Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/33

 Rh important fort Thiers' military staff had selected their men, and they forgot, moreover, that insubordination in the interior of a fortessfortress [sic] is a very different thing from insubordination in the open street under the moral pressure of a sympathetic crowd ready to protect the insubordinate from the vengeance of their superior officers. This deception, however well-intentioned it may have been, was little less than criminal under the circumstances. Most of the Guards scattered in all directions, and finally found their way back to Paris, only about 1,200 remaining with Bergeret, and pushing on. They were supported by Flourens, who, with only a thousand men (the rest having also straggled off, such was the state of discipline), routed the Versaillese vanguard, and occupied the village of Bougival. A whole Versaillese army corps was directed against this detachment, and the Parisian vanguard had to fall back on Rueil, where a few men had held the position, the object being to cover Bergeret's retreat. Flourens was here surprised with his staff, and this noble-hearted people's hero was killed, his head cleft with a sabre. Poor Flourens was a type of revolutionist of whom we have few nowadays left. Many there are now who undertandunderstand [sic] the economic question better than Flourens, but none we know who have quite that old-world chivalrous devotion to the Revolution which this remarkable man had, and which so endeared him to the impressionable working-classes of Paris. Of a well-to-do middle-class family, Flouren's impulsive nature led him in his early youth to join an insurrection against the Turks in the Levant. During the latter part of the Second Empire he was, next to Rochefort, the most prominent people's agitator. His untimely death threw a gloom over all Paris, and heightened the effect of the defeat.

The centre column under Eudes was not more