3-039-149 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Civil War in Paris: newsboys on the ramparts, 1871. 'The difficulty of conveying the Paris newspapers across the lines of the combatant forces, to supply the wants of purchasers and readers in the suburban district, is partly overcome by the ingenious audacity of the newsboys. One of these boys will bring a bundle of papers, and clamber with it upon the top of the rampart, whence he may either toss the bundle down to an outside boy creeping at the bottom of the moat, or may let it down by a string, which also serves him to pull up a bundle of foreign or provincial journals for sale in Paris. It is very likely that no other traffic of a legitimate kind is possible, much less profitable, in the dreadful and shameful state of social confusion, the result of political fanaticism, that now prevails in the capital of France'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.