3-028-589 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Disturbances in Paris: the mob attempting to construct a barricade on the Boulevard Montmartre, opposite the Café des Variétés, 1869. 'There has been unusual turbulence...Street rioting, repeated for several successive nights, can never be regarded by any Government as devoid of unwelcome significance...There was evidently no governing mind behind the vast crowds which congregated in the streets...[There were] a great many arrests, some skirmishes with...the city police, a final demonstration of military force, and a sudden subsidence of tumult and disorder...The cavalry swept the people out of the most crowded...boulevards and streets, but without using their weapons...The people of Paris...have been taught by painful experience the immense costliness and the ultimate worthlessness of revolutions...That they are not satisfied with the existing political condition of France was demonstrated by the issue of the recent elections. But neither the upper, the trading, nor the working classes, wide asunder as their political views may be, are anxious to contend for them behind barricades. They have votes, and they consider them more efficient than rifles'. (The Paris Commune revolutionary government seized power in Paris in the Spring of 1871). From "Illustrated London News", 1869.