3-034-607 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Communist Trials at Versailles: the court cleared - reading the sentence, 1871. View of the '...trial of the prisoners charged with rebelling and raising civil war in Paris, murdering the Archbishop and other clergymen, burning the Tuileries and Hotel de Ville, destroying the Vendome Column, and committing various outrages under the Commune...The judges were military officers, forming a court-martial...The Illustration shows the...President [reading] the verdicts and sentences to the accused, the general public audience having retired...the judges had spent the whole day in private deliberation, having met at six o'clock in the morning. The business of reading the verdicts and sentences took a very long time...It grew dark, and only the upper and lower ends of the hall were lighted with a few candles: the scene was gloomy and sombre enough. Two of the prisoners, Ferre and Lullier, were condemned to death; two others, Urbain and Trinquier, to penal servitude for life; seven others, Assy, Billioray, Grousset, and four more, to imprisonment for a term of years; the rest to shorter periods of confinement; Parent and Descamps were acquitted. Three or four of them, Lullier, Grousset, Rogere, and Assy, said a few words in their own vindication'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.