Photography was still in its infancy during the 1871 Paris Commune, and many people obtained visual information about current events through the 19th century illustrated magazines, periodicals and pamphlets that were read, often together in public spaces.
The pétroleuse trials and Communard trials held by the military tribunal following the Paris Commune’s Bloody Week were also, uniquely, the first time that photography was used for trial purposes, and comprise the world’s first ‘mug shots’.
Court photographer Ernest Eugene Appert took portraits of the Communards at Versailles, which he supplied to the military tribunal, offered as tokens for the families of the prisoners, and commercially exploited in his ‘Crimes of the Commune’ photo book.
In this book, Appert found fame for his ‘Crimes of the Commune’ photo montages, where he used the headshots he had taken of Communards and Pétroleuses to recreate scenes of the Commune, including the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris during Bloody Week, and the assassination of Théophile Ferré on the Satory Plains after trial.
The 1871 Paris Commune was an accidental revolution that occurred in Paris after the fall of their last Emperor to the Prussians. For seventy-two days, Paris ruled herself: and built a society with new laws that we might now consider features of modern democracy: free education, the separation of church and state, social welfare, the … Read more
The petroleuses of the Paris Commune The pétroleuses remain one of the most enduring and controversial myths of the 1871 Paris Commune. According to the accounts of the Versailles government and conservative press at the time, these were working-class women who supposedly roamed the city during the Bloody Week (Semaine Sanglante), when the Versailles army killed forty … Read more
Portraits of the Communards This gallery gathers the faces of the Paris Commune, a brief but transformative seventy-two-day period where the working class of Paris seized the reins of power. These portraits of the Communards offer a window into a small sample of the people who sought to build a “Universal Republic.” Some of these … Read more