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The Commune had left devastation behind it. On every side were smoldering ruins, including the great municipal buildings, the law courts, and other public edifices, two theatres, eight whole streets, and innumerable private houses, while the dead bodies of its victims lay where they had been shot down. The soldiers, infuriated by the ruin which they beheld on all sides, were savage in their revenge. Every man seized whose hands were black with powder was instantly shot, many innocent persons perishing, since numbers had been forced to the barricades. The story of what took place during those bloody days of retribution is too long to tell, and it must suffice to sum it up in the frightful death roll of fourteen thousand persons–six thousand of them killed in open fight, eight thousand executed in bitter revenge.

The executions over, the prisons were filled to bursting. Count Orsi tells us that six hundred men were locked up in the wine cellars of Versailles, forty-five feet underground. He himself, falsely seized through the malice of an enemy, spent ten days in this horrible place amid the scum of the insurgents. As for the members of the Council of the Commune, some escaped, some were executed, others were transported to New Caledonia, a lonely isle in the far Pacific–from which they were subsequently freed when the hot blood of that year of revengeful retribution cooled down.

Thus ends the remarkable story of that year of war, insurrection, and devastation, the whole due to the overweening ambition of one man, Louis Napoleon, who wished to shine as a great conqueror. The destiny of France lay in his hand alone. He blindly decided upon war. The result was the humiliation of France, the death of thousands of her sons, the overthrow of her government, the frightful saturnalia of the rule of the Commune, and the loss to France of two of her provinces, those of Alsace and Lorraine, and a war indemnity of one thousand million dollars. Such terrors march in the train of blind and unrestrained ambition.