In 1876 Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fought on the barricades during Bloody Week, and had gone into exile in London, wrote a highly popular and sympathetic history of the Commune. At the end, he wrote: "No one knows the exact number of victims of the Bloody Week. The chief of the military justice department claimed seventeen thousand shot." Lissagaray was referring to General Appert, who had reportedly told a National Assembly deputy that there had been 17,000 Commune casualties. "The municipal council of Paris," Lissagaray continued, "paid for the burial of seventeen thousand bodies; but a large number of persons were killed or cremated outside of Paris." "It is no exaggeration," Lissagaray concluded, "to say twenty thousand, a number admitted by the officers." In a new 1896 edition Lissagaray emphasized, ""Twenty thousand" men, women and children killed after the fighting in Paris and in the provinces." Several historians have accepted the 20,000 figure, among them Pierre Milza, Alfred Cobban and Benedict Anderson. Vladimir Lenin said that Lissagaray's estimate demonstrated ruling-class brutality: "20,000 killed in the streets... Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at "nothing"."