Communards defend the Butte-aux-Cailles

Government troops entered through the Porte de Saint-Cloud after discovering that part of the western defences was unguarded. Their entry began the Bloody Week and the final destruction of the...

The Versailles Army occupied western Paris while Communards constructed barricades and organized neighbourhood resistance. The centralized defence rapidly fragmented into local battles.

Government troops captured Montmartre, the district where the uprising had begun. Jarosław Dąbrowski was mortally wounded during the fighting as the Commune lost much of northern and western Paris.

As government forces advanced, fires destroyed the Hôtel de Ville and other public buildings. Responsibility for individual fires and their military purpose became a major subject of political...

Communard officials executed Archbishop Georges Darboy and several other hostages in La Roquette prison while government forces carried out mass executions of captured Communards.

Charles Delescluze, the Commune’s delegate for war, walked unarmed toward a barricade at the Place du Château-d’Eau and was killed by government fire.

A crowd of guards and civilians killed clergy, gendarmes and other prisoners in the Rue Haxo amid the collapse of Commune authority. Commune members including Eugène Varlin attempted unsuccessfully to...

Versailles troops arrested republican deputy and journalist Jean-Baptiste Millière and shot him on the steps of the Panthéon without trial.

Communards fought government troops among the tombs of Père-Lachaise. Captured defenders were later shot near the wall remembered as the Mur des Fédérés.

Government forces overcame the final organized barricades in eastern Paris. The defeat ended the Commune after seventy-two days, while arrests and summary executions continued.