# The Paris Commune/Appendix 2

"BLOODY WEEK"
Capitalist Vengeance.—The Quick-Lime Death-Pits of Montparnasse.—Slaughter at the Mur des Fédérés—The Murder Galliffet and the Traitor Millerand.—Communards Buried Alive—Children Fifteen Years of Age Included in the Slaughter.—Doomed Men Compelled to Walk Over the Corpses of their Murdered Comrades.
By Lucien Sanial.
(See page 98.)
The atrocities of the "Bloody Week".—Semaine Sanglante is the name under which that terrible week has passed into history—were but in part, and we may say in very small part, known to Marx when he wrote these lines; for at that particular moment, and for several days thereafter, he had no other source of information than the incomplete and disconnected reports of the London dailies. In order to form an approximate idea of their extent and savagery, it is necessary to read the thrilling account which Lissagaray gives of them in his History of the Commune. As the merit of his narrative is not only in its accuracy, but in its consecutiveness, and as we cannot here reproduce it in full, we shall not mutilate it into extracts. But the contemporary testimony of the capitalist press, which is not now so readily accessible as Lissagaray's book, has also a special value, and to Marx's quotation from a "Tory organ" we may add a few others, typical of the many of the same sort that might be made from the published letters of newspaper correspondents and editorial utterances of journalists who witnessed the horrible scenes which they described.
The Paris Temps stated that "immense pits ten meters (thirty-three feet) square and equally deep have been dug at the Montparnasse cemetery, in which layers of twenty corpses each, covered with lime, are superposed." According to the Paris Liberté the Champs de Mars was used for a similar purpose, and the bodies were thrown pellmell into deep trenches. The Théâtre ​Français Square, the Pigalle Square, and many other places were used for hasty burial, in fear of pestilence. "There are," stated that paper, "streets in Paris in which the dead bodies are being accumulated and in every house of which a number of corpses are awaiting interment." … "On the Saint Michel Boulevard, stages are driven to each barricade and may then be seen slowly filling up as with a tide of cadavres. The sight of limbs hanging out of these stages is ghastly beyond expression." Numbers of those who had been shot at the Loban barracks and other places in proximity to the river were expeditiously thrown into it. The reporter of a conservative paper, says Camille Pelletan, took the trouble of counting those he had seen floating in the course of a short walk along the quay: he called that "la pêche au fédéré." The Petite Presse noticed a long and persistent streak of blood in the river, passing under the second arch of the Tuilleries bridge and running swiftly far out of sight.
In his testimony before the legislative Commission of Inquiry, instituted with a view to whitewashing the Versailles government, the bourgeois senator Cambon had to declare that in his opinion the number of prisoners shot by the troops had been greater than the actual number of fighting men behind the barricades.
The last stand of the Parisian proletariat was at the Père la Chaise cemetery. In commenting on this final scene of the great drama, the Temps said two days later: "More than ten thousand Federals, killed at that place and in its immediate neighborhood, have already been buried. Many corpses are still lying piled up in family chapels." They were not all, of course, killed in battle. Many prisoners—men, women, and children—had been taken, two hundred at the time, to the foot of a wall now known as the Mur des Fédérés (the Federals' Wall), and been shot with mitrailleuses, their bodies immediately falling into a deep, wide, and long trench dug in front of them. On the day following the adjournment of the International Congress of 1900, the delegates went in a procession to the Mur des Fédérés. But the Millerand-Galliffet-Waldeck police cut the procession into several small bodies and would not allow more than one speech to be delivered.
The London Daily News of June 8, 1871, printed the following from its Paris correspondent:—
The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrich, and was drawn up, four or five deep, on the footway facing to the road. General Marquis de Galliffet and his staff dismounted ​and commenced an inspection from the left of the line. Walking down slowly and eying the ranks, the General stopped here and there, tapping a man on the shoulder or beckoning him out of the rear ranks. In most cases, without further parley, the individual thus selected was marched out into the center of the road, where a small supplementary column was thus soon formed. … It was evident that there was considerable room for error. A mounted officer pointed out to General Galliffet a man and a woman for some particular offense. The woman, rushing out of the ranks, threw herself on her knees, and, with out-stretched arms, protested her innocence in passionate terms. The General waited for a pause, and then with most impassable face and unmoved demeanor said: "Madame, I have visited every theater in Paris, your acting will have no effect on me" (ce n'est pas la peine de jouer la comédie). … It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, or uglier than one's neighbors. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing his speedy release from the ills of this world to his having a broken nose. … Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes afterwards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for over a quarter of an hour. It was the execution of these summarily-convicted wretches.
This Galliffet, "the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire," went during the war by the name of the French "Ensign Pistol." And it was with this Galliffet, as Minister of War, that the "Socialist" Millerand, as Minister of Commerce, entered the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet of the so-called Republican Defense, formed at the time of the Dreyfus affair! The murderer Galliffet and the traitor Millerand! Fit colleagues indeed in a bourgeois conspiracy having in view the disorganization of the socialist movement and the consequent perpetuation of wage-slavery!
The London Evening Standard of June 8, 1871, printed this paragraph from its Paris correspondent:—
The Temps, which is a careful journal, and not given to sensation, tells a dreadful story of people imperfectly shot and buried before life was extinct. A great number were buried in the square round St. Jacques-la-Boucherie; some of them very superficially. In the daytime the roar of the busy streets prevented any notice being taken; but in the stillness of the night the inhabitants of the houses in the neighborhood were roused by distant moans, and in the morning a clenched hand was seen protruding through the soil. In consequence of this, exhumations ​were ordered to take place. … That many wounded have been buried alive I have not the slightest doubt. One case I can vouch for. When Brunel was shot with his mistress on the 24th ult., in the courtyard of a house in the Place Vendome, the bodies lay there until the afternoon of the 27th. When the burial party came to remove the corpses, they found the woman living still, and took her to an ambulance. Though she had received four bullets, she is now out of danger.
Other details of the capitalist atrocities during the "Bloody Week" appeared in the capitalist papers of Paris. A few extracts gleaned at random are here given:—
In the early morning a thick cordon of troops is drawn in front of the Chatelet Theater, where sits a prevotal court. From time to time groups of fifteen to twenty persons, composed of national guards, civilians, women, and children fifteen or sixteen years old, are seen coming out of the theater. They were taken in arms (?) or "otherwise convicted of participation in the resistance." Death is their sentence. They walk two by two, surrounded by chasseurs, and, following the quay, soon reach the Loban barracks. A minute later a musketry fire is heard: they are dead.—From the Paris Débats, May 31, 1871.
It is at the Bourse [Stock Exchange; a fit place, to be sure, for this sort of business] that there was to-day the largest number of executions. The doomed men who attempted to resist were bound to the iron railing.—From the Paris Français, May 28, 1871.
The Military School and the Monceau Park have been transformed into prisons. Executions are also taking place there. Some of the doomed men are displaying extraordinary indifference and energy. Compelled to pass over the corpses of those who have already been shot, they jump quite smartly.—From the Paris Petite Presse, May 26, 1871.
In the Madelaine church, our soldiers did not rest until they had killed with the bayonet every one of the many insurgents who had taken refuge there.—From the Paris Soir.