Bloody Week (1871)
피의 주간 (1871)
The week of street fighting and massacre from 21 to 28 May 1871 in which the regular army of the Versailles government entered Paris and destroyed the Commune. Between ten and fifteen thousand Communards were killed in combat or summarily executed after capture, and more than 43,000 were taken prisoner. The Communards for their part executed about a hundred hostages and set fire to the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville and other buildings.
In depth
Between 8 and 20 May the army retook the ground around Paris and bombarded the city. On the afternoon of Sunday 21 May troops entered through the Porte de Saint-Cloud in the south-west, but the Commune leadership was slow to sound the alarm, and instead of joining into a single force the battalions dispersed, each to defend its own neighbourhood. Some nine hundred barricades were hurriedly built. The army had grown from 55,000 men in early April to 120,000 by the end of May with prisoners released from Germany, and the German army, though it took no direct part, allowed the French army to take up positions outside the walls on the west.
The first documented executions took place at Parc Monceau on 22 May. Prisoners captured with weapons or with hands darkened by gunpowder, deserters and foreigners were usually shot at once; the rest went before military tribunals and were executed at sites such as the Gare du Nord construction site, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Place du Châtelet and the Père Lachaise cemetery. The Communards set fire to the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice and other buildings; on the 24th they shot hostages including Archbishop Darboy of Paris at La Roquette prison, and on the 26th sixty-odd priests, gendarmes and others in the Rue Haxo. On the evening of the 25th Delescluze climbed the barricade at the Place du Château d'Eau and was shot dead. On the 27th the 147 men captured at Père Lachaise were shot against the cemetery wall, and on the 28th the last resistance in Belleville collapsed.
The army lost 877 killed. The number of Communards killed has long been disputed: Lissagaray put it above twenty thousand and Pelletan at thirty thousand, while recent historians working from cemetery records estimate ten to fifteen thousand. Of the 43,522 prisoners more than half were soon released, but 13,500 were convicted: 95 were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labour and 1,169 to deportation, mostly to New Caledonia. Rossel and Ferré were executed, and several thousand fled to England, Belgium and Switzerland. All were able to return after the amnesty of 1880.
Marx read The Civil War in France to the General Council on 30 May, two days after the week ended. The civilisation and justice of bourgeois order, he wrote, comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters, and then stands forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. Every year since 1880 a march to the Communards' Wall has been held in the last week of May.