Organiser of the Polish rising of 1863 who became a general of the Commune and fell at Montmartre in Bloody Week
Born into a Polish noble family in Zhytomyr, he became a Russian staff officer but was arrested in Warsaw while preparing the January Uprising of 1863, just before it broke out. Escaping on the way to Siberian exile, he reached Paris in 1865. In 1871 the Commune made him a general and gave him the western front at Neuilly and Asnières, where he was reckoned its ablest commander; on 21 May it was he who first reported that the Versailles army was inside the walls. He was mortally wounded on a barricade in the rue Myrha near Montmartre on 23 May.