The burying of such a large number of corpses soon became too difficult, and they were burnt in the casemates of the fortifications; but for want of draught the combustion was incomplete, and the bodies were reduced to a pulp. At the Buttes Chaumont the corpses, piled up in enormous heaps, inundated with petroleum, were burnt in the open air.
The wholesale massacres lasted up to the first days of June,[221] and the summary executions up to the middle of that month. For a long time mysterious dramas were enacted in the Bois de Boulogne.[222] Never will the exact number of the victims of the Bloody Week be known. The chief of military justice admitted 17,000 shot;[223] the municipal council of Paris paid the expenses of burial of 17,000 corpses; but a great number were killed out of Paris or burnt. There is no exaggeration in saying 20,000 at least.
Many battlefields have numbered more dead, but these at least had fallen in the fury of the combat. The century has not witnessed such a slaughtering after the battle; there is nothing to equal it in the history of our civil struggles. St. Bartholomew's Day, June, 1848, the 2nd December, would form but an episode of the massacres of May. Even the great executioners of Rome and modern times pale before the Duke of Magenta. The hecatombs of the Asiatic victors, the fêtes of Dahomey alone could give some idea of this butchery of proletarians.
Such was the repression "by the laws, with the laws." And during these atrocities of incomparably worse than Bulgarian type, the bourgeoisie, raising to heaven its bloody hands, undertook to incite the whole world against this people, who, after two months of domination and the massacre of thousands of their own, had shed the blood of sixty-three prisoners.
All social powers covered the death-rattle of the victims by their applause. The priests, those great consecrators of assassination, celebrated the victory in a solemn service, at which the entire Assembly assisted. The reign of the Gesu was about to commence.
FOOTNOTES:
[202] In the Boulevard des Italiens women kissed the boots of the mounted officers who escorted the convoys. A journalist, Francisque Sarcey, wrote: "With what serene joy the eye rested on the loyal faces of those brave gendarmes, who marched with a sprightly step by the sides of the hideous column, forming a martial and severe framework!"
[203] Appendix XXII.
[204] Appendix XXIII.
[205] Appendix XXIV.