The semaine sanglante ("Bloody Week") was a weeklong battle in Paris from 21 to 28 May 1871, during which the French Army recaptured the city from the Communards. This was the final battle of the Paris Commune.
Following the Treaty of Frankfurt and France's loss in the Franco-Prussian War, on 18 March the new French government under Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers attempted to remove a large number of cannons from a park in Montmartre, to keep them out of the hands of the more radical soldiers of the Paris National Guard. In the confrontation that followed, two French generals, Claude Lecomte and Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas, were seized and executed by the National Guard. Thiers, the army commander Patrice de MacMahon and the French government hurriedly left the city, and established their headquarters in Versailles, and prepared plans to recapture the city. The Paris Commune made an unsuccessful attack on Versailles under the leadership of Louis Charles Delescluze. Between 8 and 20 May, French forces had retaken the territory surrounding Paris and began bombarding the city. On 21 May, French forces entered the city and began the Semaine sanglante.
During the week of combat, an estimated ten to fifteen thousand Commune soldiers were killed in combat or executed afterwards. The Communards took and executed about one hundred hostages, including Georges Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, and committed arson against many Paris landmarks, including the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice building, the Cour de Comptes, and the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur. Fighting continued until 28 May, when the last Communard soldiers surrendered.
43,522 Communards were taken prisoner, including 1,054 women. More than half were quickly released. Fifteen thousand were tried, 13,500 of whom were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labor, and 1,169 to deportation (mostly to New Caledonia). Many Commune supporters, including several of the leaders, fled abroad, mostly to England, Belgium and Switzerland. All the prisoners and exiles received pardons in 1880 and could return home, where some resumed political careers.
Combatants
On paper the Paris Commune's military force, the National Guard, was formidable; all able-bodied men in the Commune, numbering 150,000, were required to serve, and half were enrolled in armed units. At the beginning of the Semaine sanglante, the Commune was said to have had fifty thousand men in combat companies. with ten thousand soldiers on the south line, two thousand to the west, and six thousand in the southwest. South of the city, about 7,500 Communards were entrenched. Several thousand National Guard soldiers were kept as a reserve in barracks within the city, including three thousand at the Champ de Mars. However, at the beginning of May, twenty percent, or ten thousand, were reported absent without leave.
Commune historian Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray in 1876 gave slightly smaller numbers; according to his figures, 20,000 Commune soldiers defended the Right Bank and 17,000 defended the Left Bank, or 37,000 in all.
Once the fighting began, a large number of Commune soldiers, as many as half, simply stayed home and went into hiding in the cellars under their buildings. 45,522 Commune soldiers, most of whom had not fought, were taken prisoner after the fighting ended. Jacques Rougerie put the numbers of National Guard fighters who fought at just twenty thousand.
The French Army, the official forces of the Third Republic, grew from 55,000 men at the beginning of April to 120,000 men by the end of May. In the beginning, the army had few experienced officers or trained soldiers. This problem eased with the release of thousands of soldiers and officers captured during the Franco-Prussian War from German prison-camps, who returned to service upon their release.
The German Army, which occupied parts of France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, took no direct part in the Semaine sanglante. However, their troops stood in reserve to intervene if necessary. More importantly, the Germans allowed the French army to take up positions outside the city walls on the west.
French Army casualties during the battle were 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing. 43,000 Communards were taken prisoner, and 6,500 to 7,500 fled abroad.
The number of Communard soldiers killed during the week has long been disputed: Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray put the number at twenty thousand, but estimates by later historians put the probable number between ten and fifteen thousand. Most of the dead were collected by city authorities and buried in city cemeteries after the Semaine Sanglante, with a smaller number buried in suburban cemeteries. The remains of six hundred Commune soldiers, still in uniform, were found in 1897 in a mass grave in a cemetery in the 20th arrondissement. A handful of rudimentary graves were discovered during the construction of the Paris Metro and at other building sites.
Prelude
By March 1871, the French Army had been defeated by German forces in the Franco-Prussian War. The Treaty of Frankfurt, which ended the war, forced France to pay billions of francs in war indemnity and cede Alsace–Lorraine. In Paris, soldiers from the National Guard clashed with the French Army on 18 March when the army tried to remove 227 cannons from a depot in Montmartre. The guardsmen killed two army generals, and the National Guard seized control of the city. Adolphe Thiers, the President of France, withdrew the government of France from Paris, first to Bordeaux and then to Versailles.
The Commune government was divided into various political factions. Being led by several committees with different political agendas, it lacked a commander. In April, the Commune launched a military expedition against the Versailles government led by Gustave Paul Cluseret, who had fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi and had been a general in the Union Army. The National Guard came under fire from Fort Mont-Valérien, broke ranks, and fled back to Paris, pursued by the French Army. Afterwards, Cluseret resigned and was replaced by Colonel Louis Rossel; but Rossel resigned on 9 May. He was replaced by Louis Charles Delescluze, an attorney and journalist with extensive political experience, but had no military experience. Delescluze was the civilian delegate of the War Committee, which effectively made him the military leader of the Commune.
In the weeks before the Bloody Week, the French Army was reorganized and vetted for loyalty. Soldiers suspected of sympathies to the Communards were transferred to other regiments, and often sent to French outposts in North Africa or regions distant from Paris.
On 8 May, the French Army occupied Fort d'Issy, a key defense south of the city, and gradually began digging trenches and fortifications closer to the city, until they were only a hundreds meters from the city walls and prepared for long siege. On Saturday, 20 May, the army began a bombardment of the western gates and the city, particularly the Port de Saint-Cloud.
The National Guard considered themselves safe within the ring of ramparts and fortifications that surrounded the city. On 20 May, a concert was held in the Tuileries Garden to raise funds for widows and orphans, though the Versailles artillery could be heard from the army positions outside the city.
Sunday, 21 May
On the afternoon of Sunday, 21 May, despite the sound of artillery bombardment from the Versailles batteries outside, a charity concert to raise funds for orphans and war victims went ahead in the Tuileries Garden, and attracted some eight thousand people. It was originally planned for the Place de la Concorde, but was moved to the Tuileries because of the bombardment. At the end of the concert, the master of ceremonies promised that the Versailles Army would never enter the city, and that another concert would be held at the same site the following Sunday. But by the following Sunday, the Commune no longer existed.
As the week began, there were two governments of the Commune; the Central Committee, which claimed control over the National Guard, and the Committee of Public Safety, also claiming responsibility for the defense of the Commune. The Commune forces on that day on paper amounted 200,000 men, but in reality there were no more than 60,000 ready combatants, under several different commands. There were a host of independent units, such as the "Zouaves de la Republique", and the "Lascars de Montmartre", which did not answer to the central command. The artillery also considered itself a separate branch, not under Commune army command
In the early afternoon of 21 May, an agent of the Versailles government forces, camped just outside the walls, explored the neighbourhood near the Point du Jour rampart, and saw that the rampart was not manned by Commune troops. General Félix Douay telegraphed Marshal MacMahon and the high command, and the army immediately began moving troops through the gap into the city.
General Jarosław Dąbrowski, the Polish nobleman and Commune commander of that sector, was at his headquarters at the Château de la Muette. When he learned of the intrusion, he quickly notified the Commune Minister of War and the Commune leader, Delescluze, asked for reinforcements, and announced he would make a counter-attack 1900. Delescluze, however, refused to recognise that the Versailles forces were already in the city, and refused to make any such public announcement. By the evening, the French army had consolidated its positions, and a large force was already inside the city. Dąbrowski's counter-attack failed, and then Dąbrowski disappeared for hours and was rumoured to have been killed. The Commune government did not announce the entry of the French Army until the following morning, by which time the army was solidly established within the city.
Once inside the city, the Army spread out and captured two major city gates, the Port d'Auteuil and the Port de Versailles from behind. By the late afternoon, sixty thousand Army soldiers were inside the city. Passy and the Trocadéro were quickly occupied. By the end of the day, the Army had reached the Champs de Mars.
As word spread that the Army was already within Paris, the National Guard began to react. The defense of the city was the responsibility of two separate organisations, the Committee of Public Safety (which took its name from the committee that had conducted the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution) and the Central Committee of the Commune. There was no centralized military leader, with each neighborhood having its own commander, and no comprehensive plan for the defense of the city.
The major defensive activity of the Commune, following the model of the 1848 Revolution, was the construction of barricades. The most imposing barricade was erected on the Rue de Rivoli at the entrance of the Place Saint-Jacques and the corner of Rue Saint-Denis to protect the Hotel de Ville, the headquarters of the Commune. It was six meters high and several meters deep, built of paving stones, with a protective ditch and sheltered firing positions. Similar barricades had been or built or were begun on Place Saint-Jacques, rues Auber, de Châteaudun, Faubourg Montmartre, Notre-Dame de Lorette, at the Trinité, La Chapelle, Bastille, Buttes Chaumont, boulevard Saint-Michel, and at the Panthéon. Others were begun along the length of boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Saint-Jacques. The defenders soon ran into a new problem. The Committee of Artillery of the Central Committee argued about which positions had the greatest need for cannons. As a result, many of the barricades were never finished or fully armed.
Once the Army entered Paris, several factors worked against the Commune. The wide boulevards were not conducive to defensive urban warfare, while the decentralized nature had no structure for joint action between the forces of the different neighborhoods. Each part of the city was entirely on its own. The French Army had superiority in numbers, command, and equipment. By the end of the first day, the Army had occupied a large part of the west of the city, as far as the Champs de Mars and the Trocadéro.
Monday, 22 May
By 9:30 a.m. on Monday the 22nd, fifty thousand French Army soldiers were already in Paris. General Ernest Courtot de Cissey, commander of one wing of the French Army, established his headquarters at the École militaire.
At the Commune headquarters, the alarm was not formally sounded and bells rung until early Monday morning. Louis Charles Delescluze issued a proclamation calling on Parisians to rally to the defense of the city. The proclamation had the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of joining together into a single force, the battalions dispersed, each to defend its own neighborhood. Many men who were formally members of the Guard stayed home. A women's battalion had been created, which included the activist and future anarchist Louise Michel, and was assigned to defend the Square des Batignolles, Place Blanche, or Place Clignancourt. Other than the soldiers of the National Guard, few Parisians were armed and prepared to fight.
Following the entry of the Army into Paris, the Commune soldiers abandoned the Ministry of War, which was near the new front line. They failed to take away or burn the records and documents of the Commune armed forces, which gave the Versailles government the names and history of all the Commune soldiers.
Only a few barricades were already in place, notably on the Rue Saint-Florentin, the Avenue de l'Opéra, and the rue de Rivoli. The National Guard began to build new ones; some nine hundred barricades were built hurriedly out of paving stones and sacks of earth. Residents of the neighbourhoods prepared shelters in the cellars. The first serious fighting took place on the afternoon of the 22nd with an artillery battle between French Army batteries on the Quai d'Orsay and National Guard batteries on the terrace of the Tuileries Palace.