[Jean Baptise Milliere]

Carte de visite portrait of Jean-Baptiste Millière, born December 13, 1817 at Lamarche-sur-Saone and shot on  May 26, 1871 in Paris.  is a journalist and French deput

Son of a cooper worker, Millière obtained a degree in law in Dijon and began his career as a lawyer. With the Socialist, the revolution of 1848 , he moved to Clermont-Ferrand where he became editor of L’Éclaireur Républicain and founded the newspaper Le Prolétaire. Accused of “excitement to hate“, he flees Clermont-Ferrand in 1850. In Paris, he opposed the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of December 2 1851 and is arrested and sentenced to deportation to Algeria .

He returned to France with the amnesty of 1859 and worked for several years in the insurance company Le Soleil as head of litigation, before being fired for his political opinions. In 1869, he became editor and director of La Marseillaise, of which Henri Rochefort is the editor-in-chief. Imprisoned for several cases of “conspiracy against the security of the state”, he is released on May 17, 1870 . 

During the siege of Paris by Prussian troops during the War of 1870 , he commanded the 108th National Guard Battalion and participated in the October 31, 1870 uprising against the government. The February 8, 1871 , he publishes, in The Avenger, the proof of the faults committed by the minister Jules Favre in order to obtain an inheritance. The same day, he is elected deputy of the Seine to the National Assembly and sits in the opposition in Bordeaux , where he votes against the preliminaries of peace. He supports the Commune of Paris when it imposes itself in March 1871 and is in the capital when the war begins between the Commune and the government of Versailles. Not occupying any function, administrative or military, under the Commune, of which he had not been elected a member, he did not take part in the hostilities.

On Friday, May 26, he stayed at his father-in-law’s house, 38, rue d’Ulm , near the Panthéon , when the Versailles men returned to Paris. Arrested by a platoon of soldiers, he is taken to the Luxembourg gate, under the windows of the Foyot restaurant where General Cissey, commander of the 2nd Corps, the Marquis de Quinsonas, Royalist deputy of the Assembly, Captain Garcin in charge of interrogating the prisoners, and others. In spite of the parliamentary immunity, Cissey orders Garcin to have Millière shot “in the Pantheon, on his knees, to ask pardon of society for the harm he had done to her …”; the deputy refusing to kneel, a soldier forces him to do so. Millière falls to the shouts of “Long live the Republic! And “Long live humanity!