3-066-005 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Paris Municipal Guard dispersing the crowd at the St. Lazare Railway Station, 1874. 'The personal assault on M. Gambetta by a Bonapartist military man calling himself the Comte de St. Croix was narrated in our last [issue], with the sentence of the Tribunal of Correctional Police upon the perpetrator of this outrage. The Municipal Guard, immediately after the scuffle at the St. Lazare terminus of the Versailles Railway, Place du Havre, cleared first the grand staircase and lobbies, and next the whole space outside the station, of a great crowd there assembled. None were allowed to pass in but those who were going to travel by the railway, and those who arrived by the trains were obliged at once to quit the station. It had for some time been the daily practice of an idle multitude to assemble in the afternoon, at the hour when members of the National Assembly were returning from Versailles to Paris. Those who were favourites of the mob, or whose partisans had engaged a claque for their behoof, were greeted with sounds and gestures of applause. Others had to encounter less agreeable manifestations of feeling; and, in the present uncertain temper of the populace, it seems just as well that these irregular proceedings should have been stopped'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.