Atrocities on Top of Atrocities
Source: L’Affranchi, April 9, 1871;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.
The blood spilled by reaction flows more abundantly every day. Atrocities follow horrors. After Flourens, after Duval, after hundreds of prisoners have fallen before the bullets of the assassins of December, the Vendéens, Chouans, Orléanists and left liberals, all of them leagued together against the Republic and conscience; after all the martyrs sacrificed by the madmen, other human hecatombs are now being prepared. The military tribunal of Versailles has just condemned to death those officers and non-commissioned army officers who have refused to fire upon the people, and an unexampled act of cruelty has just bloodied the suburbs. Tropmann has been surpassed: citizen Barrette of Courbevoie had provided hospitality to two wounded National Guardsmen. In order to punish him for his generous act the miserable mercenary thugs of the imperial and royal army executed him, his wife, his two daughters and the two unfortunate injured.
The former hired assassins of Pietri, today the valets of the executioner Thiers, surpass in ferocity the hordes of Haynau and Radetzky.
If we don’t put a brake on the atrocities of these brigands they will continue to spill blood like water.
We must begin, in an exemplary fashion, by punishing the renegades Jules Favre, Thiers and Jules Simon who have forgotten that it is thanks to the votes of those Parisians they are massacring that they have come to power.
The houses — the hideouts, we should say — of these bandits must be razed and an ignominious pillory must be built on their ruins, in order to assure these murderous traitors the maledictions of their contemporaries and of posterity.
These brigands who soil prisoners must be terrorized by arresting their wives, their children, their parents and their accomplices, by imprisoning them as hostages and by holding them responsible with their heads for the blood that the hyenas of Versailles would still like to spill.
