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Poster from the Commune Collection
Introduction
The Eugene W Schulkind Paris Commune Collection is the only one of its kind in the United Kingdom, and one of the four strongest on its subject in the world. It documents in extraordinary detail (there are around 2,500 items) the events of 1871 when Republican Paris, at odds with Thiers’s government for ratifying a humiliating peace treaty with Bismarck, found itself autonomous for 73 days after the government’s retreat to Versailles. Thiers had plans to restore order by force, however, and the month of May culminated in the horrific scenes of the ‘Semaine Sanglante’ when over 20,000 Communards were killed by government troops.