, there's a great quote from her that she loved it when the government planted agents provocateur in their midst

because those guys always suggested the most radical and aggressive programs. Michel joined the Malmaltre Vigilance Committee during the siege of Paris, and then on March the 18th was the one tending to the wound. of the injured National Guardsmen when it became clear that the government had come to take the cannons. She slipped out of the guardhouse and was among those who raised the initial alarm that triggered the revolution that created the Paris Commune. Joining the National Guard and also remaining head of the Montre Vigilance Committee, her big plan in April of 1871 was to go to Versailles and assassinate Adolte-Eyer. But she was talked out of it because the commune was still trying to get out of this without provoking a

Civil War. But when that Civil War broke out, she donned a National Guard uniform, organized ambulance services for the fighters, and then joined in the fighting herself. When Montmartre fell, she was knocked around by some of the Versailles soldiers, but then tossed into a ditch, probably because they didn't know who they had in hand. Because later, authorities came and arrested her mother, specifically to force the Red Virgin of Montmartre to give herself up, which she did, and she was taken away. Battles were now taking place all over the city, and Paris became consumed by the sound of cannons blasting, rifles going off like firecrackers, marching soldiers, shouting,

dust, bells ringing, yelling, black smoke rising. There was major fighting now to Place de la Concorde and the Madeline Church, which had been heavily barricaded. When the church fell, the 300 guardsmen who surrendered were all executed by machine guns. Down on the left bank, the Versailles Army advanced into the Latin Quarter, where they would spend the next two days clearing barricades and advancing through this old hotbed of student radicalism. Communards, who weren't immediately killed after being captured, would be rounded up and march back to various headquarters established by the army. Their hands would be checked for signs of gunpowder burns, and if it looked like they had fired a gun, they would be hauled before a military tribunal and then shot. By the end of May the 23rd, it was looking like defeat for the commune,

indeed inevitable. So as I briefly mentioned at the end of last week's episode, if the communards were going to be denied the opportunity to build something new, then they were going to focus on destroying everything that was old. That, at least, they still had the power to do. So with the Twilery Palace increasingly indefensible, the commander of the guard there ordered that the walls and curtains and furniture throughout the palace be doused in gasoline and any other flammable liquid they could find. Then they pile barrels of gunpower. at the base of the main staircase, and at about 7.30 that night, they lit the palace on fire before retreating. The commander sent a defiantly proud note to Delacluse and the Committee of Public

Safety, wherever they might be, telling them that he had destroyed one of the great landmarks of royalism. Now, of course, the tuileries was directly adjacent to the Louvre, which is one of the great art museums of the world. And as the twilery flames rose and spread and engulfed the seat of Royalism, the curators of the Louvre, accompanied by Parisian fire brigades, managed to stop the flames from spreading from one palace to the other. The twilery would burn for the next couple days, and be completely gutted and destroyed by the fire. It is in fact why, when you go to Paris today, there is only the Twilery Garden. There is no Twilery Palace. Construction had begun on the palace by the order of Catherine de Medici in 1564.

It served as the residence and headquarters of almost all the kings, revolutionary governments, and emperors of France over the past 300 years. Louis XIV and 15th accepted. Its gutted black husk would sit as a monument to the destructive wrath of the commune until it was all finally torn down in 1883. The burning of the tuileries was just the first of the great acts of destructive arson that accompanied the fall of the Paris Commune. It was soon joined by dozens, even hundreds of more fires, and this arson became one of the

commune's longest-lasting legacies. Now, some of these fires were started by accident. The bloody week was hot and dry, and explosions and artillery set off plenty of accidental fires. Others were started to burn down buildings adjacent to communard barricades. The Versailles Army was finding great success, boring their way through the interiors of buildings to come at barricades by literally bursting through walls behind their defenders. But plenty more of these fires were deliberately set, answering in a perverse way the remodeling of Paris that had been ordered by Emperor Napoleon.

This remodel had destroyed working-class homes and created the wide boulevards that now guaranteed the destruction of the commune. So to put an antithetical capstone on that project, the communards started targeting the homes of their rich and powerful enemies. and then they started targeting the symbols of state power. The torching of the tuileries was just the beginning of a more orchestrated and planned string of arsons. But before we move on, we need to address one of the great myths of the Paris Commune, and that is the myth of the Petrolouse.

The belief that the arsons in Paris were the work of organized groups of fanatical women, who in their grief and rage went around in small groups, often accompanied by their children, like dropping proto-Molatov cocktails into basement windows. And this was a myth that got going right away. The leaders of the Versailles forces believed that as many as 8,000 of these Petrolous were organized into fire brigades. What that meant is that any woman found wearing the poor rags of the working class was instantly accused of being one of these Petrolous.

It became an excuse to arrest her. It became an excuse to execute her. But every modern history of the commune I've read has made it very clear that the myth of the Petrolouse was always just a myth. And sure, maybe one or two women set some fires. But what happened in Paris at the end of May 1871 was mostly either ordered by commanders of the National Guard as they defended their barricades or by the Committee of Public Safety as they sought to destroy all the great symbols of royal and imperial power on their way out the door. So just a few hours after the Twilery fire got started, the next major building to go went, and it was the Hotel de Ville. Construction of this version of the Hotel de Ville had been ordered by the Emperor Francis I in 1533, and it had served as the Municipal City Hall of Paris ever since.

It has also played host to plenty of the most dramatic events of the Revolution's podcast, from the fall of Robespierre and the original Committee of Public Safety in July of 1794, to the Republican kiss that Lafayette planted on Louis-Philippe in July of 1830, to the proclamation of the Second Republican 1848, to the proclamation of the third Republican 1870, and now here to this very moment in the Paris Commune. Delacluse and the new Committee of Public Safety continued to use the Hotel de Ville as headquarters during the first few days of the fighting, but believing it was now indefensible, they plan to retreat deeper north and east into Paris. So sometime after midnight, in the wee hours of May the 24th, Delacluse ordered the building evacuated,

and then he ordered it set on fire. And it too burned into a black and charred skeleton over the next few days. Though, unlike the Royal Twilery Palace, the Third Republic decided it still needed a city hall for Paris. So over the next 20 years, it would be reconstructed. It still looks like a 16th century Renaissance building from the outside, but the interior was completely different from the original. layout. So unfortunately, there will be no finding the room where Ropes-Pierre blew his jaw off. Thanks a lot, Paris Commune. So by the morning of May the 24th, the fourth day of the bloody week, Paris was choking in thick black smoke, and the sections of Paris were falling to the army of Versailles one by one.

By now, desertion from the National Guard was getting pretty bad, and so too was desertion by the leadership. Members of the communal council were shaving their beards and donning nondescript clothes and individually or in small groups trying to slip out of the city, leaving only those foolish enough to keep fighting to die on the barricades. But two of those who would keep fighting were Delacluse and the other guy I introduced last week, Raoul Rigot. The commune's tenacious prefect of police was now serving as the chief prosecutor for the Revolutionary Tribunal that had been established by the decree on hostages, and with Bersai

now summarily executing all of its prisoners, Rigo got the ball rolling on executing the hostages, the lives of whom were supposed to have made Adolf Tier think twice about the war crimes he was committing, but apparently that didn't work. So Rigo corralled the 250 or so hostages that were at that point spread out over various locations and collected them in the La Roquette prison. But after signing the death warrant for the first four hostages, Rigo would not stick around for the rest. But unlike many of his colleagues who were concealing their connection to the commune and running, Rigo went home.

He ditched his civilian clothes and donned his National Guard uniform. And then he went out to rally the men and women in the streets back to action, to show them that their leaders had not, in fact, abandoned them. But this exercise in patriotic defiance was not going to last very long. Spotted in the street in his uniform by a company of Versailles soldiers, Rigo was apprehended and identified as a communard, although I don't think they knew which commune art they had, a sergeant pulled out a pistol. Rigo shouted, long-lived the commune, and then the sergeant shot Rigo in the head.

They left his body laying in the street where it was discovered two days later. Meanwhile, back at the La Roquette prison, the guards were wondering what to do about the rest of the hostages, especially because crowds were gathering, demanding that they all be killed. Rigo's right-hand man was a guy named Teofil Faret. who was a good friend of Louise Michel, by the way, and he signed an order saying that six more hostages should be killed, without explicitly naming which ones. When the Archbishop of Paris was pulled out of the group,

the men refused to execute him without an explicit order. And so they sent the order back to Ferreux, upon which he then scrawled, especially the Archbishop. So the Archbishop of Paris, along with five other senior members of the church, were lined up against the wall and shot dead. Meanwhile, Nelle Clues and the members of the communal council who were still with him sent out further orders to small companies of 100 to 150 men, who would be their new firebearers.

These guys would target and set fire to, among others, the Palais de Justice, the prefecture of police, various churches, various theaters, the Ligendon de Janeiro, and the Council of State. The powder magazine at the Palais de Luxembourg was also blown up. So by the end of May the 24th, the Versailles army controlled about three-fifths of Paris, and what was left of the Paris Commune was going to make sure that what they held was nothing but smoldering ruins. Now, I'm almost certain that by this point, Delacluse has decided that he's not going to get out of this alive, that he doesn't want to get out of this alive.

He's already dying from the tuberculosis that he had contracted during his years of imprisonment. He had achieved his lifelong ambition of prosecuting a successful revolution, and now he was watching as that revolution fell apart all around him. So Delacluse decided that May the 25th, 1871 would be the day that he took his leave from this cruel, cruel world. Hour by hour more and more of Paris was enveloped by the army. More barricades were torn down, more communards executed. But like Orygo, Delacluse planned to go out as a defiant and proud member of the commune, not one who was scurrying to get away.

But he also did not plan to be taken prisoner. As sunset approached that night, he put on a red sash, a symbol of his position in the commune, and walked out alone into the street near the Place de Chateau d'E, where an uncaptured barricade still held out. He mounted that barricade and bore his chest to the Versailles soldiers on the other side. Almost certainly having no idea who this suicidal old man was, the soldiers obliged him anyway, and they shot him dead. The sixth and seventh days of the bloody week. May the 26th and May the 27th, focused on Bouchemont and the Perlachet Cemetery.

That is where the last real fighting took place. The last holdout communards had artillery that actually worked, and they used it to blast away at any and all approaching soldiers. The final battle erupted on the morning of the 27th, when the army launched an all-out attack on the heights of Bouchamont. It took them all day, but they finally forced the communards to give up and surrender as those communards ran out of bullets. The captured prisoners were then lined up 40 at a time next to dug out trenches and mowed down by machine guns.

A few hours later, the same fate befell their comrades who were holding out in the Père Lachez Cemetery. And for the record, yes, that is the famous cemetery with all the famous people in it, like every famous French artist and writer and poet, and yet still when we Americans get there, all we want to know is, where is Jim Morrison? So there were about 200 communards left fighting, but by the time they finally surrendered, only 150 were left, and almost all of them were wounded. They were, of course, lined up against a wall and shot. And so when you're done locating Jim Morrison in the Perlachez Cemetery,

you can go find the communard wall, which is where all of this took place. There's a little plaque there and everything. The next couple of days were mostly just mop-up operations for the Versailles Army. Some barricaded neighborhoods never were taken by force, but with everything clearly lost, the men there surrendered rather than fight to the last man. It's possible they were hoping for clemency of some kind. Most would not get it. There's a story, for example, of one Versailles General who came across a hospital with 400 wounded

men being tended by a doctor. He ordered them all executed, and later reported that they were only pretending to be wounded and that the doctor was a fake. There are also stories of women and children going looking for dead husbands and fathers, being accused of being petrolus, and then similarly being arrested and executed. But by now, we're moving. into another mythical area, where the crimes of Tierra and the Versailles Army get ever more heartless and gruesome and cruel with each retelling, and it becomes hard to differentiate between verifiable fact and exaggerated anecdote, as the Paris Commune was even at that moment,

transforming from a living experiment with revolutionary working-class government into a tragic legend. When they were done mopping up, it was all over. The Paris Commune was no more. A final accounting of the destruction of the commune and the destruction of Paris is hard to really wrap your head around. And participants that participated in the events, and historians even now, have been arguing about the final accounting ever since. Conservatives naturally downplay the government's atrocities and exaggerate the commune's crimes, and later left-wing anarchists and socialists and communists would do the opposite. But it's from the Army's own accounts that we get reports of the summary executions. Those are simply a matter of fact. And as for the total

dead, Marshall McMahon was interviewed by an investigatory committee that was set up in August, and they confronted him with the number of 17,000 communards killed, and he said, no, that number is too high. Maybe if you combine the dead and the wounded, but probably it was more like 6,000. In his history of the Paris commune, the commune participant, Prosper Olivier Lissagraille, quote 20,000 dead, which is probably a mild exaggeration of the number that had been tossed around during that investigation. Later revolutionaries, looking to heighten the scale of the horror of the bloody week, would run that number up close to 40,000. But that is frankly unbelievable. Later studies of the Moor records can account for 6 to 7,000 dead, but that number has been challenged as being too low and not accounting for the mass graves.

So this is all kind of an ongoing battle, but I think that you could probably guess that it's somewhere in the range of 10,000. And that was all just in the Bloody Week, which itself only tells half the story. Because it is also reported that about 43,000 Parisians were taken prisoner over the course of the Bloody Week, mostly men, but well over 1,000 women and also 600 children under the age of 16. About half that number was let go on various grounds, but 16,000 were brought up on charges of treason, and of those, while over 90% were given death sentences. Some of those sentences were commuted, but most were not. The rest of those in custody were sentenced to exile or deportation or prison terms. When Louise Michelle came before the tribunal in December of 1871, she said that they would be cowards if they didn't kill her.

but they didn't kill her. Instead, they deported her to New Caledonia. Her friend, Theofiel Féret, who had signed the execution orders, was himself executed for that crime. Gustav Corber, however, the painter who had brought down the von derogne column, and who had wound up serving on the communal council, was only given six months in prison. But then they billed him for the enormous cost of re-erecting the column, and that forced him to flee into exile in Switzerland to avoid bankruptcy. Now, amazingly, Louis August Blonkey, who was the most relentless revolutionary of them all, even if he had missed the Paris Commune because he had already been taken off to prison,

was not executed. He was instead sentenced to deportation, but his age and his health reduced that to a mere prison term. And then he lived long enough to be freed in the coming amnesty. But they were the lucky ones. I think as a result of these trials, you can probably add another 10 to 15,000 to 10,000 deaths. So that's going to bring the dead up to somewhere between 20 and 25,000 total. This is a huge number. It's at least double, if not triple, the number killed during the June day's uprising in 1848, and frankly, a lot of those deaths had been in the heat of battle,

whereas this was a lot of cold-blooded, calculated murder. And it speaks to Adel Thier and the other members of the government seeking not just to end the Paris commune, but to crush revolutionary Paris once and for all. The near century of cyclical revolutionary action that had started in 1789 and then returned in 1830 and then returned again in 1848 and then again in 1870 and 1871, it had to end. And in this, Tierra was mostly successful. And you don't really see another major Parisian uprising until the summer of 1968. But that is a story for another time. So the revolutionary cycle of upheaval and violence and suffering that Paris had just endured, beginning when the Germans laid siege in September of 1870, and finally ending with the trials in 1871, is hard to fully grasp.

50,000 had died during the siege, another 25,000 during the commune and the bloody week and the mop-up that followed. Plenty more were deported or exiled. Businesses started complaining that when they went to reopen, that there weren't any workers left, that half the plumbers and painters and bricklayers and cobbler's of Paris were just gone. They were dead or fled or imprisoned. They said that Belleville, which had been a jam-packed working-class neighborhood, was now populated only by old women. And Paris itself was of course scarred by gunfire, artillery blasts, hundreds of buildings had been gutted by fire. Some were torn down and rebuilt. Others were not. It was a physically, mentally, emotionally, and psychologically traumatizing year. And in many ways, Paris has

still not gotten over it. As the years passed, though, the memory of the commune lived on, but the fear of the commune and the desire to visit vengeance on the communards faded. And by 1879, the Assembly of the Third Republic granted a partial amnesty to communards who had been deported or gone into exile. And short, final tangent alert, speaking of the Third Republic, it's going to remain in place after its founding in September of 1870. Even though the royalist members of the National Assembly had worked out an agreement to restore the monarchy, to restore the Bourbons, in fact, and they offered the crown to Henri, the Duke of Chambot, who was the grandson of King Charles the 10th. He was actually the miracle baby I talked about in episode 6.1. But he would only take the

crown on the condition that all vestiges of the revolution be erased. Most especially, the tricolor must be replaced by the white flag of the bourbons. He was told that this was impossible, but he persisted. And so the restoration never happened, and the Third Republic lived on. The Bourbons had found yet another way to let the Crown of France slip through their fingers. End of tangent. Okay, so then in 1880, following up on the partial amnesty, there was a general amnesty. The urge for national reconciliation now outweighed the desire for revenge. And, like the original French Revolution, the Paris Commune was folded into the history of revolutionary France, an inspiration to some, a warning to others, but now and forever, a part of the tumultuous history

of France. Now, what the legacy of the Paris Commune would be, we will have plenty of time yet to explore, because its example, studying how it came about, what it did right, what it did wrong, how it could have succeeded, became topics of great interest to Carlin, and Marx and Friedrich Engels, and then later to Lenin and Trotsky, as they tried to put revolutionary theory into practice. And they look to the Paris Commune, both for its inspirations and for its warnings. So the Paris Commune, like the rest of French Revolutionary history, will play an active role in the unfolding of our series on the Russian Revolution. But before we move on to Russia, we must deal with a revolution that I have been dying to tell you about since well before this

revolution's podcast ever began because the cry of land and liberty was being raised across Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. And before anyone knew what was happening, the winds of revolution swept the country. And so when we come back, we will be talking about Via as Zapata and the Mexican Revolution.