Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas

Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas was born in 1809 in Libourne (Gironde) and shot in Paris on 18 March 1871, one of the first deaths of the Paris Commune. A Republican of the old guard, Clément-Thomas was an army general, Commander in Chief of France's National Guard on two occasions, and a parliamentary deputy.

Exiled to England, Clément-Thomas returned to France after the amnesty of political offenders in 1837 and collaborated with the newspaper Le National, the organ of the "bourgeois Republican" majority. Clément-Thomas was a supporter of the French Second Republic

Return to the National Guard Clément-Thomas returned to Paris after the proclamation of the Republic He was recognized and seized by the crowd, thrown on top of the corpse of General Claude Lecomte, who had been lynched a few minutes earlier, and he too was executed. Their bodies remained exposed for two days on rue des Rosiers (now rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre).

A Doctor Guyon, who examined the bodies afterwards, found forty balls in the body of Clément-Thomas and nine rounds in the back of Lecomte.

The legend that Generals Lecomte and Thomas were shot "in a regulation manner" by a firing squad was a fabrication: it is based on a photograph staged by the photographer Eugène Appert, which was taken in June, three months later. This photograph may have in turn been inspired by an engraving and report in the edition of L'Illustration of the 25th of March, 1871. There was even a 1908 activist theater production (entitled La Commune), which portrays a pseudo-trial of the two generals before their execution.

Legacy On 18 November 1871 a court-martial (le 6e Conseil de Guerre) handed down the death penalty to Simon Charles Mayer (1820 Nancy - 1887 Basel), major of the Paris Commune, for being responsible for the murder of the two generals Claude Lecomte, and Jacques Leonard Clement Thomas, in spite of weak evidence. In 1872 this sentence was commuted to life-long forced labour, and thereafter he was exiled to New Caledonia.