"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
