title: Paris Commune

text: Under the new decree, a number of prominent religious leaders were promptly arrested, including the Abbé Deguerry, the curé of the Madeleine church, and the archbishop of Paris Georges Darboy, who was confined at the Mazas prison. The National Assembly in Versailles responded to the decree the next day; it passed a law allowing military tribunals to judge and punish suspects within 24 hours. Émile Zola wrote, "Thus we citizens of Paris are placed between two terrible laws; the law of suspects brought back by the Commune and the law on rapid executions which will certainly be approved by the Assembly. They are not fighting with cannon shots, they are slaughtering each other with decrees." About one hundred hostages, including the Archbishop, were shot by the Commune before its end.


title: Paris Commune

text: By April, as MacMahon's forces steadily approached Paris, divisions arose within the Commune about whether to give absolute priority to military defence, or to political and social freedoms and reforms. The majority, including the Blanquists and the more radical revolutionaries, supported by of Pyat and of Vermersch, supported giving the military priority. The publications , and Valles' feared that a more authoritarian government would destroy the kind of social republic they wanted to achieve. Soon, the Council of the Commune voted, with strong opposition, for the creation of a Committee of Public Safety, modelled on the eponymous Committee that carried out the Reign of Terror (1793–94). Because of the implications carried by its name, many members of the Commune opposed the Committee of Public Safety's creation.


title: Paris Commune

text: The committee was given extensive powers to hunt down and imprison enemies of the Commune. Led by Raoul Rigault, it began to make several arrests, usually on suspicion of treason, intelligence with the enemy, or insults to the Commune. Those arrested included General Edmond-Charles de Martimprey, the governor of the Invalides, alleged to have caused the assassination of revolutionaries in December 1851—as well as more recent commanders of the National Guard, including Gustave Cluseret. High religious officials had been arrested: Archbishop Darboy, the Vicar General Abbé Lagarde, and the Curé of the Madeleine Abbé Deguerry. The policy of holding hostages for possible reprisals was denounced by some defenders of the Commune, including Victor Hugo, in a poem entitled "No Reprisals" published in Brussels on 21 April. On 12 April, Rigault proposed to exchange Archbishop Darboy and several other priests for the imprisoned Blanqui. Thiers refused the proposal. On 14 May, Rigault proposed to exchange 70 hostages for the extreme-left leader, and Thiers again refused.


title: Paris Commune

text: Since every able-bodied man in Paris was obliged to be a member of the National Guard, the Commune on paper had an army of about 200,000 men on 6 May; the actual number was much lower, probably between 25,000 and 50,000 men. At the beginning of May, 20 percent of the National Guard was reported absent without leave.


title: Paris Commune

text: By the end of the Commune, 43,522 prisoners were captured, 7000 to 8000 Communards had gone into exile abroad, and an estimated 10 to 15,000 Communards were killed, giving a total Commune force of about 65,000 men.


title: Paris Commune

text: The National Guard had hundreds of cannons and thousands of rifles in its arsenal, but only half of the cannons and two-thirds of the rifles were ever used. There were heavy naval cannons mounted on the ramparts of Paris, but few national guardsmen were trained to use them. Between the end of April and 20 May, the number of trained artillerymen fell from 5,445 to 2,340.


title: Paris Commune

text: The officers of the National Guard were elected by the soldiers, and their leadership qualities and military skills varied widely. Gustave Cluseret, the commander of the National Guard until his dismissal on 1 May, had tried to impose more discipline in the army, disbanding many unreliable units and making soldiers live in barracks instead of at home. He recruited officers with military experience, particularly Poles who had fled to France in 1863, after Russians quelled the January Uprising; they played a prominent role in the last days of the Commune. One of these officers was General Jaroslav Dombrowski (), a Polish noble and a former Imperial Russian Army officer, who was appointed commander of the Commune forces on the right bank of the Seine. On 5 May, he was appointed commander of the Commune's whole army. Dombrowski held this position until 23 May, when he was killed while defending the city barricades.


title: Paris Commune

text: One of the key strategic points around Paris was Fort Issy, south of the city near the Porte de Versailles, which blocked the route of the Army into Paris. The fort's garrison was commanded by Leon Megy, a former mechanic and a militant Blanquist, who had been sentenced to 20 years hard labour for killing a policeman. After being freed he had led the takeover of the prefecture of Marseille by militant revolutionaries. When he came back to Paris, he was given the rank of colonel by the Central Committee of the National Guard, and the command of Fort Issy on 13 April.


title: Paris Commune

text: The army commander, General Ernest de Cissey, began a systematic siege and a heavy bombardment of the fort that lasted three days and three nights. At the same time Cissey sent a message to Colonel Megy, with the permission of Marshal MacMahon, offering to spare the lives of the fort's defenders, and let them return to Paris with their belongings and weapons, if they surrendered the fort. Colonel Megy gave the order, and during the night of 29–30 April, most of the soldiers evacuated the fort and returned to Paris. But news of the evacuation reached the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Commune. Before General Cissey and the Versailles army could occupy the fort, the National Guard rushed reinforcements there and re-occupied all the positions. General Cluseret, commander of the National Guard, was dismissed and put in prison. General Cissey resumed the intense bombardment of the fort. The defenders resisted until the night of 7–8 May, when the remaining national guardsmen in the fort, unable to withstand further attacks, decided to withdraw. The new commander of the National Guard, Louis Rossel, issued a terse bulletin: "The tricolor flag flies over the fort of Issy, abandoned yesterday by the garrison." The abandonment of the fort led the Commune to dismiss Rossel, and replace him with Delescluze, a fervent Communard but a journalist with no military experience.


title: Paris Commune

text: Bitter fighting followed, as MacMahon's army worked their way systematically forward to the walls of Paris. On 20 May, MacMahon's artillery batteries at Montretout, Mont-Valerian, Boulogne, Issy, and Vanves opened fire on the western neighbourhoods of the city—Auteuil, Passy, and the Trocadero—with shells falling close to l'Étoile. Dombrowski reported that the soldiers he had sent to defend the ramparts of the city between Point du Jour and Porte d'Auteuil had retreated to the city; he had only 4,000 soldiers left at la Muette, 2,000 at Neuilly, and 200 at Asnières and Saint Ouen. "I lack artillerymen and workers to hold off the catastrophe." On 19 May, while the Commune executive committee was meeting to judge the former military commander Cluseret for the loss of the Issy fortress, it received word that the forces of Marshal MacMahon were within the fortifications of Paris.


title: Paris Commune

text: The final offensive on Paris by MacMahon's army began on Sunday, 21 May. On the front line in the southwest, soldiers camped just outside the city learned from an agent inside the walls that the National Guard had withdrawn from one section of the city wall at Point-du-Jour, and the fortifications were undefended. An army engineer crossed the moat and inspected the empty fortifications, and immediately telegraphed the news to Marshal MacMahon, who was with Thiers at Fort Mont-Valérien. MacMahon promptly gave orders, and two battalions passed through the fortifications without meeting resistance. The Versailles forces were able to swiftly capture the city gates of the Porte de Saint-Cloud, La Muette and the Porte de Versailles from inside. By four o'clock in the morning, fifty thousand soldiers had passed into the city, and advanced as far as the Champs-Élysées.


title: Paris Commune

text: When he received the news from Dombrowski that the army was inside Paris, the Commune leader Delescluze refused to believe it, and refused to ring the bells to warn the city until the following morning. The trial of Gustave Cluseret, the former commander, was still going on at the Commune when they received the message from General Dombrowski that the army was inside the city. He asked for reinforcements and proposed an immediate counterattack. "Remain calm," he wrote, "and everything will be saved. We must not be defeated!". When they had received this news, the members of the Commune executive returned to their deliberations on the fate of Cluseret, which continued until eight o'clock that evening.


title: Paris Commune

text: The first reaction of many of the National Guard was to find someone to blame, and Dombrowski was the first to be accused. Rumours circulated that he had accepted a million francs to give up the city. He was deeply offended by the rumours. They stopped when Dombrowski died two days later from wounds received on the barricades. His last reported words were: "Do they still say I was a traitor?"


title: Paris Commune

text: On the morning of 22 May, bells finally were rung around the city, and Delescluze, as delegate for war of the Commune, issued a proclamation, posted all over Paris:


title: Paris Commune

text: Despite the appeals, only fifteen to twenty thousand persons, including many women and children, responded. The forces of the Commune were outnumbered five-to-one by the army of Marshal MacMahon.


title: Paris Commune

text: Once the fighting began inside Paris, the strong neighborhood loyalties that had been an advantage of the Commune became something of a disadvantage: instead of an overall planned defence, each "quartier" fought desperately for its survival, and each was overcome in turn. The webs of narrow streets that made entire districts nearly impregnable in earlier Parisian revolutions had in the centre been replaced by wide boulevards during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. The Versailles forces enjoyed a centralised command and had superior numbers. Equally important, they had learned the tactics of street fighting from 1848 and earlier uprisings. They avoided making frontal attacks on Commune barricades. They tunnelled through walls of neighbouring houses to establish positions above the barricades, and gradually worked their way around and behind them, usually forcing the Communards to withdraw without a fight. The majority of the barricades in Paris were abandoned without combat.On the morning of 22 May, the regular army occupied a large area from the Porte Dauphine; to the Champs-de-Mars and the École Militaire, where general Cissey established his headquarters; to the Porte de Vanves. In a short time the 5th corps of the army advanced toward Parc Monceau and Place Clichy, while General Douay occupied the Place de l'Étoile and General Clichant occupied the Gare Saint-Lazaire. Little resistance was encountered in the west of Paris, but the army moved forward slowly and cautiously, in no hurry.


title: Paris Commune

text: No one had expected the army to enter the city, so only a few large barricades were already in place, on the Rue Saint-Florentin and Rue de l'Opéra, and the Rue de Rivoli. Barricades had not been prepared in advance; some nine hundred barricades were built hurriedly out of paving stones and sacks of earth. Many other people prepared shelters in the cellars. The first serious fighting took place on the afternoon of the 22nd, an artillery duel between regular army batteries on the Quai d'Orsay and the Madeleine, and National Guard batteries on the terrace of the Tuileries Palace. On the same day, the first executions of National Guard soldiers by the regular army inside Paris took place; some sixteen prisoners captured on the Rue du Bac were given a summary hearing, and then shot.


title: Paris Commune

text: On 23 May the next objective of the army was the butte Montmartre, where the uprising had begun. The National Guard had built and manned a circle of barricades and makeshift forts around the base of the butte. The eighty-five cannon and twenty rapid-firing guns captured from the army at the beginning of the Commune were still there, but no one had expected an attack and they had no ammunition, powder cartridges or trained gunners.


title: Paris Commune

text: The garrison of one barricade, at Chaussee Clignancourt, was defended in part by a battalion of about thirty women, including Louise Michel, the celebrated "Red Virgin of Montmartre", who had already participated in many battles outside the city. She was seized by regular soldiers and thrown into the trench in front of the barricade and left for dead. She escaped and soon afterwards surrendered to the army, to prevent the arrest of her mother. The battalions of the National Guard were no match for the army; by midday on the 23rd the regular soldiers were at the top of Montmartre, and the tricolor flag was raised over the Solferino tower. The soldiers captured 42 guardsmen and several women, took them to the same house on Rue Rosier where generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte had been executed, and shot them. On the Rue Royale, soldiers seized the formidable barricade around the Madeleine church; 300 prisoners captured with their weapons were shot there, the largest of the mass executions of the rebels.


title: Paris Commune

text: On the same day, having had little success fighting the army, units of national guardsmen began to take revenge by burning public buildings symbolising the government. The guardsmen led by Paul Brunel, one of the original leaders of the Commune, took cans of oil and set fire to buildings near the Rue Royale and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Following the example set by Brunel, guardsmen set fire to dozens of other buildings on Rue Saint-Florentin, Rue de Rivoli, Rue de Bac, Rue de Lille, and other streets.


title: Paris Commune

text: The Tuileries Palace, which had been the residence of most of the monarchs of France from Henry IV to Napoleon III, was defended by a garrison of some three hundred National Guard with thirty cannon placed in the garden. They had been engaged in a day-long artillery duel with the regular army. At about seven in the evening, the commander of the garrison, Jules Bergeret, gave the order to burn the palace. The walls, floors, curtains and woodwork were soaked with oil and turpentine, and barrels of gunpowder were placed at the foot of the grand staircase and in the courtyard, then the fires were set. The fire lasted 48 hours and gutted the palace, except for the southernmost part, the . Bergeret sent a message to the Hotel de Ville: "The last vestiges of royalty have just disappeared. I wish that the same will happen to all the monuments of Paris."


title: Paris Commune

text: The Richelieu library of the Louvre, connected to the Tuileries, was also set on fire and entirely destroyed. The rest of the Louvre was saved by the efforts of the museum curators and fire brigades. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, later a lover of Eleanor Marx, asserted that many of the fires were caused by artillery from the French army, and that women in the Commune were wrongly blamed for arson. The consensus of later historians is that most of the major fires were started by the National Guard and several organised Communard groups; but that few if any fires were started by women. In addition to public buildings, the National Guard also started fires at the homes of a number of residents associated with the regime of Napoleon III, such as that of historian and playwright Prosper Merimee, author of "Carmen".


title: Paris Commune

text: At two in the morning on 24 May, Brunel and his men went to the Hotel de Ville, which was still the headquarters of the Commune and of its chief executive, Delescluze. Wounded men were being tended in the halls, and some of the National Guard officers and Commune members were changing from their uniforms into civilian clothes and shaving their beards, preparing to escape from the city. Delescluze ordered everyone to leave the building, and Brunel's men set it on fire.


title: Paris Commune

text: The battles resumed at daylight on 24 May, under a sky black with smoke from the burning palaces and ministries. There was no co-ordination or central direction on the Commune side; each neighborhood fought on its own. The National Guard disintegrated, with many soldiers changing into civilian clothes and fleeing the city, leaving between 10,000 and 15,000 Communards to defend the barricades. Delescluze moved his headquarters from the Hotel de Ville to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement. More public buildings were set afire, including the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, the theatres of Châtelet and Porte-Saint-Martin, and the Church of Saint-Eustache. Most of the Palais de Justice was destroyed, but the Sainte-Chapelle survived. Fires set at the Louvre, Palais-Royal and Notre-Dame were extinguished without causing significant damage.


title: Paris Commune

text: As the army continued its methodical advance, the summary executions of captured Communard soldiers by the army continued. Informal military courts were established at the École Polytechnique, Châtelet, the Luxembourg Palace, Parc Monceau, and other locations around Paris. The hands of captured prisoners were examined to see if they had fired weapons. The prisoners gave their identity, sentence was pronounced by a court of two or three gendarme officers, the prisoners were taken out and sentences immediately carried out.


title: Paris Commune

text: Amid the news of the growing number of executions carried out by the army in different parts of the city, the Communards carried out their own executions as a desperate and futile attempt at retaliation. Raoul Rigaut, the chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, without getting the authorisation of the Commune, executed one group of four prisoners, before he himself was captured and shot by an army patrol. On 24 May, a delegation of national guardsmen and Gustave Genton, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, came to the new headquarters of the Commune at the city hall of the 11th arrondissment and demanded the immediate execution of the hostages held at the prison of La Roquette. The new prosecutor of the Commune, Théophile Ferré, hesitated and then wrote a note: "Order to the Citizen Director of La Roquette to execute six hostages." Genton asked for volunteers to serve as a firing squad, and went to the La Roquette prison, where many of the hostages were being held. Genton was given a list of hostages and selected six names, including Georges Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, and three priests. The governor of the prison, M. François, refused to give up the Archbishop without a specific order from the Commune. Genton sent a deputy back to the Prosecutor, who wrote "and especially the archbishop" on the bottom of his note. Archbishop Darboy and five other hostages were promptly taken out into the courtyard of the prison, lined up against the wall, and shot.


title: Paris Commune

text: By the end of 24 May, the regular army had cleared most of the Latin Quarter barricades, and held three-fifths of Paris. MacMahon had his headquarters at the Quai d'Orsay. The insurgents held only the 11th, 12th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, and parts of the 3rd, 5th, and 13th. Delescluze and the remaining leaders of the Commune, about 20 in all, were at the city hall of the 13th arrondissement on Place Voltaire. A bitter battle took place between about 1,500 national guardsmen from the 13th arrondissement and the Mouffetard district, commanded by Walery Wroblewski, a Polish exile who had participated in the uprising against the Russians, against three brigades commanded by General de Cissey.


title: Paris Commune

text: During the course of the 25th, the insurgents lost the city hall of the 13th arrondissement and moved to a barricade on Place Jeanne-d'Arc, where 700 were taken prisoner. Wroblewski and some of his men escaped to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement, where he met Delescluze, the chief executive of the Commune. Several of the other Commune leaders, including Brunel, were wounded, and Pyat had disappeared. Delescluze offered Wroblewski the command of the Commune forces, which he declined, saying that he preferred to fight as a private soldier. At about seven-thirty, Delescluze put on his red sash of office, walked unarmed to the barricade on the Place du Château-d'Eau, climbed to the top and showed himself to the soldiers, and was promptly shot dead.


title: Paris Commune

text: On the afternoon of 26 May, after six hours of heavy fighting, the regular army captured the Place de la Bastille. The National Guard still held parts of the 3rd arrondissment, from the Carreau du Temple to the Arts-et-Metiers, and the National Guard still had artillery at their strongpoints at the Buttes-Chaumont and Père-Lachaise, from which they continued to bombard the regular army forces along the Canal Saint-Martin.


title: Paris Commune

text: A contingent of several dozen national guardsmen led by Antoine Clavier, a commissaire, and Emile Gois, a colonel of the National Guard, arrived at La Roquette prison and demanded, at gunpoint, the remaining hostages there: ten priests, thirty-five policemen and gendarmes, and two civilians. They took them first to the city hall of the 20th arrondissement; the Commune leader of that district refused to allow his city hall to be used as a place of execution. Clavier and Gois took them instead to Rue Haxo. The procession of hostages was joined by a large and furious crowd of national guardsmen and civilians who insulted, spat upon, and struck the hostages. Arriving at an open yard, they were lined up against a wall and shot in groups of ten. National guardsmen in the crowd opened fire along with the firing squad. The hostages were shot from all directions, then beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. According to Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, a defender of the Commune, a total of 63 people were executed by the Commune during the bloody week.


title: Paris Commune

text: On the morning of 27 May, the regular army soldiers of Generals Grenier, Ladmirault and Montaudon launched an attack on the National Guard artillery on the heights of the Buttes-Chaumont. The heights were captured at the end of the afternoon by the first regiment of the French Foreign Legion. One of the last remaining strongpoints of the National Guard was the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, defended by about 200 men. At 6:00 in the evening, the army used cannon to demolish the gates and the First Regiment of naval infantry stormed the cemetery. Savage fighting followed around the tombs until nightfall, when the last Communards were taken prisoner. The captured guardsmen were taken to the wall of the cemetery and shot. Another group of prisoners, consisting of officers of the National guard, was collected at Mazas Prison and La Roquette prison. They were given brief trials before the military tribunal, sentenced to death, and then delivered to Pere Lachaise. There they were lined up in front of the same wall and executed in groups, and then buried with them in a common grave. This group include one woman, the only recorded execution of a woman by the army during the Bloody Week. The wall is now called the Communards' Wall, and is the site of annual commemorations of the Commune.


title: Paris Commune

text: On 28 May, the regular army captured the remaining positions of the Commune, which offered little resistance. In the morning, the regular army captured La Roquette prison and freed the remaining 170 hostages. The army took 1,500 prisoners at the National Guard position on Rue Haxo, and 2,000 more at Derroja, near Père-Lachaise. A handful of barricades at Rue Ramponneau and Rue de Tourville held out into the middle of the afternoon, when all resistance ceased.


title: Paris Commune

text: The French Army officially recorded the capture of 43,522 prisoners during and immediately after Bloody Week. Of these, 1,054 were women, and 615 were under the age of 16. They were marched in groups of 150 or 200, escorted by cavalrymen, to Versailles or the Camp de Satory, where they were held in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions until they could be tried. More than half of the prisoners, 22,727, were released before trial for extenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds. Since Paris had been officially under a state of siege during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by military tribunals. Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; 1,169 to deportation, usually to New Caledonia; 3,147 to simple deportation; 1,257 to solitary confinement; 1,305 to prison for more than a year; and 2,054 to prison for less than a year.


title: Paris Commune

text: A separate and more formal trial was held beginning 7 August for the Commune leaders who survived and had been captured, including Théophile Ferré, who had signed the death warrant for the hostages, and the painter Gustave Courbet, who had proposed the destruction of the column in Place Vendôme. They were tried by a panel of seven senior army officers. Ferré was sentenced to death, and Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison, and later ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding the column. Courbet was given a lighter sentence than other Commune leaders; six months in prison and a fine of five hundred Francs. Serving part of his sentence in the prison of Saint-Pelagie in Paris, he was allowed an easel and paints, but he could not have models pose for him. He did a famous series of still-life paintings of flowers and fruit.


title: Paris Commune

text: He was released, but was unable to pay for the rebuilding of the column. He went into exile in Switzerland and died before making a single payment.


title: Paris Commune

text: In October 1871 a commission of the National Assembly reviewed the sentences; 310 of those convicted were pardoned, 286 had their sentences reduced, and 1,295 commuted. Of the 270 condemned to death—175 in absentia—25 were shot, including Ferré and Gustave Genton, who had selected the hostages for execution. Thousands of Communards, including leaders such as Felix Pyat, succeeded in slipping out of Paris before the end of the battle, and went into exile; some 3,500 going to England, 2,000–3,000 to Belgium, and 1,000 to Switzerland.


title: Paris Commune

text: A partial amnesty was granted on 3 March 1879, allowing 400 of the 600 deportees sent to New Caledonia to return, and 2,000 of the 2,400 prisoners sentenced in absentia. A general amnesty was granted on 11 July 1880, allowing the remaining 543 condemned prisoners, and 262 sentenced in absentia, to return to France.


title: Paris Commune

text: Historians have long debated the number of Communards killed during Bloody Week. The official army report by General Félix Antoine Appert mentioned only Army casualties, which amounted, from April through May, to 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing. The report assessed information on Communard casualties only as "very incomplete". The issue of casualties during the Bloody Week arose at a National Assembly hearing on 28 August 1871, when Marshal MacMahon testified. Deputy M. Vacherot told him, "A general has told me that the number killed in combat, on the barricades, or after the combat, was as many as 17,000 men." MacMahon responded, "I don't know what that estimate is based upon; it seems exaggerated to me. All I can say is that the insurgents lost a lot more people than we did." Vacherot continued, "Perhaps this number applies to all of the siege, and to the fighting at Forts d'Issy and Vanves." MacMahon replied, "the number is exaggerated." Vacherot persisted, "It was General Appert who gave me that information. Perhaps he meant both dead and wounded." MacMahon replied, "That's a different matter."


title: Paris Commune

text: In 1876 Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fought on the barricades during Bloody Week, and had gone into exile in London, wrote a highly popular and sympathetic history of the Commune. At the end, he wrote: "No one knows the exact number of victims of the Bloody Week. The chief of the military justice department claimed seventeen thousand shot." This was inaccurate; Appert made no such claim, he referred only to prisoners. "The municipal council of Paris," Lissagaray continued, "paid for the burial of seventeen thousand bodies; but a large number of persons were killed or cremated outside of Paris." Later historians, including Robert Tombs, could not find the source Lissagaray cited for the city payment for seventeen thousand burials, and Lissagaray provided no evidence that thousands of Communards were cremated or buried outside Paris. "It is no exaggeration," Lissagaray concluded, "to say twenty thousand, a number admitted by the officers." But neither MacMahon or Appert had "admitted" that twenty thousand were killed, they both said the number was exaggerated.


title: Paris Commune

text: In a new 1896 edition, Lissagaray wrote that the twenty thousand estimate included those killed not only in Paris, but also in the other Communes that broke out in France at the same time, and those killed in fighting outside Paris before the Bloody Week. Several historians repeated versions of Lissagaray's estimate, among them Pierre Milza ("...As many as twenty thousand"), Alfred Cobban and Benedict Anderson. Vladimir Lenin said that Lissagaray's estimate demonstrated ruling-class brutality: "20,000 killed in the streets... Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at "nothing"."


title: Paris Commune

text: Between 1878 and 1880, a French historian and member of the Académie française, Maxime Du Camp, wrote a new history . Du Camp had witnessed the last days of the Commune, went inside the Tuileries Palace shortly after the fires were put out, witnessed the executions of Communards by soldiers, and the bodies in the streets. He studied the question of the number of dead, and studied the records of the office of inspection of the Paris cemeteries, which was in charge of burying the dead. Based on their records, he reported that between 20 and 30 May, 5,339 Communard corpses had been taken from the streets or Paris morgue to the city cemeteries for burial. Between 24 May and 6 September, the office of inspection of cemeteries reported that an additional 1,328 corpses were exhumed from temporary graves at 48 sites, including 754 corpses inside the old quarries near Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, for a total of 6,667. Marxist critics attacked du Camp and his book; Collette Wilson called it "a key text in the construction and promulgation of the reactionary memory of the Commune" and Paul Lidsky called it "the bible of the anti-Communard literature." In 2012, however, historian Robert Tombs made a new study of the Paris cemetery records and placed the number killed between 6,000 and 7,000, confirming du Camp's research. Jacques Rougerie, who had earlier accepted the 20,000 figure, wrote in 2014, "the number ten thousand victims seems today the most plausible; it remains an enormous number for the time."


title: Paris Commune

text: The debate was still underway in 2021. A new book was published by mathematician Michele Audin in May, 2021, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of The Commune. Citing cemetery and police records which she said had not been consulted by Tombs and other earlier historians, she wrote that "more than ten thousand" and "certainly fifteen thousand" Communards had been killed in the "Bloody Week".


title: Paris Commune

text: The number killed during the "Bloody Week", usually estimated at ten to fifteen thousand or possibly more, was extraordinarily high by historical standards. Eight years before the Bloody Week, during the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the deadliest battle of the American Civil War, a total of 7,863 soldiers, both Confederate and Union, were killed, or about half as many as the estimated Commune casualties. The number may have equaled or exceeded the number executed during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when, following June 1793, 16,594 official death sentences were carried out throughout France.


title: Paris Commune

text: French writers and artists had strong views about the Commune. Gustave Courbet was the most prominent artist to take part in the Commune, and was an enthusiastic participant and supporter, though he criticised its executions of suspected enemies. On the other side, the young Anatole France described the Commune as "A committee of assassins, a band of hooligans [], a government of crime and madness." The diarist Edmond de Goncourt wrote, three days after "La Semaine Sanglante", "...the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it..."


title: Paris Commune

text: On 23 April, George Sand, an ardent republican who had taken part in the 1848 revolution, took the opposite view. She wrote "The horrible adventure continues. They ransom, they threaten, they arrest, they judge. They have taken over all the city halls, all the public establishments, they're pillaging the munitions and the food supplies." Soon after the Commune began, Gustave Flaubert wrote to Sand, "Austria did not go into Revolution after Sadowa, nor Italy after Novara, nor Russia after Sebastopol! But our good Frenchmen hasten to pull down their house as soon as the chimney takes fire..." Near the end of the Commune, Flaubert wrote to her again, "As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages." On 10 June, when the Commune was finished, Flaubert wrote to Sand:


title: Paris Commune

text: Victor Hugo blamed Thiers for his short-sightedness. At the news that the government had failed to have the cannons seized he wrote in his diary, "He touched off the fuse to the powder keg. Thiers is premeditated thoughtlessness." On the other hand, he was critical of the Commune but sympathetic to the Communards. At the beginning of April, he moved to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who had just died. On 9 April, he wrote, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly." He wrote poems that criticized both the government and the Commune's policy of taking hostages for reprisals, and condemned the destruction of the Vendôme Column. On 25 May, during the Bloody Week, he wrote: "A monstrous act; they've set fire to Paris. They've been searching for firemen as far away as Brussels." But after the repression, he offered to give sanctuary to members of the Commune, which, he said, "was barely elected, and of which I never approved." He became the most vocal advocate of an amnesty for exiled Communards, finally granted in the 1880s.


title: Paris Commune

text: Émile Zola, as a journalist for , reported on the fall of the Commune, and was one of the first reporters to enter the city during Bloody Week. On 25 May he reported: "Never in civilised times has such a terrible crime ravaged a great city... The men of the Hotel de Ville could not be other than assassins and arsonists. They were beaten and fled like robbers from the regular army, and took vengeance upon the monuments and houses... The fires of Paris have pushed over the limit the exasperation of the army. ...Those who burn and who massacre merit no other justice than the gunshot of a soldier." But on 1 June, when the fighting was over, his tone had changed, "The court martials are still meeting and the summary executions continue, less numerous, it's true. The sound of firing squads, which one still hears in the mournful city, atrociously prolongs the nightmare ... Paris is sick of executions. It seems to Paris that they're shooting everyone. Paris is not complaining about the shooting of the members of the Commune, but of innocent people. It believes that, among the pile, there are innocent people, and that it's time that each execution is preceded by at least an attempt at a serious inquiry ... When the echoes of the last shots have ceased, it will take a great deal of gentleness to heal the million people suffering nightmares, those who have emerged, shivering from the fire and massacre.


title: Paris Commune

text: The anarchist philosopher George Woodcock said that "a notable contribution to the activities of the Commune and particularly to the organization of public services was made by members of various anarchist factions, including the mutualists Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the libertarian collectivists Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists Elie and Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel." Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Commune. He saw the Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State," and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.


title: Paris Commune

text: Louise Michel was an important participant in the Paris Commune, though she was not formally introduced to anarchist doctrines until her exile after the Commune. Initially she worked as an ambulance woman, treating those injured on the barricades. During the Siege of Paris, she untiringly preached resistance to the Prussians. On the establishment of the Commune, she joined the National Guard. She offered to shoot Thiers, and suggested the destruction of Paris by way of vengeance for its surrender. In December 1871, she was brought before the 6th council of war and charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she vowed to never renounce the Commune, and dared the judges to sentence her to death. According to court records, Michel told the court, "Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance." Michel was sentenced to penal transportation. Following the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchist movement, as with the whole of the workers' movement, was decapitated and severely crippled for years.


title: Paris Commune

text: Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists, and others have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration of, a liberated society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grassroots up. Marx and Engels, Bakunin, and later Lenin, tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune.


title: Paris Commune

text: Marx, in "The Civil War in France" (1871), written during the Commune, praised the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat. Marx wrote that, "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all of the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them."


title: Paris Commune

text: Later, however, in private, Marx expressed a different, more critical view of the Commune. In 1881, in a letter to a Dutch friend, Nieuwenhaus, he wrote: "The Commune was simply the rebellion of a city in exceptional circumstances, and furthermore, the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, and could not have been. With a little bit of good sense, they might, however, have obtained a compromise with Versailles favourable to the mass of the people, which was in fact the only real possibility."


title: Paris Commune

text: Engels echoed his partner, maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quarters", and other features meant that the Commune was no longer a "state" in the old, repressive sense of the term. It was a transitional form, moving towards the abolition of the state as such. He used the famous term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the Commune was, he said, the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. But Marx and Engels also analyzed what they perceived to be the weaknesses or errors of the commune, including its inability to link up with the rest of the French people, its failure to completely re-organize state machinery, its Central Committee passing over power too soon to the representative assembly, it failure to immediately pursue the retreating bourgeois, and the failure to recognize the possibility that France and Prussia would unite against the commune.


title: Paris Commune

text: The other point of disagreement was the anti-authoritarian socialists' opposition to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state: the anarchists were in favour of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralised workers' councils, as those seen in the Commune.


title: Paris Commune

text: Lenin, like Marx, considered the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". But he criticised the Communards for not having done enough to secure their position, highlighting two errors in particular. The first was that the Communards "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over". Secondly, he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy. For Lenin, the Communards "underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war; and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May".


title: Paris Commune

text: The American Ambassador in Paris during the Commune, Elihu Washburne, writing in his personal diary which is quoted at length in noted historian David McCullough's book "The Greater Journey" (Simon & Schuster 2011), described the Communards as "brigands", "assassins", and "scoundrels"; "I have no time now to express my detestation ... [T]hey threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender."


title: Paris Commune

text: Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted that during the Commune, "the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguishing themselves by the fury with which they fought". However, it has been argued in recent research that these famous female arsonists of the Commune, or , may have been exaggerated or a myth. Lissagaray claimed that because of this myth, hundreds of working-class women were murdered in Paris in late May, falsely accused of being , but he offered no evidence to support his claim. Lissagaray also claimed that the artillery fire by the French army was responsible for probably half of the fires that consumed the city during the Bloody Week. However, photographs of the ruins of the Tuileries Palace, the Hotel de Ville, and other prominent government buildings that burned show that the exteriors were untouched by cannon fire, while the interiors were completely gutted by fire; and prominent Communards such as Jules Bergeret, who escaped to live in New York, proudly claimed credit for the most famous acts of arson.


title: Paris Commune

text: Historian J.P.T. Bury considers that Thiers tackled the crisis in a ruthless but successful way, thus giving a solid base to the Third Republic. As he put it, "the exile of so many extremists enabled the new Republic to [...] develop in a peaceful and orderly fashion."


title: Paris Commune

text: This view is shared by French historian Alain Plessis, who writes that "the crushing of the communards [...] was ultimately to facilitate the advent of the Third Republic."


title: Paris Commune

text: For David Thomson, Thiers had no other option to restore the unity of a country fractured by an overwhelming defeat and innumerable factions.


title: Paris Commune

text: Another French historian, Paul Lidsky, argues that Thiers felt urged by mainstream newspapers and leading intellectuals to take decisive action against ‘the social and democratic vermin’ (Le Figaro), ‘those abominable ruffians’ (Comtesse de Ségur).


title: Paris Commune

text: Even a moderate daily newspaper like wrote, "even though we were to drown this uprising in blood, were we to bury it under the ruins of the burning city, there would be no room for compromise."


title: Paris Commune

text: Theodore Zeldin in "France 1848–1945, vol.I" goes so far as to say Thiers deliberately ordered Paris to be evacuated in order to incite part of the population to rise up and eventually have a pretext for crushing Paris as a rebellious force.


title: Paris Commune

text: The Paris Commune inspired other uprisings named or called Communes: in Moscow (December 1905); Budapest (March–July 1919); Canton (December 1927), most famously, Petrograd (1917), and Shanghai (1927 and 1967). The Commune was regarded with admiration and awe by later Communist and leftist leaders. Vladimir Lenin identified the Russian soviets as the contemporary forms of the Commune and wrote: "We are only dwarves perched on the shoulders of those giants." He celebrated by dancing in the snow in Moscow on the day that his Bolshevik government was more than two months old, surpassing the Commune. The ministers and officials of the Bolshevik government were given the title "Commissar", which was borrowed directly from the of the Commune. Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow was (and still is) decorated with red banners from the Commune, brought to Moscow in 1924 by French communists. Stalin wrote: "In 1917 we thought that we would form a commune, an association of workers, and that we would put an end to bureaucracy...That is a goal that we are still far from reaching." The Bolsheviks renamed their dreadnought battleship "Sevastopol" to . In the years of the Soviet Union, the spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a Communard banner.


title: Paris Commune

text: The National Assembly decreed a law on 24 July 1873 for the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park and where General Clément-Thomas and General Lecomte were killed, specifying that it be erected to "expiate the crimes of the Commune". A plaque and a church, (Our Lady of the Hostages) on Rue Haxo mark the place where fifty hostages, including priests, gendarmes and four civilians, were shot by a firing squad.


title: Paris Commune

text: A plaque also marks the wall in Père Lachaise Cemetery where 147 Communards were executed, commonly known as the Communards' Wall. Memorial commemorations are held at the cemetery every year in May to remember the Commune. Another plaque behind the Hôtel de Ville marks the site of a mass grave of Communards shot by the army. Their remains were later reburied in city cemeteries.


title: Paris Commune

text: At least two squares are named after the Paris Commune. One is the in Paris, another is the Công xã Paris Square in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.


title: Paris Commune

text: The Paris Commune was a recurring theme during China’s Cultural Revolution. When students put up the first big character poster following the May 16 Circular, Mao Zedong described it as the “declaration of China’s twentieth-century Paris Commune.” In the Cultural Revolution’s early period, the spontaneity of every day life and mass political participation during the Paris Commune became lessons to be learned. For example, the 8 August 1966 "Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party concerning the Great Proletarian Revolution" stated, "It is necessary to institute a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune, for electing members to the cultural revolutionary groups and committees and delegates to the cultural revolutionary congresses." During the phase of the Cultural Revolution where mass political mobilization was trending downward, the Shengwulian (an ultraleft group in Hunan province) modeled its ideology on the radically egalitarian nature of the Paris Commune.


title: Paris Commune

text: Pol Pot, the leader of Khmer Rouge was also inspired by Paris Commune and said the Commune had been overthrown because the proletariat had failed to exercise dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. He would not make the same mistake.


title: Paris Commune

text: In 2021, Paris commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Commune with "a series of exhibitions, lectures and concerts, plays and poetry readings" lasting from March through May. The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, planted a memorial Araucaria tree native to New Caledonia in Montmartre; New Caledonia is where thousands of Communards were deported after the Commune was suppressed. The city's plans to commemorate the Commune proved controversial, evoking protest from right-wing members of the city council.


title: Paris Commune

text: The Commune continued to inspire strong emotions, even 150 years later. On May 29, 2021, a procession of Catholics honouring the memory of the Archbishop of Paris and the other hostages shot by the Commune in its final days was attacked and dispersed by participants from a far-left anti-fascist procession, also commemorating the Commune anniversary, outside the Père Lachaise Cemetery.


title: Paris Commune

text: Soon after the Paris Commune took power in Paris, revolutionary and socialist groups in several other French cities tried to establish their own communes. The Paris Commune sent delegates to the large cities to encourage them. The longest-lasting commune outside Paris was that of Marseille, from 23 March to 4 April, which was suppressed with the loss of thirty soldiers and one hundred and fifty insurgents. None of the other Communes lasted more than a few days, and most ended with little or no bloodshed.


title: Paris Commune

text: Some leaders of the Commune, including Delescluze, died on the barricades, but most of the others survived and lived long afterwards, and some of them resumed political careers in France. Between 1873 and 1876, 4,200 political prisoners were sent to the penal colony of New Caledonia. The convicts included about one thousand Communards, including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Daniel Reed Crenshaw (born March 14, 1984) is an American politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer serving as the United States representative for Texas's 2nd congressional district since 2019. The district includes parts of northern and western Houston. He is a member of the Republican Party.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw was commissioned in the United States Navy, and served on SEAL Team 3 in the War in Afghanistan, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. He was wounded in action during his third deployment, losing his right eye to an improvised explosive device. He served as a legislative assistant to Representative Pete Sessions, and was elected to Congress in the 2018 midterm election to succeed the retiring Ted Poe.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Born to American parents in Aberdeen, Scotland, Crenshaw grew up in Katy, Texas. His mother died of cancer when he was ten years old. His father, Jim Crenshaw, is a petroleum engineer who worked abroad, and Crenshaw spent time growing up in Ecuador and Colombia, developing proficiency in Spanish. In 2002, he graduated from Colegio Nueva Granada in Bogotá, Colombia.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: After high school, Crenshaw returned to the United States and attended Tufts University, graduating in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts in international relations and a minor in physics. After a decade of military service, he studied public administration at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, receiving a Master of Public Administration in 2017. He worked as a military legislative assistant for U.S. Representative Pete Sessions.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: While at Tufts, Crenshaw joined the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and received an officer's commission in the U.S. Navy after graduation. He received orders to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S) at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. After six months of training, Crenshaw graduated with BUD/S class 264. He completed SEAL qualification training in June 2008 and received the 1130 designator as a Naval Special Warfare Officer, entitled to wear the Special Warfare Insignia. Crenshaw served for ten years and five tours of duty, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. His first deployment was to Fallujah, Iraq, where he joined SEAL Team Three. He was based out of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in Coronado, California.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: As a Navy SEAL, Crenshaw was awarded two Bronze Star Medals, one with "V" device, the Purple Heart, and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with valor. He medically retired from military service in 2016 with the rank of lieutenant commander.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw lost his right eye in 2012 during his third deployment when he was hit by an IED explosion in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The blast destroyed his eye, and he required surgery to save the vision in his left eye. He remained in the Navy for four years after the injury, and served his fourth and fifth tours of duty in Bahrain and South Korea.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2018, Crenshaw ran for the United States House of Representatives in , which includes northern and western Houston, including Kingwood, Humble, Atascocita, Spring, and the Rice University area, to succeed the retiring Ted Poe. He announced his candidacy in November 2017. Crenshaw credited national security analyst John Noonan for encouraging him to run for Congress. In a February 2018 interview, he said that border security and immigration reform would be two of his campaign issues.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw and Kevin Roberts advanced from the nine-candidate first round of the Republican primary election to face each other in a runoff election; Crenshaw received 155 votes more than Kathaleen Wall, a candidate backed by Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott. The lead-up to the runoff election was contentious. A super PAC funded by Roberts' brother-in-law, Mark Lanier, focused on Crenshaw's 2015 criticisms of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, despite Roberts having also been critical of Trump in the past. The ads also compared Crenshaw's policy proposals to those of President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders. Gaining the endorsement of Senator Tom Cotton, Crenshaw received national attention, appearing in print and television, including on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox Business.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw won the runoff to advance to the November general election. On November 6, he defeated Democratic nominee Todd Litton, 52.8% to 45.6%. After the election, Crenshaw called for the depoliticization of comedy and sports and expressed a desire that political rhetoric be toned down.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: On the November 3 episode of "Saturday Night Live", comedian Pete Davidson joked about the appearances of multiple candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, and described Crenshaw as looking like a "hit man in a porno movie" while adding that he lost his eye in "war or whatever". The joke received widespread criticism, and on the following episode, Davidson and Crenshaw appeared on air together. Davidson offered an apology, which Crenshaw accepted. Crenshaw also used the segment to advocate for veterans' issues. Crenshaw and others have speculated that the joke may have helped him win, as well as aided later fundraising.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw was reelected in 2020, defeating Democratic nominee Sima Ladjevardian from Houston, Texas with 55.6% of the vote to Ladjevardian's 42.8%. During the campaign, he spent over $11 million through October 16, 2020, making it one of the most expensive Congressional races in the country.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: The Inspector General of the Department of Veterans Affairs implicated Crenshaw and V.A. Secretary Robert Wilkie in a 2020 report as having engaged in a campaign of disparagement toward a female veteran who reported sexual assault to the Navy. Crenshaw said, "The Democrats created this narrative".


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw is publicly critical of the Freedom Caucus, whom he regards as divisive "performance artists" for constantly attacking moderate Republicans.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw opposes abortion. In 2019, he received a 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America and a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee. He has said that "life starts at conception", that he believes "Roe v. Wade" was a "bad precedent to set", and that abortion rights "should be decided by the states".


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw opposes gun control measures, including bans on semi-automatic firearms. In response to the shootings in Dayton and El Paso, he suggested exploring red flag laws as a possible solution to gun violence. But after the 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting, Crenshaw partially retreated from the idea, arguing that such laws should be discussed at state level rather than nationally, saying, "What you're essentially trying to do with a red flag law is enforce the law before the law has been broken, and that's a really difficult thing to do" and "if there's such a threat that they're threatening somebody with a weapon already, then they've already broken the law, so why do you need this other law?" Crenshaw has also said that raising the legal age to purchase a firearm to 21 is ineffective but supports expanding background checks to include juvenile criminal history.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Crenshaw said that Democrats and the media were exaggerating the threat. He was a high-profile defender of Trump's response to the pandemic. He did not wear face masks consistently in settings advised by health experts and mandated by Governor Greg Abbott.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw favors repealing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), describing it as an "unmitigated disaster". During his 2018 campaign, he advocated allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, becoming one of a handful of Republicans to endorse what was primarily a progressive idea. By 2019, however, Crenshaw had retreated from this position.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: On May 24, 2019, Crenshaw co-sponsored a bill to extend time limits for claims under the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Act.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: According to "Politico", Crenshaw "voted with Donald Trump most of the time but isn't a loyalist. He's a stalwart conservative willing to criticize other conservatives."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Although Crenshaw had criticized some of Trump's statements in a 2015 Facebook post, he became a "staunch defender" of Trump after the 2016 election. He voted against both articles of impeachment the House of Representatives brought against Trump in 2019.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2020, Crenshaw defended the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a video Trump retweeted, Crenshaw rebutted criticisms that the Trump administration had been slow in responding to the virus.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, calling the United States "a country of heroes." He was one of few convention speakers not to mention Trump.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Trump refused to concede, Crenshaw was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of "Texas v. Pennsylvania", a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the election. The lawsuit claimed that the four swing states that Biden won had taken "unconstitutional actions", and invoked baseless claims of fraud. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on the basis that Texas lacked standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of an election held by another state.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw criticized the 2021 U.S Capitol attack perpetrated by Trump supporters, and said that Trump should have ordered the rioters to stop. During the siege, he urged the protesters to "Stop this bullshit right now" on Twitter. Crenshaw condemned the rioting and some of his fellow congressional Representatives for "saying constantly this is our time to fight." While not naming any politicians, Crenshaw stated they were "lying to millions" and scattered when there was an actual threat to the Capitol. He deemed efforts to fight the Electoral College vote certification unconstitutional, and voted against the objections to the electoral vote in both Arizona and Pennsylvania, but defended Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley against allegations that they stoked the riot. Crenshaw voted against the Trump impeachment on January 13, 2021. In a statement, Crenshaw said that while Trump's words had encouraged "unconstitutional theories that risk the stability of our nation", he had voted against the second impeachment because he felt Democrats had "rushed" the process and that impeaching a president who only had seven days left in office would serve little purpose and inflame further tensions.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: After Liz Cheney was censured for voting to impeach Trump, Crenshaw asserted in an interview that the Republican Party needed "to move on" from claims the 2020 election was stolen, but also accused the media of continuing to weaponize the issue, arguing both were ignoring larger issues such as the economy, the COVID pandemic and illegal immigration. He also said, "I do not think Trump is the devil, and I won't say that; I don't think he's Jesus either." Crenshaw also supported Representative Adam Kinzinger, who sits on the January 6 select committee and is publicly critical of Trump, and criticized far-right members of the Freedom Caucus as "performance artists" and "grifters".


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2022, on his podcast "Hold These Truths", Crenshaw criticized Republicans who contested the results of the 2020 presidential election, saying of their efforts, "It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up".


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2019, Crenshaw voiced opposition to the For the People Act of 2019, saying it would "limit free speech drastically". He also said the bill would use taxpayer money to "legalize" the kind of electoral fraud that he alleges occurred on the Republican side in the 2018 election for North Carolina's District 9. PolitiFact rated Crenshaw's assertion about the North Carolina race "false", adding, "nothing in the bill that expands who can collect absentee ballots, allows people to fill out ballots for others, or loosens witnessing procedures for absentee ballots", as happened in that election. Crenshaw argued that the bill did not include a federal ban on ballot harvesting, and supported the American Civil Liberties Union's opposition to it over new campaign contribution revisions.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: During Crenshaw's 2018 campaign, his website made brief mention of global warming, applauding Trump for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Crenshaw called the agreement "costly and meaningless", virtue signaling, and bad policy. He also said, "We must use our money to develop better infrastructure." In 2018, Crenshaw called for a debate on the causes of climate change, adding, "We can't start off the conversation saying the climate is settled. The right way to have this conversation is to actually listen to what the science says on both sides."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2019, Crenshaw said, "climate change is occurring and that man-made emissions play a part in that. What isn't clear is how our actions will serve to reverse that warming trend, and what the cost-benefit outcome would be. Regardless, we should continue pursuing new green energy solutions that lessen our impact on the environment and create cleaner air and water." In 2020, he criticized solar and wind energy as "silly solutions" that "don't work," and instead advocated expanding nuclear energy and carbon capture technology.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: During the 2021 Texas power crisis, Crenshaw argued that the Green New Deal would lead to similar crises.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2016, Crenshaw harshly criticized then-candidate Trump's "insane rhetoric" toward Muslims and "hateful" speech. During Crenshaw's 2018 campaign, he defended Trump's proposal to build a border wall on the Mexico–United States border. In a May 2019 appearance on "The View", he claimed that 80–90% of asylum seeker requests "don't have a valid asylum claim"; news outlet PolitiFact called the claim "false". In 2021, Crenshaw accused the Biden administration of provoking a crisis on the southern border by having a moratorium on deportations and reversing Trump's policies on asylum and illegal immigration. Crenshaw also argues that Mexican drug cartels have fueled illegal immigration by taking advantage of the US asylum process to smuggle people into the country.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw supports enforcing physical barriers and implementing technology at the southern border to prevent illegal immigration. He has also expressed a belief that people who try to enter the US illegally "aren't bad people" but "they are breaking the law, and they're contributing to an unsustainable system" and are "cutting in front of the line of all the legal immigrants."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw voted for the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020 which authorizes DHS to nearly double the available H-2B visas for the remainder of FY 2020.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: He also voted for the Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 1158) which effectively prohibits ICE from cooperating with Health and Human Services to detain or remove illegal alien sponsors of unaccompanied alien children (UACs).


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw believes that government should not be involved in regulating marriage and has expressed support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In 2015, he took issue with people trying to suggest Christianity is as shocking and as violent as Islam, saying, "the worst thing modern Christianity stands for is anti-homosexual marriage, which is a far cry from sex slaves, sharia law and beheadings."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In the case of a 7-year-old who at the age of 3 began to identify as a girl after being assigned male at birth and was the subject of a custody battle in which the father opposed and the mother supported the child's gender transition, Crenshaw opined in favor of the father. Following a judge's decision to grant custody to the mother, Crenshaw called it "heartbreaking" and added, "[a] 7-year-old can't possibly make this decision or understand it. Parents should know better. I hope this father receives the public support he needs."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw opposes federal funding to "subsidize college in general", but supports it in cases of vocational training. He opposes cancel culture, and athletes kneeling during the national anthem. He called Senator Tammy Duckworth unpatriotic for wanting a discussion on which statues to remove, including those of George Washington.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw supports cooperation with and support for Israel. During some of his public appearances, he has been targeted by anti-semitic white nationalists, known as Groypers, for his pro-Israel views.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2019, Crenshaw co-sponsored a resolution opposing Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, saying that it would embolden the Turkish military's assault on the Kurdish forces. He supported Trump's decision to kill Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In April 2020, Crenshaw and Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill that would allow civil suits against foreign states in incidents related to injury or death. The legislation came in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and calls for the Chinese government to be held accountable for "allow[ing] this virus to spread".


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2022, Crenshaw voiced support for a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson criticized him for this, calling Crenshaw "Eyepatch McCain"—a remark that itself drew much criticism.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: Crenshaw married Tara Blake in 2013. He is a Methodist and hosts "Hold These Truths", a podcast he launched in February 2020.


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In April 2021, Crenshaw suffered a detached retina in his functional left eye, undergoing emergency surgery. As he recovered, he expected to be virtually blind for about a month. He said, "I don't have a 'good eye,' but half a good eye."


title: Dan Crenshaw

text: In 2020, "Fortune" magazine included Crenshaw in its 40 Under 40 in the "Government and Politics" category, writing that he "wears his service to his country on his face."


title: Mulatto

text: ' (, ) is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese is not, and can even be a source of pride. A ' () is a female "mulatto".


title: Mulatto

text: The English term and spelling "mulatto" is derived from the Spanish and Portuguese . It was a common term in the Southeastern United States during the era of slavery. Some sources suggest that it may derive from the Portuguese word (from the Latin ), meaning 'mule', the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey. The Real Academia Española traces its origin to in the sense of hybridity; originally used to refer to any mixed race person. The term is now generally considered outdated and offensive in non-Spanish and non-Portuguese speaking countries, and was considered offensive even in the 19th century.


title: Mulatto

text: Jack D. Forbes suggests it originated in the Arabic term "muwallad", which means 'a person of mixed ancestry'. literally means 'born, begotten, produced, generated; brought up', with the implication of being born and raised among Arabs, but not of Arab blood. is derived from the root word (Arabic: , direct Arabic transliteration: "," "," ) and colloquial Arabic pronunciation can vary greatly. means 'descendant, offspring, scion; child; son; boy; young animal, young one'.


title: Mulatto

text: In al-Andalus, referred to the offspring of non-Arab Muslim people who adopted the Islamic religion and manners. Specifically, the term was historically applied to the descendants of indigenous Christian Iberians who, after several generations of living among a Muslim majority, adopted their culture and religion. Notable examples of this category include the famous Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm. According to Lisan al-Arab, one of the earliest Arab dictionaries (c. 13th century AD), applied the term to the children of non-Muslim (often Christian) slaves or non-Muslim children who were captured in a war and were raised by Muslims to follow their religion and culture. Thus, in this context, the term has a meaning close to 'the adopted'. According to the same source, the term does not denote being of mixed-race but rather being of foreign-blood and local culture.


title: Mulatto

text: In English, printed usage of "mulatto" dates to at least the 16th century. The 1595 work "Drake's Voyages" first used the term in the context of intimate unions producing biracial children. The "Oxford English Dictionary" defined mulatto as "one who is the offspring of a European and a Black". This earliest usage regarded "black" and "white" as discrete "species", with the "mulatto" constituting a third separate "species".


title: Mulatto

text: According to Julio Izquierdo Labrado, the 19th-century linguist Leopoldo Eguilaz y Yanguas, as well as some Arabic sources is the etymological origin of "." These sources specify that would have been derived directly from independently of the related word "muladí," a term that was applied to Iberian Christians who had converted to Islam during the Moorish governance of Iberia in the Middle Ages.


title: Mulatto

text: The Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) casts doubt on the theory. It states, "The term is documented in our diachronic data bank in 1472 and is used in reference to livestock mules in "," whereas (from ) does not appear until the 18th century, according to [Joan] Corominas".


title: Mulatto

text: Scholars such as Werner Sollors cast doubt on the mule etymology for "mulatto". In the 18th and 19th centuries, racialists such as Edward Long and Josiah Nott began to assert that mulattoes were sterile like mules. They projected this belief back onto the etymology of the word mulatto. Sollors points out that this etymology is anachronistic: "The Mulatto sterility hypothesis that has much to do with the rejection of the term by some writers is only half as old as the word 'Mulatto'."


title: Mulatto

text: Of São Tomé and Príncipe's 193,413 inhabitants, the largest segment is classified as "mestiço," or mixed race. 71% of the population of Cape Verde is also classified as such. The great majority of their current populations descend from unions between the Portuguese, who colonized the islands from the 15th century onward, and black Africans they brought from the African mainland to work as slaves. In the early years, mestiços began to form a third-class between the Portuguese colonists and African slaves, as they were usually bilingual and often served as interpreters between the populations.


title: Mulatto

text: In Angola and Mozambique, the constitute smaller but still important minorities; 2% in Angola and 0.2% in Mozambique.


title: Mulatto

text: "Mulatto" and are not terms commonly used in South Africa to refer to people of mixed ancestry. The persistence of some authors in using this term, anachronistically, reflects the old-school essentialist views of race as a "de facto" biological phenomenon, and the 'mixing' of race as legitimate grounds for the creation of a 'new race'. This disregards cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity and/or differences between regions and globally among populations of mixed ancestry.


title: Mulatto

text: In Namibia, an ethnic group known as Rehoboth Basters, descend from historic liaisons between the Cape Colony Dutch and indigenous African women. The name "Baster" is derived from the Dutch word for 'bastard' (or 'crossbreed'). While some people consider this term demeaning, the Basters proudly use the term as an indication of their history. In the early 21st century, they number between 20,000 and 30,000 people. There are, of course, other people of mixed race in the country.


title: Mulatto

text: In South Africa, "Coloured" is a term used to refer to individuals with some degree of sub-Saharan ancestry but subjectively 'not enough' to be considered 'black' under the Apartheid era law of South Africa. Today these people self-identify as 'Coloured'. Other Afrikaans terms used include (translates to 'brown people'), (translates to 'Coloured') or (translates to 'brown Africans' and is used to distinguish them from the main body of (translates to 'African') who are white). Under Apartheid law through the latter half of the 20th century, the government established seven categories of Coloured people: Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua and Other Coloured – the aim of subdivisions was to enhance the meaning of the larger category of Coloured by making it all encompassing. Legally and politically speaking, all people of colour were classified "black" in the non-racial terms of anti-Apartheid rhetoric of the Black Consciousness Movement.


title: Mulatto

text: In addition to European ancestry, the Coloured people usually had some portion of Asian ancestry from immigrants from India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, China and/or Saint Helena. Based on the Population Registration Act to classify people, the government passed laws prohibiting mixed marriages. Many people who classified as belonging to the "Asian" category could legally intermarry with "mixed-race" people because they shared the same nomenclature. There was extensive combining of these diverse heritages in the Western Cape.


title: Mulatto

text: In other parts of South Africa and neighboring states, the coloured usually were descendants of two primary ethnic groups - primarily Africans of various tribes and European colonists of various tribes, with generations of coloured forming families. The use of the term "Coloured" has changed over the course of history. For instance, in the first census after the South African war (1912), Indians were counted as 'Coloured'. But before and after this war, they were counted as 'Asiatic'.


title: Mulatto

text: In KwaZulu-Natal, most Coloureds (that were classified as "other coloureds") had British and Zulu heritage. Zimbabwean coloureds were descended from Shona or Ndebele mixing with British and Afrikaner settlers.


title: Mulatto

text: Griqua, on the other hand, are descendants of Khoisan and Afrikaner trekboers, with contributions from central Southern African groups. The Griqua were subjected to an ambiguity of other creole people within Southern African social order. According to Nurse and Jenkins (1975), the leader of this "mixed" group, Adam Kok I, was a former slave of the Dutch governor. He was manumitted and provided land outside Cape Town in the eighteenth century. With territories beyond the Dutch East India Company administration, Kok provided refuge to deserting soldiers, refugee slaves, and remaining members of various Khoikhoi tribes.


title: Mulatto

text: Africans were transported by Portuguese slave traders to Spanish America starting in the early 16th century. Offspring of Spaniards and African women resulted early on in mixed-race children, termed mulattoes. In Spanish law, the status of the child followed that of the mother, so that despite having a Spanish parent, their offspring were enslaved. The label "mulatto" was recorded in official colonial documentation, so that marriage registers, censuses, and court documents allow research on different aspects of mulattoes’ lives. Although some legal documents simply label a person a "mulatto/a", other designations occurred. In the sales of casta slaves in 17th-century Mexico City, official notaries recorded gradations of skin color in the transactions. These included or ('white mulatto'), for light-skinned slave. These were usually American-born () slaves. Some said categorized persons i.e. used their light skin to their advantage if they escaped their unlawful and brutal incarceration from their criminal slave owners, thus 'passing' as free persons of color. often emphasized their Spanish parentage, and considered themselves and were considered separate from or "pardos" and ordinary mulattoes. Darker mulatto slaves were often termed or sometimes . In Chile, along with , there were also ('dark Spaniards').


title: Mulatto

text: There was considerable malleability and manipulation of racial labeling, including the seemingly stable category of mulatto. In a case that came before the Mexican Inquisition, a woman publicly identified as a mulatta was described by a Spanish priest, Diego Xaimes Ricardo Villavicencio, as "a white with curly hair, because she is the daughter of a dark-skinned and a Spaniard, and for her manner of dress she has flannel petticoats and a native blouse ("huipil"), sometimes silken, sometimes woolen. She wears shoes, and her natural and common language is not Spanish, but Chocho [an indigenous Mexican language], as she was brought up among Indians with her mother, from which she contracted the vice of drunkenness, to which she often succumbs, as Indians do, and from them she has also received the crime of [idolatry]." Community members were interrogated as to their understanding of her racial standing. Her mode of dress, very wavy hair and light skin confirmed for one witness that she was a mulatta. Ultimately though, her rootedness in the indigenous community persuaded the Inquisition that she was an , and therefore outside of their jurisdiction. Even though the accused had physical features of a mulatta, her cultural category was more important. In colonial Latin America, could also refer to an individual of mixed African and Native American ancestry, but the term "zambo" was more consistently used for that racial mixture.


title: Mulatto

text: Dominican friar Thomas Gage spent over a decade in the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the early 17th century; he converted to Anglicanism and later wrote of his travels, often disparaging Spanish colonial society and culture. In Mexico City, he observed in considerable detail the opulence of dress of women, writing that "The attire of this baser sort of people of blackamoors and mulattoes (which are of a mixed nature, of Spaniards and blackamoors) is so light, and their carriage so enticing, that many Spaniards even of the better sort (who are too too [sic] prone to venery) disdain their wives for them... Most of these are or have been slaves, though love have set them loose, at liberty to enslave souls to sin and Satan."


title: Mulatto

text: In the late 18th century, some mixed-race persons sought legal "certificates of whiteness" (), in order to rise socially and practice professions. American-born Spaniards ("criollos") sought to prevent the approval of such petitions, since the "purity" of their own whiteness would be in jeopardy. They asserted their "purity of blood" ("limpieza de sangre") as white persons who had "always been known, held and commonly reputed to be white persons, Old Christians of the nobility, clean of all bad blood and without any mixture of commoner, Jew, Moor, Mulatto, or converso in any degree, no matter how remote." Spaniards both American- and Iberian-born discriminated against pardos and mulattoes because of their "bad blood." One Cuban sought the grant of his petition in order to practice as a surgeon, a profession from which he was barred because of his mulatto designation. Royal laws and decrees prevented pardos and mulattoes from serving as a public notary, lawyer, pharmacist, ordination to the priesthood, or graduation from university. Mulattas declared white could marry a Spaniard.


title: Mulatto

text: According to the IBGE 2000 census, 38.5% of Brazilians identified as , i.e. of mixed ancestry. This figure includes mulatto and other multiracial people, such as people who have European and Amerindian ancestry (called "caboclos"), as well as assimilated, westernized Amerindians, and mestizos with some Asian ancestry. A majority of mixed-race Brazilians have all three ancestries: Amerindian, European, and African. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics census 2006, some 42.6% of Brazilian identify as "," an increase over the 2000 census.


title: Mulatto

text: In keeping with Spanish practice, for most of its colonial period, Puerto Rico had laws such as the or "." A person with African ancestry could be considered legally white if he could prove that at least one person per generation in the last four generations had been legally white. People of black ancestry with known white lineage were classified as white, in contrast to the "one-drop rule" put into law in the early 20th century in the United States. In colonial and antebellum times in certain locations, persons of three-quarters or more white ancestry were considered legally white.


title: Mulatto

text: Historians have documented sexual abuse of enslaved women during the colonial and post-revolutionary slavery times by white men in power: planters, their sons before marriage, overseers, etc., which resulted in many multiracial children born into slavery. Starting with Virginia in 1662, colonies adopted the principle of "partus sequitur ventrem" in slave law, which said that children born in the colony were born into the status of their mother. Thus, children born to slave mothers were born into slavery, regardless of who their fathers were and whether they were baptized as Christians. Children born to white mothers were free, even if they were mixed-race. Children born to free mixed-race mothers were also free.


title: Mulatto

text: Paul Heinegg has documented that most of the free people of color listed in the 1790–1810 censuses in the Upper South were descended from unions and marriages during the colonial period in Virginia between white women, who were free or indentured servants, and African or African-American men, servant, slave or free. In the early colonial years, such working-class people lived and worked closely together, and slavery was not as much of a racial caste. Slave law had established that children in the colony took the status of their mothers. This meant that multi-racial children born to white women were born free. The colony required them to serve lengthy indentures if the woman was not married, but nonetheless, numerous individuals with African ancestry were born free, and formed more free families. Over the decades, many of these free people of color became leaders in the African-American community; others married increasingly into the white community. His findings have been supported by DNA studies and other contemporary researchers as well.


title: Mulatto

text: A daughter born to a South Asian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680, both of whom probably came to the colony as indentured servants, was classified as a "mulatto" and sold into slavery.


title: Mulatto

text: Historically in the American South, the term mulatto was also applied at times to persons with mixed Native American and African American ancestry. For example, a 1705 Virginia statute reads as follows:


title: Mulatto

text: "And for clearing all manner of doubts which hereafter may happen to arise upon the construction of this act, or any other act, who shall be accounted a mulatto, Be it enacted and declared, and it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indian and the child, grand child, or great grand child, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto."However, southern colonies began to prohibit Indian slavery in the eighteenth century, so, according to their own laws, even mixed-race children born to Native American women should be considered free. The societies did not always observe this distinction.


title: Mulatto

text: Certain Native American tribes of the Inocoplo family in Texas referred to themselves as "mulatto". At one time, Florida's laws declared that a person from any number of mixed ancestries would be legally defined as a mulatto, including White/Hispanic, Black/Native American, and just about any other mix as well.


title: Mulatto

text: In the United States, due to the influence and laws making slavery a racial caste, and later practices of hypodescent, white colonists and settlers tended to classify persons of mixed African and Native American ancestry as black, regardless of how they identified themselves, or sometimes as Black Indians. But many tribes had matrilineal kinship systems and practices of absorbing other peoples into their cultures. Multiracial children born to Native American mothers were customarily raised in her family and specific tribal culture. Federally recognized Native American tribes have insisted that identity and membership is related to culture rather than race, and that individuals brought up within tribal culture are fully members, regardless of whether they also have some European or African ancestry. Many tribes have had mixed-race members who identify primarily as members of the tribes.


title: Mulatto

text: If the multiracial children were born to slave women (generally of at least partial African descent), they were classified under slave law as slaves. This was to the advantage of slaveowners, as Indian slavery had been abolished. If mixed-race children were born to Native American mothers, they should be considered free, but sometimes slaveholders kept them in slavery anyway. Multiracial children born to slave mothers were generally raised within the African-American community and considered "black".


title: Mulatto

text: Mulatto was used as an official census racial category in the United States, to acknowledge multiracial persons, until 1930. (In the early 20th century, several southern states had adopted the one-drop rule as law, and southern Congressmen pressed the US Census Bureau to drop the mulatto category: they wanted all persons to be classified as "black" or "white".)


title: Mulatto

text: In the 2000 United States Census, 6,171 Americans self-identified as having mulatto ancestry. Since then, persons responding to the census have been allowed to identify as having more than one type of ethnic ancestry.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Super Bowl XLVIII was an American football game between the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Denver Broncos and National Football Conference (NFC) champion Seattle Seahawks to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 2013 season. The Seahawks defeated the Broncos 43–8, the largest margin of victory for an underdog and tied for the third largest point differential overall (35) in Super Bowl history with Super Bowl XXVII (1993). It was the first time the winning team scored over 40 points while holding their opponent to under 10. This became the first Super Bowl victory for the Seahawks and the fifth Super Bowl loss for the Broncos, at the time a league record (it would later be tied by the New England Patriots following their Super Bowl LII loss) for the most of any team. The game was played on February 2, 2014, at MetLife Stadium at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the first Super Bowl played outdoors in a cold-weather city and the first Super Bowl to be played on February 2.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: The Seahawks posted a 13–3 record and were making their second Super Bowl appearance in nine years. The Broncos were making their seventh Super Bowl appearance after also posting a 13–3 record. This marked one of the few times that two former divisional rivals met in a Super Bowl, as the Seahawks and Broncos were in the same division (the AFC West) from 1977 to 2001.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Seattle led 22–0 at halftime and ultimately went up 36–0 before allowing Denver's first and only score on the final play of the third quarter. The 36–0 lead was by far the largest shutout lead in Super Bowl history; the previous record was 24–0, shared by the Miami Dolphins over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII and the Washington Redskins over the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVI. Seahawks defensive end Cliff Avril scored a safety on the first play from scrimmage. They became the first team in a Super Bowl to score on a safety (12 seconds into the start of the game which set the record for the quickest score), a kickoff return for a touchdown (12 seconds into the second half), and an interception return for a touchdown. The Broncos were held to almost 30 points below their scoring average. Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, a five-time NFL Most Valuable Player (MVP) award winner, threw two interceptions in the first half. Seahawks linebacker Malcolm Smith, who returned one of those interceptions 69 yards for a touchdown, recovered a fumble and made nine tackles, was named Super Bowl MVP.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: In the United States, the game was televised by Fox; with an average audience of 111.5 million viewers that peaked at 115.3 million during the halftime show featuring Bruno Mars, the game was briefly the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of all time, until it was surpassed by Super Bowl XLIX the following year. The game's inaugural Spanish-language telecast on Fox Deportes was also the highest-rated Spanish-language cable telecast outside of soccer. Seattle also tied the 1992 Dallas Cowboys for the third-largest blowout in Super Bowl history, behind Super Bowl XXIV in 1990, a 55–10 San Francisco 49ers victory over the Denver Broncos, and Super Bowl XX in 1986, a 46–10 Chicago Bears victory over the New England Patriots. This was also the first time since 1991 that the #1 scoring offense (Broncos) went up against the #1 scoring defense (Seahawks).


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., those metro areas' business communities separately discussed seeking to host a future Super Bowl. The general thought was that either of these cities being the location of a Super Bowl would symbolize national recovery in the aftermath of the attacks. There was belief that if New York were awarded a Super Bowl (either building a new stadium or renovated the existing Giants Stadium to be the host venue), it might assist the city's bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics in the same vein that awarding Super Bowl XXIX to the city of Atlanta may have assisted the prospects of Atlanta's ultimately successful bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Both New York City and Washington, D.C. were, at one point, seen as likely to bid in 2003 for either 2008's Super Bowl XLII or 2009's Super Bowl XLIII. However, the prospect of the New York City region hosting a Super Bowl proved challenging due not only to the non-ideal cold weather climate, but also due to the difficulty in delivering an appropriate host venue. The city of New York and the New York Jets failed to secure a deal to build a new West Side Stadium (which, according to the initial plans, would have been built with a roof). Proposed renovations to the aging Giants Stadium were still subject to dispute between stakeholders. Giants Stadium lacked a roof, as did the city's two Major League Baseball stadiums. The lack of a venue with a roof was also seen as an obstacle due to the NFL having never played an outdoor Super Bowl in a cold weather climate.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: New York City ultimately bid in 2005 for a Super Bowl. The NFL voted on March 23, 2005 to award New York City the rights to host 2010's Super Bowl XLIV, contingent on the proposed West Side Stadium (the planned site of the game) being completed by 2008. In August 2005, after New York state government officials declined to approve $400 million for the stadium, the NFL decided to revoke New York City's hosting rights, and reopen the bidding for the game's site.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Tampa had hosted four Super Bowls (XVIII, XXV, XXXV and XLIII), while South Florida / Miami had hosted ten Super Bowls (II, III, V, X, XIII, XXIII, XXIX, XXXIII, XLI and XLIV).


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: During the voting process by the league owners, the South Florida/Miami bid was eliminated in the second round of voting, but it eventually took the fourth round of voting for New Jersey's bid to beat Tampa's. The game was awarded on May 26, 2010 at the NFL owners meetings in Irving, Texas.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Super Bowl XLVIII was the first Super Bowl held at an open-air stadium in a "cold-weather" city; previous Super Bowls in cold-weather cities were held at indoor stadiums. However, the temperature at kickoff was a mild , making this only the third-coldest Super Bowl. A major snow storm hit the area the very next day. According to Weather.com, the average high and low temperatures for East Rutherford on February 2 were and , respectively. The coldest outdoor Super Bowl of the first 47 games was Super Bowl VI, held at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans on January 16, 1972, with a kickoff temperature of (Tulane Stadium also hosted the second coldest outdoor Super Bowl, Super Bowl IX, with a kickoff temperature of ). However, New Orleans usually has a humid subtropical climate, with January morning lows averaging around and daily highs around ; also, all New Orleans Super Bowls since XII have been played at the indoor Superdome. Since Super Bowl X in 1976, all but one outdoor Super Bowl has been played in either California or Florida, the exception being Super Bowl XXX in Tempe, Arizona. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell indicated that if Super Bowl XLVIII was successful, additional "cold-weather" Super Bowls would be considered.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: Super Bowl XLVIII was the first NFL championship game to be held in the New York metropolitan area since December 30, 1962, when the Green Bay Packers beat the New York Giants in the original Yankee Stadium, 16–7. Since then, two other major pro football leagues have held title games in the area:


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: MetLife Stadium was the first Super Bowl venue that was simultaneously home to two NFL teams: the New York Giants and the New York Jets, and thus was the first championship game to have two host teams. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (which hosted Super Bowls I and VII) served as the home of the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Raiders, but not at the same time.


title: Super Bowl XLVIII

text: This was also the first Super Bowl played outdoors on artificial turf (FieldTurf) since Super Bowl X (1976) at the Miami Orange Bowl. It was also the first in which two U.S. states, New York and New Jersey, shared hosting duties. This was also the first Super Bowl to be played outdoors since Super Bowl XLIV was played in Miami Gardens.