On Sunday 21 May afternoon, Mac-Mahon's army entered Paris through the Porte de St Cloud, where the defences were bare. Led by generals of the Empire, it deployed from the south-west. The news reached the Hôtel de Ville at the end of the day. But nothing had been decided and no defence plan had been drawn up. Without knowing it, the Conseil de la Commune closed its last meeting. Contradictory information was circulating in Paris. General Dombrowsky tried to organise the resistance but the reinforcements did not arrive. Killings and arrests had already begun...

On the morning of the 22nd, parts of the 15th and 16th arrondissements were already occupied. Delescluze called on Parisians to fight, and Paris was covered in barricades, erected and defended by everyone, men, women and children.

On the morning of the 23rd, the front line ran along the railway tracks from St Lazare to Montparnasse, passing through La Concorde. The federates were caught in a pincer movement (to the north, thanks to the complicity of the Prussians). Montmartre and Montparnasse were taken. The relentlessness of the troops became savage, prisoners were shot on the spot and the Communards retreated despite pockets of fierce resistance (on Place Blanche, a barricade held for several hours by women is still remembered).

Wednesday 24th saw the start of the great fires, caused by the shells and petrol bombs rained down on the city by the Versaillais. Corpses piled up as they progressed. Six hostages or spies were shot in the Roquette prison. The Parisians set fire to the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville and the fires gained other parts of the centre of Paris. The members of the Commune retreated to the Town Hall in the 11th arrondissement. The massacre had taken on a furious dimension, with the army killing the people of Paris regardless of sex or age.

They were fighting an army six times their size. Held for two long days by General Wroblewsky, the Butte aux Cailles gave way and the left bank was conquered on 25 May. Reactionaries came out of their holes and denunciations swelled the number of arrests in the occupied districts. People were shot en masse, even the wounded, often with machine guns, in the courtyards of town halls, barracks, public buildings and squares.

The 12th arrondissement, the Bastille and the Villette fell in turn on the 26th, with the resistance concentrating on Ménilmontant and Belleville. Fifty hostages (gendarmes, clerics, spies) were executed without command on rue Haxo.

On Saturday 27th, the Père-Lachaise cemetery was taken by surprise, with fighting among the graves. On the morning of 28th, the federates held only two sections of the 11th and 20th arrondissements, which had been eaten away down to the last barricade at the bottom of Belleville... It was all over.

The fort at Vincennes, away from the fighting, was disarmed on Monday 29 May and the last defenders shot.

Appalling eyewitness accounts tell of streams of blood flowing through the streets, escaping from the slaughterhouses that had become the Luxembourg and Lobau barracks, where the extermination continued. The blood of thousands of corpses that were thrown into mass graves, into the Seine, into wells or quarries... and which gave its name to that last week of May 1871.