After the Paris Commune rose against the national government in March 1871, the Versailles army entered the city on 21 May and retook it street by street in the week to 28 May, known as la semaine sanglante. Communards were killed in the fighting and in large numbers after capture, shot at improvised courts ('cours prévôtales') and, in one well-known case, against the wall of Père-Lachaise cemetery; Commune forces executed about a hundred hostages during the same week. The death toll is disputed: older estimates of 15,000-40,000 and the figure of about 20,000 still used by the City of Paris contrast with Robert Tombs's 2012 archival revision in the Historical Journal, which puts the dead at about 5,700-7,400, roughly half of them killed after the fighting. About 43,000 people were then arrested, and some two dozen military courts sitting over four years convicted 10,137, deporting some 3,800-4,300 to New Caledonia, where Louise Michel was among those held, before partial amnesty in 1879 and full amnesty in 1880. The penal colony and the colonisation of New Caledonia are covered in the entry on Kanak dispossession, which counts these political deportees within its convict figures; this entry covers the killing in Paris and the deportation itself. In 2016 the French National Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming the rehabilitation of the victims of the repression.
The French government at Versailles and its army retook Paris from the Commune, killing thousands of Communards in the fighting and in summary executions, then tried tens of thousands before courts-martial and deported several thousand to New Caledonia
The low end is Robert Tombs's 2012 revision (Historical Journal), an order-of-magnitude range of about 5,700-7,400 dead built from cemetery, hospital and municipal records, with about half killed after the fighting; Quentin Deluermoz rounds it to 6,500. The high end is the City of Paris's 2021 account, which gives 3,000-5,000 Fédérés killed in combat and about 20,000 others massacred, in line with the 'nearly 20,000' long used in histories; Varley notes Tombs himself had earlier used 25,000 and then 20,000. Higher figures exist: Deluermoz cites earlier estimates of up to 40,000 and Jacques Rougerie's argument that the fall of 180,000 in Paris's population between 1870 and 1872 could support up to 30,000 dead, and the Amis de la Commune panel gives 15,000-30,000 summary executions; Deluermoz suggests that a wide range of 6,500-20,000 is the safest. The disagreement turns on how many bodies escaped the institutional records (burned, buried outside the cemeteries or dying later of wounds). Separately, the City of Paris gives 500-800 Versailles soldiers killed and about a hundred hostages executed by the Fédérés.
Robert Tombs (2012) and the City of Paris's account document the killing of Communards after capture, including by improvised 'cours prévôtales' and the shootings at Père-Lachaise, and the French National Assembly's 2016 resolution refers to summary executions.
France, New Caledonia