It takes nothing away from the devastation of the past week’s events in Paris to recall that the city — when not viewed through a postcard kaleidoscope — is no stranger to horror.

One of the first cataclysms to be chronicled by The Times, in its 20th year, was the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune by French and Prussian troops during the “Bloody Week” in May 1871. The most conservative estimates have placed the number of dead at 6,000 to 7,000. The Encylopaedia Britannica states that about 20,000 insurrectionists were killed. Other estimates reach 30,000.

The New-York Times was no friend of the revolutionary Communards (Communists, insurgents or Federals). But in its contemporary reporting, it did not downplay the carnage unleashed as government troops (Versaillists) stormed the city, stating: “It is calculated that there are upwards of 50,000 dead bodies in the houses and cellars of Paris, many of them those of women and children.”

Day after day during the “bloody week,” The Times led its daily report with the awful news from Paris, which arrived quickly in New York thanks to the relatively new miracle of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. Cobbled together from various sources, the accounts were typically a few paragraphs of terse, breathless, electrifying prose. These were bundled together under a bold-face headline that was meant somehow, in one column, to summarize the paroxysms gripping the city.