Under the Red Flag
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, June 26, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ...feared, and now to be revealed in all their power for evil. With the opening of the gates began an emigration of the respectable classes. Husbands and fathers hastened to rejoin their families, provincials returned to their provinces--one hundred thousand of the National Guard, good citizens, brave, loyal, devoted to the cause of order, are said to have left Paris at this time. Those who remained behind were for the most part an armed mob, demoralised by idleness, by drink, by the teaching of a handful of rabid Republicans, the master-spirits of Belleville and Montmartre. Too soon the storm burst. There is no darker day in the history of France than this 18th of March 1871, on which Paris found itself given over to a horde of which it knew neither the strength nor the malignity, but from which it feared the worst. Hideous faces, which in peaceful times lurk in the hidden depths of a city, showed themselves in the open day, at every street corner, irony on the lip and menace in the eye. A day which began with the seizure of the cannon at Chaumont and Montmartre by the Communards, and the desertion of the troops of the Line to the insurgents, ended with the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas, and the withdrawal of the government and the loyal troops to Versailles. When night fell Paris was abandoned to a new power, which called itself Central Committee of the Federation; and it seemed that two hundred and fifty battalions of the National Guard had become Federals. They were for the most part Federals without knowing why or wherefore. They knew as little of the chiefs who were to command them as that doomed city upon which they were too soon to establish a reign of ignominy and terror. But the Central Committee, sustained by the...