Between the high summer of 1870 and the late spring of 1871 France suffered a series of interrelated crises which all but undid the work of rebuilding the country that had taken place over seven decades since 1799. War against Prussia brought about the collapse of the Empire and ushered in the Republic for the third time since 1792. Northern France was occupied by German forces and Paris besieged, leaving the southern half of the country more or less independent, a pattern that would in many ways be reproduced in 1940. The republican attempt to continue the war against German forces failed and an armistice was agreed, but whereas in 1940 the Germans occupied Paris without encountering resistance, in 1871 the population of the beleaguered city refused both to give up the fight against the Germans and to be disarmed by the republican government. The result was the insurrectionary Paris Commune and a civil war that cost at least 20,000 lives. The Commune was at one and the same time a class war, a war between Paris and the provinces, a war against organized religion and a revolution in gender roles that left deep scars in French society which would not be healed until the eve of the Great War.
The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 began as a dynastic and religious war and finished as a national war. Since Prussia’s triumph over Austria at the battle of Königgrätz or Sadowa in 1866 France felt that it had lost its leading rank among European powers, and the sense of humiliation was compounded by Bismarck’s attempt to encircle it by placing a Hohenzollern prince on the throne of Spain. Asking the Legislative Body for war credits on 15 July 1870 Napoleon’s chief minister, Émile Ollivier, said that ministers would go to war ‘with a light heart’ because France’s honour had been impugned and its greatness must be recovered.1 The population of Paris was massively behind the war, coming out on to the streets on the nights of 13, 14 and 15 July, crying ‘Vive la France! Vive la Guerre! À bas la Prusse! À Berlin!’ After the triumph of the plebiscite on the constitution of a Liberal Empire in May, said one report, ‘This war will generate wide enthusiasm and rally the whole of France behind the Napoleonic dynasty; this war will deal the final blow to the republican cause in France.’2
Unfortunately, France did not have the military organization to back up its puffed-up patriotism and grandiose aspirations. Military reform had been debated since 1866 but France did not go down the Prussian route of universal conscription and three years’ service in the regular army followed by extended readiness in the reserve. It preferred a ‘professional’ army of hardened soldiers, ‘the grognards of the First Empire’ praised by generals of the Second Empire like Trochu, selected by lot and overwhelmingly of peasant stock because those with money could always purchase their ‘replacement’ by the poor.3 A reform of 1868 increased military service for the minority who were conscripted from seven years to nine, but for everyone else there was only a fortnight’s training a year, after an initial military service of five months, to qualify them for the National Mobile Guard. In 1870 this Mobile Guard existed little more than on paper, and chaotic mobilization meant that the Rhine army that invaded Germany under the personal command of Napoleon III on 2 August was only 202,000 strong instead of 385,000. Forces under Marshal Bazaine were defeated at Wissembourg on 4 August and at Forbach on 6 August, while on the same day a cavalry charge at Froeschwiller under the orders of General MacMahon was decimated by Prussian gunfire. On 9 August, as news of these defeats reached Paris, a crowd of 10,000–30,000 demonstrated outside the Legislative Body urging deputies to declare the Empire finished. They secured the resignation of Ollivier, his political career now over at the age of forty-five, but the Empire remained intact. Panic spread through the country at large and republicans risked being attacked as fifth-columnists in the pay of Prussia. At a fair in the Dordogne village of Hautefaye the mayor’s son, who shouted ‘Vive la République,’ was set upon by a group of locals and murdered. ‘We killed him to save France,’ one of the killers explained at his trial. ‘Our Emperor will save us in return.’4 In fact, the Rhine army was besieged in Metz, and the army sent under MacMahon to relieve it was defeated at Sedan on 1 September. Napoleon III, a sick man, surrendered to the Prussian King William on 2 September and was escorted to the Belgian border while over 100,000 French soldiers became prisoners of war.5
War destroyed the dynasty, and it also plunged the Catholic Church into crisis. French Protestants were accused by bishops of supporting Protestant Prussia, and Alsatian Protestants in particular of facilitating the Prussian invasion. More than that, the victory of Prussia, condemned by Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot as ‘Europe’s sin’ because of its identification not only with Protestantism but with atheism, was seen in Catholic circles as a divine punishment for France’s apostasy from the Catholic religion, dating from Voltaire and the Revolution and culminating now in the withdrawal from Rome, where they had defended the Papacy since 1849, of French troops in order to fight the Germans.6 The way was now clear for Piedmontese forces to occupy Rome and complete Italian unification, which they did on 20 September 1870. Only a few thousand papal zouaves, among whom were loyal French Catholics such as the division commanded by a descendant of the Vendean leader Charette, defended the Holy City until told by the pope to lay down their arms. These became heroes and martyrs for the Catholic Church, the more so because France now fell into the hands of godless republicans.
On 4 September 1870 crowds invaded the Legislative Body and demanded that it now proclaim the Republic. The speaker, Eugène Schneider, president of the Comité des Forges, was obliged to suspend the session as the deputies elected for Paris, led by Léon Gambetta and Jules Favre, but without the Orleanist Adolphe Thiers, went to the Hôtel de Ville. ‘The Republic was victorious over the invasion of 1792. The Republic is proclaimed,’ they announced, and formed a provisional government which they called the Government of National Defence.7 ‘Let the lion of 1792 draw itself up and bristle,’ declared Victor Hugo, returning from exile in Brussels to Paris. ‘Let us make war day and night, war in the mountains, war on the plains, war in the forests.’8 Gambetta, as minister of the interior, mobilized the Paris National Guard that had been disbanded by Louis-Napoleon after his coup of 1851 and by the end of September had built it up to a force of 134 battalions and 400,000 men. These supported the 60,000 regular troops and 100,000 Mobile Guards who were commanded by General Trochu, now military governor of Paris and president of the Government of National Defence, whom Juliette Adam hoped would be ‘our Washington’.9
Unfortunately, 1792 did not materialize in 1870. Paris was surrounded by German armies after 19 September and cut off from the rest of the country. On 7 October Gambetta left Paris by balloon to take command of a delegation of the Government of National Defence that had been set up at Tours on the Loire, as minister of war as well as of the interior. He took the engineer Charles de Freycinet as his right-hand man to build up a Loire army of 200,000 regular troops for the relief of Paris and appealed to citizens of all French departments on 9 October to launch a ‘national war’ in which national guardsmen, mobile guards and irregular units of francs-tireurs would take part, enrolled into an Auxiliary Army with the same rank and pay as regular soldiers on 14 October.10 Francs-tireurs defended Chateaudun, west of Orléans, attacked by the Germans on 18 October, and provoked German reprisals against surrounding villages. What for the French was the highest manifestation of the nation-in-arms was for the Germans resort to unlawful guerrilla warfare, and it bred a fear of the hidden enemy, civilian rather than soldier, which returned to haunt them during later occupations after 1914 and 1940.11
In fact, Gambetta’s ‘people’s war’ was not generally supported by the Government of National Defence. Having told European governments on 6 September that France would not cede ‘an inch of her soil or a stone of her fortresses’, foreign minister Jules Favre visited Bismarck in James de Rothschild’s pastiche Renaissance château of Ferrières, east of Paris, on 19–20 September, to learn that Prussia would not return Alsace-Lorraine, placed under German administration on 26 August. Between 12 September and 12 October Thiers, at the request of the government, toured the European capitals from London to Vienna and from St Peterburg to Florence, trying to convince the powers to intervene on France’s side, but to no avail, so he came to Tours to urge peace. Neither could Gambetta rely on the commanders of the regular army, who were Napoleon III’s appointees, had no love for the Republic and feared that Gambetta’s patriotic war would lead to social revolution, as in 1793. Bazaine, besieged in Metz, surrendered with 100,000 troops on 28 October, a gesture that was condemned by Gambetta as a ‘sinister epilogue of the military coup of December [1851]’.12 At his court martial in 1873 Bazaine argued that the army was the ‘palladium of society’ and must be kept intact for the maintenance of social order as much as for the defence of the frontier.13 Trochu, far from being a French Washington, refused to make use of the Paris National Guard on several occasions when sorties were made in an attempt to break through the Prussian ring round Paris. He later claimed that a tenth of the National Guard was made up of criminals and professional revolutionaries indulging in ‘armed demagogy’ and attacked Gambetta for being obsessed by ‘the military tradition of 1793’.14
The German occupation of northern France had a traumatic effect on the French people. ‘I do not know how I am not dead, I have suffered so much for the last six weeks,’ Flaubert wrote to George Sand on 11 October. ‘The Prussians are now twelve kilometres from Rouen and there is no order, no command system, no discipline, nothing, nothing.’15 The system of administrative centralization set up in 1800 buckled and the country threatened to fragment into its constituent cities and departments. With Paris surrounded by nearly 250,000 Prussian and other German troops, southern France began to separate from the north. Republican feeling in cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Toulouse had given a majority of ‘no’ votes in the plebiscite of May 1870, and military setbacks now opened a political breach for republicans. In Marseille the town hall was invaded by republican hotheads, led by a young Jewish lawyer, Gaston Crémieux, at the news of the first imperial defeats on 8 August. Municipal elections held on 27–28 August put moderate republicans in charge of the city, but on 5 September, the day after the Republic was declared in Paris, Crémieux and his friends occupied the prefecture and set up a departmental commission, rivalling the city hall. As minister of the interior Gambetta sought to regain control of the country by purging the prefectoral administration and appointing his own men to eighty-five of the eighty-nine prefectures in the ten days to 14 September. His nominee for Marseille was Alphonse Esquiros, a Montagnard deputy of 1849 who had gone into exile after the coup of 1851. Unfortunately for Gambetta, Esquiros went native and on 18 September set up a Ligue du Midi which federated thirteen departments in the south-east of France, from Marseille to Lyon and from Nice to Montpellier. Its declared ambition was to raise forces to save the One and Indivisible Republic, but this was also the rhetoric of the federalist movement of 1793 which defended the interests of the cities and departments against Paris. Gambetta was forced to dismiss Esquiros and send a more reliable Montagnard of 1849, Alphonse Gent, to wrest control of the Marseille prefecture from Crémieux’s commission on 2 November and preside over new elections which returned Bory to office. Lyon constituted another challenge for Gambetta. It declared the Republic on 4 September ahead of Paris and established a committee of public safety in the town hall which introduced itself to Gambetta’s prefect, Challemel-Lacour, as ‘the government of Lyon’. Municipal elections on 15 September returned a combination of moderate republicans and members of the committee of public safety to the city council, under the sensible hand of Louis Hénon, a professor at the Medical School and one of the five republicans elected in 1857 to take the oath to the Empire. On 28 September the town hall was again invaded, this time by a band led by the Russian anarchist Bakunin and Albert Richard, leader of the Lyon silkweavers and local architect of the International Workers’ Association founded in 1866. They proclaimed the abolition of the state and called for a federation of communes across the country to set up ‘committees for saving France’, taxing the rich and raising volunteers, but Richard panicked and Bakunin and his crew were soon ejected by the Lyon National Guard. Cities such as Lyon and Marseille wanted not social revolution or the abolition of the state but a decentralizing republic that would merely allow them to enjoy municipal autonomy.
The most serious problem for the Government of National Defence, nevertheless, was Paris itself. While Gambetta ruled from Tours, the rest of the government, including Jules Ferry, was still based at the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Yet almost immediately after 4 September the revolutionary currents which had been dammed by the Empire, wholly until 1868, then partially, broke free. The bookbinder Eugène Varlin had organized a Paris Chamber of Workers’ Unions in December 1869, which joined the Paris federation of the International. These workers followed the teaching not of Marx, who believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalization of industry, but of Proudhon, who had died in 1865, but believed in a stateless society of trade unions, co-operatives and communes freely associating. Moreover, although the Paris International had been devoted to international socialism before the fall of the Empire, on 4–5 September, much to the dismay of Marx, it sent an address to the German people quoting article 120 of the constitution of 1793, ‘the French people… does not make peace with an enemy occupying its territory,’ and calling on them to ‘recross the Rhine!’16 Based at the place de la Corderie du Temple, the Paris International was behind the setting up of vigilance committees in the twenty arrondissements, each of which maintained surveillance of their own municipal council and mayor, in order to ensure that they remained radical and patriotic. Varlin was a key figure in the vigilance committee of the 6th arrondissement, dyeworker Benoît Malon in that of the 17th. That of the 18th arrondissement, Montmartre, was the power-base of the red schoolteacher Louise Michel, who made it her business to extract food from hoarders during the siege and distribute it to the poor.17 In December the twenty vigilance committees elected a central committee, the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, which also sat at the Corderie and maintained a ‘dual power’ opposite the Government of National Defence, intending to fight any sign of ‘bourgeois reaction’.18
Vying with the Internationalists for radical and patriotic influence were the professional revolutionary Auguste Blanqui and his followers. Blanqui launched La Patrie en Danger on 7 September 1870, or 20 fructidor Year 78 according to the revolutionary calendar it resurrected. It was bitterly critical of the failure of the Government of National Defence, Gambetta as well as Trochu, to pursue the war and contain reaction. ‘’92 saved the Revolution and founded the Republic, but the Hôtel de Ville is destroying them,’ he declared on 30 October/9 brumaire Year 79.19 The formation of a revolutionary, all-Paris Commune, on the model of that set up on 10 August 1792, when the monarchy was overthrown, was a frequent demand in clubs which mushroomed in halls and cafés all over the capital. ‘If you had the Commune,’ said an orator at the Club Reine-Blanche, Montmartre, on 4 November, ‘you could act like revolutionaries. You could send emissaries to stir up the shit in the departments.’20 The battalions of the National Guard, which elected their own officers, were also forums of revolutionary debate, although they remained fairly autonomous until the formation of a republican federation of battalions of the National Guard at the end of February, with a central committee that was to be the guiding force behind the insurrection of 10 March 1871.
Paris in the autumn of 1870 was defined as much by the siege as by the rising revolutionary temperature. Madeleine Brès, the first French woman to enrol in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, was taken on as an intern at the Hôpital de la Pitié, although only for the duration of the siege. Juliette Adam rediscovered her expertise as a doctor’s daughter and organized a hospital for wounded soldiers in the Music Conservatory in the 9th arrondissement. ‘All day I am with the wounded who moan, are dressed, amputated, whose tortures afflict me,’ she wrote, although she was still in a position to maintain something of a salon in the evening, not least because her husband Edmond was prefect of police.21 Despite the hardships Paris society still existed to a limited extent. Jules de Goncourt died in 1870 but his brother Edmond hosted Tuesday literary dinners at Brebant’s restaurant, attended by Théophile Gautier, Ernest Renan, the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, Auguste Nefftzer, editor of Le Temps, and later Louis Blanc, with his ‘priest’s physique and his Levite’s frock coat… secretly bitter that his name, so popular in ’48, has so little weight with the masses’.22 At the other end of the spectrum, reported the writer Francisque Sarcey, ‘Victor Hugo is finally having the day he has awaited for eighteen years,’ his attack on the Second Empire, Les Châtiments, being read to 3,000 spectators at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, before transferring to the Comédie Française. The Popular Sunday concerts of Pasdeloup began their autumn season on 23 October and the Folies Bergère was still frequented by Parisians who wanted to ‘smoke a cigar and have a good joke, which is the nature of every boulevardier’.23
The wit and resourcefulness of Parisians could not disguise the fact that the situation was becoming increasingly desperate. Frustration with the Government of National Defence, which seemed to prefer surrender to using the energy of the armed people to lift the siege of Paris, came to a head with news of the capitulation of Marshal Bazaine at Metz on 28 September and the decision of General Trochu to abandon Le Bourget outside Paris on 30 October. On 31 October the Hôtel de Ville was invaded by revolutionaries led by Blanqui and Flourens, who commanded the Montmartre and Belleville (20th) National Guard, taking the Government of National Defence hostage. Leaping on to a table, Flourens proclaimed the formation of a committee of public safety that was to include Blanqui, Delescluze and Victor Hugo, to oversee the election of a Commune. In the event, the government was liberated by loyal National Guards led by Jules Ferry and Edmond Adam. A deal was reached with the insurgents under which there would be no arrests, but a referendum would take place testing support for the Government of National Defence. In addition elections would be held, not for a Commune, but for new municipalities in the twenty arrondissements. This appeal to the electorate marginalized the revolutionaries. The Government of National Defence was acclaimed by 90 per cent of the vote on 3 November, and municipal elections on 5/8 November returned radical mayors to only two town halls in north-east Paris, Delescluze to the 19th and the Blanquist woodworker Gabriel Ranvier to the 20th. To offset them Jules Ferry was appointed mayor of Paris.
The survival of the Government of National Defence did nothing to relieve the military situation. The Army of the Loire, sent to liberate Paris, captured Orléans but was driven out again on 4–5 December. The Army of the North took Saint-Quentin on 18 January, but was forced out the next day. The government retreated to Bordeaux as the so-called artists’ battalion of the National Guard built a huge snow statue entitled Resistance above the city defences of the 19th arrondissement.24 Conditions in Paris, however, were making resistance difficult. An attempted breakout to Champigny on 30 November ended in disaster two days later. Food prices rose astronomically: a chicken worth 3 francs before the siege was sold for 15 francs, ham went up from 2 francs 50 to 16 francs a kilo. Eggs were a franc each when a worker’s wage was 4 francs a day if he was in work, but only 1 franc 50 if he was a national guardsman.25 The poor were reduced to eating dogs and cats, the bourgeoisie to eating wildlife and zoo animals. Juliette Adam served camel’s hump on 23 December and a portion of the elephant Castor, partner of another called Pollux, on New Year’s Day 1871. On 14 January Edmond de Goncourt ate a blackbird he had shot in his garden. Trees in the Bois de Boulogne were stripped and wooden fences knocked down for firewood.26 On 27 December the Prussians opened up an artillery bombardment, clearing the Avron plateau, and began a bombardment of Paris itself on 5 January. ‘The barbarians,’ wrote Juliette Adam, ‘more than three thousand bombs fell around the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg… One woman returning home found her two children in shreds.’27 A final breakout attempt to the west of Paris on 19 January came to grief at Buzenval. This triggered another attack on the Hôtel de Ville on 22 January, orchestrated by the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, which ended with the opposing sides for the first time shooting at each other. Trochu was finally dismissed as governor of Paris but this was not to steel Parisian defences. On 26 January Jules Favre went to discuss an armistice with Bismarck, who was now chancellor of the German Empire that had been proclaimed in the château of Versailles on 18 January.
The armistice agreed on 28 January might have restored France to peace and order. France was to pay Germany an indemnity of 5,000 million francs for starting the war, to disarm its regular army and to forfeit Alsace and Lorraine. German forces still encircled Paris, although people and supplies could now cross the lines. Elections to a National Assembly, to meet in Bordeaux, were held forthwith in order to endorse the armistice. The elections of 8 February 1871 restored the country as a political unit and the conservative countryside and small towns swamped the radicalism of Paris and the large cities. Of 768 deputies, 400 were royalists, including two sons of Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Aumale and the Prince de Joinville. This did not mean that a restoration of the monarchy was imminent: the vote was for peace and order against war and disorder. The Legitimist Comte de Falloux, now re-elected, had no wish for a monarchy restored by a foreign power, as in 1814 and 1815, and was prepared to wait for the Republic to destroy itself.28 In Paris the International put up forty-three candidates for the forty-three seats on offer but failed to have any of them elected. Those elected for Paris included Gambetta, Henri Rochefort, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc and Edmond Adam; Juliette was delighted to leave Paris for Bordeaux, where the Assembly met on 11 February. The Assembly elected Adolphe Thiers head of the executive power, inevitably, some said, as a longtime opponent of the Empire but also of the war, having warned Ollivier against it on 15 July 1870. Thiers, an Orleanist by nature, added the words ‘of the Republic’ to his title: as in 1850 he thought the Republic was the regime that divided French people least, permitting the reconstitution of a ‘party of order’ of royalists and moderate republicans, and isolating the revolutionaries.
To ensure that the armistice was indeed ratified, German troops marched into Paris on 1 March, paraded in the Bois de Boulogne and were reviewed by the German emperor on the Champs-Élysées; when terms were duly ratified, they withdrew on 3 March. In protest against the surrender of their provinces the deputies of Alsace-Lorraine together with Gambetta, Rochefort and Victor Hugo walked out of the Assembly, but this was not the moment for thoughts of revanche. The obstacle to the armistice was not the Assembly but Paris. The revolutionary movement had fought for months against what Blanqui called ‘the alliance of reaction with Bismarck’ and was not prepared to stop now.29 It had a particular hatred of Thiers, the quintessential bourgeois held responsible for the massacre in the rue Transnonain in 1834 and declared enemy of the ‘vile multitude’, the ‘dressing-gowned Cavaignac of the Third Republic’ (after the general who put down the insurrection of June 1848), in the opinion of journalist Jules Vallès.30
Thiers, however, could not regain control of Paris, where 300,000 armed national guardsmen were still at large. On 18 March 20,000 regular troops were sent into the city to seize artillery and to disarm the National Guard. A confrontation between the government and the people of Paris threatened, as in the June Days of 1848, but this time the people were armed and organized, and also keen to exact vengeance. General Clément Thomas, despatched to Montmartre to remove cannon, was remembered as ‘having behaved with incredible ferocity towards the defeated insurgents’ in June 1848, and was murdered along with another general, Lecomte, by an angry crowd.31 Georges Clemenceau, mayor of Montmartre since November 1870, tried to intervene, but was too late. This was the signal for a general insurrection, orchestrated by the Central Committee of the National Guard with the support of the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements. Jules Ferry tried to hold on to the Hôtel de Ville, but there was no question of negotiation, as on 31 October. His October ‘fix’ was now seen to be a trick, with Blanqui and Flourens, promised amnesty, now under sentence of death, and during the siege he had gained a reputation as ‘famine Ferry’. Rejected by the Paris electorate on 8 February, he was instead elected deputy of his native Vosges and represented the desire of the provinces to smother the capital. Ferry was forced to abandon the Hôtel de Ville at 10 p.m. on 18 March and tried briefly to rally the mayors of the bourgeois arrondissements in the town hall of the 1st arrondissement. However crowds outside were crying ‘Mort à Ferry!’ and he escaped through the church of Saint-Germain L’Auxerrois to reach Versailles, where the government and Assembly were now located, the next day.
The insurrection of 18 March 1871 was revenge for June 1848. It was also a re-run of 10 August 1792, when the monarchy was toppled and an insurrectionary Commune was formed in Paris which for nearly two years dictated the pace of revolution to the Convention parliament elected the following September. The revival of their own city government, instead of the dictatorship of the prefect of the Seine and the prefect of police, ending the division of power between what Le Grand Colère du Père Duchesne called ‘a heap of mayor-of-arrondissement buggers’, was what the people of Paris demanded.32 There was one attempt at negotiation, on 19 March. Clemenceau and some of the twenty mayors obtained the authority of the Central Committee of the National Guard, now sitting in the Hôtel de Ville, to request permission from the National Assembly, now sitting in Versailles, to elect a unitary city government, the Commune. This was refused by Versailles, so the central committee unilaterally called elections to the Commune on 22 March. Much of the bourgeois population had left Paris after the siege and many others did not vote: the abstention rate was 52 per cent, higher in the richer arrondissements. The mayors put together a moderate list but it took only fifteen out of ninety-two seats and these members soon resigned in the face of the overwhelming presence of revolutionaries. Seventeen of those elected, including Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon, Édouard Vaillant and Charles Beslay, were members of the Paris section of the International, professing federalist and Proudhonian ideas, and most of these had come up through the vigilance committees. In their general orbit were the like of the journalist Vallès and the painter Courbet. About thirty were Jacobins, such as Gustave Flourens and Charles Delescluze, a veteran of 1848 and in many ways the Robespierre of the Commune. A dozen were Blanquists (although Blanqui himself had been arrested just before the insurrection), including Émile Eudes, Théophile Ferré, Raoul Rigault and Gustave Tridon, historian of the Hébertistes who had dominated the Commune of 1792–4.
Marx called the Commune a proletarian government, the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Others have pointed out that many members of the Commune were not authentically working class but middle-class déclassés such as Vaillant, a notary’s son who had studied at Heidelberg university, or Flourens, a young professor at the Collège de France with a private income of 30,000 francs. But the members of the Commune had made their reputation in the direct democracy of the sections and unions of the International, in the radical clubs and press, in the municipal vigilance committees and battalions of the National Guard, so that they were in the truest sense representatives of the people. Many measures were taken by the Commune of a socialist nature: night-work in bakeries was abolished, valuable objects were returned from pawnshops and abandoned workshops were handed over to workers’ co-operatives. Some hotheads complained that the deserted apartments of the rich had not been requisitioned for slum-dwellers, although Thiers’ house was pulled down on 11 May, and Beslay stood guard over the vaults of the Banque de France, to ensure that the National Guard would be paid. It was nevertheless clear to Edmond de Goncourt, one of the few bourgeois who remained in the city, that ‘what is happening is very simply the conquest of France by the workers and the enslavement under their despotism of the nobles, the middle class and the peasants’.33
The Paris Commune did its best to trigger other communes across the country. Unlike in 1793, it promised in its address to the French people on 19 April that it would not seek to impose a red dictatorship on France. It called for the autonomy and self-government of all communes, towns and villages, free of the grip and interference of the central administration, and for them to show solidarity with the Paris Commune in its struggle against the militarism, clericalism, bureaucracy and exploitation incarnated by Versailles. Communes were proclaimed in sympathy on 23 March at Lyon and Marseille, on the 24th in the industrial towns of Le Creusot and Saint-Étienne and at Narbonne, with Toulouse following on the 25th, but attempts to declare communes at Limoges and Bordeaux failed. While some towns and cities wished to regain their municipal liberties, the inauguration of the Republic was felt to be enough to guarantee that autonomy. In Lyon, mayor Hénon and his deputy Désiré Barodet were able to convince extremists that to all intents and purposes Lyon already had a commune, and a rising in the working-class suburb of La Guillotière on 30 April was easily put down. In Marseille power was again seized at the prefecture by Gaston Crémieux, and three representatives of the Paris Commune arrived on 28 March, but Crémieux was opposed by Bory’s municipality which was able to rely on the National Guard and regular forces under General Espivant to restore order on 3 April. Thiers was determined to make an example of Crémieux, who was tried and shot on 30 November.
‘Thank God the civil war has begun,’ wrote Edmond de Goncourt on 2 April, as the army directed from Versailles began to bombard Paris.34 A desperate attempt to reach a compromise between the Paris Commune and Versailles was made on 29 April by a body of freemasons, who went to parley with a freemason general of the Versailles army, Leclerc, on the bridge at Courbevoie, but to no avail. Within Paris the Commune divided over whether to set up a committee of public safety with supreme authority. The Jacobins and Blanquists were in favour and won the vote on 1 May, the anti-Jacobin Internationalists were against, and lost. The Internationalist minority resigned from the Commune on 15 May, although not from the fight. Delescluze, appointed war delegate on 10 May, declared that ‘if your breasts are exposed to bullets and shells of the Versaillais it is for the prize that you have promised yourselves, the liberation of France and the world, the safety of your home and the lives of your wives and children. Long live the universal Republic! Long live the Commune!’35
The Versailles forces closed in, taking the outlying forts of Issy on 8 May and Vanves on the 14th. The finalization of the peace treaty, following on from the armistice, by Jules Favre at Frankfurt on 10 May enabled French prisoners of war to be released and returned to reinforce the Versailles army, which numbered 55,000 in April but 120,000 towards the end of May. Thiers, scoffed Marx, ‘hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz by special permission of Bismarck’.36 These were pumped up with extra pay, double drink rations and propaganda to the effect that the rebels were the criminals, pimps, spies and alcoholics of the classes dangereuses in order to steel them for the work of repression.37
Versailles forces broke into Paris proper through the Porte de Saint-Cloud on Sunday 21 May, and the week that followed became known as the Semaine Sanglante. ‘The hour of revolutionary war has struck,’ announced Delescluze. ‘To arms, citizens, to arms!’38 Some lukewarm revolutionaries like Henri Rochefort slipped away before things became too hot, while women organized in the Union des Femmes and the Légion des Fédérées of the 12th arrondissement took up arms to replace them, defending their own barricade on place Blanche on 23 May.39 The participation of women in the defence of Paris was later caricatured as the use of petrol-bombs to set fire to the city, while they were attacked as ‘unworthy creatures who have taken it upon themselves to become an opprobrium to their sex’.40 Hostages were taken and executed on both sides. The Communards arrested the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Darboy, in order to barter him for Blanqui, held by the Versaillais under sentence of death. When no exchange was forthcoming, they shot him together with a batch of Dominican monks. The Church did not forgive the Communards for this act, but was also keen to make religious capital out of it. ‘God is victorious,’ wrote Veuillot, who himself remained in Paris editing L’Univers until 12 May. ‘He has taken martyrs, we will have miracles, we are saved!’41
The Commune was forced to abandon the Hôtel de Ville on 24 May and took refuge in the town hall of the 11th arrondissement. Delescluze donned his scarf of office and climbed on to the barricade at the place du Château d’Eau to meet a hail of bullets. Last stands were made on the Buttes Chaumont and in the Père Lachaise cemetery on 27 May, where captured fighters were machine-gunned and rolled into an open ditch. Belleville gave out on 28 May and Varlin was captured and shot in rue des Rosiers. Perhaps 10,000 Parisians died in the fighting and another 10,000, seized with weapons in their hands, were taken to barracks in various parts of the city and summarily executed en masse. Edmond de Goncourt observed columns being taken into the Lobau barracks near the Hôtel de Ville.
Almost at that instant there is an explosion like a violent sound enclosed behind doors and walls, a fusillade having something of the mechanical regularity of a machine-gun. There is a first, a second, third, fourth, a fifth murderous rrarra – then a long interval – and then a sixth, and still two more volleys, one after the other.42
Less than two weeks later, on 10 June, Goncourt had lunch with Gustave Flaubert, who had come up to Paris to do more work on his Temptation of St Anthony. Flaubert’s house at Croisset had been occupied by the Prussians in the autumn, but they had done no damage, and left his study untouched. He wrote to George Sand:
The smell of bodies disgusts me less than the miasmas of egoism breathed from every mouth. The sight of ruins is nothing compared to the immense Parisian stupidity. One half of the population wants to strangle the other, and the other has the same desire. You can read it in the eyes of passers-by.43
Paris was calm, but France was in a state of dislocation and shock. It had been defeated and humiliated, toppled from its great-power status, no longer certain of the superiority of its civilization. Revolutionary violence had broken out again, stirring up painful memories of 1793 and June 1848, and that in a modern democracy where universal suffrage was supposed to replace violent by peaceful change. The national territory had broken up: the government had been driven out of Paris, Alsace and Lorraine were lost, provincial cities and departments had attempted to reclaim their independence. A society that preached careers open to talent and held together by ambition had fallen victim to class war. The long march of rechris-tianization undertaken since the Concordat in 1802 faltered as priests, including another archbishop of Paris, were murdered and churches desecrated. Women, who were supposed to impart religious teaching from one generation to another, were now throwing petrol-bombs into Paris apartments. Perhaps only literature, Goncourt and Flaubert might have reflected as they lunched on 10 June, had survived the descent into anarchy, but their literature was of no interest to the mass public that was now emerging. Much work was required if France was to regain political stability, national consensus and great-power status.