This is the balance-sheet of 1874. The following years added new condemnations. The number of the courts was reduced, but their institution was maintained and the prosecutions are going on. Even now, six years after the defeat, the arrests and convictions have not ceased.
FOOTNOTES:
[247] Let us cite Dupont de Bussac, and above all Léon Bigot, who defended Maroteau, Lisbonne, and a great number of obscure prisoners. For a year he gave them his time, his labour, his money, publishing memoirs, exhausting himself in applications. He died in harness, falling, struck by apoplexy, even at the bar. The friends of the Commune will not forget this noble devotion.
[248] He was condemned in 1876 to five years' imprisonment for embezzlement.
[249] In the law-schools is there no one to undertake it? What finer cause to begin with for a young man? What noble occasion to efface the great wrongs of the schools during the Commune, to bring nearer the proletarian this part of our youth, which is drifting further from them every day?
[250] "To this demand of the communication of judicial evidence," said the tribunal of Buda-Pesth in its judgment, "the French Government has answered by purely and simply transmitting the sentence of the court-martial. In this sentence there exists no trace of proof, nor any precise evidence establishing culpability. Considering that this verdict is totally destitute of evidence and legal proofs, and that it indicates no means of procuring them, this tribunal exonerates Frankel from the charges brought against him."
[251] Here are their names, which truly belong to the history of the people:—Martel, president; Piou, vice-president; the Count Octave de Bastard, Félix Voisin, secretaries; Batbie, the Count de Maillé, the Count Duchâtel, Peltereau-Villeneuve, François Sacaze, Tailhaud, the Marquis de Quinsonnas, Bigot, Merveilleux-Duvignan, Paris, Corne.
[252] Appendix XXXVII.
[253] According to reactionary journals this agent had been first bound to a board, an odious invention, which nothing that came out during the trial could justify. Vizentini, seized in a spontaneous outburst of fury, and thrown immediately into the Seine, might even have been saved, if a board to which he clung had not in tipping over struck him on the head.
[254] Report of General Appert.