Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, the artist who produced the painting at right, was a captain in the National Guard in June 1848 and was present at the massacre he depicted in this painting. He later described the scene:

"When the barricade in the rue de le Mortellerie was taken, I realized all the horror of such warfare. I saw the defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground shrewn with corpses, the earth red with the blood it had just drunk. 'Were all these men guilty?' said Marrast to the officer in command . . . 'I can assure you, M. le Maire, that not more than a quarter of them were innocent."

Meissonnier himself was a supporter of the conservative forces of order, and he presumably did this painting as a warning to future revolutionaries of the consequences of revolt. But the poorer population of the city remembered the kind of horror captured in this painting, not as sign of the folly of revolution, but rather as a reminder that the ruling classes in France were their enemies. This is the meaning to June 1848 that would reemerge in the Paris Commune of 1871.