France in the Nineteenth CenturyLatimer, Elizabeth Wormeley
History
France in the Nineteenth Century
Latimer, Elizabeth Wormeley
France -- History -- 1789-1900
Some prisoners were transported to New Caledonia; Cayenne had been
given up as too unhealthy, and this lonely island in the far Pacific
Ocean had been fixed upon as the Botany Bay for political offenders.
Some of the leaders in the Council of the Commune were shot in the
streets. Raoul Rigault was of this number. Some were executed at
Satory; some escaped to England, Switzerland, and America; some
were sent to New Caledonia, but were amnestied, and returned to
France to be thorns in the side of every Government up to the present
hour; some are now legislators in the French Chamber, some editors
and proprietors of newspapers. Among those shot in the heat of
vengeance at Satory was Valin, who had vainly tried to save the
hostages. Deleschuze, in despair at the cowardice of his associates,
quietly sought a barricade when affairs grew desperate, and standing
on it with his arms folded, was shot down. Cluseret, who had real
talent as an artist, had an exhibition a few years since of his
pictures in Paris, and writing to a friend concerning it, speaks
thus of himself:[1]
[Footnote 1: Le Figaro.]
"You can tell me the worst. When a man has passed through a life
full of vicissitudes as I have done, during seventeen years of
which I have seen many campaigns, fighting sometimes three hundred
and sixty-five days in a year, or marching and counter-marching,
without tents or anything; when one has been three times outlawed
and under sentence of death; when one has known much of imprisonment
and exile; when one has suffered from ingratitude, calumny, and
poverty,--one is pretty well seasoned, and can bear to hear the
truth."
One thousand and thirty-one women were among the prisoners at Versailles
and Satory. Many of them were women of the worst character. Eight
hundred and fifty were set at liberty; four were sent to an insane
asylum; but doctors declared that nearly every woman who fought
in the streets for the Commune was more or less insane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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