The Paris Commune. Friday, April 21, 1871. Today the Versailles army imposes a railway blockade on Paris while clashes continue in the outskirts of the capital. The conditions of the National Guards taken prisoner by the Versailles army are terrifying. Élie Reclus describes them in his book “La Commune de Paris au jour le jour”: The families of Paris who have the misfortune of having their members taken prisoner by the Versaillais and brought as prisoners to the prisons and prison hulks* of Brest and Toulon, Aix and Belle-Isle, learn with horror of the suffering and ignominy that the soldiers had the horrendous courage to inflict on the National Guards, … The prisoners we saw brought to Versailles before being locked up in the Satory camp were crammed, as the prisons were not enough, into cellars. They were thrown one on top of the other, haphazardly, in a promiscuity a thousand times more frightening than the terrible solitude of the Mazas cells. After 48 hours, these caves were nothing but a filthy cesspit, a cesspit in whose darkness human larvae swarmed. * The prison hulks are old ships used as prisons
