Notably in the affair of the spy of the Hautes-Bruyères, for which several persons had already been condemned. This spy—a young man of twenty, and not a child, as the reactionists have stated—had attracted the shells of the enemy to the Federal positions. Brought before a court-martial, composed of La Cécilia, commander of the army corps, of Johannard, delegate of the Commune, and of all the chiefs of battalions, he admitted having taken the Versaillese the plan of the Federal positions, and having received twenty francs as reward. He was unanimously condemned to death. At the moment of the execution, Johannard and Grandier, La Cécilia's aide-de-camp, explained to the condemned man that he would be pardoned if he would reveal the name of his accomplice, an inhabitant of Montrouge. He replied, "You are brigands. Je vous emm...." This fact, odiously travestied, has furnished Victor Hugo, very ill informed as to this civil war, with a verse for his "Année Terrible," as unjust to Johannard as to Sérizier, one of the men shot at Satory. The great poet owes himself a disclaimer.
FOOTNOTES:
[269] Thiers and Jules Favre themselves have calumniated Paris less than Louis Blanc. The first says in the Enquéte sur le 18 Mars, vol. ii. p. 15: "It is not true, as has been asserted, that I had great difficulties with the Prussian Government concerning the Commune, or that it had any predilection for the latter." Jules Favre, vol. ii. p. 49; "I have seen nothing that could authorise me to accuse either the Bonapartists or Prussia. General Trochu has been mistaken. I have seen nothing that could authorise me to accuse the Bonapartists of having fomented the 18th March. After the insurrection of the 18th March, I spent my time in refusing the offers which were made me by the Prussians to assist in the overthrow of the Commune."
[270] The Siècle, in search of attenuating circumstances for the army, had invented this more than phantasmagorial incident.