The French army was humiliated by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, then shaken by the Paris Commune uprising.

ECONOMIST: The Dreyfus affair

The same is true in a photograph of dead anarchists from the Paris Commune, also in caskets.

ECONOMIST: Most-wanted photography | The

By the late 1880s, however, Belgium's state of affairs mirrored the tragic fate of France after the 1871 Paris Commune.

WSJ: A Macabre Kingdom of Masks | James Ensor | Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 | By Mary Tompkins Lewis

That was the year Gustave Courbet, the celebrated Realist painter then in his early 50s, found himself at the center of a 72-day utopian experiment known as the Paris Commune.

WSJ: Discovering Columbus | A Monumental Problem | By James Panero

Time and again, support for terrorism appears to increase when legitimate political activism is suppressed - from the French anarchists who began bombing campaigns after the defeat of the Paris Commune, to the Algerian National Liberation Front struggling to end French colonialism, to the Weather Underground's "Declaration of a state of war" after state repression of student campaigns against the Vietnam War.

CNN: Missing the best chance to prevent terror bombing