Chapter 30. Prelude to the Paris Commune

The Franco -Prussian War marked the clash of two contrasting but hitherto parallel developments in nineteenth-century Europe.

In 1870 both France and Germany—in its various stages of unification— were still predominandy rural. Although both countries were on the threshold of the industrial revolution, nearly seventy per cent of the French population and sixty per cent of the German population lived in rural areas. In the two decades that Louis Napoleon sat on the throne, as we have seen, he did not decisively alter this basic economic landscape: even when the Second Empire came to an end, artisanal labor still produced the bulk of French goods, and the peasants still accounted for the great majority of the French population. Unskilled proletarians producing machine-made commodities were becoming much more numerous, but in 1870 French artisans still occupied a considerable place in the economic life of their country—particularly in Paris, which remained a world center of artisanal excellence, and its working class still consisted mainly of artisans rather than industrial proletarians.

Politically, after the bloodletting of June 1848, the Parisian workers had retreated back to their neighborhoods, apathetic and disdainful of the bourgeoisie that had condemned their rising. The years of repression, accompanied by improved economic conditions, left France politically inert— its provincials largely Bonapartist, its city residents smoldering with bitter disillusionment or turning inward to cope with problems of material well-being. The reputation of the Second Empire as not only dissolute and pleasure-loving but crassly mean-spirited and egoistic has a strong basis in fact. In the 1850s, much to the satisfaction of the ruling classes, Bonaparte delivered on his promise to provide a stable authoritarian state, control over the working classes, and economic growth.

Most notably, as we have seen, Napoleon III laid the infrastructure for France’s leap forward into an industrial economy in the closing decades of the century. Much of the new economic prosperity he gave France came as a result of the massive public works programs he instituted. His government borrowed great sums to build or improve the country’s roads, railways, bridges, canals, and cities. But the years of growth in the Second Empire were gained essentially by mortgaging France’s economic future to achieve a buoyant present By concentrating its economic resources on constructing transportation and infrastructure—and equipping a large French army—Bonaparte’s regime failed to generate an industrial revolution in France. In effect, the emperor had laid the groundwork for the transformation of France to an industrial society, rather than produce it direcdy.

Which is not to say that industry was absent—on the contrary, Bonaparte himself did import English-style factories to the country and foster their development at home. Indeed, if Paris itself was still artisanal, the Parisian suburbs were filling up with factories. Locomotive works, railway repair shops, chemical plants, and metallurgical works materialized outside the capital’s walls, utilizing the labor of a new type of working class, the industrial proletariat. These men and women, instead of selling wares they had made to merchants and the public, were paid hourly or piecework wages for producing goods according to increasingly rationalized systems of production, and commodities that had once been crafted by skilled handworkers were increasingly fabricated by relatively unskilled workers mobilized in highly mechanized factories. Moreover, many French and German artisans were now de facto subsidiary employes of factory owners who, since they still required their skills, permitted them to work at home or in small workshops. Try as they might to hold on to their independence and maintain their corporations (in Germany, guilds were still common), these workers occupied an intermediate position between traditional craftspeople and the modern industrial proletariat Nevertheless, even as factories multiplied, these artisans were steadily absorbed into the industrial world and reduced to mere proletarians.

During the two Bonapartist decades, the population of all of France’s industrial cities ballooned. Roubaix, a major textile center in the north, trebled in population; Toulouse, Lille, and Lyon doubled; and the great port cities of Marseilles and Bordeaux were half again as large, despite the fact that the French population as a whole rose by only two million between 1851 and 1861 and in fact by 1872 decreased by more than a million, which suggested that much of the urban population increase was primarily the result of internal migration from the countryside and the conversion of peasants into proletarians.

In Paris in particular, as David H. Pinkney tells us, population growth was so rapid that in 1850 congestion was already an immensely serious problem:

the area within the inner ring of boulevards on the Right Bank, the seventeenth century line of fortifications, was an almost impenetrable hive of tenements and shops. Here in an area not twice the size of New York’s Central Park, piled one above another in rooms or tiny apartments, lived more than a third of the city’s one million inhabitants. The density of the population was higher than on the lower East Side of New York in the 1930s.[531]

The size of the city expanded enormously in the next two decades, especially in 1861, when the oudying suburbs were annexed to the existing twelve arrondissements, bringing the total to twenty, so that by 1870, an estimated 1.9 million people lived in an area that barely exceeded six miles at its widest diameter.

Yet in physical and logistical terms, the city could scarcely support such a large population. In 1851, the year Louis Napoleon performed his coup, Paris had still been an agglomeration of largely medieval villages. Its boundaries scarcely extended beyond the old eighteenth-century “General Farmers’ Wall,” at whose sixty gates the city taxes (octroi) were imposed on all goods entering the capital. The city’s narrow, winding streets, its dark caverns of houses crammed together with open sewers running alongside, were virtually impossible for visitors to negotiate, and many parts were unknown even to native Parisians.

In the face of these problems of congestion and sanitation, Louis Napoleon undertook a massive rebuilding program, assigning the task in 1853 to Baron Georges Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine department who became, under the Second Empire, the virtual ruler of Paris. Over the course of seventeen years, Haussmann cleared and enlarged the narrow streets, opening them up to create wide boulevards with sweeping vistas and immense squares whose great expanses made the capital one of the civic splendors of the world. Parisians who had formerly lived, worked, and met all their needs within their immediate neighborhood, as Balzac and Eugene Sue portrayed them in their novels, now had easy access to the central areas of the city.

But beautification, mobility, and improved sanitary conditions were not the only motivations that impelled Haussmann and Louis Bonaparte. The highly congested Parisian neighborhoods had been notorious hotbeds of sedition and insurrection, and the narrow streets in the working-class neighborhoods were famously suited for the construction of barricades in periods of insurrection. Between 1827 and 1849, in a span of a single generation, barricades had been reared eight times in the eastern half of the city; in 1830 and twice more in 1848, they had been used in insurrections. That the city was physically congenial to insurgency had been a source of vexation to regime after regime. The problem had been raised in the Chamber of Deputies as long ago as the rising of the Saisons in 1839 and as recendy as the street fighting of 1851; indeed, some measures had already been taken to push wider streets into the most intractable of the working-class areas. There can be little doubt, as Haussmann himself attests in his memoirs, that the Bonapartist regime straightened, widened, and lengthened the streets and boulevards of Paris so that it could more effectively deploy its artillery and cavalry against barricades. With extraordinary determination and sometimes guile, Haussmann transformed Paris into a city that was not only remarkably beautiful but that was far more defensible against future insurgencies.

To perform the massive construction work required to rebuild the dty, Haussmann brought in from the provinces thousands of unskilled workers, or gros metiers (as distinguished from skilled artisans), who added greatly to the restiveness of the Parisian working class. Moreover, the reconstruction worsened rather than improved working-class housing, exacerbating workers’ anger and militancy; indeed, by tearing down their hovels and entire districts, it produced an upward spiral of rents that ultimately forced the removal of many to new slums in annexed suburban areas. These changes were not without their political consequences: in the 1860s many cities in France began to return republican deputies to the Corps Legislatif, where they joined the opposition of bourgeois critics to Louis Napoleon. Despite the high esteem in which the French bourgeoisie held their free-trading English counterparts, they had long been nurtured in protectionism, and they now tended to blame every setback in the French economy on trade agreements that Louis Napoleon had signed with Britain to lower tariffs. Indeed, many industries, particularly small firms, openly criticized the emperor’s policies for their mounting economic difficulties. As rumblings against the government mounted in the Corps Legislatif, the liberal deputies began to demand more participation for the middle classes in state affairs, with the result that the imperial government had to face discontent by all but the most reactionary social classes in the realm.

As the 1860s drew to an end, great cracks were opening in the Empire’s facade and challenges to the government were everywhere on the increase. The huge debts that Bonaparte had piled up to make possible his massive infrastructure and reconstruction projects were destabilizing the economy without increasing the productive capacity of the country, as were the emperor’s costly war against Russia in the Crimea and his futile imperialist adventures in Mexico (from which French troops were evicted in 1867 by a combination of Benito Juarez’s peon armies and American pressure). Money that went into roads and urban development was money that did not go into industry as a whole, lining the pockets of French financiers without dramatically advancing industrial development

Moreover, the end of the building boom in the late 1860s left thousands of workers unemployed, and the heavy bank speculation in real estate that had pardy underwritten Haussmann’s civic improvements led to the virtual collapse of the financial structure. In 1868 France slipped into an economic crisis that,

although relatively mild, was the most serious the Empire had experienced. Credit tightened up, the reckless financial improvizations of the previous decade came to an end, and the French bourgeoisie beat a quick retreat to what Tom Kemp has called its traditional system of “orthodox finance.” By withholding funds from the state or else charging it high interest rates, the bankers now “staged a kind of strike against the regime as the expression of [their] disapproval.”[532]

Bonaparte’s response to these difficulties was typical of his temporizing policies: in 1868 he put an end to the economic and imperialist adventurism that had previously characterized his regime’s behavior and converted the “Authoritarian Empire” into what has been called the “Liberal Empire,” essentially creating a limited monarchy under the premiership of the liberal deputy Emile Ollivier. The Corps Legislatif now became an increasingly authentic parliamentary forum in which deputies openly challenged policies of the emperor’s ministers—challenges that found their way into an ever-freer press and that were echoed in open public meetings and discussions. Indeed, a critical republican opposition, which had been emerging since the mid-1860s, now crystallized around three flamboyant deputies: Leon Gambetta, Jules Favre, and Jules Ferry. Even the archreactionary Orleanist Adolphe Thiers prudendy aided the opposition with advice and votes when he deemed it politically expedient to do so.

The emperor’s declining status in the country can be judged by the election results for the Corps Legislatif since 1857. In that year only seven opposition candidates had been elected to the chamber; only a few years later, in 1863, this number leaped to thirty-five; and by 1869, the last election prior to Louis Napoleon’s abdication, opposition deputies soared to ninety-three. In this last election, all the large cities—Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles—returned deputies for the opposition; in Paris the opposition got 234,000 votes, to the government’s paltry 70,000. In 1868, to lessen public discontent, the nervous government further liberalized press controls, and before the year was out, 140 new periodicals mushroomed in the capital alone, including Le Rappel (an unmistakably militant name), with a circulation of at least 120,000. Finally, the 1860s witnessed the revival of the socialist left and the labor movement and the reactivation of the secret societies, many of which were Blanquist and Jacobin in their orientation, leading to conspiracies to overthrow the regime, even to assassinate the emperor. To ease working- class hostility, the government completely legalized trade unions in 1864, whereupon the ever-zealous Eugene Varlin toured the country in a campaign to establish combative working-class associations, or societes de resistance (as distinguished from the fairly tepid trade councils, or chambres syndicates, favored by the Proudhonist mutualists).

Although he was always deferential to the bourgeoisie, Louis Napoleon varied his policies toward the workers, allowing for reforms that were often followed by acts of repression. In the 1860s, as we have seen, he courted the workers in order to countervail the demands of the bourgeoisie, on the hopeful assumption that the workers had abandoned their bloody insurrectionary course of June 1848. Yet despite the legalization of unions, men of Varlin’s stripe were frequendy arrested and sent to prison or to exile in North Africa. In March 1868 fifteen leaders of the Paris bureau of the International were tried and convicted, followed two months later by a second trial, and still a third one in June 1870. The International had been banned and its members were ruthlessly persecuted by the police—in fact, by the last year of the Empire, it was effectively suppressed. Varlin was obliged to seek refuge in Belgium, where he ceaselessly attacked the regime and tried, even from a distance, to strengthen the French working-class opposition to the regime.

These feverish shifts in the emperor’s policy earned him only the contempt of nearly all classes in France; indeed, by 1869, the Bonapartist system was on the brink of toppling. Louis Napoleon was a sick man—physically (due to a massive kidney stone) as well as politically, and his regime was clouded by economic instability, a resdess working class, and a dissatisfied bourgeoisie. It was haunted by financial scandals and painful defeats, most recendy his humiliating failure to turn Mexico into a colony.

Moreover, despite his thirst for “glory” and his incongruous posturing over a decaying regime, the emperor was afflicted with a bumbling and sclerotic officer corps and an army that, despite cosdy military expenses, was ill trained and, by comparison with the developments in weaponry that were being made elsewhere, especially in Prussia, poorly armed. The French chassepot rifle, to be sure, was immensely superior in range and accuracy to the Prussian needle gun, but the emperor’s army had not advanced appreciably in heavy equipment beyond the 1840s. Where the Prussian artillery, thanks to Alfred Krupp, was the most advanced in Europe, Prussian logistics and training made the French army, despite its celebrated elan, seem almost amateurish by comparison. Prussian officers, although less colorful and dashing than their French counterparts, were typically efficient, and the Prussian cavalry was perhaps the most superbly trained in Europe, certainly far more able to reconnoiter enemy terrain than the French. The “Iron Chancellor” of the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation, Otto von Bismarck, having already united many of the northern German states under a Prussian king, was only too eager to establish a still more powerful German empire by annexing the long-cherished territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which were under French rule.

VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE!

That Bismarck wanted a war with France can hardly be doubted. All his geopolitical aspirations demanded it. Filled with pride in their country’s economic expansion and Prussian military efficiency, the north Germans regarded France as effete, even dissolute, and disdained her pretensions to leadership of the European continent as archaic. Louis Napoleon, in turn, was eager to restore national unity by using war to mobilize popular support for his throne. But the French were by no means enthusiastic about engaging the Germans; indeed, even reactionaries like Thiers feared for the ability of the military, led principally by the intransigent monarchist Marshal MacMahon, to take on the more able Prussian army.

For Bismarck, the question of war with France was simply how to provoke one. The opportunity came as a result of an affront that France suffered, or seemed to suffer, at the hands of Prussia in a dynastic quarrel in Spain. In July 1869, the Spaniards had had enough of their bumbling queen, Isabella II, and called upon the Hohenzollern rulers of Prussia to provide them with a new sovereign. The Prussians were delighted to oblige, anticipating the wealth and power that a dynastic alliance with Spain would bring. Following a series of secret negotiations, Prince Leopold of Sigmaringen, a Hohenzollern notable, was made available. But the prospect of a Hohenzollern dynasty on the other side of the Pyrenees was not only a slap in France’s face, it seemed to open the French southern flank to Prussian encirclement. Indeed, in Paris’s eyes, for the Prussians to try to extend their influence to France’s southern frontier was absolutely intolerable.

After much diplomatic maneuvering, in the course of which the prince withdrew his own candidacy, the French issued a virtual ultimatum stipulating that Leopold would never be allowed to sit on the Spanish throne. Although the Prussian king’s telegram in reply to the ultimatum was fairly tepid, Bismarck shrewdly reworded it to make it appear that the king had rebuffed the French ambassador. He then released the doctored telegram to the press, knowing it would provoke the French. The French, confident of their military superiority over the Prussians, allowed themselves to be infuriated by this manufactured snub, and on July 19, 1870, Louis Bonaparte declared war on the Prussian- controlled North German Confederation. As French troops marched out of Paris, jubilant crowds lined the streets, certain that a vibrant Gallic military would surely rout the dour Teutons.

Their hopes were grossly misplaced. Within weeks, the poorly mobilized French armies, led by incompetent generals who lacked any realistic offensive strategy against the well-coordinated Prussian forces, were surrounded. Where Bismarck’s well-trained infantry and ubiquitous Uhlan cavalry did not crush them, they fled in a near panic. By August 7, news reached Paris that the Prussians had pushed back both Generals MacMahon and Frossard, resulting on August 9 in an angry demonstration before the Palais Bourbon, where the Corps Legislatif was obliged to protect itself with troops against its own citizens. With a crisis at hand, the ministry was changed, with Thiers installed at its head. But now outraged, even defiant calls to replace the empire with a republic and save France from the Prussians were heard throughout the city, redolent of past revolutionary situations and insurrections.

In mid-August Blanquist hotheads decided that the time was ripe for another putsch and called upon Blanqui himself to return to Paris from his refuge in Brussels. Their plan was, first, to attack the barracks of the Villette fire station, where the firemen had stored a number of rifles, and with arms in hand to arouse the people in the streets against the government Inasmuch as the fire station and barracks were located in a radical working-class district, the Blanquists naively thought the residents would instantly rise up and rally to their support. From there they would capture other key points in the city and march on the center of Paris. Blanqui, recalling the defeats he had suffered earlier, objected to the plan, warning that the time was still not propitious for an uprising—but he was overruled by his followers and was obliged to yield to their wishes.

On August 14, armed with litde more than a handful of revolvers and daggers, the putschists and perhaps a hundred supporters launched their attack on the barracks—only to be met with a refusal by the firemen to surrender their weapons. The Blanquists withdrew, mindful of Blanqui’s injunction against spilling any blood in the attack, and proceeded down the Boulevard Villette toward the Belleville district shouting “Long live the Republic!” and “To arms!” to a starded crowd along the way. Needless to say, hardly anyone responded to their cries. The “uprising” was patendy a fiasco, and its initiators scattered before either the police or the troops could arrive in force. Two were captured and sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after a number of notable Parisians called for administrative clemency. The Villette fiasco definitively revealed the failure of Blanquist putschism. Without trying to gamer mass support for their tiny conspiracy, Blanqui’s elitist followers were simply stranded. Parisians had understandably remained unmoved when a small group of revolutionaries, planning behind their backs, tried suddenly to stir them into an adventuristic action. But the putsch also provided the authorities with an excuse to crack down on the entire revolutionary movement in Paris, which they did with all the energy at their disposal.

With the revolutionary movement in retreat, the privileged classes found they had litde to fear but their Bonapartist emperor. Even this problem was resolved when, on September 2, the last of the operational French armies—107,000 troops—capitulated to the Prussian army at Sedan, and the ailing and listless emperor, who accompanied rather than led them, gave his sword over to the Prussian king. The cities of Strasbourg and Metz managed to hold out longer against the German juggernaut and were duly besieged. But Louis Napoleon was now Bismarck’s prisoner, a shock that, back in Paris, threw the Corps Legislatif into an uproar. The proclamation of a republic now seemed unavoidable, but both Orleanists and republicans tried in every way to delay it the Orleanists were monarchists, still committed to an Orleans dynasty, and the republicans feared the Paris “mob,” which was already demanding radical change.

On September 4, a demonstration with vague patriotic themes was planned for the Place de la Concorde, but the night before, the Blanquists, who still managed to retain an organized presence in Paris, combed the working-class quarters, fervently urging the workers and the National Guard to follow them, with arms in hand, in a popular insurrection the next day. Nor were the workers alone in taking to the streets; this time, the largely bourgeois National Guard, long neglected and humiliated by Louis Napoleon, joined them. Thus, on September 4, while the deputies were trying to decide on the future of the government, a huge crowd burst into the Palais Bourbon, with the Blanquists at their head, and demanded the immediate creation of a republican regime.

In a replay of the invasion of the Palais Bourbon in February 1848, Jules Favre acted out Lamartine’s role as the reluctant republican leader. Although Favre was no last-minute convert to republicanism, as Lamartine had been, he clearly did not want the republic to be proclaimed in the heat of another insurrection, that is, when the workers might sweep the entire government away and possibly proclaim a social republic. To distract the invading crowd, the nervous Favre, aided by several deputies, once again led the workers and the National Guards in a march to the Hotel de Ville to proclaim the republic, and once again, he and his procession found the Place de Greve filled with workers. The Hotel was occupied by jacobins and Blanquists who were already busily forming their own government, dropping from the windows to the crowd below lists of proposed names, including those of the old Jacobin Charles Delescluze, Blanqui, and the heady republican journalist Henri Rochefort, among other radical candidates. And like Lamartine before him, Favre, who had been a moderate republican in 1848, slyly proposed, to placate the radicals in the crowd, that until a permanent republican legislature could be established by national elections, a provisional Government of National Defense should be created, composed exclusively of the existing legislature’s Parisian deputies—presumably in emulation of the “Mountain” of 1793. By seeming to promise the restoration of a Commune, the proposal quieted potential popular objections to the fact that such a government would in reality be filled with Orleanist deputies left over from the old regime. Finally, as if to complete the parody of February 1848, a younger republican, Leon Gambetta, persuaded the crowd in the Place de Greve to retain the tricolor in preference to the red flag—a task that, in the wake of national military humiliation at Prussian hands, was not very difficult to achieve.

Gambetta’s symbolic victory acquired political reality when the coterie established the Government of National Defense, politically not unlike the Provisional Government that had emerged from the February Revolution of 1848. The new government, working closely with the old monarchist and republican rump of the Corps Legislatif—many of whose deputies had fled Paris for the safety of their respective departments—immediately set about to eliminate the potential for further revolutionary changes. Installed at the head of the government was a dour Breton, General Jules Trochu, who was not only a devout Catholic but a firm Legitimist. His political beliefs alone would hardly have made him acceptable to working-class Parisians. But because he had had the foresight to criticize the army for its unpreparedness—even before the war—he had been rewarded with the military governorship of Paris and, known to be a mild man, was fairly popular with the crowd.

The real leaders of the government, however, were Favre and Gambetta. As vice-president and minister of foreign affairs, Favre was situated to negotiate an armistice with the Prussians, which he was only too eager to do to restore normality in France. Gambetta, whose militant republicanism made him popular with the crowd, was given the equally strategic Ministry of Interior, from which he ostensibly “republicanized” France by appointing men of republican sympathies to the departmental prefectures as well as the Paris mairies. Emest Picard, a major opposition leader in the Corps Legislatif, became minister of finance; General LeFlo was selected for the Ministry of Defense; and Etienne Arago, the aging playwright who had headed the Paris Post Office in 1848, was made the mayor of Paris. Still another remnant of 1848, Gamier-Pages, also found his way into the government. Less known to the public was Pierre Dorian, an industrialist who apparendy prided himself on his good labor relations and his efficiency, he became the minister of works, a position largely concerned with fortifying the capital. The prefecture of the police was given to Edmund Adam who, in time, proved a fairly honorable man in a dubious crew of naifs and cynics.

As a concession to the Left, Favre and Gambetta appointed Rochefort to a sinecure position in the government. A prominent opposition journalist during the Second Empire, Rochefort had opened his newspaper, La Marseillais, to Blanquist and Jacobin writers; moreover, he had the distinction of being imprisoned for his oppositional activities under Bonaparte and had just now been freed by the rebellious crowd. But it speaks volumes about the provisional government that it even offered a post to Adolphe Thiers, the aging counterrevolutionary reprobate of Louis-Philippe’s reign. At a time of potential danger to his person, however, this architect of counterrevolution and notorious coward discreedy refused any post and professed to withdraw into political retirement.

To the bitter disappointment of the socialists, Jacobins, and Blanquists, the February Revolution of 1848 seemed to be replaying itself. Once again the moderates had, by deft manipulation, trickery, and persuasion, captured the power from the popular movement. Bitterly, the old Jacobin writer Delescluze remarked to a friend that evening, “We are lost.”[533]

Indeed, as Samuel Bernstein points out, “Except in decor, the government was not a sharp departure from the Liberal Empire” of the 1860s. In fact, several of the government members, in 1848, had contributed to the destruction of the Second Republic: “Favre, for example, had drafted the decree ordering the deportation, without trial, of the June insurgents; and Gamier-Pages had been the author of the ill-starred supertax of forty-five centimes.”[534] Marx put it well when he wrote that the Government of National Defense neither replaced the monarchy nor introduced social measures of worth, but merely occupied Louis Bonaparte’s vacant throne in the guise of republicanism.

PARIS UNDER SIEGE

The military defeat that France had just suffered was as total as it was unexpected. Once the emperor surrendered his sword in September, Prussian armies moved rapidly toward Paris, a move for which the capital was woefully unprepared. Of the regular army, only 60,000 effectives remained in Paris, along with 100,000 Mobile Guards who were now ill-trained reserves or “territorials” from the provinces, and a miscellany of police, firemen, and sailors. Short of an outright surrender of the capital, a Prussian siege was unavoidable.

Yet even as Prussian artillery moved ever closer to Paris, the significant event, for the citizens of the capital, seems to have been less the danger of the military defeat than the new prospects opened by the fall of the imperial regime. A heady air of expectancy buoyed up the city—another republic had been created, this time bloodlessly, and a carnival of fraternity prevailed. To be sure, patriotism and wartime chauvinism also infected Parisians—even Blanqui succumbed to it and called for unity among all Frenchmen, if need be at the expense of social conflict, editing a newspaper called La Patrie en danger. But in the main, Parisians seem to have assumed that the fall of Louis Napoleon had been the fulfillment of the Prussians’ own military goals as well as the consummation of their own wishes.

In fact, this was not at all the case. The Prussians were seeking France’s complete humiliation and a sizable chunk of French territory. As the weeks went by, reality set in for the Parisians, and faced with the danger of a siege, the National Guard ballooned from 20,000 into a huge force of 350,000 in Paris alone. Once again, as in 1848, the Guard was opened up to all able-bodied men, including large contingents of workers, who received a franc and a half a day for their service and, as tradition dictated, had the right to elect their own officers. Moreover, Paris was very well fortified: surrounding the city was a thirty-foot wall, outside of which was a moat and, spaced at strategic intervals, sixteen powerful forts, each mounted with fifty to seventy heavy guns that could rain fire on much of the surrounding landscape. About 3000 cannons of varying types were available for the city’s defense, many of them purchased by popular subscription, with funds contributed by the workers and middle classes.

Trochu saw to it that the city was as well provisioned as possible for a siege. Inside the city walls sheep by the thousands were permitted to graze on any open spaces that were not under cultivation, from the Bois de Boulogne to the small plazas. Cattle roamed everywhere. Farmers brought their vegetables and poultry into the capital, not only to feed Parisians but to prevent the Prussians from living off the land. The Tuileries became an artillery emplacement, factories were converted to cannon foundries, and the Louver was emptied of art treasures and transformed into an arsenal. With all these preparations, it seemed certain that Paris could hold out against the Prussians almost indefinitely, with the result that the city was flooded with foreign tourists as well as provincials. The looming siege thus took on the air of an exciting festival rather than a painful ordeal.

Finally, on September 20, the Prussian armies completed their encirclement, or investment, of the capital, and the siege was under way in earnest But apart from skirmishes and some artillery duels, initially the two armies scarcely engaged each other. In fact, it is entirely possible that the Prussians might have succumbed to a concerted, well-planned, and resolute offensive, had the French launched one early on, when they were still positioning themselves around the city. But no such undertaking was mounted. Rather, a siege mentality pervaded the government’s thinking; far from mounting an offensive against the Prussians, the government eagerly hoped to reach an armistice with them. The Government of National Defense was already betraying a greater fear of its own armed people—particularly the workers—than of the artillery and infantry of the invaders it was expected to repel.

Although by their behavior most Parisian bourgeois exhibited little serious inclination to resist the Prussians, they bombastically declaimed their refusal to allow “even one inch” of French territory to pass to the enemy. It was generally assumed that some other military force would eventually rally to the capital’s defense, most likely one gathered from the provinces. To organize such a force, an extension of the government was established some distance from Paris, in Tours, known as the Delegation of Tours. There was also some hope that a foreign power, such as England, might come to the aid of Paris and bring the insufferable investment of Europe’s most glorious city to its rightful end. Favre and Thiers all but begged the English to provide assistance, even invoking the danger of a possible “red revolt” by an enemy more terrifying than even the Prussians, namely the revolutionary elements of the working class. But the Prussians had suffidendy intimidated Europe with their victory over the French to render international aid to Paris implausible, assuming it was ever contemplated.

In contrast to the passivity and defeatism of the government, the workers— or at least their most socially conscious leaders—were determined not to surrender the capital to the Prussians. On the contrary, they were eager to defend the new republic—the fruit of the most recent of France’s revolutions—to the bitter end if necessary. With understandable suspicion, they regarded the government, with all its passivity, as treacherous and demanded that Paris continue to resist by calling a levee en masse, or general mobilization and arming of the population, such as the Jacobins had done in 1793. This demand was forcefully articulated on September 5, a day after the formation of the new government, when a delegation met with Gambetta at the Hotel de Ville. Composed of members of the Paris Council of the IWMA, the Trade Union Federation (a loosely formed group of chambres syndicates), and a miscellany of socialists, the delegation’s demands were not limited only to the military situation. In fact they blundy called for municipal elections (stirring memories of the Commune of 1792–93) and, even more disturbingly, the substitution of the National Guard for the police, complete freedom of speech and the press, and the election of all judges.

Gambetta received them politely, but he was conspicuously evasive in his response. The next day the International, together with the trade unions, convened a meeting that was attended by 400 to 500 people. This meeting called upon Parisians to establish a defense and vigilance committee (so redolent of similar committees in the Great Revolution) in each of the twenty arrondissements. The committees, in turn, were to be coordinated by a Republican Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements for National Defense, consisting of four elected delegates from each local vigilance committee. These committees were duly formed over the next few days, under a Central Committee headed by Eugene Varlin. Significandy, the Central Committee met in the same building—a hall in the Rue de la Corderie—that housed the International and the Trade Union Federation and in time became a center for the most revolutionary tendencies in Paris. With the support of the unions, the Central Committee would virtually turn the “Corderie” (as it was called) into a dual power against the Government of National Defense.

Nor were the Committee and its supporters without a radical program. On September 15, members of the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements issued a proclamation that was posted on the walls of Paris, listing the full range of its demands.[535] In addition to the demands of September 5, it called for a complete inventory of all the essential commodities in the city, and demanded that these goods be shared equitably among the people according to need. Moreover, it called for the arming of all citizens (including the provision of ammunition), for placing the police under popular control, and for housing for all, including the “appropriation” of all empty apartments and buildings for “various defense services.” Without explicitly using the language of the Great Revolution, it called for “national delegates” to be sent out to the departments, with functions similar to those of the old Representatives on Mission of 1793.

The government, fearful that the terror of 1793–94 would return—this time as a “red” specter, with an implicit challenge to property and exploitation— clearly viewed the Prussians as the lesser enemy and began to extend feelers for an armistice. In fact Favre, as the foreign minister, had already called for an armistice shortly after the Government of National Defense was established. On September 18, he secredy met with Bismarck, only to find the Prussian terms so demanding that he rode back to Paris in complete despair. Not only would Prussia require France to cede Alsace, parts of Lorraine, and Metz, as well as provide a huge indemnity, but even during the siege itself, Favre was warned, Paris would no longer have access to outside provisions unless the government gave up Strasbourg and permitted the Prussians to occupy Mont-Valerien, the massive French fort to the west of the city walls. The news of these terms incited widespread protests in the capital, and on September 20 the Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements sent a delegation to the Hotel de Ville to make known its objections to any armistice with the hated invaders. Even the ever- resourceful Thiers failed to persuade the Prussians to preserve French honor in the peace terms; indeed, he encountered the same difficulties that confronted Favre.

In the fall of 1870, the people of Paris stood firm against the Prussians— although very much alone. On October 7, in the hope of mobilizing support from the rest of France for the defense of the capital, Gambetta left for Tours in a hot-air balloon (this was the only way he could cross the Prussian lines) to head the government’s delegation there. Taking over the ministry of war from the elderly Cremieux, he bestirred the delegation’s somnolent members with his usual bluster and energy and tried to mobilize new troops from the provinces to create an Army of the Loire. But until this force could prove itself to be effective in the field, Paris was still isolated militarily and politically. Indeed, to many of its citizens, it seemed that the city would be left to function as a sovereign municipality in its own right.

But what political structure would such a sovereign municipality have? Would it continue to be led by a politically mixed group of leaders who were committed to capitulation to the Prussians, as well as to a counterrevolutionary domestic agenda? Or would it be a Commune, revived for the first time since the Great Revolution, with a municipal council of elected representatives? Or would it be a direct democracy of the more radical kind, like the sectional democracy of 1793, which had variously supported and later opposed the old Commune?

The Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements now became the arena for a debate over the nature of the prospective Commune. With the support of many Blanquists, Gustave Lefrangais, one of the committee’s most militant and socialistic members, blundy demanded that a future Commune be structured around a direct democracy like that of 1793. The defense and vigilance committee of the eighteenth arrondissement declared in Le Combat of September 21 that “the quartiers are the fundamental base of the democratic Republic,”[536] thereby voicing a radical demand for mass democracy and the possible reconstruction of the old sections. In the end, however, moderates on the Central Committee succeeded in toning down this proposal: the final version, as published in Le Combat of October 5, simply called upon citizens to use their local assemblies as vehicles for the election of members to a citywide Municipal Council: “at your public meetings, in your arrondissement committees, in your National Guard battalions, right now you must select the men most worthy to represent you at the Hotel de Ville.”[537] The proposal was not received enthusiastically by the Corderie—the International, the Trade Union Federation, and the National Guard Central Committee—but the idea of a Commune structured around sectional assemblies faded permanendy from the political horizon.

October, however, was to be filled with continued demonstradons and stormy events. On October 5, a young National Guard officer named Gustave Flourens (who had written an account of an ideal society in which “men, freed from their chains, governed themselves”[538]) led a march of Guard battalions to the Hotel de Ville, where he repeated the demands for a levee en masse, municipal elections, and a fair distribution of rations in the besieged city, only to be pleasandy escorted out by the government, which made no commitments. This escapade was followed three days later (October 8) by a demonstration, held by the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements, to demand municipal elections. As yet, few Parisians responded to the call, and the turnout was embarrassingly meager. Delighted by this failure, the government used the opportunity to ban demonstrations and postpone municipal elections until the siege was lifted, but as Stewart Edwards puts it, the defense and vigilance committees “were constandy crossing the border between active attempts to ‘aid’ the Government in conducting the defense and attempts to supplant the official administration because it was not vigorous enough” in pursuing the war.[539] By now it was only a matter of time before these small skirmishes would give rise to a major clash between the government and its radical critics.

The occasion for the clash was provided, in part, by the surrender of Metz to its Prussian besiegers. With nearly a 100,000 troops under his command, Marshal Bazaine had been quiedy sitting out the siege of the city by surrounding Prussian forces. A Bonapartist general, the marshal detested the republic, and when Louis Napoleon surrendered at Sedan, he had made little effort even to engage the Prussians, let alone raise the siege. Finally, on October 27, after seventy days, he capitulated to his besiegers—an act that freed an entire Prussian army to reinforce the siege of Paris and engage in operations against growing French provincial resistance. Everywhere across the French political spectrum, the cry of “treachery” went up—not only from the Left but from Gambetta himself, who openly denounced Bazaine as a traitor.

To exacerbate an already turbulent situation, at the end of October the government announced not only the fall of Metz but the news that Thiers was traveling abroad once again to seek an armistice with Bismarck. However much the announcement may have pleased the bourgeoisie, which was eager to return to businesslike normality, the news sent a shock wave through the city. The prospect of Paris falling as Metz had just done, of a Bazaine surrender followed by a Thiers armistice, was intolerable to the infuriated working and lower-middle classes, who alone seemed prepared to defend France against Prussian aggression.

At length, at midday on October 31, about 150,000 Parisians, many of them National Guards, gathered in the Place de Greve in pouring rain, furiously denouncing the military setback and crying “No armistice!” and “Vive la Commune!” The demonstration was spontaneous and so large that the mayors of the capital’s arrondissements hastened to the Hotel de Ville to demand that the government call municipal elections, presumably to calm the situation and hold out hope to the demonstrators for the prospect of a Commune. The government, in turn, fearful that the huge demonstration would encourage radicals to take over the Hotel de Ville, beat the rappel in the bourgeois districts of the capital, hopefully to rally the reliable or “good” battalions of the National Guard to its defense. But even these “good” battalions failed to respond. Indeed, it now seemed that almost everyone in Paris was fed up with the treachery of Trochu’s coterie in the Hotel de Ville, if not the entire Government of National Defense.

For his part, the hot-headed Gustave Flourens decided that the demonstration had created an opportunity for establishing a Commune. Despite the objections of his more prudent fellow officers, he took it upon himself to rally his Belleville battalions of the National Guard—they included a contingent of sharpshooters equipped at his own expense with chassepot rifles—in an advance on the Hotel de Ville, clearly with the intention of deposing the existing government and replacing it with a revolutionary Commune composed of, among others, Delescluze, Blanqui, the radical republican Felix Pyat, the socialist Jean-Baptiste Milliere, and, oddly, Victor Hugo (who declined the honor as soon as he learned of it).

Meanwhile in the early afternoon, a rumor—wrong, as it turned out—spread among the demonstrators that Mayor Arago had consented to call municipal elections and that Trochu would be replaced as president of the government by Pierre Dorian, the more popular minister of works. Viewing the concession on municipal elections as a victory, the crowd now began to disperse, and the situation once again seemed under control. Suddenly Flourens and his sharpshooters burst into the room in the Hotel de Ville where the government was meeting, leaped up on to the long baize table around which the members were seated, and flamboyandy began to march up and down, his spurs tearing the fabric. He firmly demanded the formation of a Commune, to which he gave the chilling name Committee of Public Safety, and he furnished the ministers with his list of committee members. In their eyes, the names Blanqui and Delescluze might just as well have been Robespierre and Saint-Just.

At six-thirty Blanqui, learning that he had been anointed for the new Commune, very reluctandy appeared at the Hotel de Ville but with his usual decisiveness quickly sat down to write decrees, requisitioning food and closing the city’s gates, lest the Prussians take advantage of the disarray in the city and attack. When the remaining members arrived—Delescluze, Milliere, and Pyat, among others—it seemed that a “red republic” had indeed been established, with Blanqui and Delescluze at the helm. But as it turned out, the appearance was entirely deceptive and provided the occasion that the government needed to strike back at the Parisian Left.

The table upon which Flourens was striding collapsed when a defender of the government leaped up to challenge him. In the general melee that followed, Trochu, as well as other ministers, escaped from the room and, making their way to the Louver, where their panicky supporters were assembling, laid plans to retake the Hotel de Ville. In the meantime, the news that the city hall had been seized by “the reds” galvanized middle-class opinion in favor of the government. By early evening contingents of “good” bourgeois National Guards appeared before the Hotel de Ville and demanded of Delescluze, who had come out to parley, that the building be evacuated. In return, they said that the government’s promise to hold municipal elections would be scrupulously kept. Delescluze returned inside to tell his fellow insurgents of the proposal and persuade them to leave. Meanwhile Mobile Guards, who had been brought to the scene by the government, infiltrated the building by passing through a litde-known subterranean passageway from a nearby barracks. The would-be Commune established by Flourens was now in a hopeless situation, facing hostile National Guards outside the building and mobiles within.

Peace was finally established when the government agreed to call municipal elections the very next day and promised to take no reprisals against the confused insurgents. This agreement was vouchsafed by Jules Ferry and Adam, the police prefect. Finally, at three o’clock on the morning of November 1, the leaders of both sides amiably walked out of the city hall arm in arm—Blanqui with General Tamasier (the commander of the National Guard), Delescluze with Dorian, and so forth—each insurgent linked with a military or government leader. After politely shaking hands with their opposites in the nearly empty Place de Greve, the insurgents wisely hastened to the Belleville, there to find safety from the reprisals that were certain to follow if the government broke its agreement

THE WINTER OF REACTION

Needless to say, less than twenty-four hours after the agreement was made, the government broke it. Before Prefect Adam was even awake the next morning, a ruthless crackdown against the insurgents was under way. Orders were issued for the immediate arrest of Blanqui, Delescluze, Pyat, Flourens, and Milliere, among others. (Blanqui managed to elude the authorities for several months, as did his second in command, Gustave Tridon, and the future leader of the Blanquists in the 1880s, Edouard Vaillant.)

Creditably, Adam angrily resigned his post in protest over this breach of promise. He was replaced by a far less honorable police prefect, Cresson, who proceeded to ferret out insurgent leaders. Rochefort also resigned, as could have been expected, while the honorable General Tamasier turned in his command of the National Guard. He was replaced by the reactionary General Clement Thomas, who promptly cashiered sixteen of the more radical Guard commanders. On November 3, almost as an afterthought, the government defaulted on its promise to hold municipal elections by conducting a mere vote of confidence. In this Bonaparte-style plebiscite, it received 560,000 affirmative votes as against 63,000 negative ones. The plebiscite was followed the next day by an election simply for arrondissement mayors—and beyond these steps the government refused to budge.

With the failure of the October 31 insurgency at the Hotel de Ville, the influence of the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements quickly waned, and the members of the defense and vigilance committees disappeared into their respective republican, Jacobin, and Blanquist clubs, which for their part underwent a sudden revival. Clubs such as the Club des Montagnards and Club de la Patrie en Danger (both Blanquist) and the Club de la Commune (Jacobin) replaced the arrondissement committees and the public assemblies that had grown up around them. In a sense, the Parisian militants were becoming more politicized and revolutionary, a change that would not become evident until the beginning of 1871.

In the meantime, the pressure mounted on Trochu, as commander of the defense of Paris, to carry out an offensive against the Prussians, who seemed to be waiting patiently for the siege to starve the city into submission. This pressure was inspired in part by Gambetta’s efforts to raise an army in the provinces, efforts that were now showing some success. On November 9, in an engagement against Bavarian forces, his troops won the first French victory in the war, recapturing the city of Orleans. Indeed, had the cavalry pressed its advantage over the retreating Prussian forces, the French army might very well have routed them completely.

As much as the news of Gambetta’s success delighted Paris, it threw Trochu’s own plans for a military offensive into disarray. The general had massed a large army with considerable equipment in the northwestern part of the capital and planned to break through the Prussian lines—which were weak in this sector—and try to drive toward the Channel ports. But having captured Orleans in the south, Gambetta now demanded that Trochu link up his forces with those of the Army of the Loire, which required that Trochu transport all his troops and supplies across the city to the southwestern part of the capital— where the Prussians were very numerous and well entrenched. Nor could Trochu take the Prussians by surprise there: the movement of a large French army across an open city could easily be seen from the high ground outside the besieged capital.

On November 29, having obliged Gambetta and moved his troops and supplies to the southwest despite his own doubts, Trochu initiated a “great sortie” against the Prussian forces to the south. It was a disaster. Despite the undeniable courage of the French troops, everything seemed to work against them: the weather, which had swollen the Mame to flood level (which they then had to cross under Prussian fire), the lack of command coordination, the poor logistics, and the treacherous terrain, which gave the Prussians the high ground, all assured a complete rout. The fighting was bloody, presaging the kind of losses the French would suffer in the First World War—in only three days of combat, they lost some 12,000 men and officers. The results for the French were pitiful: the siege was still intact, and to add insult to injury, Orleans was soon recaptured by counterattacking Prussians, causing Gambetta to shift his government from Tours to Bordeaux, farther to the south of France.

With the arrival of the winter months, the siege of Paris now took its terrible toll in hunger, disease, and cold. Although wealthy Parisians still had access to premium foodstuffs, the poor, already accustomed to horsemeat, were reduced to eating dogs, cats, and even rats. So high were prices, especially of necessities, that Blanqui’s newspaper, La Patrie en danger, folded on December 8, due in part to the limited resources of his subscribers. Although few adults actually succumbed to outright starvation, long lines of small coffins, containing the bodies of children, moved in a steady train to the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Military failures now brought the Government of National Defense and the people of Paris into open conflict. The government was desperate for an armistice, in marked contrast to most Parisians, who astonishingly were still prepared to fight on against the Prussians. On December 21, compelled by popular opinion, Trochu launched a second “sortie” toward the northeast, this time in bitterly cold weather. This attack, too, failed miserably, at a cost of 2,000 casualties, removing whatever remaining confidence Parisians had in the government and especially in Trochu. On December 27, intensifying the demoralization that had settled into the city, the Prussians began to bombard Paris—barely a week after the failed sortie. For several weeks shells fell on the capital at the rate of 300 to 400 daily, mosdy exploding in the Left Bank, where they did surprisingly little damage. Indeed, no more than 97 people were actually killed and 278 wounded, and by early January, Parisians were taking the bombardment in their stride, as a routine and virtually harmless assault.

What really plunged the city into despair was the lack of fuel. The winter of 1870–71 was the most brutal in memory, and virtually every tree in the parks and along the avenues of Paris was cut down to provide warmth. The weekly death rate from infections (principally smallpox, typhoid, and respiratory ailments) soared from 1,200 during the first week of the siege to 4,444 between January 14 and 21. The prestige of the Government of National Defense had reached its nadir, and it was only a matter of time before Parisian workers would try to replace it with a Commune. Indeed, on January 6 the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements plastered Paris with an affiche rouge (or “red poster”), declaring that “the Municipality or the Commune, whatever one chooses to call it, is the only salvation of the people, their only guarantee against destruction,” and it closed with the call: “MAKE WAY FOR THE commune!”[540]

Anticipating that an uprising was in the offing, the blundering government cynically decided to bleed the National Guard by sending it out on a completely useless sortie. Having abandoned all hope of lifting the siege, the government had made no effort to train the Guards, whose main function had been crowd control, for combat in open warfare against a highly disciplined and well- officered foreign army. To send them out against the Prussians, who had already routed well-trained regular armies, was a transparent attempt to teach revolutionary Paris a bloody lesson. As one member of the government is quoted as declaring, “there must be a big sortie of the National Guard because opinion will only be appeased when there are 10,000 National Guards dead on the ground.”[541]

Surprisingly, despite this lack of training, the National Guards were eager to take up arms against the enemy. Filled with patriotic and revolutionary ardor, they hoped to overcome the Prussians with an overwhelming “torrential” charge, or sortie torrentielle, sweeping them away by sheer force of numbers and bayoneted rifles. The sortie, directed against Buzenval, to the west of the city, began on January 19—and from the start, the Guards were badly coordinated and plagued by delays. They were faced with the logistical nightmare of getting as many as a 100,000 men across two narrow bridges. Within a short time, the attack degenerated into confusion. Ironically, only a few National Guard battalions were sent into the heat of batde, bourgeois units rather than popular ones. Once Trochu decided that the National Guard had had enough of combat and bloodshed, he quickly ordered them to retreat—an order that astonished the popular battalions, who had hardly had a chance to take on the Prussians. When it was noticed that most of the sortie’s six hundred casualties were from the bourgeois units, the rumor spread that the bourgeois units had fought with heroism, while the popular units had behaved with cowardice—a falsehood that only contributed to divisiveness among the Guards and their overall anger toward Trochu and his government

Ordinary Parisians, in turn, were infuriated by the fact that the Guards had scarcely been permitted to see batde. The government was more detested than ever, by nearly all sectors of popular opinion. In their outrage, the Jacobins of the Republican Alliance, led by veterans of 1848 such as Delescluze and Ledru- Rollin, even made sympathetic overtures to the largely Blanquist “reds” of Belleville and Montmartre, offering to join forces in a common alliance against the government. No such alliance was actually made, and the Belleville revolutionaries decided that the time for an uprising against the government was finally at hand.

On the night of January 21, a public meeting of Club de la Revolution in Montmartre solemnly vowed to take the Hotel de Ville at noon on the following day. (The government had shifted its proceedings to the safety of the Louver, but the Commune, it was felt, could not properly be proclaimed anywhere but in the city hall.) When other groups were told of this solemn oath, they responded warily; the International and the Trade Union Federation, convinced that the time was not right for a journee, did not join them, while the Republican Alliance, which opposed socialism, decided to content itself with making a plea for municipal elections. Even Blanqui kept his distance from the uprising, regarding the attack as hopeless, although he went to a cafe near the Hotel de Ville to observe it, as did Delescluze elsewhere near the Place de Greve.

If the time for a full-scale uprising had not yet arrived, however, the idea did have a measure of popular support. So thoroughly disgusted was the population with the government that when the National Guard commander sounded the rappel summoning the Guards to come out against the uprising, very few responded. At noon on January 22 the most radical Guard battalions showed up at the Place de Greve, not to defend the government but to take it over in alliance with the young Blanquists Vaillant and Theophile Ferre, and the Internationalist Benoit Malon. Not unexpectedly, the anarchist Louise Michel, an unfailing insurgent, also appeared in her customary National Guard uniform, with rifle in hand.

To guard the city hall, the government had left behind contingents of Mobile Guards within the building. These mobiles were not Parisians: deeply religious Catholics who barely spoke French, they had been recruited from Brittany and dutifully hated the atheistic, dissolute, and urbane Parisians. Barely had Vaillant, Ferre, and Malon’s National Guards been reinforced by the radical battalions, when the mobiles suddenly opened fire from the windows—not only on the Guards but on everyone in sight, including bystanders. The murderous firing continued for a full half hour before it came to an end, leaving thirty dead and at least as many wounded. The National Guards tried to return their fire from neighboring houses but were completely routed.

Up to this point in the siege, no blood had been shed between Parisians, but at least two score workers had now been shot down by troops of the Government of National Defense, a toll that was impossible to overlook So extreme was the polarization that civil war between the government and the people was now a realistic possibility. Immediately, General Joseph Vinoy, who had just replaced Trochu as commander of the Paris garrison, outlawed the clubs, suspended the newspapers of Delescluze and Pyat, and ordered the mass arrest of known and suspected revolutionaries. It was clear to all that the siege, if it continued, would lead to Parisians turning their weapons on each other. Accordingly, the next day Favre visited Bismarck at Versailles, where the German command was ensconced, and on January 28 the Government of National Defense put an end to the four-month siege by signing an ostensible armistice that was in fact a capitulation to the Prussian army. The siege was to be lifted, and Paris was to receive food and other provisions from outside, but at a price that was very high. The Government of National Defense was obliged to pay the Prussians an armistice indemnity of 200 million francs, followed by a full indemnity, whose amount would be set in formal peace negotiations. Paris was to surrender its perimeter forts, and a National Assembly was to be convened at Bordeaux within three weeks, to negotiate the final peace treaty with the Prussians. The French army was permitted to retain only one division within the walls of the capital. The National Guards were allowed to keep their arms, but only because, as Favre fully realized, any attempt to disarm them would certainly lead to an open civil war.

When the harsh terms of the armistice were made known, they infuriated the capital. Gambetta, who had been kept in the dark about the armistice negotiations and was still mobilizing the Army of the Loire, went into a rage; after much soul-searching, he resigned, filled with hatred for the monarchists on whom he blamed the detestable agreement. The radical workers were equally outraged, which created a problem for the government, since the arrondissements had acquired so much political and administrative autonomy during the four months of the siege that the revolutionary sectors of Paris were now a force to be reckoned with, especially since the National Guard was still under arms. As Stewart Edwards notes:

The war ... had broken up the political forces of repression so gready relied on by the highly centralized system of government in France. Instead the Paris population had begun to assert itself. It was also a population that was armed, and the National Guard did not feel it had been defeated. On the contrary, it was spoiling for a fight and needed little to turn it completely against a Government that was held to have betrayed the nation. This frustrated patriotism was important in providing a general animosity which extended to a wider section of the population than just the regular revolutionaries.[542]

The air in Paris was fraught with tension, and only by showing some understanding and making some concessions to the long-suffering working class could the powers in control of the city avoid a bloody confrontation with the masses.

THE COMING STORM

No such understanding was shown or concessions made. Instead, the government set February 8 as the day for elections to the National Assembly, which would negotiate the final treaty. The Paris clubs were permitted to reopen only as electoral organizations, in order to present their Assembly candidates. Once again, as occurred so often in the past when Parisian radicalism became too menacing, the government tried to counter it by holding Assembly elections, which would invariably permit the peasants to determine the policy of the country. This time the peasantry would be joined by many members of the lower middle class, who had had all they could take of the war.

The voting results were as disastrous as they had been in April 1848, and far worse than even the most pessimistic Parisian revolutionaries could have anticipated. Out of 675 deputies, the country at large returned about 400 Legitimists and Orleanists. Despite the fact that France was a republic, only 150 authentic republican deputies were elected. Far from recognizing the legitimate complaints and needs of the Parisian working classes, rural France took its revenge on them by filling the Assembly with upper-class reactionaries and bourgeois elements.

Not even Paris as a whole acquitted itself well. Parisian voters accorded Louis Blanc the single largest number of votes, followed by Victor Hugo, Garibaldi (who had fought in support of France against Prussia), Edgar Quinet (a romantic nationalist), Gambetta, Rochefort, Delescluze, Ledru-Rollin, Milliere, and the Proudhonist Jerome Langlois. Of the “revolutionary socialist slate” put forth by the “Corderie”—namely the International in alliance with the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements (as the guiding body of the vigilance committees was now renamed)—the only candidates elected to the Assembly were those whose names also appeared on the slates of other groups, such as Garibaldi, Gambon, Pyat, Tolain, and Malon. Blanqui, the most important of the socialist nominees, received only 50,000 votes—which was not enough to earn him even the last place in the list of Parisian deputies to the Assembly. Although Thiers received a deservedly low vote in Paris, he headed the list in twenty-six provincial departments of the country.

The National Assembly that convened at Bordeaux on February 13 was not only reactionary but unruly and spiteful. It selected Thiers as chief of state, whereupon the old Orleanist formed a determinedly conservative government, composed of monarchists and, for decorative reasons, moderate republicans. So suffused was the Assembly with venom toward all liberal, let alone radical, deputies, that the moment Garibaldi tried to speak, the delegates rose from their seats and tried to silence him with shouts of “No Italian!” and “No Garibaldi!” When spectators in the chamber’s galleries protested this treatment, diey were rudely cleared from the chamber. Garibaldi, in turn, left with them and returned to Italy in sheer disgust.

Thereafter the Assembly, faced with Bismarck’s February 19 deadline, turned to the issue of a peace treaty. It was hardly necessary for Thiers to warn the deputies that he would resign if the German terms were not met; the Assembly accepted the terms he had negotiated with litde hesitation. These terms required France to give to Bismarck Alsace, Lorraine, Metz, and Strasbourg, as well as five billion gold francs as the full indemnity, and to permit the Germans to conduct a military parade through the French capital, as part of a token occupation of the city. Indeed, until the indemnity was paid in full, the German troops would occupy the northern part of France, including the outskirts of Paris. The treaty, with all these humiliating stipulations, was ratified by a staggering majority vote of 546 to 107.

The Assembly now turned its attention to Paris, with a degree of hostility that it had not shown toward the Prussians. To many rural deputies—or ruraux, as they were called—the capital was a far greater danger than a foreign occupying army. General d’Aurelle de Paladines, a violendy anti- Parisian Bonapartist, was named as commander of the Paris National Guard, and Blanqui and Flourens, among others, were sentenced to death for their roles in the October 31 uprising. Six left-wing journals were proscribed, and the one-and-a-half-franc daily wage for National Guard service was voided, a decision that would make it virtually impossible for working-class members to remain in the militia.

But the most provocative behavior of the Assembly—and, in terms of its own goal of quelling the Parisian workers, the stupidest—was the passage of a series of acts so punitive that they ultimately delivered over the most politically indifferent sectors of the lower middle classes, let alone the workers, to the Left During the siege, the poorest of the poor had been obliged, to keep themselves alive, to deposit goods (often little more than mattresses and the scissors of seamstresses) in the state-run pawnshop, Mont de Piete. To protect these items, a moratorium had been placed on the selling of unredeemed goods. The Assembly, with insensate cruelty, now abolished the moratorium, so that any items that were not instantly redeemed by their owners would be put up for sale. In a second act, the Assembly allowed landlords to immediately claim from their impoverished tenants all the back rent that had come due to them during the terrible months of the siege. And as if these measures were not brutal enough to infuriate the poorer sectors of Paris, the Assembly delivered its coup de grace: during the economically grim months of the war, when few could afford the basic means of life, Parisian shopkeepers, independent artisans, and small merchants had had to depend on promissory notes (echeances) from their customers. The Assembly now decreed that these had to be fully paid, with interest, within four months.

Just as the forty-five-centime tax of 1848 had infuriated the peasantry, the Assembly’s abrogation of the credit moratorium now infuriated the middle classes. Innumerable small entrepreneurs who had built up a crushing backlog of loans were faced with the complete loss of their livelihood. Middle-class Parisians, many of whom had formerly regarded the workers, unemployed and poor as “rabble,” now joined forces with the poor, bringing the middle class back into an alliance with the workers. In fact, the Assembly made it clear that it viewed the very existence of a republic in France as merely “provisional,” implying that the gains of the September 4 uprising might soon be annulled and a monarchy restored. Having done their handiwork, these malicious reactionaries, presided over by Thiers, adjourned, to meet again on March 20 in Versailles.

More than any single factor, the Assembly’s behavior (which frustrated even Thiers) revived the radicals of Paris. The clubs came back to life with renewed vigor, and during February 20 and 23, a general meeting of the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements adopted a resolution to create a Revolutionary Socialist Party. The avowed aim of the new party was

the abolition of the privileges of the bourgeoisie, its elimination as a ruling caste and the advent of the workers to political power. In a word, social equality: no more employers, no more proletariat, no more classes.”[543]

It would difficult not to see the hand of the International in this resolution. A meeting of delegates from the local vigilance committees approved the document, and membership in a vigilance committee now became contingent on acceptance of the resolution.

At the same time, the National Guard began to form its own decidedly leftist federation. After the armistice, some 140,000 people, mainly from the well-to-do classes of Paris, had fled the hardships of the city for the provinces, appreciably reducing the number of bourgeois or “good” National Guards. On February 6, the popular battalions sent delegates to a general meeting that endorsed the most radical of the republican candidates for the Assembly. At a second meeting, on February 16, they laid the basis for a Federation of the Paris National Guard, whose existence was confirmed a week later by 2,000 delegates from the majority of the battalions. This step-by-step process of consolidation was completed on March 15, when delegates to the new Federation of the National Guard established an officially mandated Central Committee, consisting of representatives from battalions in more than half of the arrondissements. Significantly, at the same time many local Guard battalions were forming their own committees to maintain a vigil in all the arrondissements of the capital, ready to alert Paris to any attempt by the Prussians to enter the city—and any attempt to disarm the city.

The Guard Federation was now the most formidable citizen army in France, numbering perhaps 200,000 armed men—or federes, as they preferred to call themselves, following in the traditions of the Great Revolution—with more than 200 cannons at their disposal. In late February and early March, what remained of the official government in Paris had collapsed, and the Guard Federation, with its Central Committee, and its members drawn from various local committees, effectively became the real government in the capital. Indeed, the Federation and its Central Committee now constituted themselves into an independent power—a revolutionary dual power—that, as Thiers and his government properly saw, had the potential to replace the official government. As long as the Central Committee remained a dual power, civil war with the new government, now based in Versailles, was inevitable. The sole question that faced Thiers and the Versaillais (as the government and the National Assembly came to be called) was the specific circumstances that would bring this latent conflict into the open.