The Paris Commune. The Bloody Week. Friday, May 26, 1871. Throughout the day the Versailles troops advanced in Paris and the flow of prisoners grew so much that it was necessary to centralize the executions in a few designated places: the Lobau barracks, the military school, the Jardin des Plantes and the East and North stations. The condemned prisoners were herded and executed using machine guns. In the afternoon the Versaillais had taken the Bastille and General Vinoy, despite the slowdown caused by the strenuous resistance of the barricade in rue de Reuilly, continued the advance towards the east of the city, not without continuing the house-to-house searches and summary executions. Without a trial and forced to his knees, Jean-Baptiste Millière, the people's representative in the National Assembly, was shot on the steps of the Pantheon. A crowd of Parisians and communards, exasperated by the bombings and the shootings, gathered in Haxo street and broke into Roquette prison, seized the imprisoned hostages and shot them. Spies, a dozen priests and about thirty gendarmes died, despite the opposition of Varlin and Piat, two members of the Commune assembly, who tried in vain to prevent this useless massacre. At the end of this dramatic day, the Communards are now barricaded only in the Butte-Chaumont, Belleville and the Père-Lachaise cemetery, corresponding to the 19th, 20th, part of the 11th and a little of the 10th arrondissements. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
