THE COMMUNE OF PARIS by E. B. Washburn

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 29, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 50.

THE COMMUNE OF PARIS.

By E. B. Washburn

But few people are fully aware of the immense proportions which the Paris Commune had taken on before its final suppression. Its military strength was simply enormous. Cluseret told me of his furnishing rations at the time he was delegate to the Ministry of War, to one hundred and twenty-five thousand soldiers in Paris. And the amount of war material found in possession of the Commune at the time of its collapse was prodigious. There were 548,000 guns, of different models, with saber bayonets; 56,000 cavalry sabers, of every form and description; 14,000 Enfield rifles; 39,000 revolvers; making a total of nearly 700,000 weapons of every kind taken from the hands of the Communards. Independently of the vast amount of this particular material, the military authorities of the Commune had 1,700 pieces of cannon and mitrailleuses, which they had robbed from the city, and which they had used with such terrible effect. But what must ever excite amazement is the knowledge of the vast number of the people in Paris at this time who not only were in sympathy with the Commune, but who abetted and sustained it in its career of crime and blood. The minority, embracing the better class of Paris, was completely cowed and subdued by this vast insurrectionary mass of population.—Ex-Minister E. B. Washburn, in Scribner's Magazine for April.