3-043-842 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Inside the prison of La Roquette, Paris, 1871. '...it is our painful task to represent the wholesale acts of vengeance which followed the conquest of different quarters of the city...Our own Artist, Mr. Simpson, visited La Roquette [Nouveau Bicêtre prison] on the Monday morning, when there was still a large number of living prisoners, two thousand he was told, within this prison...Inside...[he] found the shocking sight which he has drawn: "We found on the south side of the western half of the prison, in a sort of garden, a long row of dead bodies of the National Guard. They were those who had been taken fighting in that neighbourhood; and this place, being near the final struggle of the day before, had been used for their execution. There were about two hundred in the heap. They had been shot against the wall of the prison, on the right, where the last who had suffered lay just as they fell. Streams of blood still marked the pavement, and indentations on the wall told either that the balls had missed, or had gone clean through the body. The dead had evidently been lifted and thrown on to the heap, for they were piled up on one another. It was melancholy to see so many old men, men with grey hair or bald heads, among this pile of dead".' From "Illustrated London News", 1871.