Editing Paris Commune (section)

== Communard prisoners and casualties ==
=== Prisoners and exiles ===
[[File:Commune de Paris Prisonniers à Satory.jpg|center|450px|thumb|Communard prisoners at [[Satory]] camp]]

[[File:Commune de Paris éxécution de communards caserne Lobau.jpg|thumb|Mass execution of Communard prisoners in the Lobau barracks, engraving by Frédéric Lix]]

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.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|pp=431–432}}

[[File:Théophile Ferré by Appert.jpg|thumb|upright|The Commune's deputy prosecutor [[Théophile Ferré]], who handed over six hostages for execution, was executed in November 1871.]]

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. Serving part of his sentence in the [[Sainte-Pélagie Prison]] 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.<ref>{{harvnb|Riat|1906|pp=120–122}}</ref>
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 payment.

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 [[Trial in absentia|in absentia]]—25 were shot, including Ferré and Gustave Genton, who had selected the hostages for execution.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|pp=436–437}} Thousands of Communards, including leaders such as [[Félix 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.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|p=440}}

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.{{sfn|Rougerie|2014|page=120}}

=== Casualties ===
[[File:Commune de Paris enlèvement des cadavres par les parisiens.jpg|thumb|When the battle was over, Parisians buried the bodies of the Communards in temporary mass graves. They were quickly moved to the public cemeteries, where between 6,000 and 7,000 Communards were buried.]]

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".<ref name="Versailles1875">{{Citation |title=Rapport d'ensemble de M. le Général Appert sur les opérations de la justice militaire relatives à l'insurrection de 1871 |date=1875 |trans-title=Overall report by General Appert on the operations of military justice relating to the 1871 insurrection |trans-chapter=appendix to the minutes of the session of 20 July 1875 |chapter=annexe au procès verbal de la session du 20 juillet 1875 |place=Versailles |publisher=Assemblée nationale |language=fr}}</ref> 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."<ref name="Mac-Mahon 1871 p. 183">Deposition de M. le maréchal Mac-Mahon (28 August 1871) in Enquéte Parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars 1871 (Paris: Librarie Législative, 1872), p. 183</ref>

[[File:Exilés communards à Londres, juin 1872.jpg|thumb|Communard exiles in London, June 1872]]

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."{{sfn|Lissagaray|2000|p=383}} But neither MacMahon or Appert had "admitted" that twenty thousand were killed, they both said the number was exaggerated.<ref name="Mac-Mahon 1871 p. 183" />

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"),<ref>Milza, Pierre, ''La Commune''</ref> [[Alfred Cobban]]<ref>''A History of Modern France. Vol 2: 1799–1861'', Penguin Books, 1965. p. 215</ref> and [[Benedict Anderson]].<ref name="Anderson">{{Cite journal |last=Anderson |first=Benedict |author-link=Benedict Anderson |date=July–August 2004 |title=In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel |url=http://newleftreview.org/II/28/benedict-anderson-in-the-world-shadow-of-bismarck-and-nobel |url-status=live |journal=[[New Left Review]] |volume=II |issue=28 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151219130121/http://newleftreview.org/II/28/benedict-anderson-in-the-world-shadow-of-bismarck-and-nobel |archive-date=19 December 2015 |access-date=7 January 2016}}</ref> [[Vladimir Lenin]] said that Lissagaray's estimate demonstrated ruling-class brutality: "20,000 killed in the streets... Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at ''nothing''."<ref>V.I. Lenin, ''On the Paris Commune'', Moscow, [[Progress Publishers]]</ref>

[[File:Paris 1871 - communards.jpg|thumb|Communards killed in 1871]]

Between 1878 and 1880, a French historian and member of the [[Académie française]], [[Maxime Du Camp]], wrote a new history {{lang|fr|Les Convulsions de Paris}}. 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.{{sfn|du Camp|1881|p=303}}

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."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wilson |first=Colette |title=Paris and the Commune, 1871–1878: The Politics of Forgetting |date=2007 |publisher=[[Manchester University Press]] |location=Manchester |page=20}}</ref> In 2012, however, supporting du Camp's research, historian [[Robert Tombs]] made a new study of the Paris cemetery records and placed the total number killed between 6,000 and 7,000, estimating around 1,400 of those to have been executed and the rest being killed in combat or dying from wounds received during the fighting.<ref name="RTombs" /><ref>Baker, A. R. (2021). The Personality of Paris: Landscape and Society in the Long-nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury Publishing, pg 421</ref> 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."{{sfn|Rougerie|2014|page=118}}

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".<ref name="Audin, Michele 1871" />

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.<ref>Sears, Stephen W., ''Gettysburg''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.{{ISBN|0-395-86761-4}}</ref> The number may have equalled 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.{{Sfn|Tombs|2009|p=421}}