by Luc Sante
* A souvenir print commemorating the Siege was published two decades later, with elaborate graphics surrounding a mounted cube of this bread. You can see an example in the Musée Carnavalet; the bread, now over one hundred forty years old, looks much as it must have when freshly baked.
* Prostitution all but vanished during the Commune, although there were strong conflicting opinions on the subject. Some of the clubs wanted to arrest whores (and drunks), whereas Louise Michel, for one, always made a point of refusing to judge the profession as different from any other.
* His death sentence was commuted to life in the bagne; he escaped from Devil’s Island in 1901 and fled to New York City, where he spent the rest of his days. His thousand-page memoir was published in Italian in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929.
* Or as Paul Reclus, Élisée’s brother, put it, “As producers, we seek to obtain the most possible for our work. As consumers, we pay the least possible. The consequence of these combined transactions is that every day of our lives we steal and are stolen from” (La Révolte, November 21, 1892).