Although many incendiary acts were committed during the Paris Commune as signs of rebellion, most of Paris returned to its original physical state within weeks after the Bloody Week. In a letter to his father, Edwin Child, a seed merchant trapped in Paris Siege during the Franco-Prussian War, was so impressed with the speed of the repairs done in Paris that he says, "in about 6 months and we shall wonder where all the fires took place."
Nevertheless, some important monuments were destroyed or damaged during this time. Two of the most notable are the Tuileries Palaces and the Hotel de Ville. These two buildings illuminate the different approaches taken by the French government to deal with the aftermath of the Paris Commune. On the one hand, although the shell of the Tuileries Palace remained intact with most of the damage contained inside, the French government eventually decided to take down the shell nevertheless. The Hotel de Ville, on the other hand, was restored even though the building was almost completely razed to the ground. According to Alistair Horne's The Fall of Paris, "The immense heat [on the Hotel de Ville] hadimparted to the stone and the metal the most exotic colours; 'All pink and ash-green and the colour of white-hot steel, or turned into shining agate where the stone work has been burn by paraffin, it looks like the ruins of an Italian palace…', sighed Goncourt."
Countless other less high profile buildings were also damaged. For example, according to the Goncourt journal, in the place de la Concorde, "the tritons in the fountains were twisted into fantastic shapes; the candelbras torn and bent; the statue of Lille decapitated." ? Théophile Gautier, poet, novelist, dramatic writer and critic of 19th-century France,even claims that the rue de Lille, on the left Bank, was completely deserted except for old women. The Mérimée library that housed precious medical notes and valuables also burned down. Not only did buildings disappear as a result of the fall of the Paris Commune, the French government commissioned buildings to be built to commemorate the events of 1871, the grandest of which was the National Assembly's decision to erect the Sacre Coeur cathedral. Sacre Coeur, built at Montmartre, memorialized the spot where the Communards took their first actions in opposition to the French government. Père-Lachaise cemetery also became an important site to Paris history after the Paris Commune. According to Collin Jones, "the wall (mur) of the fédérés became a place of left-wing pilgrimage" after the Paris Commune.
Although the Communards did not know at the time of their involvement, the fates their lives had been sealed well before the end of the Bloody week. However briefly stated, the Communards endured great humiliation and tortured from the French government. Some history books on the French history sum up the results of the Paris Commune in one or two sentences and failed to give detailed accounts of the effects of the insurrection of 1871 while others offer detailed figures on the trials that followed the Bloody Week. Pierre Goubert in his The Course of French History , for example, notes, “For three years afterward courts-martial held trails of 14,000 survivors. Relatively few were sent to the firing squads, but many were deported to Guiana and New Caledonia .” Authors like Lissagaray, on the other hand, writes a full account of the fates of the Communards with the purpose of painting a vivid picture of what the Communards had to endure as part of their punishment for carrying through an insurrection. Documents like Lissagaray are the ones that illustrate the macabre consequences of the effects of the Paris Commune on the people who participated in the uprising.
According to multiple sources, starting from the end of the Bloody Week, the Versailles imprisoned all the people they thought played a role in the Paris Commune in attempts to figure out what to do with them next.Whether the roles were prominent or as petty as merely having been present during an uprising was not important to the French government. The Versaillese went to great trouble to hunt down all that was suspicious of being involved in the Paris Commune. Prosper Olivier Lissagaray describes in the History of the Paris Commune of 1871 , “The average arrests kept up in June and July to a hundred a day. At Bellevill, Menilmontant, in the thirteenth arrondissement, in certain streets, there were only old women left.” Unfortunately, imprisonment would soon prove to be the Communards' paradises before any hope of redemption. But even then, their fleeting paradises could have been as torturous as St. Marcouf where the “prisons remained …for over six months, deprived of air, light, and tobacco, forbidden to speak, having for their only nourishment the crumbs of brown biscuits and rancid fat.” From Lissagary's presentation of the Paris Commune, he makes clear that after the Bloody Week the people in control, the French government, Thierry Breton, and the Versaillese, got less and less angry as the number of Communards who died rose. At first the Versailles imprisoned the Communards they gathered, sent them to Versailles , and had them shot. They then proceeded to humiliate the Communards in public. Then, finally after time time—and arguably getting tired of killing or imprisoning them—proceeded to humiliate the Communards in a more civilized manner: the Versaillese decided to put the Communards on trial. To say the least, the problem with the trials was that the Communards were not tried but rather put on public display for the bourgeoisie, who had to endure the suffering of being away from their homes, to spit, yell, and witness ‘justice'. The first trial took place on August 7 th . According to Lissagary's account,
The ceremony commenced on the 7th of August, in a large hall containing two thousand seats. Personages of rank reclined in the red velvet arm-chairs; deputies occupied three hundred seats; the remainder belonged to the bourgeois of note, to ‘worthy' families to the aristocracy of positions, and to the howling press.
Successive trials ran the same course as the one witnessed on the seventh of August. “The bulk of the prisoners were thrust before the tribunals after an examination which did not even always make sure of their identities” and sentenced to one of three sentences: death, transportation (deportation), or penal colony. Lissargary's opinion on the consequences endured by the Communards is clear: the empowered went too far with their punishment. Nevertheless, other historical sources suggest the same idea, but they do so with figures rather than detailed explanations of the trials. In The Fall of Paris , Horne notes,
Altogether twenty-three death sentences were carried out; seventy-two death sentecens were commuted…251 were sentenced to forced labor for life; 1,160 to transportation to a fortified place; 3,417 to simple transportation (principally to new Caledonia in the south Pacific)...while there were another five thousand lesser sentences passed.
Colin Jones in Paris:A History says, “Over 35,000 Parisians were arrested and subsequently some 10,000 were tried. Nearly 5,000 of them were departed to New Caledonia.” Regardless of the exact number, the French government found many to punish and did so without scruples. The full amnesty of the Communards finally occurred in 1880 with the efforts of Rochefort and Gambetta.