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The tragic episode at the end of May 1871, when the republican troops of Versailles entered the rebel city of Paris to put an end to the Commune experiment, is traditionally named la semaine sanglante (the bloody week). This paper interrogates the graphic choice in the use of upper and lower cases and quotation marks when writing the phrase. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the historian forms a heterogeneous corpus constituted of literary and political texts, newspaper articles, and historiographic analyses covering the wide period from May 1871 to 2021. This exploratory study does not claim to be exhaustive and should be followed up, in particular by creating an English corpus.