Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
There was a man named Matillion, charged by the Central Committee to do anything or to burn anything to prevent their advance. A wild, demon-like dance was led by three women who had done duty all day as pétroleuses, Florence, Aurore, and Marie. Marie had been publicly thanked at the Hôtel-de-Ville for sending a cannonball through one of the statues before the Chamber of Deputies.
For the sake of convenience it is necessary to designate this latter group by some definite name, but I confess I have some difficulty in making a choice. I do not wish to call these gentlemen Socialists, because many people habitually and involuntarily attach a stigma to the word, and believe that all to whom the term is applied must be first-cousins to the petroleuses.
"If a revolution come again, I think well, madame, it will be the great shops that will fall, and that it is workwomen who will bear the torch and even consent to the name of terror, pétroleuses. For see a moment what thing they do, madame.
A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois beheld one of those petroleuses who were the constant bugbear of terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night, slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy, to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars.
The most pathetic part of it is the murder of the hostages, which took place on the morning of May 24, and which cannot be told in this chapter. The desperate leaders of the Commune had determined that if they must perish, Paris itself should be their funeral pyre. It was General Eudes who organized the band of incendiaries called "pétroleuses" and gave out the petroleum.
But among all the fossils which Cuvier found in the Parisian basin, nothing was more monstrous than the poissardes of the old Revolution, or the petroleuses of the recent Commune, and I fear that the breed is not extinct.
From Catherine de Medicis in the struggle of the League, down to Louise Michel, in the recent catastrophe at Paris from the tricoteuses of the first French Revolution to the pétroleuses of the last, woman has seemed to aggravate rather than soothe popular fury. Nor is the history of civil strife nearer home, without parallel examples.
The Tuileries, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Ministry of War, and the Treasury were flaming like the craters of a great volcano. We have heard much of pétroleuses. They appear to have worked among private houses in the more open parts of the city. Here is a picture of one seen by an Englishman: "She walked with a rapid step under the shadow of a wall.
But among all the fossils which Cuvier found in the Parisian basin, nothing was more monstrous than the poissardes of the old Revolution, or the petroleuses of the recent Commune, and I fear that the breed is not extinct.
An organized mob of petroleurs and petroleuses receive two francs a day for pouring petroleum about and then setting fire. How awful! Louis assures us that they will not come near us, as their only idea is to destroy public property. My father-in-law says the fever of destruction may seize them, and they might pillage the fine houses and set fire to them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking