People of the Revolution and the USSR

France state institutions 1823–1900 ○ Natural causes

French soldier who served as the Paris Commune’s Delegate for War

As the Commune’s Delegate for War, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but was arrested amid conflicts with its leaders.

Cluseret served in the French army, Garibaldi’s volunteers and the Union Army during the American Civil War. As Delegate for War of the Paris Commune in 1871, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but clashed with Commune leaders and was arrested on a charge of betrayal; an ad hoc court acquitted him. He escaped France after the Commune’s defeat, returned under the 1880 amnesty, and was elected a socialist deputy for Toulon in 1888, 1889, 1893 and 1898. He later moved away from socialism and joined the anti-Dreyfus camp.

1836–1871 ✕ Killed in action

Organiser of the Polish rising of 1863 who became a general of the Commune and fell at Montmartre in Bloody Week

Arrested while preparing the 1863 uprising and sentenced to Siberian hard labour, Dąbrowski escaped. As a general of the Paris Commune, he fought Versailles forces and was mortally wounded on 23 May 1871.

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.

France state institutions 1844–1871 ✕ Executed

French army officer who served as the Paris Commune’s war delegate

He sought to reorganize the Commune’s defenses, but National Guard units largely refused to serve outside their own districts.

Louis-Nathaniel Rossel was a French army officer and the only senior French officer to join the Paris Commune in 1871. As its war delegate, he sought to reorganize the defenses and artillery, but National Guard distrust of centralized command hindered his plans.

Italy state institutions 1850–1928 ○ Natural death

Italian chief of staff who repeated frontal assaults on the Isonzo, ruled by harsh discipline and was dismissed after Caporetto

Born in Piedmont, the son of a general, he became an artillery officer known for strict discipline and the doctrine of the offensive. As chief of staff of the Italian Army in 1914–1917 he launched offensive after offensive along the Isonzo. There were gains such as Gorizia, but he accepted huge losses, holding that the war could only end through the exhaustion of men and resources. He dismissed 217 officers and ordered the summary execution of officers whose units retreated; about 750 soldiers were executed under him, the most of any army in the war. After the disaster at Caporetto in October 1917, where 275,000 soldiers were captured, he was dismissed on 7 November. He was made a Marshal of Italy in 1924 under Mussolini and died in 1928.

France state institutions 1856–1924 ○ Natural death

French commander-in-chief whose failed offensive of 1917 brought on the army mutinies and his dismissal

Born in Tulle, Corrèze, to a French father and an English Protestant mother, he became an artillery officer and served in the Boxer Rebellion. In May 1916 he succeeded Pétain in command of the Second Army at Verdun and led the counter-offensives, but was accused of wasting French lives. Made commander-in-chief on the Western Front in December 1916, he opened the Nivelle Offensive at the Chemin des Dames on 16 April 1917, promising a decisive breakthrough. Casualties reached 134,000 in ten days against the 10,000 he had predicted, yet he pressed on without breaking through. A mutiny spread through roughly half the French Army, and on 15 May he was replaced by Pétain. He was sent off to command in North Africa and died in 1924.