IV.3.1.f. AN OMEN AND A TURNING POINT

MENU: 4.3.1.f. An omen and a turning point

SEQUELS 

The Cry of the People, graphic novel by Jacques Tardi (Castermann, 2001-4), after the novel by Jean Vautrin, 2001

In brief

• A foretaste of genocide

• Toward the 20th century

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Next,
A foretaste of genocide

A FORETASTE OF GENOCIDE

A QUASI-LEGAL VIOLENCE 

Improvised courts and firing squads, wherever fighting takes place: an estimated 20, plus the important ones at Châtelet and the Luxembourg.

Internet, no source named

The family head stands quietly, arms folded, a posture that many take up and that Versaillais mention with grudging admiration.

Firing Squad, the Mur des Fédérés, May 28 1871, by E. Bousseau / zoom

"We shot about 40 of those creeps ["canaille," bold in the text.] They all died as soldiers. Some folded their arms and held their heads high. Others opened their tunics and cried, 'Fire!' " 

-- Lissagary citing 

"One of the most violent journals of the Belgian bourgeois against the Commune, l'Etoile,"

and other eye-witness accounts from that and similar sources.: Appendix XXVIII

Dehumanized victims

"All great cities have cages for lions [...] when they are opened the hyenas of '93* and the gorillas of the Commune burst out."

-- Théophile Gautier, a point of view interminably repeated.

*The leaders of the Revolution who sent 2000 people to the guillotine.

Individual responsibility weakened

Killings are organized in phases — arrest, escort to prison, judgement, firing squad. Soldiers may not know the outcome, or tell themselves they don't.

Stoicism 

Victims wait in line to be shot.

  

Merry music as background

When the shootings move toward the eastern frontier, soldiers and victims hear polkas played by Prussian orchestras.

-- Vuillaume, My Red Notebooks: the Hostages of rue Haxo (in French)

Nazi death squads in Eastern Europe make local accordionists play as they shoot.

--  The Einsatzgruppen, documentary on RML (French television), October 2, 2017

Denunciations 

For bounties of 500 francs for information that leads to the capture of a member of the Central Committee or the Commune, and innumerable letters for one's own goals.

-- Louise Michel

"Solid citizens, having taken over, formed purification tribunals in their districts and had their rivals, their creditors, arrested as Communards [...]. The Commune had rejected denunciations, while the police now kept an open register. The avalanche of letters came to 399 823, the official figure, of which 20 at most were signed."

-- Lissagary.
In occupied France the Gestapo received more denunciations than it could follow
(commentary on the The Crow by Henri Clouzot, 1943, Arte, October 18 2019.
(A "crow" was a person who denounced anonymously.)

Transport to prisons in cattle trains, so crowded that prisoners die  

-- Lissagary citing a letter from the geographer Elysée Reclus
Appendix XLVII

The first concentration camp

(At Satory, next to Versailles)

Claretie

"The Prisoners at Versailles — the Roll Call"

Striped pajamas are all that's missing.

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Next,
Toward the 20th century

TOWARD THE 20TH CENTURY

THE MASSACRES SHOW THAT REVOLT MUST CEDE TO UNIONS AND STRIKES 

In France,

the terrible repression of La Commune

brings the end of insurrections

and the start of the struggle

between capital and labor,

more deeply and bitterly than elsewhere.

End of this section.

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4.3.2.,

Fraternity that worked