Though elected as the city council (in French, the "commune"), the Commune eventually proclaimed its own authority to govern all of France. The killing of two French army generals by soldiers of the Commune's National Guard and the refusal of the Commune to accept the authority of the French government led to its harsh suppression by the regular French Army in "La Semaine sanglante" ("The Bloody Week") beginning on 21 May 1871. Debates over the policies and outcome of the Commune had significant influence on the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
On 2 September 1870, after his unexpected defeat at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, Emperor Louis Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck . When the news reached Paris on 3 September, shocked and angry crowds came out into the streets, the Empress Eugenie, the regent of the Emperor, fled the city, and the Government of the Second Empire swiftly collapsed. Republican and radical
In 1871 France was deeply divided between the large rural, Catholic and conservative population of the French countryside and the more republican and radical population of Paris, Marseille, Lyon and the few other large cities. In the first tour of the parliamentary elections held under the French Empire on 24 May 1869, 4,438,000 had voted to support the Bonapartiste candidates supporting Louis Napoleon III, while 3,350,000 had voted for the republican opposition. In Paris, however, the republican candidates dominated, winning 234,000 votes against 77,000 for the Bonapartistes.
Of the two million people in Paris in 1869, according to the official census, there were about 500,000 industrial workers, or fifteen percent of all the industrial workers in France, plus another three to four hundred thousand workers in other enterprises. Only about 40,000 were employed in factories and large enterprises; most were employed in small workshops and businesses making clothing and textiles, furniture, and in construction. There were also 115,000 servants and 45,000 concierges. In addition to the native French population, there were about one hundred thousand immigrant workers and political refugees, the largest number being from Italy and Poland.
During the war and the siege of Paris, a large part of the middle class and upper class Parisians departed the city, and at the same time there was an inlfux of refugees from parts of France occupied by the Germans. The working class and immigrants were the sections of the population that suffered the most from the lack of industrial activity caused by the war and the long siege of Paris, and they were the basis of the popular support for the Commune..
The Commune resulted in part from growing discontent among the Paris workers. This discontent can be traced to the first worker uprisings, the Canut Revolts, in Lyon and Paris in the 1830s[7] (a Canut was aLyonnais silk worker, often working on Jacquard looms).
Many Parisians, especially workers and the lower-middle classes, supported a democratic republic. A specific demand was that Paris should be self-governing with its own elected council, something enjoyed by smaller French towns but denied to Paris by a national government wary of the capital's unruly populace. They also wanted a more "just", if not necessarily socialist, way of managing the economy, summed up in the popular appeal for "la république démocratique et sociale!" ("the democratic and social republic!")
Socialist movements, such as the First International, had been growing in influence. Hundreds of societies affiliated to it across France. In early 1867, Parisian employers of bronze-workers attempted to de-unionize their workers. This was defeated by a strike organised by the International. Later in 1867, an illegal public demonstration in Paris was answered by the legal dissolution of its executive committee and fines to the leadership. Tensions escalated; Internationalists elected a new committee and put forth a more radical programme, the authorities imprisoned their leaders, and a more revolutionary perspective was taken to the International's 1868 Brussels Congress. The International had considerable influence even among unaffiliated French workers, particularly in Paris and the big towns.
The killing of Victor Noir incensed Parisians and the arrests of journalists critical of the Emperor did nothing to quiet the city. A coup was attempted in early 1870, but tensions eased significantly after the plebiscite in May of that year. The war with Prussia, initiated by Napoleon III in July 1870, was initially met with patriotic fervour.
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Radicals and revolutionaries
Paris was traditionally the home of French radical movements and revolutionaries, who had gone into the streets to oppose their governments during the French Revolution, the popular uprisings of 1830 and June 1848.
Of the radical and revolutionary groups in Paris at the time of the Commune, the most conservative were the "radical republicans". This group included the young doctor Georges Clemenceau, who was a member of the National Assembly, Mayor of Montmartre, and a deputy in the National Assembly. Clemenceau was considered extremely radical by the provincial deputies of rural France, but too moderate by the leaders of the Commune. He became the Prime Minister of France during the last years of World War I, and signed the peace treaty that restored Alsace and Loraine to France.
The most extreme revolutionaries in Paris were the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, a charismatic professional revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life in prison. He had about one thousand followers, many of them armed, in cells of ten persons, which operated separately, were unaware of the members of the other groups, who communicated only with the leaders of their groups. The groups communicated with each other by code. Blaqui had written a manual on revolution, Instructions for an armed uprising, to give guidance to his followers. Though their numbers were small, the Blanquists provided many of the most disciplined soldiers and several of the major leaders of the Commune.
The Defenders of Paris
By September 20, 1870, the German army had surrounded Paris, and was camped just two thousand meters from the French front lines. The regular French Army in Paris was under the command of General Louis Jules Trochu, and had only 50,000 professional soldiers of the line; the majority of the French first-line soldiers were prisoners of the Germans, or were trapped in Metz, surrounded by the Germans. They regular army soldiers were supported by 5,000 armed firemen, some 3,000 gendarmes, and about 15,000 sailors.
The regular professional army was supported by the Garde Mobile, new recruits who had little training or experience. Seventeen thousand of the garden mobile were from Paris, and 73,000 from the provinces. These included twenty battalions of men from Brittany, who spoke little or no French.
The largest armed force in Paris was the Garde Nationale, or National Guard, numbering about three hundred thousand men. They also had very little training or experience. They were organized by neighborhoods; those from the upper and middle class arrondissements tended to support the national government, while those from the working-class neighborhoods were far more radical and politicized. Guardsmen from many units were known for their lack of discipline; some units refused to wear uniforms, they often refused to obey orders without discussing them, and they demanded the right to elect their own officers. The members of the National Guard from the working-class neighborhoods became the main armed force of the Commune.
The siege of Paris and the first demonstrations
As the Germans surrounded the city, the more radical groups saw that the Government of National Defense had few soldiers to defend itself, and launched the first demonstrations against it. On September 19, National Guard units from the main working-class neighborhoods, Belleville, Menilmontant, La Villette, Montrouge, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Faubourg du Temple, marched to the center of the city and demanded that a new government, a Commune, be elected. They were met by regular army units loyal to the Government of National Defense, and the demonstrators eventually dispersed peacefully. On October 5, five thousand protesters marched from Belleville to the Hotel de Ville, demanding immediate municipal elections and rifles. On October 8, several thousand soldiers from the National Guard, led by Eugene Varlin of the Inernationale. marched to the center, chanting 'Long Live the Commune!" but they also dispersed without incident.
Later in October, General Trochu launched a series of armed attacks to try to break the German siege, with heavy losses and no success. The telegraph line connecting Paris with the rest of France had been cut by the Germans on September 27. On October 6, Leon Gambetta, the Minister of Defense of the Government of National Defense, departed the city by balloon to try to organize national resistance against the Germans.[11]
The uprising of October 31
On October 28, the news arrived in Paris that the 160,000 soldiers of the French army at Metz, which had been surrounded by the Germans since August, had surrendered. The news arrived the same day of the failure of another attempt by the French army to break the siege of Paris at Bourget, with heavy losses. On October 31, the leaders of the main revolutionary groups in Paris, including Blanqui, Pyat and Delescluze, called new demonstrations at the Hotel de Ville against General Trochu and the government. Fifteen thousand demonstrators, some of them armed, gathered in front of the Hotel de Ville in a pouring rain, calling for the resignation of Trochu and the proclamation of a commune. Shots were fired from the Place, one narrowly missing Trochu, and the demonstrators crowded into the Hotel de VIlle, demanding the creation of a new government, and making lists of its proposed members. Louis Blanqui, the leader of the most radical faction, established his own headquarters at the nearby Prefecture of the Seine, issuing orders and decrees to his followers, intent upon establishing his own government. While the formation of the new government was taking place inside the Hotel de Ville, however, units of the National Guard and Garde Mobile loyal to General Trochu arrived and recaptured the building without violence. By three o'clock the demonstrators had been given safe passage and left, and the brief uprising was over.
On 3 November 1871, city authorities organized a plebiscite of Parisian voters, asking if they had confidence in the Government of National Defense. 557,996 voted yes, and 62,638 voted no. Two days later municipal councils in each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris voted to elect mayors; five councils elected radical opposition candidates, including Delescluze and a young doctor from Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau.
Negotiations with the Germans and continued war
In September and October, The leader of the conservative faction in the National Assembly, Adolphe Thiers, had toured Europe consulted with the foreign ministers of Britain, Russia and Austria, and found that none of them were willing to support France against the Germans. He reported to the Government of National Defense there was no alternative to negotiating an armistice. He traveled to Tours,occupied by the Germans, and on 1 November met with the Prussian Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. Bismarck demanded the cession of all of Alsace, parts of Lorraine, and an enormous sum for reparations. The Government of National Defense, decided to continue the war and raise a new army to fight the Germans.
The newly organized French armies won a single victory at Coulmiers on 10 November 1870, but an attempt by General Ducrot on 29 November 1870 to break out of Paris was defeated with a loss of 4,000 soldiers killed and wounded, compared with 1700 German casualties.
The life of the Parisians under siege became more and more difficult. In December the temperature dropped to ten and fifteen degrees below zero Celsius, and the Seine froze for a period of three weeks. They suffered shortages of food, firewood, coal and medicine. The city was almost completely dark at night. The only communication with the outside world was by balloon, carrier pigeon, or letters packed in iron balls floated down the Seine. Rumors and conspiracy theories were abundant.
By early January, Bismarck and the Germans were themselves tired of the prolonged siege. They installed seventy-two 120 and 150 millimeter artiillery pieces in the forts around the city and on January 5 began to bombard the city day and night. Between 300 and 600 shells hit the center of the city each day.
The uprising of 22 January
Between January 11 and 19, the French armies had been defeated on four fronts and Paris was facing a famine. General Tronchu received reports from the prefect of Paris that agitation against the government and military leaders was increasing in the political clubs and in the National Guard of Belleville, La Chapelle, Montmarte,and Gros-Caillou.
At midday on 22 January 1871, three or four hundred National Guards and members of radical groups, mostly Blanquists, gathered at gathered outside the Hotel de Ville. A battalion of Gardes Mobiles from Brittany were inside the building, to defend it in case of an assault. The demonstrators presented their demands that the military be placed under civil control, and that their be an immediate election of a commune. The atmosphere was tense, and in the middle of the afternoon, gunfire broke out between the two sides; each side blamed the other for firing first. Six demonstrators were killed, and the army cleared the square. The government quickly banned the publications of two of the revolutionary leaders; Le Reveil of Delescluze and Le Combat of Felix Pyat, and arrested eighty-three of the revolutionaries.
The signing of the armistice
At the same time as the demonstration in Paris, the leaders of the Government of National Defense, located in Bordeaux, had concluded that the war could not be carried on any longer. On 26 January, a cease-fire and armistice were signed, with special conditions for Paris. The city would not be occupied by the Germans; the regular soldiers would give up the arms, but would not be taken into captivity. Paris would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs; and, at the request of Favre and agreed by Bismarck, the National Guard would not be disarmed, so that order could be maintained in the city.
Adolphe Thiers and the parliamentary elections of 1871
The national government in Bordeaux called national elections at the end of January, 1871, and the elections were held just ten days later, on 8 February 1871. Most electors in France were rural, Catholic and conservative, and this was reflected in the results; Of the 645 deputies assembled in Bordeaux on February, about four hundred favored a constitutional monarchy, under either the grandson of the deposed King Charles X (The Legitimists) or under the grandson of the deposed Louis Philippe (the Orleanists).
The republicans in the new parliament numbered about two hundred, of whom about eighty were former Orleanists, and moderately conservative; they were led by Adolphe Thiers, who was elected in twenty-six departments, the most of any candidate. There were an equal number of more radical republicans, includingJules Favre and Jules Ferry, who wanted a republic without a monarch, and who felt that signing the peace treaty was unavoidable. Finally, on the extreme left, there were the radical republicans and socialists, a group that included Louis Blanc, Leon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau.
The republicans and socialists were the victors in Paris, where they won 37 of the 42 seats. Of the 547,000 registered voters in Paris, Louis Blanc had won the most votes (216,000); Victor Hugo won 214,000 votes; Garibaldi received 200,000, Rochefort 163,000, the socialists Delescluze 153,000, and Felix Pyat 141,000. The left and center-left candidates also won a majority in Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.
On 17 February the new Parliament elected Adolphe Thiers as chief executive of the French Republic, as the candidate most likely to bring peace and to restore order. Adolphe Thiers was seventy-four years old in 1871. He had begun his career as an historian, writing a multi-volume history of the French Revolution. He entered politics in his early 30s, taking part on the 1830 Revolution which overthrew King Charles X of France and replacing him with a constitutional monarch, King Louis-Philippe. Thiers served Louis-Philippe as minister of the Interior, minister of trade and public works, foreign minister, and president of the Council.
During the French Revolution of 1848, Louis-Philippe offered him the post of prime minister, but he refused, and instead became a leader of the Parliament of the French Second Republic. Thiers initially supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, but when Bonaparte seized power in 1851 and declared himself EmperorNapoleon III, Thiers was arrested and exiled from France. He returned two years later to become the leader of the main parliamentary opposition to the Emperor. He was the only prominent member of Parliament to oppose the declaration of war on Prussia in 1870. When the Emperor was captured, Thiers refused to join the Government of National Defense, then ran and won his seat new Parliament with the largest vote of any candidate, and persuaded the Parliament that peace was necessary. He traveled to Versailles, where Bismarck and the German King were waiting, and on February 24 the armistice was signed.
The Cannons of Paris
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At the end of the war, four hundred obsolete muzzle-loading bronze cannon, which had been partly paid for by public subscription of the population of Paris, remained in the city. The new Central Committee of the National Guard, dominated by members of the more radical parties, decided to put the cannon into parks in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Montmartre, to keep them away from Regular Army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. Adolph Thiers, as chief executive of the national government, was equally determined to bring the cannon under government control.
Georges Clemenceau, the doctor from Montmartre who had been elected a Deputy to the National Assembly on February 8, and who was a friend of many of the revolutionaries, including Jules Valles, August Blanqui and Louse Michel, tried to negotiate compromise, by which some of the cannon would have remained in Paris and the others given to the army, but Thiers and the national Assembly did not accept his proposals. Thiers wanted to restore order and state authority in Paris as quickly as possible, and the cannons became the symbol of that authority. The Assembly also refused to prolong the moratorium on debt collections, imposed during the war and suspended two radical newspapers, the Cri de Peuple of Valles and the Mot d'Ordre of Rochefort, which further inflamed radical opinion in Paris. Thiers also decided to move the National Assembly and government from Bordeaux to Versailles, rather than to Paris, to be farther away from the pressure of demonstrations, which further increased the anger of the National Guards and the radical political clubs.
On 17 March, 1871, at a meeting of Thiers and his Council of Ministers, joined by Jules Ferry, the mayor of Paris, General Aurelle de Paladines, the new commander of the National Guard, and General Joseph Vinoy, commander of the regular army units in Paris, Thiers announced the plan to send the army to take charge of the cannons. The plan was initially opposed by the new Minister of War, General Adolphe Le Flo, Aurelie de Paladines and General Joseph Vinoy, who argued that the move was premature, because the army had too few soldiers, was undisciplined, demoralized, and many units had become politicized and were unreliable. Vinoy urged that they wait until Germany had released the French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full strength. Thiers insisted that operation must go ahead as quickly as possible to use the element of surprise. If the seizure of the cannon was not successful, the government would withdraw from center of Paris, build up its forces, and then attack with overwhelming force, as they had done during the uprising of June 1848. The Council accepted his decision, and Vinoy gave orders for the operation to begin the next day.
Early in the morning of 18 March, two brigades of soldiers climbed the butte of Montmartre, where the largest collection of 170 cannon was located. A small group of revolutionary National Guards was already there, and there was a brief confrontation between the brigade led by General Claude Lecomte, and the National Guards, in which one guardsman, named Turpin, was shot dead. Word of the shooting spread quickly, and members of the National Guard from all over the neighborhood, as well as Mayor Georges Clemenceau, hurried to the site to confront the soldiers.
Elsewhere in Paris, the Army had succeeded in securing the cannon at Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and other strategic points in the city, but the crowd continued to grow and the situation became more and more tense at Montmartre. The horses that were needed to move the cannon away did not arrive, and the army units were immobilized. The soldiers were surrounded by the crowd, and soldiers began to leave the ranks and join the crowd. General Lecomte tried to withdraw, and then ordered his soldiers to load their weapons and fix bayonets. He gave the order three times to fire, but the soldiers refused. Some of the officers were disarmed and taken to the city hall of Montmartre, under the protection of Clemenceau. General Lecomte and the officers of his staff were seized by the National guards and his mutinous soldiers and taken to the local headquarters of the National Guard at the ballroom of the Chateau-Rouge. The officers were pelted with rocks, struck, threatened, and insulted by the crowd. In the middle of the afternoon Lecomte and the other officers were taken to 6 rue des Rosiers by members of a group calling themselves The Committee of Vigiilance of the 18th arrondissement, who demanded that they be tried and executed.
At 5:00 in the afternoon, the National Guards had captured another important prisoner: General Jacques Leon Clement-Thomas. General Clement-Thomas was an ardent republican and fierce disciplinarian, who had helped suppress the armed uprising of June 1848 against the Second Republic. Because of his republican beliefs, he had been arrested by Napoleon III and exiled, and had only returned to France after the downfall of the Empire. He was particularly hated by the National Guardsmen of Montmartre and Belleville because of the severe discipline he imposed during the siege of Paris. Earlier that day, dressed in civilian clothes, he had been trying to find out what was going on, when he was recognized by a soldier and arrested, and brought to the building at rue des Rosiers.
At about 5:30 on 18 March, the angry crowd of National guardsmen and deserters from the Lecomte's regiment at rue des Rosiers seized Clement-Thomas, beat him with rifle butts, pushed him into the garden, and shot him repeatedly. A few minutes later, they did the same to General Lecomte. Doctor Guyon, who examined the bodies shortly afterwards, found forty balls in the body of Clement-Thomas and 9 balls in the back of General Lecomte.
By the later morning, the operation to recapture the guns had failed, and crowds and barricades were appearing in all the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. General Vinoy ordered the army to pull back to the Seine, and Thiers began to organize a withdrawal to Versailles, where he could gather enough troops to take back Paris.
The Government Retreats
On the afternoon of March 18, following the government's failed attempt to seize the cannons at Montmartre, the Central Committee of the National Guard ordered the three battalions of National Guard to seize the Hotel de Ville, where they believed the government was located. They were not aware that Thiers, the government and the military commanders were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the gates were open and there were few guards. They were also unaware that Marshal Patrice Mac-Mahon, the future commander of the forces against the Commune, had just arrived at his home in Paris, having just ben released from imprisonment in Germany. As soon as he heard the news of the uprising, he made his way to the train station, where national guardsmen were already stopping and checking the identity of departing passengers; a sympathetic station manager concealed him in his office and helped him board the train, and he escaped the city. While he was at the train station National Guardsmen sent by the Central Committee arrived at his house looking for him.
At the advice of General Vinoy, Thiers ordered the evacuation to Versailles of all the regular forces in Paris, some forty thousand soldiers, including the soldiers in the fortresses around the city, the regrouping of all the army units in Versailles, and the departure of all government ministries from the city.
The National Guard takes power
In February, while the national government had been organizing in Bordeaux, a new rival government had been organized in Paris. The National Guard had not been disarmed by the armistice, and had on paper 260 battalions of 1500 men each, a total of 400,000 men.[25] Between 15 February and 24 February, some five hundred delegates elected by the National Guard began meeting in Paris. On March 15, just before the confrontation between the National Guard and the regular army over the cannons of Paris, 1,325 delegates of the federation of organizations created by the National Guard elected a leader,Giuseppe Garibaldi (who was in Italy and respectfully declined the title) and created a Central Committee of thirty-eight members, which made its headquarters in a school on the rue Basfroi, between Place de la Bastille and La Roquette. The first vote of the new Central Committee was to refuse to recognize the authority of General Aurelle de Paladines, the official commander of the National Guard appointed by Thiers, or of General Vinoy, the Military Governor of Paris.
Late on 18 March, when they learned that the regular army was leaving Paris, the units of the National Guard quickly to take control of the city. The first to take action were the followers of Louis Blanqui, who went quickly to the Latin Quarter and took charge of the gunpowder stored in the Pantheon, and the Orleans train station. Four battalions crossed the Seine and captured the prefecture of police, while other units occupied the former headquarters of the National Guard at place Vendome and the Ministry of Justice.
During the night of 18–19 March, the National Guard occupied the empty offices vacated by the government; they quickly took over the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of the interior, and the Ministry of War. At eight in the morning on the 19th, the Central Committee was meeting in the Hotel de Ville. By the end of the day 20,000 national guardsmen were camped in triumph in the square in front of the Hotel de Ville, with several dozen cannon, and a red flag was hoisted over the building.
The extreme left members of the Central Committee, led the Blanquists, demanded an immediate march on Versailles, to disperse the Thiers government and to impose their authority on all of France, but the majority of the Committee wanted first to establish a more solid base of legal authority in Paris. The committee officially lifted the state of siege, named commissions to administer the government, and called elections for 23 March. They also sent a delegation of mayors of the Paris arrondissements, led by Georges Clemenceau, to negotiate with the Thiers government in Versailles to obtain a special independent status for Paris.
The Commune Elections (March 26)
In Paris, hostility was growing between the elected republican mayors, including Clemenceau, who believed that they were legitimate leaders of Paris, and the more members of the Central Committee of the National Guard. On 22 March, the day before the elections, the Central Committee declared that they, not the mayors, were the legitimate government of Paris. They declared that Clemenceau was no longer the Mayor of Montmartre, and seized the city hall there, as well as the city halls of the 1st and 2nd arrondissements, which were occupied by more radical national guardsmen. "We are caught between two bands of crazy people," Clemenceau complained, "those sitting in Versailles and those in Paris."
The Commune elections held on 26 March elected a Commune council of 92 members, one member for each twenty thousand residents. In advance of the elections, the Central Committee of the National Guard and the leaders of the Internationale gave out their list of candidates, mostly from the extreme left. The candidates had only a few days to campaign.
The government of Thiers in Versailles urged the citizens of Paris to abstain from the elections. There was fine spring weather on Election Day. When the voting was finished, 233,000 Parisians had voted, out of 485,000 registered voters, or forty-eight percent. In the upper-class 7th and 8th arrondissements, 77 percent of voters had abstained; 68 percent in the 15th, 66 percent in the 16th, 62 percent in the 6th and 9th. But in the working-class neighborhoods, turnout was high: 76 percent in the 20th, 65 percent in the 19th, 55 to 60 percent in the 10th, 11th, and 12th.
A few candidates, including Blanqui (who had been arrested when outside Paris, and was in prison in Brittany), won in several arrondissements. Other candidates elected, including about twenty moderate republicans and five radicals, refused to take their seats. In the end, the Council had just 60 members. Nine of the winning candidates were Blanquists (some of whom were also candidates of the Internationale). Twenty-five, including Delescluze, and Pyat, classified themselves as "Independent revolutionaries," about fifteen were from the Internationale, and the rest were from a variety of radical groups. One of the best-known candidates, George Clemenceau, received only 752 votes. The professions represented by the Commune council members were 33 workers, five small businessmen, 19 clerks, accountants and other office staff, twelve journalists, and a selection of workers of the liberal arts. All were men; women were not allowed to vote.
The winners of the election were announced on 27 March, and a large ceremony and parade by the National Guard was held the next day in front of the Hotel de VIlle, decorated with red flags.
The Commune organizes and begins work
The new Commune held its first meeting on 28 March in a euphoric mood; the members adopted a dozen proposals; including an honorary presidency for Louis Blanqui, the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of military conscription, a proposal to send delegates to other cities to help launch communes there, and a resolution declaring that membership in the Paris Commune was incompatible with being a member of the National Assembly. This was aimed particularly at Pierre Tirard, the republican mayor of the 2nd arrondissement, who had been elected to both the Commune and National Assembly. Seeing the more radical political direction of the new Commune, Tirard and some twenty of the republican members decided it was wiser to resign from the Commune. A resolution was also passed, after a long debate, that the deliberations of the Council should be secret, since the Commune was now effectively at war with the government in Versailles and should not make its intentions known to the enemy.
Following the model proposed by the more radical members, the new government had no President, no mayor, and no commander in chief. The Commune began by establishing nine commissions, similar to those of the National Assembly, to run the business of Paris. The Commissions in turn reported to an Executive Commission. One of the first measures passed declared that military conscription was abolished, that no military force other than the National Guard could be formed or could be introduced into the capital, and all healthy male citizens were members of the National Guard. The new system had one important weakness; the National Guard now had two different commanders; it reported to both the Central Committee of the National Guard and to the Executive Commission, and it was not clear which one was in charge of the inevitable war with the government in Versailles.
The Program of the Commune
In addition, employers were prohibited from imposing fines on their workmen.[34] commune adopted the previously discarded French Republican Calendar during its brief existence and used thesocialist red flag rather than the republican tricolour. In 1848, during the Second Republic, radicals and socialists had also adopted the red flag to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans; this was similar to the symbolic distinctions adopted by the moderate, liberal, Girondist movement during the 1789 revolution.
Despite internal differences, the Council began to organize the public services essential for a city of two million residents. It also reached a consensus on certain policies that tended towards a progressive, secular, and highly-democratic social democracy. Because the Commune was only able to meet on fewer than sixty days in all, only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included:
- the separation of church and state;
- the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege (during which, payment had been suspended);
- the abolition of night work in the hundreds of Paris bakeries;
- the granting of pensions to the unmarried companions and children of National Guards killed on active service;
- the free return, by the city pawnshops, of all workmen's tools and household items valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege; the Commune was concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war;
- the postponement of commercial debt obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts; and
- the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune, nonetheless, recognized the previous owner's right to compensation.
The decrees separated the church from the state, appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice of religion from schools. (After the fall of the Commune, separation of Church and State, or laïcité, would not enter French law again until 1880-81 during the Third Republic, with the signing of the Jules Ferry laws and the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.) In theory, he churches were allowed to continue their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public political meetings during the evenings. In practice, many churches were closed, and many priests were arrested and held as hostages, in the hope of trading them for Louis-Auguste Blanqui, a revolutionary who had been arrested outside of Paris on March 17 and was held in prison in Brittany.
Other legislation proposed to make technical training freely available to all. It was not implemented because of the lack of resources and time.
Feminist initiatives
Women played an important role in both the initiation and governance of the Commune. Several women and children threw themselves between Adolphe Thiers' army and the cannons they were attempting to confiscate from the National Guard on Montmartre. Despite orders from Thiers, soldiers refused to fire on their own people. This led the French army to retreat to Versaillesand allowed the Paris Commune to form.
Some women organized a feminist movement, following on from earlier attempts in 1789 and 1848. Thus, Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section of the First International (IWA), created the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés ("Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and Care of the Wounded") on April 11, 1871. The feminist writer André Léo, a friend of Paule Minck, was also active in the Women's Union. Believing that their struggle against patriarchy could only be pursued through a global struggle against capitalism, the association demandedgender equality, wages' equality, the right of divorce for women, the right tosecular education and professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubines, and between legitimate and illegitimate children. They advocated the abolition ofprostitution (obtaining the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or legal official brothels). The Women's Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organized cooperative workshops. Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Le Mel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for indigents, and then fought during the Bloody Week on the barricades.[37]
Paule Minck opened a free school in the Church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre and animated the Club Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank.[37] The Russian Anne Jaclard, who declined to marry Dostoievsky and finally became the wife of Blanquist activist Victor Jaclard, founded the newspaper Paris Commune with André Léo. She was also a member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre, along with Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the First International. Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA activists, and founder of a cooperative bakery in 1867, also fought during the Commune and the Bloody Week.[37]
Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre", who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolized the active participation of a small number of women in the insurrectionary events. A female battalion from the National Guard defended the Place Blanche during the repression.
Local organizations
The workload of the Commune leaders was enormous. The Council members (who were not "representatives" but delegates, subject in theory to immediate recall by their electors) were expected to carry out many executive and military functions as well as their legislative ones. Numerous organisations were set up during the siege in the localities ("quartiers") to meet social needs, such as (canteens and first aid stations. For example, in the third arrondissement, school materials were provided free, three parochial schools were "laicised", and an orphanage was established. In the twentieth arrondissement, schoolchildren were provided with free clothing and food. At the same time, these local assemblies pursued their own goals, usually under the direction of local workers. Despite the formal reformism of the Commune council, the composition of the Commune as a whole was much more revolutionary. Revolutionary factions includedProudhonists (an early form of moderate anarchism), members of the international socialists, Blanquists, and more libertarian republicans.
War between the Commune and the national government
In Versailles, Thiers had estimated that he would need 150,000 soldiers to recapture Paris, and he had only about twenty thousand reliable first-line soldiers, plus about five thousand gendarmes. He worked rapidly to assemble a new and reliable regular army. Most of the soldiers were prisoners of war who had just been released by the Germans, following the terms of the armistice. Others were sent from military units in all of the provinces. To command the new army Thiers chose Patrice Mac-Mahon, who had won fame fighting the Austrians in Italy under Napoleon III, and who had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Sedan. He was highly popular both within the army and in the country. By 30 March, less than weeks after the route of the army on Montmartre, the regular army began skirmishing with the National Guard in the outskirts of Paris.
In Paris, the members of the Military Commission of the Commune and the executive committee of the Commune, as well as the central committee of the National Guard, met on April 1 and decided to launch an offensive toward the army in Versailles within five days. The attack was first launched in the morning of April 2 by five battalions who crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly. The National Guard troops were quickly repulsed by the regular soldiers, with a loss of about twelve soldiers. One officer of the Versailles army, a surgeon from the medical corps, was killed; the National Guardsmen had mistaken his uniform for that of a gendarme.
Five of the National Guard soldiers were captured by the Versailles soldiers; two were deserters from the regular army and two were National Guardsmen who were caught with their weapons in their hands. General Vinoy, the commander of the Paris Military District, had ordered that any prisoners who were deserters from the regular army should be shot. The commander of the regular forces, Colonel Boulanger, went further and ordered that all four prisoners be summarily shot. The practice of shooting prisoners captured with weapons became common in the bitter fighting in the weeks ahead.
The March on Versailles
Despite this first failure, the Commune leaders were still convinced that, as at Montmartre, the soldiers of the Versailles army would refuse to fire on the soldiers of the National Guard. They prepared massive offensive of 27,000 national guardsmen who would advance in three columns. They were expected to converge at the end of twenty-four hours at the gates of the Palace of Versailles. They advanced on the morning of 3 April without cavalry to protect the flanks, without artillery, without stores of food and ammunition, and without ambulances, confident of rapid success. They passed by the line of forts outside the city, believing that the forts were occupied by National Guardsmen, not knowing that the Versailles soldiers had re-occupied the abandoned forts on March 28. They soon came under heavy artillery and rifle fire from the Versailles soldiers, broke ranks and fled back to Paris. Once again National guardsmen captured with weapons were routinely shot by the Versailles units.[39] The Commune forces, the National Guard, first began skirmishing with the regular Army of Versailles on April 2. Neither side really sought a major civil war, nor was either side ever willing to negotiate.
Support for the Commune outside of Paris
Abroad, there were rallies and messages of goodwill sent by trade union and socialist organisations, including some in Germany. But any hopes of getting serious help from other French cities were soon dashed. In provincial and rural France there had always been a skeptical attitude towards the activities of the metropolis. Attempts to create Communes in Narbonne, Limoges, and Marseille were quickly crushed.
The Decree on Hostages
The leaders of the Commune responded to the defeat, and the public anger it caused, by drafting and passing a new order on 5 April which became known as the Decree on Hostages. It was roughly similar to the law of suspects of 1793, at the beginning of the reign of terror of the French Revolution. Under the decree, any person accused of complicity with the Versailles government could be immediately arrested, imprisoned, and tried by a special jury of accusation. Those convicted by the jury would become "hostages of the people of Paris." Article 5 stated: "Every execution of a prisoner of war or of a partisan of the government of the Commune of Paris will be immediately followed by the execution of a triple number of hostages held in virtue of article four." Prisoners of war would be brought before a jury, which would decide if they would be released or held as hostages.[41]
Under the new decree, a number of prominent religious leaders were promptly arrested, including the Abbé Deguerry, the curé of the Madeleine church, and the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. He was confined at the Mazas prison. The National Assembly in Versailles responded swiftly on April 6 with its own law, allowing military tribunals to judge and punish suspects within twenty-four hours, a law which was broadly and frequently applied during the suppression of the Commune. When the new law was introduced, the journalist and author Émile Zola wrote,"Thus we citizens of Paris are placed between two terrible laws; the law of suspects brought back by the Commune and the law on rapid executions which will certainly be approved by the Assembly. They are not fighting with cannon shots, they are slaughtering each other with decrees."
Life Inside Paris during the Commune
The Bank of France and the Commune
The new Commune named Francis Jourde as the head of the Commission of Finance. He had been the clerk of a notary, an accountant in a bank, and an employee of the city department of bridges and roads, and he maintained the accounts of the Commune with prudence. The tax receipts of the City of Paris amounted to 20 million francs, with another 6 million seized at the Hotel de Ville. The expenses of the Commune were 42 million, the largest part going to pay the dailry salary of the National Guard. Jourde first obtained a loan from the Rothschild Bank, then paid the bills from the city account, which was soon exhausted.
The gold reserves of the Bank of France had been moved out of Paris for safety in August 1870, but the vaults of the Bank of France contained 88 million francs in gold coins and 166 million francs in banknotes. When Thiers and the government left Paris in March, they did not have the time or the reliable soldiers to take the money with them. The reserves were guarded by a five hundred National Guardsmen, who were themselves employees of the Bank of France. Some of the members of the Commune wanted to take the Bank's reserves to fund social projects, but Jourde resisted, explaining that, without the gold reserves, the value of the currency would collapse and all the money of the Commune would be worthless. The Commune appointed Charles Beslay as the Commissaire of the Bank of France, and Beslay made an arrangement that the Bank would loan the Commune four hundred thousand francs a day. This arrangement was approved Thiers and the government in Versailles, because Thiers knew that in the future treaty of peace the Germans were demanding an indemnity of five billion francs for the cost of the war, and the Reserves were needed to keep the franc stable and pay the indemnity. The prudence of Jourde was later condemned by Karl Marx and other Marxists, who felt the Commune should have confiscated the reserves of the Bank of France and spent all the money immediately.
The press during the Commune
From March 21, the Central Committee of the National Guard banned the publication of the major pro-Versaille newspapers, Lu Gaulois and Le Figaro; their offices were invaded and closed by crowds of supporters of the Commune, and after April 18 other newspapers sympathetic to Versailles were all closed.
The most popular of the pro-Commune newspapers was Le Cri du peuple,published by Jules Valles, which was published from 22 February until 23 May. Another highly popular publicagtion was Pere Duchene, inspired by a similar paper of the same name published from 1790 until 1794; its first issue on March 6, it was briefly closed by General Vinoy, and then reappeared again until May 23, and specialized in humor, vulgarity and extreme abuse against the opponents of the Commune.
A republican press also flourished, including such papers as Le mot d'ordre' of Henri Rochefort, which was both violently anti-Versailles and critical of the faults and excesses of the Commune. The most popular republican paper was Le Rappel,' which condemned both Thiers and the killing of General Leconte and Thomas. The editor, Auguste Vacquerie, was close to Victor Hugo, whose son write for the paper. The editors wrote, "We are against the National Assembly, but we are not for the Commune. That which we defend, that which we love, that which we admire, is Paris."
The Commune and the Catholic Church
From the beginning, the Commune had a tense relationship with the Catholic Church. On 2 April, soon after the Commune was established, it voted a decree accusing the Catholic Church of "complicity in the crimes of the monarchy." The decree declared the separation of church and state, confiscated the state funds allotted to the church, seized the property of religious congregations, and ordered that Catholic schools to cease religious education and become secular. Over the next seven weeks, some two hundred priests, nuns and monks were arrested, and twenty-six churches were closed to the public. At the urging of the more radical newspapers. National guard units searched the basements of churches, looking for evidence of alleged sadism and criminal practices. More extreme elements of the National Guard carried out mock religious processions and parodies of religious services. Early in May, some of the political clubs began to demand the immediate execution of Archbishop Darboy and the other priests in the prison. The Archbishop and a number of priests were executed during Bloody Week, in retallation for the execution of Commune soldiers by the regular army.
The destruction of the Place Vendome Column
The destruction of the column honoring the victories of Napoleon I, topped by a statue of the Emperor, was one of the most prominent civic events during the Commune. It was decided by the It was voted on April 12 by the executive committee of the Commune, which declared that the column was "a monument of barbarism" and a "symbol of brute force and false pride." The idea had originally come from the painter Gustave Courbet, who on written to the Government of National Defense on 4 September calling for the demolition of the column. In October, he had called for the a new column, made of melted down German cannons, "the column of peoples, the column of Germany and France, forever federated." Courbet was elected to the Council of the Commune on April 16, after the decision to tear down the column was already made. The ceremony took place on May 16, in the presence of two battalions of the National guard and the leaders of the Commune, a band played the Marseillaise and Le Chant de Depart. The first effort to pull down the column failed, but at 5:30 in the afternoon the column broke from its base and shattered into three pieces. The pedestal was draped with red flags, and pieces of the statue were taken to be melted down and made into coins.
On 12 May another civic event took place; the destruction of the home of Adolphe Thiers on place Saint-Georges. The idea was proposed by Henri Rochefort, editor of the newspaper Le Mot d'ordre, on 6 April, but not voted by the Commune until 10 May. According to the decree of the Commune, the works of art were to be donated to the Louvre (which refused them) and the furniture was to be sold, and the money given to widows and orphans of the fighting. The house was emptied and destroyed
The Committee of Public Safety
As the military situation of the Commune deteriorated further in April, the Council of the Commune voted, with some opposition, for the creation of a Committee of Public Safety, modelled on the Committee that carried out the reign of terror during the French Revolution of 1789. The Committee was given extensive powers to hunt down and imprison enemies of the Commune.
The army of the Commune
Since every able-bodied man in Paris was obliged to be a member of the National Guard, the Commune on paper had an army of about 200,000 men on May 6, but the actual number was much lower, probably between twenty-five and fifty thousand men. At the beginning of May twenty percent of the National Guard was reported absent without leave.
The National Guard had hundreds of cannon and thousands of rifles in their arsenals, but only half of the cannon and two-thirds of the rifles were ever used; There were heavy naval cannon mounted on the ramparts of Paris, but there were few National Guardsmen trained to use them. Between the end of April and may 20, the number of trained artillerymen fell from 5,445 to 2,340.]
The officers of the National Guard were elected by the soldiers, and their leadership qualities and military skills varied widely. Gustave Clusaret, the commander of the National Guard until his dismissal on May 1, had tried to impose more discipline on the army, disbanding many of the unreliable units and making soldiers live in barracks instead of at home. He recruited officers with military experience, particularly Polish officers who had fled to France in 1863 after the Russians crushed the January Uprising; they played a prominent role in the last days of the Commune. One of these officers was General Jaroslav Dombrowski, a former Imperial Russian Army officer, who was appointed commander of the Commune forces on the right bank of the Seine. On May 5, he was appointed commander of the Commune's whole army. Dombrowski held this position until May 23, when he was killed while defending the city barricades.
The capture of Fort Issy
One of the key strategic points around Paris was Fort Issy, south the Paris near the Porte de Versailles, which blocked the route of the Army into Paris. The garrison of which was commanded by Leon Megy, a former mechanic and a militant Blanquist, who had been sentenced to twenty years hard labor for killing a policeman, He had been freed and had led the takeover of the prefecture of Marseille by militant revolutionaries. When he came back to Paris, he was given the rank of Colonel by the Central Committee of the National Guard, and given the command of Fort Issy on April 13.
The Army commander, General Ernest de Cissey, army began a systematic siege and a heavy bombardment of the fort that lasted three days and three nights. At the same time Cissey sent a message to Colonel Megy, with the permission of Marshal Mac-Mahon, offering to spare the lives of the fort's defenders and let them return to Paris with their belongings and arms weapons if they would surrender the fort. Colonel Megy gave the order, and during the night of 29–30 April, most of the soldiers evacuated the fort and returned to Paris. When the news of the evacuation reached the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Commune. Before General Cissey and the Versailles army could occupy the fort, the National Guard rushed reinforcements there and re-occupied all the positions. General Cluseret, commander of the National Guard, was dismissed and put in prison. General Cissey resumed the intense bombardment of the fort. The defenders resisted until the night of April 7–8, when the remaining National Guards in the fort, unable to withstand further attacks, decided to withdraw. The new commander of the National Guard, Louis Rossel, issued a terse bulletin: The tricolor flag flies over the fort of Issay, abandoned yesterday by the garrison." The abandonment of the fort led the Commune to dismiss Rossel, and his replacement as commander by Rossel and his replacement by Delescluze, a fervent Communard but a journalist with no military experience.
Bitter fighting followed as Mac-Mahon's army worked their way systematically forward to the walls of the city. On 20 May, Mac-Mahon's artillery batteries at Montretout, Mont-Valerian, Boulogne, Issy and Vanves opened fire on the western neighborhoods of the city, Auteuil, Passy, and the Trocadero, falling close to l'Etoile. Dombrowski reported that the soldiers he had sent to defend the ramparts of the city between Point-du-Jour and porte d'Auteuil had retreated to the city-- he had only 4000 soldiers left at la Muette, 2000 at Neuilly, and 200 at Asnieres and Saint Ouen. "I lack artillerymen and workers to hold off the catastrophe." On 19 May, while Commune executive committee was meeting to judge the former military commander Clauseret for the loss of the Issy fortress, they received word that the forces of Marshal MacMahon were within the fortifications Paris.
The radicalization of the Commune
By April, as the forces of Mac-Mahon steadily approached Paris, divisions had arisen within the Commune about whether to give absolute priority to military defense or to political and social freedoms and reforms. The majority, including the Blanquists and the more radical revolutionaries, supported by Le Vengeurde Pyat and Le Pere Duchene of Vermersch, supported the military priority. The publications La Commune, La Justice and Le Cri du peuple of Jules Valles feared that a more authoritarian government would destroy kind of social republic they wanted to achieve.
The Committee on Public Safety of Raoul Rigault began to make more arrests, usually for treason, intelligence with the enemy, or insults to the Commune. Those arrested included General de Martimprey, almost eighty years old, the governor of the Invalides, alleged to having caused the assassination of revolutionaries in December 1851, as well as more recent commanders of the National Guard, including Cluseret. High religious officials had been arrested; the Archbishop Darboy, the Vicar General, Abbe Lagarde, and the cure of the Madeleine, Abbe Deguerry. The policy of holding hostages for possible reprisals was denounced by some defenders of the Commune, including Victor Hugo, in a poem entitled "No reprisals" published in Brussels on Paril 21.[54]
The leader of the most extreme faction of the Commune, Louis Blanqui, had been arrested by the Versailles government on 17 March, and was being held in a prison in the Bay of Morlaix in Brittany. On April 12, Rigault proposed to exchange Archbishop Darboy and several other priests for Blanqui. Thiers refused the proposal. On 14 May, Rigault proposed to exchange seventy hostages for Blanqui, and Thiers again refused.
The "Bloody Week"
May 21 - The Army enters Paris
The final offensive on Paris by Mac-Mahon's army began early in the morning on Sunday, 21 May. On the front line, soldiers learned from a sympathizer inside the walls that the National Guard had withdrawn from one section of the city wall at Point-du-Jour, and the fortifications were undefended. An army engineer crossed the moat and inspected the empty fortifications, and immediately telegraphed the news to Marshal Mac-Mahon, who was with Thiers at the fort of Mont-Valerien. Mac-Mahon immediately gave orders, and two battalions passed through the fortifications without meeting anyone, and occupied the porte de Saint-Cloud and the porte de Versailles. By four o'clock in the morning, sixty thousand soldiers had passed into the city and occupied Autuil and Passy.
Once the fighting began inside Paris, he strong neighborhood loyalties that had been an advantage of the Commune became something of a disadvantage: instead of an overall planned defence, each "quartier" fought desperately for its survival, and each was overcome in turn. The webs of narrow streets that made entire districts nearly impregnable in earlier Parisian revolutions had in the center been replaced by wide boulevardsduring Haussmann's renovation of Paris. The Versailles forces enjoyed a centralized command and had superior numbers. They had learned the tactics of street fighting and simply tunnelled through the walls of houses to outflank the Communards' barricades. Ironically, only where Haussmann had made wide spaces and streets were they held up by the defenders' gunfire.
The trial of Gustave Clusaret, the former commander, was still going on at the Commune when they received the message from General Dombrowski that the army was inside the city. He asked for reinforcements and proposed an immediate counterattack. "Remain calm," he wrote, "and everything will be saved. We must not be defeated!".[57] When they had received this news, the members of the Commune executive returned to their deliberations on the fate of Cluseret, which continued until eight o'clock that evening.
The first reaction of many of the National Guards was to find someone to blame, and Dombrowski was the first to be accused; rumors circulated that he had accepted a million francs to give up the city. He was deeply offended by the rumors. They stopped when Dombrowski died two days later from wounds received on the barricades. His last reported words were: "Do they still say I was a traitor?"
May 22 - the barricades go up, and the first street battles
On the morning of 22 May, bells rang around the city, and Delscluze, as delegate for war of the Commune, issued a proclamation, posted all over Paris:
"In the name of this glorious France, mother of all the popular revolutions, permanent home of the ideas of justice and solidarity which should be and will be the laws of the world, march at the enemy, and may your revolutionary energy show him that someone can sell Paris, but no one can give it up, or conquer it! The Commune counts on you, count on the Commune!"
The Committee of Public Safety issued its own decree:
TO ARMS! That Paris be bristling with barricades, and that, behind these improvised ramparts, it will hurl again its cry of war, its cry of pride, its cry of defiance, but its cry of victory; because Paris, with its barricades, is undefeatable ...That revolutionary Paris, that Paris of great days, does its duty; the Commune and the Commitee of Public Safety will do theirs!
Despite the appeals, only fifteen to twenty thousand persons, including many women and children, responded. The forces of the Commune were outnumbered five times by army of Marshal Mac-Mahon.[61]
On the morning of 22 May, the regular army occupied a large area from the porte Dauphine to the Champs-de-Mars and the Ecole Militaire, where general Cissey established his headquarters, to the porte de Vanves. In a short time the 5th corps of the army advanced toward Parc Monceau and Place Clichy, while General Douay occupied the place de l'Etoile and General Clichant occupied the Gare Saint-Lazaire. Thousands of National guardsmen surrendered, and many others surrendered. Little resistance was encountered in the west of Paris, and the army moved forward slowly and cautiously, in no hurry.
No one had expected the army to enter the city, so only a few large barricades were already in place, on the rue Saint-Florentine and rue de l'Opera, and the rue to Rivoli. barricades had not been prepared in advance; some nine hundred barricades were built hurridly out of paving stones and sacks of earth. were hurridly put in place. Many other people prepared shelters in the cellars. The first serious fighting took place in the afternoon of the 22nd, an artillery duel between regular army batteries on the Quai d'Orsay and the Madeleine and National Guard batteries on the terrace of the Tuileries Palace. On the same day, the first executions of National Guard soldiers by the regular army inside Paris took place; some sixteen prisoners captured on the Rue de bac were given a summary hearing, and then shot.
May 23 - the battle for Montmartre and the burning of the Tuileries Palace[edit]
On May 23 he next objective of the army the Butte of Montmarte, where the uprising had begun. The National Guard had built and manned a circle of barricades and makeshift forts around the base of the Butte. The garrison of one barricade, at Chaussee Clignancourt, was defended in part by a battalion of about thirty women, including Louise Michelle, the celebrated "Red Virgin of Montmartre", who had already participated in many battle outside the city. She was seized by regular soldiers and thrown into the trench in front of the barricade and left for dead. She escaped and soon afterwards surrendered to the army, in order to prevent the arrest of her mother. The battalions of the National Guard were no match for the army; by midday on the 23rd the regular soldiers were at the top of Montmartre, and the tricolor flag was raised over the Solferino tower. The soldiers captured forty two guardsmen and several women, took them to the same house on Rue Rosier where generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte had been executed, and shot them. On the Rue Royale, soldiers seized thee formidable barricade around the Madeleine church; three hundred prisoners captured with their weapons were shot there, the largest of the mass executions of prisoners.
On the same day, having had little success fighting the army, units of National Guardsmen began to take revenge by burning public buildings symbolizing the government. The guardsmen led by Paul Brunel, one of the original leaders of the Commune, took cans of oil and set fire to the buildings around the rue Royale and the Faubourg Saint-Honore. Following the example set by Brunel, guardsman set fire to dozens of other buildings on rue Saint-Florentin, rue de Rivoli, rue de Bac, rue de Lille, and other streets.
The Tuileries Palace, which had been the residence of most of the monarchs of France from Henry IV to Napoleon III, was defended by a garrison of some three hundred National guards with thirty cannon placed in the garden. They had been engaged in a day-long artillery duel with the regular army. At about seven in the evening, the commander of the garrison, Jules Bergeret, gave the order to burn the palace. The walls, floors, drapes and woodwork were soaked with oil and turpentine, and barrels of powder were placed at the foot of the grand staircase and in the courtyard, then the fires were set. The fire lasted 48 hours and gutted the palace, except for the southernmost part, the Pavillon de Flore[64] Bergeret sent a message to the Hotel de Ville: "The last vestiges of royalty have just disappeared. I wish that the same will happen to all the monuments of Paris."
The Richelieu library of the Louvre, connected to the Tuileries, was also set on fire and entirely destroyed. The rest of the Louvre was saved by the efforts of the museum curators and fire brigades. Defenders of the Commune later claimed that many of the fires were produced by artillery from the French army.
Besides public buildings, the National Guard also burned the homes of several people associated with the regime of Napoleon III, such as the home of the playwright Prosper Merimee, the author of Carmen.
May 24 - the burning of the Hotel de Ville, and the execution of prisoners and hostages
At two in the morning on May 24, Brunel and his men went to the Hotel de Ville, which was still the headquarters of the Commune and of its chief executive, Delescluze. Wounded men were being tended in the halls, and some of the National Guard Officers and Commune members were changing from their uniforms into civilian clothes and shaving their beards, preparing to escape from the city. Delescluze ordered everyone to leave the building, and Brunel's men set it on fire.
The battles resumed at daylight of 24 May, under a sky black with smoke from the burning palaces and ministries. There was no coordination or central direction on the Commune side; each neighborhood fought on its own. The National Guard disintegrated, with many soldiers changing into civilian clothes and fleeing the city, leaving between ten and fifteen thousand Communards to defend the barricades. Delescluze moved his headquarters from the Hotel de Ville to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement. More public buildings were set afire, including the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, the theaters of Chatelet and Porte-Saint-Martin, and the Church of Saint-Eustache.
As the army continued its slow advance, the summary executions continued. Informal Military courts were established at the Ecole Polytechnique, Chatelet, the Luxembourg Palace, Parc Monceau, and other locations around Paris. The hands of captured prisoners were examined to see if they had fired weapons. The prisoners gave their identity, sentence was pronounced by a court of two or three gendarme officers, the prisoners were taken out and sentences immediately carried out.
The Commune carried out its own executions. Raoul Rigaut, the chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, without getting the authorization of the Commune, executed one group of four prisoners, before he himself was captured and shot by an army patrol. On 24 May a delegation of National guardsmen and Gustave Genton, a member of the Committee of Public Safety came to the new headquarters of the Commune at the city hall of the 11th arrondissment and demanded the immediate execution of the hostages held at the prison of La Roquette. The new prosecutor of the Commune, Theophile Ferre, hesitated and then wrote a note: "Order to the Citizen Director of la Roquette to execute six hostages." Genton asked for volunteers to serve as a firing squad, and went to the La Roquette prison, where many of the hostages were being held. Genton was given a list of hostages and selected six names, including the Archbishop of Paris three priests. The Director of the Prison, Francois, refused to give up the Archbishop without a specific order from the Commune. Genton sent a deputy back to the Prosecutor, who wrote "and especially the archbishop" on the bottom of his note. The archbishop and five other hostages were promptly taken out into the courtyard of the prison, lined up against the wall, and shot.
May 25 - the death of Delescluze
By the end of 24 May, the regular army had cleared most of the Latin Quarter of barricades, and held three-fifths of Paris. Mac-Mahon had his headquarters at the Quai d'Orsay. The insurgents held only the 11th, 12th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, and parts of the 3rd, 5th, and 13th. Delescluze and the remaining leaders of the Commune, about twenty in all, were at the city of the 13th arrondissement on Place Voltaire. A bitter but took place between about fifteen hundred National Guards from the 13th and the Mouffetard district, commanded by Walery Wroblowski, a Polish exile who had participated in the uprising against the Russians, against three brigades commanded by General de Cissey.
During the course of the 25th the insurgents lost the city hall of the 13th and moved to a barricade on place Jeanne-d'Arc, where seven hundred were taken prisoner. Wroblowski himself and some of his men escaped to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement, where he met Delescluze, the chief executive of the Commune. Several of the other Commune leaders, including Brunel, were wounded, and Pyat had disappeared. Delescluze offered Wroblowski the command of the Commune forces, which he declined, saying that he preferred to fight as a private soldier. At about seven-thirty Delescluze put on his red sash of office, walked unarmed to the barricade on the place Chateau-d'eau, climbed to the top and showed himself to the soldiers, and was promptly shot dead.[73]
May 26 - the capture of Place de la Bastille and the executions on Rue Haxo[edit]
On the afternoon of 26 May, after six hours of heavy fighting, the regular army captured the Place de la Bastille. The National Guard still held parts of the 3rd arrondissment, from square du Temple to the Arts-et-Metiers, and the National Guard still had artillery at their strong points at the Buttes-Chaumont and Pere-Lachaisse, from which they continued to bombard the regular army forces along the Canal Saint-Martin
The executions of prisoners by the army continued, as did the execution of hostages by the Commune. A contingent of several dozen National Guardsmen led by Antoine Clavier, a commissaire and Emile Gois, a Colonel of the National Guard, arrived at La Roquette prison and demanded, at gunpoint, the remaining hostages there; ten priests, thirty-five policemen and gendarmes, and two civilians. They took them first to the city hall of the 20th arrondissement, the Commune leader of that district refused to allow his city hall to be used as a place of execution. Clavier and Gois took them instead to rue Haxo. The procession of hostages was joined by a large and furious crowd of national guards and civilians who insulted, spat upon and struck the hostages. Arriving at an open yard, they were lined up against a wall and shot in groups of ten. National guardsmen in the crowd opened fire along with the firing squad, and the hostages were shot from all directions, then beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets
May 27-28- the last battles and the massacre of Pere-Lachaise Cemetery
On the morning of 27 May, the regular army soldiers of Generals Grenier, Ladmirault and Montaudon launched an attack on the National Guard artillery on the heights of the Buttes-Chaumont. The heights were captured at the end of the afternoon by the first regiment of the French Foreign Legion. The last remaining strongpoint of the National Guard was the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, defended by about two hundred men. At 6:00 in the evening the army used cannon to demolish the gates and the First Regiment of naval infantry stormed into the cemetery. Savage fighting followed around the tombs until nightfall, when the last one hundred and fifty Guardsmen, many of them wounded, were surrounded and surrendered. The captured guardsman were taken to the wall of the cemetery, known today as the Communards' Wall, and shot.
On 28 May, the regular army captured the last remaining positions of the Commune, which offered little resistance. In the morning the regular army captured la Roquette prison and freed the remaining 170 hostages. The army took fifteen hundred prisoners at the National Guard position on Rue Haxo, and two thousand more at Derroja, near Pere-Lachaise. A handful of barricades at rue Ramponneau and rue de Tourville held out into the middle of the afternoon, when all resistance ceased.
The casualties
The number of Communards killed during Bloody Week has long been a subject of debate by historians. The official army report by General Felix Antoine Appert mentioned only military casualties, which amounted to 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing, during the period from April through May. The report said nothing about Communard casualties, other than that the information was "very incomplete."
The number of casualties during the week was raised at a hearing of the National Assembly on August 28, 1871, where the leader of the army during the suppression the Commune, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, testified. One of the members of the Assembly, M. Vacherot, told the Marshal, "A general has told me that the number killed in combat, on the barricades, or after the combat, was as many as 17,000 men." The Marshal responded: "I don't know what that estimate is based upon; it seems exaggerated to me. All I can say is that the insurgents lost a lot more people than we did." Vacherot continued, "Perhaps this number applies to all of the siege, and to the fighting at Forts d'Issy and Vanves." MacMahon replied, "the number is exaggerated." Vacherot persisted: "It was General Appert who gave me that information. Perhaps he meant both dead and wounded." To which MacMahan replied, "Ah, well, that's different."
In 1876, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who fought on the barricades during the Bloody Week and wrote a highly sympathetic history of the Commune, estimated that between seventeen and twenty thousand Communards had been killed during bloody week. This was based on interviews and his own observations, and was also apparently based on Appert's number of seventeen thousand, though Appert's number had included wounded as well, and covered the whole period of the Commune. Lissagaray estimated that three thousand Communards were killed in combat, and the other seventeen thousand were executed afterwards.
Vladimir Lenin seized upon the number twenty thousand and cited it as proof of the brutality of the ruling classes: he wrote, "20,000 killed in the streets...Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at nothing." [87] The historianBenedict Anderson cited the number of twenty thousand.[88] The British historian Alfred Cobban also used this estimate in 1965, writing: "the death toll of the Communards was probably not less than twenty thousand."[89] The number "probably at least twenty thousand" was also cited by French historian Pierre Milza.[90]
The bodies of those Communards killed on the barricades and by execution afterwards had been buried in mass graves around the city. Immediately after the end Commune, for reasons of public health, they were quickly exhumed and reburied in the city cemeteries. Not long after the Commune, a French journalist, Maxime du Camp, examined the registers of the Paris cemeteries and reported that the dead buried after Bloody Week numbered 6,562. In 2012 a British historian, Robert Tombs, made a similar study of the cemetery records and estimated that the number killed was between 6,000 and 7,000.[91] A 2014 book by the French historian Jacques Rougerie, wrote: "the number ten thousand victims seems today the most plausible; it remains an enormous number for the time."
The Legacy of the Paris Commune
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The Paris Commune inspired other uprisings named or called Communes: in Moscow (December 1905); Budapest (March-July 1919); Canton (December 1927), and, most famously, Saint Petersburg (1917). The Commune was regarded with admiration and awe by later Communist and leftist leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao.
Lenin wrote: "We are only dwarves perched on the shoulders of those giants." He celebrated by dancing in the snow in Moscow on the day that the Bolshevik government was more than two months old, surpassing the Commune. The ministers and officials of the Bolshevik government were given the title "Commissar" borrowed directly from the "Commissaires" of the Commune. Lenin's tomb in Moscow was (and still is)) decorated with red banners from the Commune, brought to Moscow for his funeral by French communists.
Stalin wrote: "In 1917 we thought that we would form a commune, an association of workers, and that we would put an end to bureaucracy...That is a goal that we are still far from reaching.
The Bolsheviks renamed the dreadnought battleship Sevastopol toParizhskaya Kommuna. In the later years of the Soviet Union, The Soviet spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a communard banner from the Paris Commune.
The Marxist critique of the Commune
Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists and others have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration of, a "liberated" society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from thegrass roots up. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, and laterVladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune.
Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, praised the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat.
Marx wrote that: "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators' history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.".[95]
Friedrich Engels echoed this idea, later maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quarters", and other features meant that the Commune was no longer a "state" in the old, repressive sense of the term: it was a transitional form, moving towards the abolition of the state as such—he used the famous term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the Commune was, he said, the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", meaning it was a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. But Marx and Engels were not entirely uncritical of the Commune. The split between theMarxists and anarchists at the 1872 Hague Congress of the First International (IWA) may in part be traced to Marx's stance that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more harshly with reactionaries, instituted conscription, and centralized decision making in the hands of a revolutionary direction, etc. The other point of disagreement was the anti-authoritarian socialists' oppositions to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state (the anarchists were in favor of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralized workers' councils as those seen in the commune).
Lenin, along with Marx, judged the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", though Lenin criticized the Communards for having "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over"; he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy.
But two mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about "expropriating the expropriators", it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a "just exchange", etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.
...Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it [the Russian proletariat] knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle—they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution—but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.
The Paris Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this dictatorship was weak and incomplete. The Communards lacked the fundamentals—a Marxist proletarian party, discipline, organisation, a clear understanding of the aims of their struggle, and an alliance with the peasantry. The Commune committed a number of serious errors. It did not venture to confiscate the tremendous assets of the French bank and showed hesitance in dealing with counter-revolutionary agents and accessories, saboteurs, spies and the slanderous campaign in the bourgeoise press. The Commune paid too little attention to military training.— Marx Engels Lenin on Scientific Socialism[97]
The legacy of the Commune in France
In France, a different lesson was drawn by the diarist Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote, three days after La Semaine Sanglante, "...the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it..."
Paris had seen at least six armed uprisings before the Paris Commune. After the defeat of the Commune, there was only one; In August, 1944, against the Germans occupying Paris, shortly before the city was liberated by French and American troops. The more peaceful student uprising in Paris in May 1968, which was sometimes referred to as a 'student Commune," though it never took power in the city. France did not have a socialist pirme minister until Leon Blum in 1936.
Criticism
Among conservative authors, the assessment of the Commune's reign has been highly critical. For example, the American Ambassador at the time, Elihu Washburne, writing in his personal diary which is quoted at length in noted historian David McCullough's book, The Greater Journey (Simon & Schuster 2011), described the Communards as "brigands", "assassins", and "scoundrels"; "I have no time now to express my detestation.... [T]hey threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender." According to this interpretation, the fighting resulted in the burning by the Communards of the Tuileries Palace, the Library of the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, Prefecture of Police, Palais Royal, and many houses. Fires were also started in Notre Dame, but were extinguished before it could be destroyed. The sewers from the Hôtel de Ville to the Banque de France had also been mined. Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted that "the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguishing themselves by the fury with which they fought" However, it has been argued in recent research that these famous female arsonists of the Commune, or pétroleuses, may have been a myt). Lissargaray wrote that because of this myth, hundreds of working-class women were murdered in Paris in late May falsely accused of being petroleuses. He also noted that this myth hid that the artillery fire by the French army was responsible for probably half of the fires that consumed the city during the bloody week] Washburne unsuccessfully sought to save the Commune's hostages, six of whom would eventually be executed during the last phase of the fighting in Paris, by entreating Thiers to accept the proposed exchange with Blanqui (see above for details).[104] Washburne wrote that the Commune was guilty of "unparalleled atrocities", followed by "awful vengeances" as the government troops retook Paris.
Other commune
Simultaneously with the Paris Commune, uprisings in Lyon, Grenoble and other cities established equally short-lived communes
