3-039-240 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Late Events in Paris: Communist prisoners led through the Place de l'Opéra, 1871. 'The prisoners taken alive were numbered by tens of thousands. Our Illustration shows a large party of them as they were marched, under a strong military escort, past the Grand Opera House to the depot in the Boulevard Malesherbes, whence they were afterwards removed to the camp at Satory...There was one group...that was of peculiar interest, calling down even a greater amount of curses and hisses than usually accompanies their progress. It consisted of some twenty or thirty girls, well dressed and pretty, shopwomen of a sewing-machine establishment, who were accused of having inveigled a company of soldiers within their doors, and, after dallying with them like Judiths, of having poisoned them all in wine. The young ladies tripped along surrounded by a cordon of guards, smiling on the crowd that was execrating them, and marching gaily to the Place Vendome where they probably were shot'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.