Franco-Prussian War · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The atrocities of the Franco-Prussian War fell into three categories: German reprisals against French civilians and franc-tireur irregular fighters, the deliberate starvation and bombardment of Paris, and the French government's violent suppression of the Paris Commune — which killed more French civilians in a single week than the entire military campaign had. The franc-tireur problem — irregular French fighters who operated outside the laws of war as understood at the time — led to German executions of civilians that prefigured the systematic reprisals of the First and Second World Wars. The Paris bombardment, the first deliberate shelling of a major European capital in the modern era, killed hundreds of civilians and produced international outrage. But the worst atrocity of the war was French against French: the Versailles government's suppression of the Commune in Bloody Week was one of the most lethal events in French history, killing more people in six days than the entire military campaign of 1870.