Special Guest Blogger: Raoul Rigault

I was a journalist with a penchant for good wine, shouting and filling my nose with snuff before i became the leader of The Communards who were the workers of Paris who rebelled against the Emperor’s government.
We had no real organization and not much idea about how to fight a revolutionary war against the Emperor’s army but what we lacked in skill, we made up for in cruelty.
I had been a revolutionary with a particular hatred of religion since my youth, I was arrested at a meeting of revolutionaries and escaped and was while on the run , I was hidden by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the famous painter, but when the authorities caught up with me I served three months imprisonment for publishing a journal on Atheism.
Wisely at the start of the Revolution we pinched 200 of the Emperor’s cannon and took them up to the top of a hill so we could bombard the city below. The Emperor sent a troop of soldiers to recapture them which they almost did because all the stupid sentries were asleep!
Luckily the  Emperor’s men were just as stupid as us because nobody had brought any horses to drag away the guns so as they waited they were soon surrounded by the Communards who  made them an offer of being taken hostage or joining us.
The leaders,  General Lecomte and Thomas , were not given that choice and were dragged from their horses and taken for execution and then for a bit of je ne sais quo, we mutilated the bodies.
We particularly detested the Catholic Church and set out to eliminate all the priests in Paris and when we executed the Bishop of Paris we threw his body into a ditch and in revenge the Emperor’s army took 147 Communards to the cemetery and shot them but they were better shots than us, when we  took four policemen into a courtyard to be shot, we only managed to hit one of them and another one escaped.
Being crap shots didn't deter us from executing those we caught though, thousands died and probably thousands more would have done if we could have shot straight but our executions did give me a chance to return the favor to Renoir when i noticed him destined for the firing squad in the Paris Commune, and had him immediately pardoned and released.
A socialist with a large slice of charm, I became, in effect, the head of the Commune's police force and our stronghold was the slums of Paris and we built barricades and would pour boiling water on any soldier that tried to scale them.
Being not very good at Revolutions, it quickly began to unravel and when we realised it was all over we took the prisoners out of their cells and shot them but my days of power were short lived, I was dragged away and shot by enemy soldiers and my naked body was left in a gutter for two days to be kicked and spat on until my girlfriend finally covered it with a coat so my one tip to wannabe Revolutionaries is make sure you can shoot straight and pick a cool name and in 100 years time you too may have a band named after you.