Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/20

 14 and adjurations, could do nothing; a few hundred men were the most that rallied to them.

Thiers, seeing the whole of Paris against him, insisted upon the immediate evacuation of the city, including the forts on the south, by the Government and remaining troops. He escaped by a back door from the Hotel de Ville to Versailles. The insurrection, it will be observed, now that it had come, was a purely spontaneous popular movement. The Central Committee did not meet till comparatively late in the day. This lack of preparation and organisation had its drawbacks, however, in spite of the immediate success, as we shall presently see.

At half-past four in the afternoon, a general who had had a hand in the slaughtering of the insurgents in 1848, Clement Thomas by name, was arrested. There were many who tried to rescue him from a summary execution, crying, "Wait for the Committee!" "Constitute a court martial!" but without avail. The old martinet was thrust against a wall in the Rue des Rosiers, and riddled with bullets from twenty chassepots. Though the scoundrel doubtless deserved his fate, it is to be regretted that the formality of a trial was not observed, as the score against him was an old one. The same observation does not apply to Lecomte, who had been seized in flagrante delicto in the morning, ordering a massacre. This cowardly miscreant, when the door of the room where he was confined was burst open by an angry crowd, grovelled on his knees, spoke of his family, and whined for mercy. What had he cared for the fathers of families among his would-be victims to the cause of "order" of a few hours before? He was taken outside, and justice was summarily dealt out to him. Of course, the bourgeois journals everywhere bellowed loudly at the execution of these two rascally bandits of their cause.