Chapter 31. The Paris Commune of 1871

The peace treaty between Bismarck and the National Assembly, it has been noted, permitted the Prussian army to stage a formal march into the French capital on March 1 and “occupy” it (more as a symbolic gesture than a reality) until the first payment on the indemnity was met—which the national government prompdy proceeded to pay. Prior to the parade, Parisians furiously debated whether they should violendy resist this military insult to the city or treat it with disdainful indifference. After much discussion in the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, it was wisely decided not to provoke the Prussians, who, after their parade, confined their occupation of Paris to the north of the capital’s perimeter.

At the same time, the more radical sectors of the populace were mindful that Thiers and his government were only too eager to disarm Paris, indeed to disband any potentially revolutionary National Guard units that might challenge the authority of the National Assembly over the French capital. Accordingly, workers in Paris began to seize weapons wherever they were stored, especially the chassepdts and early machine guns, or mitrailleuses, that had been denied to radical Guard battalions during the siege. Above all, they began to collect the cannons that had been parked in the middle-class districts of western Paris for use against the Prussians. Since large numbers of these cannons had been purchased by patriotic popular subscription, they were now seen as, by all rights, belonging to the people. Hence the cannons in the western half of Paris were dragged by them across the city and installed on the working-class heights of Belleville and Montmartre, presumably to keep them out of the clutches of the Prussians.

Ironically, the peace treaty was to prove very serviceable to the radicals in Paris. Not only did it give them the excuse they needed to park as many cannons as they could in the eastern working-class areas, but inasmuch as the agreement between Thiers and Bismarck obliged the French national government to significantly reduce its garrison in the capital to some 60,000 men, most of the French army regulars in and around the city were demobilized. As a result, the largest military force remaining in Paris was the National Guard—which had been allowed, under the terms of the earlier armistice, to keep all of its weapons. The army demobilization left some 200,000 well-trained line soldiers and mobiles in the city without income, and although many of them returned to their home provinces, others remained behind and fraternized with the National Guard, in many cases joining its ranks.

If the National Assembly had ever had any possibility of regaining the cannons from the potential insurgents in Paris, it had foreclosed it when it ended the moratorium on rental payments and overdue loans. Having just emerged from an agonizing siege, ordinary Parisians were now expected to make payments that they could not possibly afford. On March 15, as we have seen, the National Guard angrily responded to these provocations by forming a Federation of its local battalions and electing a guiding Central Committee. This Central Committee was determined to keep the cannons in Paris under its own control. Negotiations between the Central Committee and the National Assembly—mediated by the arrondissement mayors—ultimately failed, and the city’s artillery remained in the hands of the people.

THE CANNONS OF MONTMARTRE

Thiers fully understood that the cannons had to be removed and Paris disarmed if the government was to exercise control over the capital. On March 16 he arrived in Paris with his ministers, and a day later, at a government council meeting, they formulated a plan to seize the cannons in the working- class districts. Regiments of line troops were to occupy all the major squares, buildings, railroad stations, bridges, and strategic points in the center and eastern half of the capital. Generals Lecomte and Paturel were to enter the city from the north and scale the steep heights of Montmartre and Belleville, which together had 245 cannons out of the 417 guns held by the Guard. It is apparent that Thiers intended not only to confiscate the Guard’s artillery but to establish military control over revolutionary Paris, stationing troops in considerable force in strategic positions and, if necessary, subduing any resistance in the working- class districts. The police were authorized to arrest and imprison some thirty members of the Central Committee and to seize every known radical that they could find in the capital.

The success of Thiers’s coup would depend entirely on secrecy, speed, and surprise. At three a.m. on March 18, while most of Paris was asleep, the troops were ordered out of their barracks, without even eating breakfast, and swifdy marched to their assigned positions. When they arrived at the artillery park at Montmartre, they found it poorly guarded and occupied it easily, taking complete possession of the guns. They then setded down to await the horses that were to come to cart them away. Owing to a lack of coordination as well as horses, however, the soldiers found themselves waiting for hours.

At dawn, the unsuspecting neighborhood around them began to stir. Incredibly, the soldiers were still sitting in the park as late as eight a.m., famished and chilled by the night mist Many men had left their posts and weapons to get something to eat at the opening bistros. No sooner did the working-class women emerge from their houses and see the soldiers than they set off a furious alarm—Louise Michel ran though the neighborhood, calling out the National Guard, who quickly arrived in their kepis and assembled in columns to protect the artillery. The demoralized regular soldiers were no more eager to fight the Guards than the Guards were eager to fight them When General Lecomte ordered his men to fire, they flady refused, and troops on both sides began to fraternize. The entire operation soon collapsed. By nine in the morning, government soldiers, National Guards, and workers—female as well as male—were toasting each other and the republic in joyous celebration.

Thiers’s foray into the revolutionary heart of Paris had been a complete fiasco. Allowing for minor variations, much the same story was repeated throughout the city, either horses came too late to be used, or National Guards were alerted in time to prevent the government troops from seizing the cannons. Everywhere soldiers of the line fraternized with the Guards. The Parisians’ victory was not entirely bloodless, to be sure—it cost the life of General Clement Thomas, the former Guard commander who, dressed in civilian clothing, had been drawn into the streets out of curiosity. There he was recognized and pursued by a crowd who remembered his bloody role in repressing the journee of May 15, more than two decades earlier. Despite earnest efforts by National Guards to protect him—he was a republican now— he was killed, as was General Lecomte, who had provocatively unsheathed his sword against an angry crowd. An autopsy later revealed that dozens of bullets from army chassqjots accounted for their deaths, which suggests that they had been shot by troops. This evidence notwithstanding, Thiers would claim that they had been brutally murdered by the “reds” of Paris.

At three in the afternoon, Thiers and his ministers convened at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they decided that, in the light of the fiasco, the government would evacuate the dty. Suddenly, looking down from a window, the minister of war saw a battalion of National Guards marching in the street below. Fearing that the Guards intended to capture them, all the ministers were thrown into a panic. Although the Guard battalion marched past the Ministry, with no inkling of the haul they could have scooped up by taking the building, the ministers scattered in different directions. Thiers, scurrying down the back stairs to a carriage and cavalry escort, paused only to confirm the order to evacuate the capital, then made his way as quickly as possible to Versailles.

Despite furious opposition from Jules Ferry, the mayor of Paris, and by some of the arrondissement mayors, Thiers’s decision to abandon the capital was irrevocable. Behind it lay a strategy that the chief of state had advocated as far back as 1848, when in the last days of Louis-Philippe’s reign he had urged the king to retreat with all his troops outside the capital, regroup his forces, and then return to retake the city in a bloody conquest. Where Louis-Philippe had declined to follow his advice, Thiers himself was now free to carry it out himself. Once he had built up his forces at Versailles, his hand, Thiers reasoned, would be free to eliminate the revolutionary “pest” once and for all. As time was soon to reveal, he considered the Parisian working class to be little more than vermin who had to be ruthlessly driven back to their holes in the slums.

PARIS UNDER THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

Once the ministers had departed, control over Paris and its environs, for all practical purposes, lay in the hands of the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation. Barely had the government fled, however, when the Committee, apparendy stunned by its own success, performed the first of the many blunders that were to mark its actions—or lack of them—during the two weeks when it was the governing body in Paris, with potentially enormous power. It did virtually nothing against the fleeing government or its troops. Even as Thiers and his cabinet were hurrying to Versailles, the Committee behaved as though it were faced with the need to defend itself. Rather than mount an attack to crush its opponents, the Committee ordered the Guard’s battalion officers to build barricades to protect themselves against an attack, indeed to withdraw if the government undertook a resolute assault.

On the following Sunday night, March 19, the Central Committee convened at the Hotel de Ville to decide on its next step. Two energetic Blanquists, Emile Eudes, a steelworker, and Paul Brunei, a student, called on the Committee to make an immediate attack upon the retreating and demoralized government troops and march on Versailles, demands that were supported by the Montmartre committee of the National Guard. At the very least, the two Blanquists demanded that the city gates be closed—as Blanqui himself had ordered during the attempted coup of October 31—to prevent the troops from escaping to Versailles. Lissagaray, whose History of the Commune of 1871 has long been regarded by the Left as the official account of the Commune, notes that at the very time of the Committee’s meeting, “files of soldiers were still marching off [to Versailles] through the gates of the left bank.”[544] Had the Central Committee mounted such an attack on Thiers’s fleeing troops, it is fairly certain that the Guards could have defeated them and taken Versailles. Indeed, as Edwards observes,

The retreat of the army to Versailles was chaotic. The troops were insubordinate to their officers, and it was only the gendarmes who could keep some sort of order. So hasty was the withdrawal that several regiments were forgotten and left stranded in Paris.[545]

Possibly because the two Blanquists were too young to be treated with the respect that their mentor had earned by his long years of experience and imprisonment, their pleas were ignored. Lissagaray describes how their demands to immediately march on Versailles were answered: “No. We have only the mandate to secure the rights of Paris. If the provinces share our views, let them imitate our example.”[546] The Committee, apparendy suffering a disastrous failure of nerve, gave every excuse it could muster for doing almost nothing. Far from mounting an attack, it procrastinated, even allowing the demoralized Versailles troops to retreat by failing to close the city’s gates.

Moreover, most of the forts, which had originally been held by regular army troops outside the city during the war, were unoccupied. It seems not to have occurred to the National Guard at least to claim Mont-Valerien, the most important stronghold in the whole Parisian defensive system, while it could still be easily taken. Indeed, for two whole days it lay virtually unoccupied; not until Monday did Thiers’s forces take over this vital outpost and foreclose the possibility that the Central Committee could claim it.

What the Central Committee lacked that Sunday night and for much of its remaining existence was the presence of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who had acted so decisively in the uprising the previous October. But Blanqui, still at large since that failure, had finally been captured by the government in the provinces on March 17, only a day before the attack upon Montmartre and Belleville. Thiers, who was only too familiar with Blanqui’s resoluteness, would keep him imprisoned throughout the entire period of the Commune. Perhaps more than anyone else, he knew that no one could have better given it clear direction, at least in military affairs, than the old revolutionary.

In fact, few revolutionary institutions were more confused about their immediate goals and functions than the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation. As Lissagaray observes, the Committee “saw not—very few saw as yet—that this was a death struggle with the Assembly at Versailles.”[547] Instead, hesitant, overly cautious, and reluctant to confront Thiers and the National Assembly, it was preoccupied with clarifying the scope of its own powers and its own legal status. Finally the members decided to call, as quickly as possible, for the election of a Commune to replace their own Committee. Thus, in its “Appeal to the Departments,” the Committee declared that its “existing powers are essentially provisional, and will be replaced by an elected Communal Council.”[548] At a dme when the Committee should have been subduing Thiers, it issued a statement limiting its own authority.

“Let the provinces therefore hasten to imitate the example of the capital by organizing themselves in a republican fashion,” the “Appeal” continued. Herein, as Edwards emphasizes, lay another of the great failings of the Paris Commune of 1871: the parochial mentality of its officers and men. On the afternoon of March 18, when the Central Committee was busy issuing defensive orders to Guard battalions and ordering the battalions of the seventeenth and eighteenth arrondissements to take the Place de Vendome, “the local commanders hesitated to lead their men into the center of Paris away from the safety of their own districts,” Edwards notes dryly.[549] And indeed it was not until eight that evening, nearly six hours after the order was given, that the battalions had moved toward the plaza in the heart of the capital. Moreover, the Central Committee’s strategic vision of a revolution, in many cases, did not extend further than the immediate neighborhoods in which its members lived, let alone beyond the walls of Paris. As in June 1848 they were imbued with a notion of revolutionary spontaneity that precluded any serious attempt to give their revolutions guidance, still less direction.

The Committee’s “Appeal to the Departments” also reveals the nature of the political thinking that guided the members of the Committee. After calling upon the provinces to imitate the capital, it declared: “We have only one hope, one end: the safety of the country and the final triumph of the democratic Republic, one and indivisible.”[550] Like many other proclamations of the Central Committee and of the Commune that followed it, the “Appeal” echoes the republican appeals of the Great Revolution more than the class-oriented proclamations of the June insurgents of 1848.

But in a less tepid and more class-oriented vein, Central Committee delegates to the government’s Journal officiel declared that

the proletarians of the capital, faced with the incompetence and treachery of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has come for them to save the situation by taking direction of public affairs ... Will the workers, who produce everything and enjoy nothing in return, who endure poverty in the midst of wealth which they have produced by the sweat of their brow, always be subjected to abuse? ... The proletariat, faced with a constant threat to its rights, a total denial of all its legitimate aspirations, along with the imminent destruction of the country and of all its hopes, has realized that it is its imperative duty and absolute right to take its destiny in its own hands by seizing political power.[551]

The two statements seem strangely at odds with each other. The first emphasizes civic autonomy and political rights, speaking to the citizens of Paris in the same way that the Great Revolution addressed “la Nation,” without any reference to economic or class issues. The second statement speaks to a specific oppressed class, the “proletariat,” referring to the bitter economic war between workers and their exploiters. Since these two classes could hardly be expected to live amicably together under the existing economy, let alone share the management of a municipality, the statement stakes out a claim for the proletariat to seize “political power.”

Taken together, the two statements reveal the confusion that existed not only in the Central Committee but in the Paris Commune itself which was the all-inclusive name given to the institutions and events in Paris in the spring of 1871. The two statements were addressed to very different strata: the first to citizens of Paris, irrespective of their class status; the second, to radical workers in the eastern parts of the capital. The working class, principally the impoverished residents in the eastern half of Paris who worked with their hands, were the backbone of the Commune. By appealing to them in statements like the second one, with its militant class-oriented phrases, the Commune acquired the image of being a stricdy working-class phenomenon.

But if the working class formed the pillar that supported the Commune, its support was also more broadly based than the working class alone. Many middle-class people—shopkeepers, small-scale producers, merchants of all kinds—actively supported the emerging Commune, which clearly issued statements to satisfy their sentiments and interests as well. The republican statements were directed toward the large numbers of bourgeois patriots as well as workers who tacitly or actively supported the Commune because they opposed the treaty that Thiers had negotiated with the Germans.

Nor did such republican appeals contradict the predominant sentiment among Commune members: the Proudhonists and Jacobins who composed a sizable part of the Central Committee and later the Commune of Paris were not opposed to the private ownership of property and hoped merely to achieve its widest distribution. Given its respect for property and legality, the Committee (and later the Commune) made no attempt to appropriate the vast gold holdings in the Bank of France; leaving the Bank’s treasury completely untouched, they simply negotiated a substantial bank loan. Nor did the new officials even touch the substantial funds that lay in the safes of various ministries, which the government had left behind—despite their desperate need for money, they never broke open the locks. Instead of expropriating property, they used very moderate means to bring in much-needed funds, such as the collection of the octroi (the tax on goods entering the capital’s gates). Republican legality seems to have had a paralyzing effect upon these ostensible revolutionaries who, once they were in power, despite their federalist and sometimes socialist rhetoric, were virtually hypnotized by the mystical ambiance that surrounded the French state and its financial institutions.

Where the Central Committee fretted over the legality of every action it undertook, even questioning its right to meet in the Hotel de Ville, the Versaillais threw all conventional restrictions to the winds. In this respect the contrast between the behavior of Paris and Versailles is arresting. Despite bloody altercations between the National Guards and supporters of the Versaillais, the Committee—unwilling to impede freedom of speech—placed few if any restrictions on the circulation of essentially pro-Versailles propaganda in the capital. For their part, by contrast, the Versaillais used every measure at their disposal to prevent news from Paris from reaching the provinces, especially pamphlets and other literature that tried to rally provincial support for the capital. Thiers’s control over information was a major obstacle to the Commune’s vague injunctions that other French cities and towns should follow its own example. No mere republican legalities would deter him from his goal of suppressing revolutionary Paris.

THE CREATION OF THE COMMUNE

Finally, on March 26, Parisians went to the polls to elect their Commune. For once, they could choose their delegates in proportion to their numbers rather than by district, so that in the final tally, the densely populated working-class neighborhoods gained a representation that reflected their actual size. Out of a presumed electorate of 480,000, it was reported that some 229,000 men voted—ostensibly a rather small proportion, and one that Thiers used in order to argue that over half the voting population had abstained from the elections, in sympathy for his Versailles government. In fact, the proportion of Parisian men who voted was actually much higher; the 480,000 figure was based on the voting lists for the 1870 plebiscite—after which a large number of bourgeois had fled Paris during the siege and the armistice for nonpolitical as well as political reasons.

The Commune of Paris was finally proclaimed on March 28 on the steps of the Hotel de Ville. As the radical journalist Jules Valles described the momentous occasion in his newspaper, Le Cri du peuple:

The artillery thunders a salute from the quays; the gray smoke is gilded by the sun. A crowd has gathered to greet the triumphal procession; men wave their hats and women their handkerchiefs while from the barricades the cannon humbly bow their bronze muzzles lest they threaten the joyful onlookers.... The Commune is proclaimed by a revolutionary, patriotic celebration, a day of peace and joy, excitement and solemnity, splendor and merriment worthy of the days lived by men of ’91.... Today is the festive wedding day of the Idea and the Revolution.[552]

Indeed, the festive mood of the population seemed irrepressible and continued throughout the life of the Commune. So joyous were the people, even as the threat of the Versaillais loomed over them, that Villiers de l’lsle-Adam wrote:

Would you believe it? Paris is fighting and singing! Paris is about to be attacked by a ruthless and furious army and she laughs! Paris is hemmed in on all sides by trenches and fortifications, and yet there are corners within these formidable walls where people laugh![553]

More insighdully, L. Barron emphasized that underlying the festivity lay an idealistic revolutionary exaltation:

In these solemn ceremonies, these festivities, these batdes joyously fought, are bom the great and sublime movements that cause people to break out of their habits and set their sight on a new ideal. The educated and positive- thinking, the skeptically and the spiritually inclined, all find themselves involved in spite of themselves, carried along with the sublime multitude. This is how viable revolutions begin and develop. One returns from each exalted experience as one would awake from a dream, but the memory remains of a brief moment of ecstasy, an illusion of fraternity.[554]

But what in fact was the Commune? The word has multiple meanings that depend upon the context in which it is used. Derived from the medieval Latin communa, it originally meant a communality or a corporate community, that is, a municipality. As European towns and cities had developed self-governing institutions since the medieval era, commune had also come to mean a dty council. Finally, French revolutionary history imparted to the Commune a uniquely radical connotation: the popular city council of 1793 was generally regarded as the most radical municipal force in the Great Revolution, until it was purged by Robespierre. The Paris Commune of 1793 included not only the communality and the city council but also the supporters and institutions of the extreme Left, which implicidy included the sections and even the radical clubs into which the sans-culottes were mobilized.

As for 1871, the “Commune of Paris,” which appeared at the bottom of decrees and called for mobilization in the spring of that year, meant, stricdy speaking, the Communal Council, the assembly of delegates who had been elected to the dty council. As a substitute for the ministries that existed under the Government of National Defense, the Communal Coundl created nine commissions, whose operations were supervised and coordinated by an Executive Commission. Although each commission was charged with a specific governmental portfolio, the Communal Council as a whole tended to preempt most of the activities of its commissions, which often meant that many practical details were neglected except in emergencies.

Coexisting with the Communal Council was the Central Committee of the National Guard (which had welcomed the Commune and surrendered all of its powers to it with much fanfare—only to continue meeting on its own afterwards), as well as the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, and the Trade Union Federation. In addition, popular clubs existed in every arrondissement of Paris, which also could be placed, together with the other organizations, under the rubric of “the Commune.”

In a broad sense, then, all of these institutions constituted the Paris Commune of 1871: the Council and the Commissions that met at the Hotel de Ville, the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation, the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, the trade unions, the International, the multitude of clubs, the various committees of the National Guard battalions, and the vigilance committees—in short, the richly articulated body of organizations that gave immense vitality to Parisian political life. To define the Paris Commune exclusively in terms of the Communal Council and its commissions is to lose sight of the wealth of public activity that engaged all the socially conscious people of the capital—activity that the privileged class profoundly feared as evidence of rampant and revolutionary anarchy.

But who were the delegates who were elected to the Commune, or more specifically the Communal Council, the body that met for some thirty-one sessions at the Hotel de Ville? Out of a total of ninety-two seats, a good number actually went unoccupied: roughly fifteen to twenty were vacant, having been awarded to moderate republicans from the western, bourgeois half of Paris who resigned immediately after they were elected in protest of the Commune’s formation. Other seats were held by delegates in absentia, such as Blanqui, who was in prison, or by Garibaldi, who was no longer in France; both had been elected for entirely honorific reasons.

How working class were the delegates? Only the roughest occupational estimates are available—hence only a general sense of the Commune’s class composition can be given. About thirty-five were artisans, such as carpenters, house decorators, masons, metalworkers, bookbinders and the like. Thirty or so could be classed as intellectuals of sorts, such as journalists, and another eleven were professionals, notably doctors, lawyers, and teachers. The remainder were clerks, even businessmen, and two were soldiers. Only four or five industrial workers, from factories on the outskirts of Paris and railway shops, can be identified—indeed, the French industrial proletariat had still to find its identity and assert its interests in the largely artisanal capital. The average age of the delegates has been placed at thirty-seven, but no single generational group predominated.

What was the political composition of the Commune? Some twenty-five of the delegates were neo-Jacobins, followed by fifteen or twenty neo-Proudho- nists and protosyndicalists like Varlin, nine or ten Blanquists, a miscellany of radical republicans, and a few Internationalists who were influenced by Marx— namely Leo Frankel and Auguste Seraillier, the latter having been dispatched by the General Council as an observer. When by-elections were held on April 16 to fill the seats of those who had resigned, the Jacobin contingent was increased by nine delegates, the Proudhonists by six (including affiliates of the International), and the Blanquists by two.

Although the Blanquists were a minority, it was they who gave the Communal Council whatever fiery militancy it had. Having urgently demanded an attack on Versailles when Thiers fled, they continued to argue that the Council should undertake a military offensive against the Versaillais and exercise repressive measures against Versaillais propaganda inside Paris—even calling, late in the Council’s life, for the formation of a Committee of Public Safety. As decisive as they were militarily—they believed in a dictatorship of Paris over the rest of France—the Blanquists had litde in the way of a concrete social or economic program, apart from a militant if vague socialism.

The Jacobins, inchoate politically, were opposed to socialism, but their radical republicanism admitted the use of measures that the bourgeoisie would have regarded as socialistic, at a time when laissez-faire capitalism was becoming the ideology of the day. The most prominent Jacobin in the Council, the venerable Charles Delescluze, believed that France should be a “social democracy,” by which he meant a politically (and to some extent economically) more “egalitarian” society. But the word egalitarianism may connote anything from equality of opportunity to equality of condition—and it is not at all clear that Delescluze meant anything more than equality of opportunity, reinforced by a humane concern for the plight of the poor and downtrodden. His supporters do not appear to have advanced much further in their thinking than Robespierrist ideas of political egalitarianism, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Commune of 1793. The policies they called for, in the main, would have been acceptable to the earlier Commune. They generally looked askance upon any measures that were more radical than Saint-Just’s old Ventose decrees, which had pledged to divide the property of suspects and convicted opponents of the Convention among needy patriots. Their opposition to socialism notwithstanding, however, when it came to practical details, especially in military matters and the formation of a Committee of Public Safety, the Jacobins joined with the Blanquists and the more radical Internationalists to form the majority voting bloc in the Communal Council.

The Proudhonist Internationalists and more moderate republicans formed the Communal Council’s minority, and as we have seen, they believed in the private ownership of property. Indeed, to soothe unfounded bourgeois fears that the Commune was about to expropriate the wealthy, Proudhonist periodicals assured the public that the Commune held private property in “sacred” regard and would fully respect it. A few days after the Commune was established, one newspaper, the Sociale, wrote soothingly: “Be assured, bourgeois and peasants, there is no question of robbing you of your conquests. You legitimately possess what you have gained.”[555] Although the Proudhonists were in the minority on the Council, they had reason to make such an assurance in the name of the Commune because, as Samuel Bernstein observes:

Whatever social and economic program the Commune had, stemmed from the [Proudhonist Internationalists], The primary demands were Proudhonist, such as free credit, cooperation, a peoples’s bank and free exchange of the products of labor.... History, to be sure, had pulled them into strikes and political action. But they preferred autonomy and federalism to centralism, a cardinal point with neojacobins and Blanquists.[556]

In practice, the concrete Proudhonist demands did not add up to much; the Commune was too besieged, quarrelsome, and short-lived to effectuate much of an economic program before it was crushed.

If socialism is to be defined in any modem sense (especially as proletarian socialism), as a cooperative society involving the public ownership of the means of production—including workshops, factories, and land—then apart possibly from Leo Frankel and the other non-Proudhonist Internationalists on the Council, the Paris Commune of 1871 was not socialist. Certainly, the Commune’s practices were neither Babouvist nor Marxist, let alone anarchist in Bakunin’s collectivist sense of the word. If, more stricdy speaking, the Commune is conceived as a government of workers or a “workers’ state,” the student of the Commune encounters even more ambiguities. Most strikingly, the Council did not expropriate the bourgeoisie or try to socialize the many workshops and industrial facilities of Paris. There is nothing, in fact, to show that most of its delegates ever intended to do so—as we have seen, most of the delegates on the Council were Jacobins, followed by Proudhonists, who together believed in private property.

The only official program that the Commune ever promulgated, published in the Journal qfficiel of April 20, was notable not only for its brevity but for its largely political demands.[557] It called for the recognition of the republic (which the National Assembly, as yet, had not formally proclaimed), and many of its affirmations were municipalist in nature, invoking the “inherent rights” of the Commune itself. It asserted the right of French communes to function autonomously based on a Proudhonist “contract of association” to “secure the unity of France,” affirming the Commune’s “inherent right” to vote its own budgets and taxes, and to create its own administrative, judicial, and police apparatus. Not only were elections to be free, but voters would also have “the permanent right of control and revocation” of all magistrates. Citizens were to enjoy the right of “permanent intervention into Communal affairs by the free manifestation of their ideas and the free defense of their interests.”[558]

But the program expressed no commitment whatsoever to the collective ownership of property—a lacuna that was of deep concern to the anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin in his discussion of the Commune. Nowhere did the Commune’s program even make basic assertions of artisanal socialism for the “organization of work” or the “right to work,” which was unusual considering that most radical French socialists of the time were still mainly associationist To be sure, it cited the “liberty of work” and expressed the Commune’s intention to “universalize power and property according to the necessities of the moment.” But such a right could have been exercised by any bourgeois government as a response to the exigencies of war.[559]

The essentially nonsocialist nature of the Paris Commune is somewhat ironic, considering that the Commune quickly became legendary in the international socialist movement as a socialist uprising, perhaps because of the rhetoric articulated by its more radical adherents, especially the Blanquists and the non-Proudhonist Internationalists, as well as miscellaneous class-conscious workers and intellectuals. Yet to call the Commune “socialist” in any modem, proletarian sense is to stretch the meaning of the term beyond recognition until it is lost in a foggy notion of “equally” modest nonexploitative enterprises. The actual social practices of the Commune, if anything, were oriented toward artisanal socialism, but even in this respect, as we will see, its efforts toward sponsoring the creation of a cooperative society, along the lines of Louis Blanc, were half-hearted at best. (Ironically, Blanc himself, having returned to Paris from England with the fall of Louis-Napoleon, was quiedy sitting as a representative in the National Assembly at Versailles.)

Although there is no important evidence that most members of the Communal Council meant to expropriate the bourgeoisie, there was much talk in the capital about the possibilities for workers’ control of production, particularly in the large factories on the outskirts of Paris, and for a more equitable distribution of goods and the wealth of the country. But this talk was not formulated into a systematic program that went beyond moral cries for economic justice and denunciations of class exploitation. The most broadly felt view of the artisanal socialists in Paris was that the means of life should be distributed based on toil, not on the ownership of capital. Put colloquially: they stood for the “workers against the bosses”—a deeply moral class consciousness, to be sure, but hardly the programmatic or theoretical foundations for ending the power of capital in France.

What, then, were the concrete economic policies of the Commune? The first item on the Council’s economic agenda was to counteract the specific pieces of unfeeling legislation that the National Assembly had visited upon the workers and middle classes. On March 30, only two days after it was inaugurated, the Council reinstated the moratorium on overdue rents, much to the relief of ordinary Parisians. On April 12, not without considerable wrangling, it also reinstated the moratorium on overdue commercial bills, but pardy because of its qualms about offending the sensibilities of Parisian “commercial interests”— the more well-to-do entrepreneurs who were least friendly to the Commune— the Council did not officially announce this measure until April 18. The delay undoubtedly induced the financially vulnerable to wonder how real was the concern of the Commune for their own interests. Insofar as both these moratoriums had been enacted by the old bourgeois Government of National Defense in a time of national emergency, then abrogated by a vindictive National Assembly, their reinstatement, however humane it was, can hardly be regarded as revolutionary. The moratoriums were both popular, but the Council’s qualms about rushing to reinstate the delay on overdue bills is a striking example of its economic conservatism, reflecting the awe in which the Proudhonists held property, credit, and banking practices. Indeed, it was not until April 25—nearly a month after its establishment—that the Council requisitioned vacant lodgings for the homeless.

Nor did it behave with conspicuous zeal in dealing with one of the issues most vexing for the working class—the National Assembly’s heardess law permitting the sale of goods that had been pawned in the state pawnshop, Mont de Piete. For ordinary Parisians, cancellation of the Assembly’s legislation was imperative—indeed, many of the poorest artisans had pawned their tools and even their clothing during the most difficult moments of the siege. Not that the pawnshop had been much of a boon to working people. Although Mont de Piete was the city’s largest recipient of workers’ pawned goods, it had been particularly biased, as has been noted, against the poorest workers, charging the highest interest rates for loans on the least expensive items, and the lowest rates for those on the most expensive items. Nonetheless, allowing the pawned goods to be sold had been a cruel blow on the part of the Assembly, divesting workers of the much-needed personal possessions and tools.

Once the Commune was in power, the cancellation of the Assembly’s legislation was held up by a lively debate in the Council over the issue of socializing the pawnshop. The Council’s delegates argued intensely among themselves about whether the pawnshop should be nationalized (as the Blanquists thought), modified (the Jacobins), abolished (the revolutionary socialists), turned into a workers’ bank (the Proudhonists), or simply left as it was (a variety of republicans). Not until May 7, more than five weeks after the Commune had been brought into existence, was the decree canceling the Assembly’s law proclaimed, and in the end, the Council made no change in the pawnshop’s directorship; it simply renewed the old moratorium, allowing for the restitution of work tools and household items of up to twenty francs in value.

To be sure, many workers benefited from the Council’s decrees. Thus on April 27, employers were forbidden to deduct fines from workers’ wages, and the next day, April 28, the exacting nightwork hours imposed on bakers were abolished. But even this measure was delayed because of the protests of bakery owners. Moreover, the Council also abolished the livret de travail, the personal record of employment that every worker had been obliged to carry and show to any new employer.

From a leftist perspective, the most celebrated of the Council’s decrees was the one issued on April 16 that concerned the empty factories and workshops whose owners had fled Paris during the siege. These vacated premises, according to the new law, could be transformed into self-managed cooperatives. To radicals of the time the measure on cooperatives seemed a remarkable instance of associationism, but the fact remains that the besieged regime had to mobilize production in any way it could, and any bourgeois regime under similar circumstances of impending military threat could have created cooperatives to do so. In all, about ten factories were taken over and run as cooperatives by the trade unions. The new industrial cooperatives, it should be emphasized, were not created as a result of expropriations; in fact, although the former owners were scathingly denounced as cowards for fleeing Paris, they were promised financial restitution for their property when they returned. By contrast, the large Cail factory, which had been continually troubled by strikes and class antagonisms, was left completely untouched.

To be sure, the Commune did try to promote voluntary producers’ associations, in which privately owned workshops cooperated with each other in sharing resources and fixing prices. About forty-three such craft cooperatives were established, but few of them were able to get under way before their workers were obliged to mount barricades against the Versaillais. Moreover, they faced problems typical of later attempts at what came to be called workers’ control: the market threw them into competition with completely independent enterprises. Generally, in fact, such producers’ cooperatives have a disconcerting tendency to drift toward “collective capitalism.” Not only do they tend to become part of the capitalist system, but their ability to survive as cooperatives is impaired when conventional independent workshops can charge less for their products than the cooperatives, thereby driving them out of business or forcing them to compete with each other

Unfortunately, Proudhon had not explained in his writings how this problem of marketplace competition could be overcome, but capitalist economic imperatives reigned no less in “red” Paris than in “white” Versailles. Contrary to all ideas of artisanal socialism, the Commune tended to buy not from the cooperatives, which badly needed paying customers, but from the cheapest vendors—the conventional independent firms. Not until May 12, in response to a surge of complaints, did the Commune change its policy to favor cooperatives and instruct its various agencies to buy primarily from them. That it had to be pressured into adhering to a basic tenet of artisanal socialism is revealing of the Commune’s fiscal conservatism and limited economic oudook.

The Commune’s dealings with the Bank of France were no bolder than those of the Central Committee, more closely resembling comic opera than a challenge to a major financial institution. On March 29, the day after the Commune’s inauguration, the Commune sent the seventy-six-year-old Charles Beslay, an engineer, to the Bank as its delegate. Contrary to what one might have expected from a revolutionary socialist body, the Council did not authorize Beslay to assert the Commune’s control over this immensely important institution, still less to hold it hostage against the entire bourgeoisie of France. Rather, his task was to exercise a vague surveillance over the Bank’s activities. Beslay was not predisposed to be confrontational, least of all toward so austere and powerful an enterprise as a national bank. The old man had been a friend of Proudhon, indeed a fervent disciple, an association that appears to have disarmed what fortitude he might have possessed in dealing with a large bank. Ironically, where Proudhon had once demanded the “organization of credit” on behalf of artisans, his friend Beslay now stood in awe of the most important credit institution in France—which might have been expropriated and even transformed into a Proudhonist People’s Bank.

Instead, the meeting between Beslay and the Marquis de Ploeuc, the Bank’s acting governor, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The crafty marquis, chatting amiably, managed to establish a rapport with the old man that was to last the entire life of the Commune. Personally, Beslay thanked the marquis for his public-spiritedness in heading an ambulance service during the siege, and the two warmly agreed that the financial integrity of France, not to speak of her business interests, depended upon retaining the integrity of her financial institution—especially after the day the National Guards rudely entered the bank to search it for arms. The vigilant Beslay, wrapped in the authority of his red sash, dissuaded the Guards from intervening in the Bank’s business and even took up residence there in order to prevent further intrusions. Meanwhile, for the remainder of the spring, the marquis, while honoring the financial requests of the Commune, systematically smuggled sizable amounts of gold out to the Versaillais—under the very nose of Beslay. The Council, for its part, seemed satisfied with the Bank as long as it was loaning it the relatively modest sums it requested.

Marx was later to claim that the Commune would have needed more time than it had to unfold its internal logic—presumably a socialistic logic. But would the Commune have evolved toward socialism, even if time had been on its side? To radical artisans, the most humane alternatives to the existing economy were still associations—cooperatives—whether owned and managed by a sizable number of factory workers or by cooperatives of craftspeople in small privately owned workshops. At most, the Commune might have evolved toward fostering cooperatives more aggressively. But as we have seen, any notion of the ownership and control of the means of production even by the municipality as a whole, still less the nationalization of property, was far from the minds of the majority of delegates. The Commune either ignored or eschewed the need to create a society in which private ownership, the market, and even profit would be replaced by the social ownership of the means of production and the distribution of goods according to needs—in short, a communistic society.

Despite the abundance of red flags on the Communard barricades and the wealth of legends that have grown up around the Commune itself, it was not the climax or even necessarily the most class-conscious of the nineteenth- century revolutions. The June insurrection of 1848—which, by comparison with the Commune, the revolutionary tradition has all but forgotten—was far more class-conscious and far more committed to making basic changes in the “organization of work”; it was even more audacious in its demands to replace capitalist relations of production with cooperative ones. In his closely researched comparative study of the June insurrection of 1848 and the Commune of 1871, Roger V. Gould has shown that the class nature of the Commune has been overemphasized at the expense of its civic features—to which 1 would add, its patriotic features. Where the June 1848 uprising widely demanded the emancipation of workers, the Communal Council (and the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation) addressed themselves overwhelmingly to the citizenry as a whole. The Commune’s “demands for municipal liberties and the safeguarding of the Republic,” Gould observes, were far different from the class-oriented statements and proclamations common in 1848:

The Central Committee of the National Guard Federation, in its own carefully drafted announcement of elections to the Commune, made it abundandy clear that the constituency on whose behalf it saw itself as acting—the constituency, in other words, of the revolution itself—was the entire city of Paris, irrespective of class position.[560]

What the insurgency of June 1848 and the Commune have in common is that they were both expressions of artisanal socialism, one coming early, during its period of hegemony, and the other at its waning phase. In marked contrast to the insurgents of June, the Commune’s approach, both in its declarations and in its practices, was notable for its moderation. In this respect—contrary to the prominent place it has been given in the history of socialism—the Commune marked a retreat from the high point of the artisanal socialist agitation that had been reached in 1848.

On the day following its inauguration, the Commune created commissions corresponding to the regular ministries of the national government The most important of these, during the early weeks, were the Executive Commission and the Military Commission. The Executive Commission was composed of four civilians and three military officers. The civilians were Gustave Lefrangais, a Proudhonist schoolteacher; Gustave Tridon, a fervent Blanquist and joumalist- historian; Edouard Vaillant, a Blanquist engineering student; and the mischievous Felix Pyat, whose ultraradical rhetoric was equaled only by his cunning in extricating himself from dangerous situations. The three military members were Jules Bergeret, a bookshop worker whose main military qualification was that he had been elected to a leading position in the National Guard; Emile Duval, a committed Blanquist steelworker who had urged an immediate attack on Versailles after March 18; and Emile Eudes, the Blanquist student who had also urged an attack on Versailles.

The Military Commission, for its part, contained all three of the Executive Commission officers—Bergeret, Duval, and Eudes—as well as Gustave Flourens, whose flamboyant role in the October 31 attack on the Hotel de Ville had gained him a reputation for courage and militancy. Raoul Rigault and Theophile Ferre, both young Blanquists, took charge of Security—that is, of the Parisian police.

Unlike the Provisional Government in 1848, the Commune also created a Labor and Exchange Commission, as evidence of its concern for the interests of the Parisian working class. Sitting on this commission and the Industry Commission were three of the Commune’s most prominent Internationalists and socialists: the jeweler Leo Frankel (who was in close touch with Marx), the bronze worker Albert Thiesz, and the publicist Benoit Malon. The syndicalist and Internationalist Eugene Varlin sat on the Finance Commission, together with the Internationalist Victor Clement and the bumbling Proudhonist Charles Beslay. Mention should also be made of one of the Commune’s most impressive figures, the aging and ailing Jacobin journalist Charles Delescluze, who tried to let younger, more energetic individuals take leading roles in the Commune but was continually drawn into it by the demanding problems it faced.

As a whole, the Communal Council and its commissions were too disparate ideologically and included too many prickly intellectuals and even bohemians to function effectively. The Proudhonists were embatded with the socialists, while the Jacobins dueled with almost everyone, including each other. Moreover, many of the Commune’s members were answerable to multiple constituencies. Too often, when the Commune attempted to cope with the city’s needs in an orderly fashion, its efforts were impeded by the presence of many groups and institutions claiming jurisdiction over different aspects of the capital’s life. In reality, however, the inauguration of the Communal Council on March 28 had been of no great significance to the various committees, clubs, and other local institutions that embodied the Commune in the everyday life of the neighborhoods. For one, the local mayors of the arrondissements were a constant nuisance to the Council, challenging its legality, claiming that they alone were the sole legal governing authority in Paris—a claim that they did not give up until local National Guard committees, acting on their own initiative, simply expelled the mayors from the mairies. For its part, the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation—although it welcomed the Council and with much fanfare surrendered all its legal powers to it—still continued to exist, almost as a parallel power to the Hotel de Ville, its preoccupation with legal niceties notwithstanding. Another constant presence was the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, which issued local challenges to many of the Communal Council’s policies at the neighborhood level.

The plethora of committees and clubs that flourished in the neighborhoods constituted still another level of local power. Attendance must have varied enormously from one meeting to another, but some involved thousands of people. The political oudook of the clubs seems to have ranged across the whole political spectrum and often constituted a strange mix of centralistic Jacobin and extreme libertarian views akin to those of Varlet in 1783. The Club des Proletaires, meeting in the Church of Saint-Ambroise, for example, emulating the radical sections of the Great Revolution, demanded that the Commune desist from issuing decrees and seek popular sanction for its proposals, a view that was echoed by the Club Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.

But sectional democracy or not, the clubs seem to have been very conscious of themselves as an important political phenomenon. The Club Saint-Nicolas- des-Champs exhibited a great deal of initiative in promoting a federation of the clubs: it published a daily Bulletin communal to provide accounts of debates in the different clubs and present the various proposals that they had accepted. In fact a short-lived Federation of Clubs was established, as Edwards tells us, whose committee held daily meetings in the public assistance building and whose individual component clubs began “to circulate motions among themselves.”[561] When the time came for the Commune to resist the troops of the National Assembly in the streets of Paris, the clubs played a vital role in mobilizing popular local support for the struggle.

All of these various committees, as well as the Council and its commissions, were plagued by disagreements—political, social, and unfortunately, personal—that frequendy threw them against one another and wracked them internally as well. The Parisian municipality was direly in need of a communal constitution that clearly delineated the jurisdictions of its many committees and that established ways to coordinate its administration. No such constitution existed. Where the Assembly was centralistic and statist, the Commune was decentralistic and confederal, not only in administering the city but in its militia, or Jederes, as the National Guard was appropriately called. For the first time since 1793, Varlet’s day, Paris had created a loosely libertarian alternative to central government in France. But in the face of a military emergency it would have been difficult enough to maintain this libertarian structure, and even the most libertarian institutions require a degree of centralization to defeat a well-organized military force. Unfortunately, the Jederes were often as local in their orientation as the rest of the clubs and arrondissement organizations. Their decisions were usually based on the will of individual neighborhood committees, which often acted entirely on their own.

To add to these problems, the Communal Council’s authority was subverted when the Central Committee of the National Guard Federation adamandy refused to accept the fact that responsibility for the Jederes—the military arm of the Commune of Paris—no longer belonged to itself but was now the province of the Military Commission. The Central Committee regarded the Commune as a purely political and administrative body—and an inadequate one at that— rather than a military one and thus tried to recover the control over the Guard that it had surrendered with the installation of the Communal Council.

Finally, even among the Jederes, the National Guard battalions often disregarded orders they received, whether they came from the Commune’s Military Commission or from the Central Committee itself. Some artillery battalions acted entirely on their own, obeying no one but their own independent arrondissement committees. Others went so far as to arrest their own commanders if they suspected them of any dereliction of duty Indeed, so chaotic was their behavior that they often made the Commune’s military force essentially dysfunctional. Even in a time of dire emergency, when the Commune’s military commanders tried to mobilize the city against the Versaillais, battalions of Jederes were often unresponsive to their commands. Ironically, the Central Committee’s attempt to assert itself against the Commune diverted its attention and energy from the task of bringing military discipline to the ranks, and turning them into the effective fighting force that the city needed so desperately.

Not only was the National Guard undisciplined and chaotic, but as Lissagaray emphasizes, it was not trained to fight as a field army, despite its valiant showing during the sortie of January 19. The Jederes were at their best as a defensive force, not in attacks upon regular troops. A well-trained, experienced, and disciplined force might have had a good chance of defeating Thiers’s troops—especially in the early days of the Commune—and the Guards were certainly more motivated than their opponents, but they had none of the qualities that would have made them effective against a well-organized army. Despite small successes and acts of extraordinary heroism, the federes never won any major victories against the well-disciplined Versaillais.

THE COMMUNE AT WAR

The Commune’s inability to coordinate the Guards and train them to become an offensive fighting force was particularly troubling in light of the fact that the National Assembly and the head of state in Versailles had absolutely no intention of allowing the Commune to continue to exist for any longer than it was obliged to. As the history of revolutionary movements over the centuries has repeatedly revealed, counterrevolution takes no quarter in any class war, and as such, if the Commune could hope to survive at all, it was obliged to throw the federes against the Versaillais quickly, before Thiers could mobilize his regular army.

This the Commune did not do. Nothing reveals the Commune’s naivete better than its public response to a limited foray that the Versaillais made on April 2, to occupy a temporary barracks at Courbevoie, some six miles to the northwest of Paris. When the National Guards engaged Thiers’s forces that day, they acquitted themselves poorly—in fact, they fled in a pell-mell retreat. Thiers could have ordered his troops to pursue the fleeing fideres into Paris, but as yet he did not feel his forces were strong enough: two weeks after he had vacated Paris, he still had a total of only 35,000 disorganized troops and 3,000 gendarmes at his disposal.

But he did give evidence of his deadly intentions by executing five captured Communards, which caused the Commune to explode in injured outrage. In a genuinely shocked denunciation, the Executive Commission declared, “Royalist conspirators have ATTACKED. In spite of our moderate attitude, they have ATTACKED.”[562] This reaction was surely highly symptomatic of a larger problem: that the Commune expressed shock at being attacked in the midst of a conflict that was, if not a clear-cut class war, then clearly a social war, was self-deceptive in the extreme. That it could have been so shocked revealed an absence of psychological fortitude and political sophistication, not to speak of an unpreparedness to determinedly resist its resolute and committed enemy.

The Commune had not yet accepted the reality that it was facing a civil war, led by a ruthless enemy that was remorselessly planning its extermination. Not until it was too late did it come to terms with this fact—or realize the necessity for confronting its enemy while it still had a chance to prevail. The failure of the Central Committee and then the Communal Council to perceive the intentions of the Versaillais in the weeks after March 18; their continued quibbling over republican legality; the uncertainty that surrounded almost every action they took outside a stricdy “constitutional” framework that had yet to be defined; their trepidation in dealing with the Bank of France; their respect for the money that lay untouched in various ministries; and their qualms over expropriating property (which even many bourgeois states would have done in wartime)—all guaranteed the doom of the Paris Commune of 1871.

The failings of the National Guards—as well as their courage—were demonstrated very clearly on April 3–4, just after the Versaillais incursion on Courbevoie. In blind outrage against the attack, instinctively understanding that it was necessary to mount a counterattack, the Commune undertook a “grand sortie” against Thiers’s troops. Apart from his incursion of the day before, Thiers had helped this endeavor along by making belligerendy provocative statements and sending shells into the capital. The prospect of a full-scale civil war, which had still seemed somewhat of an abstraction, now became searingly real.

At a meeting the night before the sortie, the Communal Council gave command of the Jederes to Gustave-Paul Cluseret, a professional officer who, oddly enough, had begun his military career as a reactionary, capturing barricades in June 1848, but later developed more liberal sympathies. He served as a Union officer in the American Civil War, then shifted his allegiance to the International. His detractors often called him “the Yankee” because, like many American officers, his uniform was slovenly and his demeanor easygoing—and he sported a cheroot, in the fashion of General U.S. Grant. Despite his democratic “Yankee” mannerisms, however, Cluseret was a stem disciplinarian who vowed to shape the National Guard into a highly disciplined military force. But he regarded the “grand sortie” that was planned for the next day as a reckless and doomed endeavor, led by officers who were wholly unqualified to mount it. In any case, having been appointed the Commune’s war delegate only at the last minute, there was little he could do to improve its prospects. As Edwards notes, he “wisely avoided taking responsibility, leaving the other generals to see through what they had so rashly begun.”[563]

And rash it was. The most ardent proponents of the sortie were the members of the Military Commission: Duval, Eudes, and the former bookseller Bergeret. According to the plan of attack, each of these inexperienced officers was to head a column, lead it out of one of the western gates, march to Versailles, then converge with the other two columns to make a common assault As Lissagaray bitterly observes, this simple plan would have been “easy of execution” had there been “experienced officers and solid heads of column.”

But most of the battalions had been without chiefs since the 18^th March, the National Guards without cadres, and the generals who assumed the responsibility of leading 40,000 men had never conducted a single battalion into the field. They neglected even the most elementary precautions, knew not how to collect artillery, ammunition-wagons, or ambulances, forgot to make an order of the day, and left the men for several hours without food in a penetrating fog. Every Federal chose the chief he liked best. Many had no cartridges, and believed the sortie to be a simple demonstration.[564]

The columns departed from Paris in a festive mood, even accompanied by women and children, naively assuming that when they encountered the Versaillais soldiers, the rank-and-file, rather than fight them, would instandy fraternize with their National Guard brothers, as they had done on March 18. As a result, the federes were poorly equipped and thoroughly unprepared for any serious fighting.

Not surprisingly, everything went wrong. When the northernmost column— the 15,000federes under Bergeret’s command—marched northwest toward the village of Rueil (with only eight cannons!), they were obliged to pass by Mont- Valerien, the most pivotal fort on the Parisian military perimeter—the one that the Central Committee had neglected to take when it lay virtually unoccupied immediately after March 18. A rumor was circulating among the federes that the fort was now back in the Commune’s hands, but this rumor was entirely false. As Bergeret’s column passed the fort, Versaillais artillery fire erupted and rained on the Guards, producing complete panic Bergeret’s federes, wholly astonished, scattered into the fields shouting “Treachery!” and the entire right flank fled in haste, heading back to Paris as quickly as their feet could carry them. Bergeret continued on with a few troops, coming within four miles of Versailles, after which he finally had to withdraw. Flourens, who was attached to this column, reached Rueil with a handful of men, but there he was killed, sword in hand, by a Versailles cavalry officer.

On the extreme left flank of the march, the column under Duval did no better. Lacking artillery and sufficient cartridges, the federes retreated, abandoning Duval to the Versaillais, who executed him. As for the center, the 10,000 Guards under Eudes managed to push due west to Meudon, but lacking sufficient artillery and ammunition to take the well-fortified Versaillais garrison, they retreated back to a strong point near Paris. Fortunately, guns were rushed from the capital in time to prevent the Versailles troops from taking the offensive.

The sortie was a decisive turning point in the military fortunes of Paris and Versailles. The Paris Commune was never again to undertake a major offensive against Thiers, and the National Guard, despite limited successes and individual acts of extraordinary heroism, won no major victories over its enemies. The Versaillais, in turn, emboldened by their victory, moved steadily doser to Paris, taking crudal forts such as Issy on May 9 and Vanves on May 13. Within a matter of days, Thiers’s forces—reinforced by the thousands of French war prisoners that Bismarck had released precisely for this purpose— were only a few hundred yards from the city’s walls.

On April 6, in response to the executions of the captured Communards, the Commune passed a Law on Hostages, which permitted it to arrest and try potential “hostages of the people of Paris.” Indeed, a few individuals, including the archbishop of Paris, were taken into custody, and in mid-April the Commune offered all of these hostages to Thiers in exchange for the release of Blanqui. But Thiers cannily refused, observing that to give the old revolutionary to the Commune would be equivalent to providing it with an army corps.

On May 1, due to internal disputes, the Commune arrested Cluseret and replaced him as war delegate with Louis Rossel, an able officer who had turned against the National Assembly because of its capitulation to the Prussians. Rossel tried to transform the National Guard into a disdplined force but encountered the usual obstructions over autonomy. A less flamboyant and inspiring commander than his predecessor, he quickly lost the confidence of the federes as well as his credibility with the Commune. Only nine days after he was appointed, he resigned, in part because of the fall of Issy—the linchpin of the dty’s defense—and fled into the warrens of Paris before he had to answer for real or imagined malfeasances against the Commune. Indeed, in the three weeks left to the Communard leaders, the quarrels among them intensified. On May 1, in the wake of the fall of Issy, the Jacobin-Blanquist majority split with the Proudhonists and some of the Internationalists over whether to tighten central control by establishing a Committee of Public Safety.

In the face of the military emergency, there could be few disputes that at least some degree of centralized control was vital, but a rancorous conflict arose over the committee’s name. The Jacobins and Blanquists favored calling it the Committee of Public Safety, invoking the tradition of which they saw themselves the continuation; but the Proudhonists and many Internationalists pointed out that it was the Committee of Public Safety that, in 1793, had destroyed the Paris Commune of that era. So bitter was the acrimony that Jules Miot, ajacobin, demanded that the minority who opposed the name be tried as “Girondins.” Although Miot’s demand was happily not fulfilled, the majority in the Commune-—by six votes—finally voted in favor of the ill-starred name.

Although its name raised alarms about a new terror, the new Committee of Public Safety inflicted no mass executions on the Commune’s opponents. In fact, it did little more than dose down critical or hostile periodicals, enforce conscription (which the local battalions of the federes carried out with considerable zest), and issue identity cards as a safeguard against the many agents in Paris who were working for Versailles. Some of its actions were merely symbolic, such as the pulling down of Napoleon I’s Vendome column, a symbol of Bonapartist imperialism and militarism that had been forged from cannons captured by the emperor after the batde of Austerlitz. Influenced by Delescluze, however, the committee did manage to bring the majority and minority together in the waning days of the Commune, although they were by no means reconciled ideologically or even freed of mutual distrust. The Central Committee of the National Guard, now essentially a corpse, came to terms with the Commune on issues of their respective authority. But this agreement no longer had any meaning: the Versaillais, reinforced by newly released prisoners of war, were about to break into the streets of Paris.

On May 21 the fully assembled Commune was meeting at the Hotel de Ville, preoccupied with a malicious attempt by Jules Miot to put Cluseret on trial for the loss of Issy. Suddenly, at seven o’clock in the evening, a member of the Committee of Public Safety broke in with the cry “Stop! Stop! I have a communication of the utmost importance, for which I demand a secret session.”[565] The Versaillais, he informed the Commune, had found an entry into Paris and were pouring into the city in force.

It might have been expected that at this point the Commune would finally rally itself to take immediate and decisive military action. In reality, stunned, it managed to acquit Cluseret of the charges against him; whereupon its members quickly dispersed, each to his own arrondissement “Thus the council of the Commune disappeared from history and the Hotel de Ville at the moment of supreme danger, when the Versaillese penetrated Paris.” As Lissagaray emphasizes in disgust,

there was no one to demand a permanent committee; no one to call on his colleague to wait here for news.... There was no one to insist at this critical moment of uncertainty, when it might be necessary to improvise a plan of defense at a moment’s notice or take a great resolution in case of disaster.[566]

It was the ultimate ineptitude of a conflicted, often confused, and tragic group of men lacking any dear political or organizational direction.

THE BLOODY WEEK OF MAY 22–28

By mid-May, Thiers’s troops had moved so close to the southwestern wall of Paris that their conversation could be overheard by the jederes on the other side, only a few yards away. Despite these advances, however, they still could not breach the wall: thdr previous attempts to enter the dty had been repelled often enough to render them extremely prudent about launching a direct frontal attack. Instead, they continued their heavy artillery bombardment of the city. Unknown to them, however, they might well have made a successful foray into the dty because the federes had carelessly failed to guard key parts of the wall that were highly vulnerable to attack.

On Sunday, May 21, one Ducatel was taking an afternoon stroll near the Porte de Point du Jor, in the southwestern part of the city. An engineer for the Department of Public Works, Ducatel had no sympathies for the Commune. In the course of his walk, he happened to notice that no federes were defending an immensely strategic area—indeed, that a gate was unguarded and available for the taking. At three o’clock he climbed to the top of the wall, waved a white handkerchief to the Versailles troops on the other side, and shouted, “Come!” The Versaillais hesitated; they had been deceived twice before in similar situations, entering the city only to encounter fire from the federes. A naval officer prudendy made his way over to Ducatel—and was astonished to find that a whole secdon of the wall and its ramparts were indeed completely deserted. Returning to his troops, the naval officer telegraphed the news to General Douay, the commanding divisional officer, who took careful precautions to confirm that the call was not a ruse. Ending the artillery bombardment of the area, he ordered his troops to advance carefully into the city in small groups. Before the day was out, some 60,000 Versaillais had entered Paris, and a full-scale assault upon the capital was under way.

That night Delescluze, head of the Committee of Public Safety and the federes’ nominal commander, exhibited the Commune’s fatal proclivity for a stricdy localized defense by plastering Paris with posters calling to the people and the Guards to take to the streets in decentralized barricade fighting. “Enough of militarism, no more staff-officers,” the poster declaimed, evoking the myth of popular spontaneity in military engagements.

Make way for the people, the bare-armed fighters! The hour of revolutionary war has struck. The people know nothing of elaborate maneuvers, but when they have a rifle in their hands and cobble-stones under their feet they have no fear for the strategists of the monarchist school.[567]

The Parisian working class responded to the call, as they had before, by building barricades. Starting that night and continuing for several days, the Communards built a total of 600, in all parts of the city but especially in the eastern half. As in June 1848, everyone helped—women and children as well as men, piling not only paves but busses, cabs, furnishings, mattresses, and even soil from the streets. In the working-class districts in particular, they formed an individually strong but disorganized network, entirely defensive in nature.

Unfortunately, the federes had much to fear from “the strategists of the monarchical school.” As Cluseret and Rossel understood but Delescluze did not, strategy and meticulous planning count for a great deal in war, and these features were conspicuously lacking among the Communards. “When the Minister of War [Delescluze] thus stigmatizes all discipline,” Lissagaray observes trenchandy, “who will henceforth obey?”

When he repudiates all method, who will listen to reason? Thus we shall see hundreds of men refusing to quit the pavement of their street, paying no heed to the neighboring quarter in agonies, remaining motionless up to the last hour waiting for the army to come and overwhelm them.[568]

The Versaillais divided themselves into two major columns, one for each bank of the Seine. In the western half, they had relatively litde difficulty moving down Haussmann’s boulevards and overcoming the federes’ resistance. Much of the resistance they encountered was heroic: Paul Brunei, in particular, comported himself with extraordinary bravery. No less striking was the brilliant defense put up by General Jaroslav Dombrowski, a Polish nationalist of aristocratic lineage, who had completely identified with the Commune and held back the Versaillais for nearly two months at Neuilly with remarkable courage.

But these heroic cases do not alter the fact that many working-class federes defended the bourgeois portions of the city with less zeal than they would have defended their own quartiers. Most of the barricades in western and central Paris gave way fairly rapidly to the superior firepower and tactics of the Versaillais. In addition, Haussmann’s broad avenues enabled Thiers’s men to execute pincer movements, unexpectedly taking barricade after barricade from the rear. In fact, the days when a frontal attack upon a barricade was the rule had come to an end; henceforth the barricade would be merely a symbolic structure rather than a military one.

Thiers knew, however, that the most ferocious batdes still lay ahead, in the eastern half of the city. Those batdes would have been even more ferocious if the Communards had been able to use the eighty-five cannons and two dozen machine guns that they had collected on the heights of Montmartre. But since Thiers’s abortive attempt to retrieve them in mid-March, the guns had been neglected and left to corrode—indeed, they were all but useless just when they were most needed. For the few that were serviceable, there was hardly enough ammunition. The same was true of the cannons in the artillery park at the Ecole Militaire. The disorder in the National Guard, to which all the generals appointed by the Commune had consistendy objected week after week, now left them with relatively few usable cannons—the weapons par excellence that Thiers was using to demolish the capital’s defenses.

At nine o’clock on the moming of May 22, the Commune—or rather, twenty of its members—assembled again at the Hotel de Ville. Apart from rhetoric and Pyat’s histrionics—he pledged, with tears in his eyes, to die on the barricades (but disappeared before the fighting came too near and was next seen in London, after the conflict)—the Communal Council had little to offer its beleaguered Jederes.

On May 23, fires broke out in many important government buildings in the center of the city, including the Tuileries, the Finance Ministry, and the Hotel de Ville, among many others. Variously caused by the artillery of the Versaillais or by Jederes, the burnings cleared the way for guns to arrest the flanking movements of both sides. Later, Thiers was only too eager to claim that the fires had been the work of petroleuses, or “women incendiaries,” an accusation that, like so many others generated by the Versaillais, has been shown to be entirely spurious. To be sure, few Communards would have wept to see the symbols of French royalism, such as the Tuileries and the Louver, go up in flames; but neither the Commune nor the workers tried to systematically bum down Paris. In all likelihood, the bombardment of the city by the Versaillais destroyed more structures than the Communards did.

But what is indubitably true is that the bloody repression now conducted by the Versaillais—the purge that Thiers had urged upon Louis-Philippe in 1848— led to the most wanton slaughter of men, women, and even children in the history of nineteenth-century counterrevolutions. Every time the Versaillais took a barricade, they would line up its defenders against a wall and shoot them, even those suspected merely of helping the actual fighters. Anyone found with a weapon, or wearing a portion of a National Guard uniform—such as a kepi, jacket, or cartridge belt—indeed, anyone with darkened hands that resembled powder burns—was executed at once, as were outright captives who had been cajoled into surrendering with promises of clemency. One working-class child begged an officer to temporarily release him so that he could give his watch to his mother: when the officer consented, he left, then was shot on his return. The savagery perpetrated by the Versailles troops as they advanced through the boulevards and streets of the capital beggars all description.

The executions increased the fury of the Jederes and made their resistance so desperate that they sometimes retaliated in kind. Not surprisingly, the six notable hostages taken by the Commune, including the archbishop of Paris, were executed in reprisal. A furious crowd, incensed by the wanton butchery by the Versaillais of the Communards, massacred fifty-one prisoners—mainly police and priests—despite vigorous efforts by Varlin to save them.

But the advance of Thiers’s troops was relendess. Like the June insurgents of 1848, the Communards at nearly every barricade fought desperately in their own neighborhoods, sparing little or no effort to assist nearby insurgents in greater need of aid. “The troops of Versailles could only be seriously checked,” Edwards observes, “if there had been a coordinated line of barricades across Paris, covering each other and preventing any given position from being outflanked and taken from behind.”[569] No such line was formed.

The imprisoned Blanqui had long urged the Parisian working class to overcome its neighborhood parochialism at such moments and recognize the importance of developing a coordinated strategy—“above all, not to become shut up, each in his quartier, as all uprisings have never failed to do, to their great loss.”[570] But in the seventeenth arrondissement, when Malon called on adjacent Montmartre for help, the Jederes there refused to leave their home district. Despite the Communards’ ferocious resistance, their neighborhood focus allowed the Versaillats to vanquish them barricade by barricade, with little fear of having to face reinforcements from other districts before each barricade fell.

Belleville was the last neighborhood to hold out against the Versaillais, but by Saturday, May 27, the entire district was invested by Thiers’s troops. At the end of the day the Versaillais broke into the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the Communards were making their last stand. Despite fierce hand- to-hand fighting, the Communards failed to halt the advancing troops. On Sunday, they were finally compelled to surrender—and the last important engagement of the Commune was over. The Versaillais, almost as a matter of course, lined the prisoners up against a cemetery wall—the mur des jederes, as it came to be called—and shot them. Thousands of corpses, including those of men and women who had had to surrender because they lacked ammunition, littered the gravesites. Dramatically, the very last barricade fell on Sunday in Belleville, on the Rue Ramponeau, where one man held out alone, as long as he could, coolly defending his position against hopeless odds. After a quarter of an hour, he fired a parting shot in the direction of the attacking Versaillais, then calmly stepped down from the barricade and disappeared into the streets.

Charles Delescluze went to his death with all the nobility that had marked his life and character. On Thursday, May 25, dressed in an unassuming black hat, coat, and trousers, with a red scarf around his waist, the venerable Jacobin leader walked with great dignity toward a barricade at what is now the Place de la Republique and mounted it in full sight of the Versaillais guns. He was shot down. Two Communards who tried to rescue his body were also killed. Eugene Varlin, on the last day of the fighting, led a column of fifty men under a huge red flag to a barricade at the intersection of the Rue de la Fontaine and the Rue du Faubourg du Temple. After Thiers’s troops took the barricade, this remarkable man wandered through the streets, dazed by the fury of the fighting. When he was recognized and taken, his captors beat him with their rifle butts, and an enraged crowd of bourgeois surrounded him and mercilessly pelted him with stones. Finally, with his face smashed and one eye out of its socket, he was placed before a firing squad. Despite his battered condition, Varlin managed to raise his head high and defiantly shout, “Long live the Commune!” It took two volleys to finish him off. Well-dressed bourgeois ladies prodded his body as it lay in the street, until it was finally carted off with the rest of the dead.

Women had played a crucial role in the Paris Commune. Not only did they aid in building the barricades, but they readily took up arms against the Versaillais, for which a large number paid with their lives, either in battle or at the hands of the government’s executioners. The roster of women Communards is impressive, including Elisabeth Dmitrieff, who organized the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris, as well as uncounted working-class women whose names are lost to us forever. Perhaps the most outstanding and militant among them was Louise Michel, who seems to have been everywhere during each of the Commune’s major crises: participating in the October uprising after the surrender of Metz; orating at the clubs, where she was a familiar and inspiring figure; rousing the workers of Montmartre on March 18, when the cannons were about to be taken away, and fighting in various batdes, wearing a kepi and carrying a weapon. After March 18, during the controversy over whether to pursue Thiers out of the city, Michel had even made her way to Versailles itself, merely to demonstrate that the head of state could be assassinated.

By the time the fighting came to an end, Michel had achieved a degree of distinction unequaled by any other female Communard. Since the authorities had singled her out as the leader of the mythic petroleuses, who ostensibly set fire to the buildings, the troops and police combed Paris to find her. She managed to elude them completely and take refuge in the recesses of the capital. Not until December 16, when the government took her mother hostage, did she voluntarily surrender herself to the Sixth Council of War. Placed on trial, Michel defiandy shouted back at her judges:

Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.[571]

Louise Michel’s courage so impressed the spectators at her trial that she was prudendy sentenced to exile instead of death. When it was suggested that she lodge an appeal for clemency, she refused, declaring that she “would have preferred death.”[572]

Brunei, Cluseret, Eudes, Frankel, Longuet, Lefrangais, Miot, and Vaillant—all survived, and several of them later became prominent figures in the French Socialist Party. Ferre, Moreau, Rigault, Rossel, and Clement Thomas were shot by the Versaillais—although Rossel was executed after leaving his hideout, a refugee from the Commune as well as the Versaillais. The many thousands who were shot or killed in the barricade fighting and afterwards remain an anonymous mass, their names forgotten in the history of humanity’s fight for social justice. Yet they died in huge numbers as heroically as their better-known leaders.

After the barricade fighting was over, the carnage continued without respite. The prisoners of the Versaillais were slaughtered by the hundreds, even thousands, without any discrimination. Commanders like the Marquis de Galliffet simply strode up and down the ranks of the captives and arbitrarily selected individuals for immediate execution. The Paris correspondent of the London Daily News, observing the marquis’s behavior, wrote:

It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, or uglier than one’s neighbors. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing his speedy release from ills of this world to his having a broken nose.... Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column resumed its march, leaving them behind.[573]

In June 1871 the British Standard correspondent reported that two courts- martial were shooting people at the rate of 500 a day, including women and children. Thousands of captives, marched off to the Satory encampment at Versailles, were shot indiscriminately or perished from exhaustion. The Lobeau barracks were turned into a killing ground and the corpses thrown into a shallow grave at the Place Saint Jacques or into the Seine. In some places, blood ran in a steady trickle into the gutters. So chilling and grotesque were the reports coming out of France that revulsion gave rise to protests against the slaughter, even in conventional newspapers abroad, and in time the government was obliged to replace outright executions with transportation to New Caledonia, a French colony where more than 3,000 Communards were forced to live in huts under the eyes of brutal wardens. In all, 10,000 people were condemned and confined, either within France or in French possessions abroad. Twenty thousand more, who suffered terribly through the winter of 1871–72 in ad hoc forms of confinement, were released without ever being formally charged.

As for fatalities, the most commonly accepted estimate is that 25,000 Communards were killed, although a figure of 30,000 would not be unreasonable. The Versaillais lost only 877 dead and 6,454 wounded. Most by far of the Communards who perished were executed by Thiers’s troops, usually summarily, without even a pretense of courts-martial. For months after the suppression of the Commune, Paris suffered from a labor shortage due to the murder and imprisonment of its best artisans. Thiers did complete his purge of Paris—with far more brutality than even the Terror of the Great Revolution, in which, during 1793–94, about 2,600 were killed in Paris and about 17,000 in the rest of France.