‘Bloody Week’ leaves Paris in ruins
The French Army annihilates the Paris Commune
When the Irish-born cricketer and Paris resident Denis Arthur Bingham entered the Père Lachaise cemetery in late May 1871, he was greeted with a “simply appalling” sight. Amid the labyrinth of monuments lining the graveyard were dozens of open trenches, each containing the bodies of men and women who had been executed after defending the Paris Commune. “Most of them,” recalled Bingham in his memoirs, “wore an expression of anger and hatred which rendered their faces perfectly hideous. It was a ghastly spectacle, from which I turned away with horror.”
The Commune – a radical leftist government formed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War – had seized control of Paris in March. France’s acting head of state, Adolphe Thiers, responded by ordering his national forces to evacuate to Versailles, but it wasn’t long before the army’s top brass were plotting the capital’s reconquest. While the Communards were busy initiating a programme of social reforms, soldiers were being drilled with propaganda depicting their opponents as bestial, criminal and virulent. This impression was given further credence on 2 April, when the Communards responded to the killings of two of their number by taking the archbishop of Paris and several priests hostage.
Thiers’s troops launched their assault on the Commune on 21 May, beginning what would become known as ‘Bloody Week’. By 24 May, large portions of the city were ablaze, as the Communards responded to the army’s near-constant bombardment by setting fire to hated symbols of the old order, such as the Tuileries Palace – a former home of French royalty.
As hysteria took hold and Paris burned, the invading soldiers soon began killing anyone suspected of setting fires eXen child chimney sweeps found with sooty palms were slain in the chaos.
By 28 May, the Commune had been crushed, and thousands of people were summarily executed in the Jardins du Luxembourg. “The simple fact of having stayed in Paris under the Commune is a crime,” the city’s prefect of police, Louis Ernest Valentin, later declared. “Everyone there is to blame, and if I had my way, everyone would be punished.”
The Times, whose Paris-based correspondents had kept readers up to date with the latest developments across the Channel, neatly summarised the turmoil in one of its subsequent editorials: “History has never seen anything like this before.”