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From the earliest contemporary commentaries to the most recent scholarly accounts, the exceptional level of violence in Paris during la semaine sanglante, 21-8 May 1871 - 'one of the bloodiest weeks in the annals of human butchery' 1 - when the French regular army (the 'Versaillais') invaded the city, destroyed the tottering insurrection, and slaughtered thousands of Parisians, has been central to perceptions of the Paris Commune as a whole, and, more broadly, of class and political antagonisms in nineteenth-century France. The London Times at once set the tone: 'The French are filling up the darkest page in the book of their own or the world's history', it wrote on 31 May. 'The Versailles troops seem inclined to outdo the Communists in their lavishness of human blood.' 2 Some counter-revolutionaries gloated over the carnage. The head of the government, Adolphe Thiers, informed the nation that 'the ground ... is strewn with their corpses. May this terrible sight serve as a lesson'. 3 Edmond de Goncourt noted in his journal 'the bleeding has been done thoroughly ... by killing the rebellious part of a population, [it] postpones the next revolution'. 4 Karl Marx, in his almost contemporary Civil war in France, made the slaughter of Communards the core of his peroration: the Commune's 'martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.' 5 Military commanders showed no less awareness of the power of martyrdom. General Courtot de Cissey, commander of the 2nd army corps, tried to prevent the body of the radical Tony Moilin, who had been executed by a court martial he had set up at his headquarters at the Luxembourg Palace, from being handed over to his widow for fear that his grave might become a place of pilgrimage. For the same reason, General Douay, commander of the 4th army corps, gave precise orders to bury the body of Charles Delescluze, the Commune's war delegate killed on the barricades, secretly in a common grave so that it could never be recovered. 6
Not only the fact of the killing, which...