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  Most Parisians believed that only a republic could save France. Members of the Government of National Defence, the title of which suggested political neutrality, feared another Parisian insurrection and were determined to elbow aside radical republicans and socialists. A Bonapartist wrote in his diary that ‘the internal dangers were dreaded as much as the Prussians’.17 The continued presence of Trochu as the interim president of the government was intended to reassure conservatives and moderates; he made clear his commitment to ‘God, Family and Property’. In the meantime, Paris took on a festive air, its people confident that republican unity, unlike the regime of Napoleon III and Eugénie, would ultimately defeat the Prussians.

  Empress Eugénie fled Paris, leaving behind the disorder of empty jewel boxes tossed on the floor in haste, as well as an unfinished, elegantly prepared meal which ‘revolutionaries’ finished upon storming into the Tuileries.18 Fearing both Prussian troops and a republic, many other wealthy residents also took the easy way out, leaving the more prosperous western arrondissements for the safety of country houses. As they did, workmen replaced Paris signs announcing ‘rue du 10 décembre’, the date Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had been elected president in 1848, with ‘rue du 4 septembre’, still the name today. Hammers pounded away the ‘N’ for Napoleon on bridges and stone monuments.

  The Left mobilised quickly. Raoul Rigault, a militant Blanquist who had been hiding in Versailles from the police, arrived in Paris on 5 September, the day after the proclamation of the Republic. That day, members of ‘Vigilance Committees’ that radical republicans had created in each arrondissement (and which constituted a Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements, organised by members of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association, which had been founded in London in 1864) demanded elections for a municipal government. Ten days later, a red poster (affiche rouge) repeated this demand. Rigault and other Blanquists began feverishly planning an insurrection. They rushed to Mazas prison near the Gare de Lyon, freeing Eudes and several other political prisoners. Rigault then went to the Prefecture of Police and installed himself in the office of the head of security. Rigault combed through documents in the police archives to uncover the names of those who had worked as imperial police spies, in the hope of later punishing them. Given his obsession with the police, Rigault was the perfect person for the job. Blanqui described his ardent disciple as having ‘a vocation … He was born to be Prefect of Police.’19

  France was a divided, fledgling Republic. Many on the left believed that the circumstances might provide an opportunity to establish a radical, progressive Republic. Reconstituted Parisian political clubs joined the chorus. Plebeian Paris led the way. On 6 September, Jules Vallès, a radical journalist, organised a club in Belleville. It met in the Salle Favié, one of the bastions of the public meeting movement before the war. In Montmartre in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, André Léo (Victoire Léodile Béra, a writer who took the names of her twin sons) and Nathalie Le Mel (a bookbinder, a frequent orator in the public meeting movement, and one of the founders of a consumers’ cooperative in Montmartre) were among militant women devoted to the cause of defending Paris, working-class families, and the Republic. There the mairie (the town hall of each arrondissement) provided some social services in response to letters written by working-class women asking for assistance. These letters reflected the women’s suffering as they tried to make do for themselves and their families with the help of friends and neighbours.20 In the Thirteenth Arrondissement, the Club Démocratique Socialiste announced it would study ‘all of the social and political problems related to the emancipation of work and of workers’, while remaining vigilant against any attempt to restore monarchy. The Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements held its first meeting on 11 September. It gradually evolved into the equivalent of a party of the Left, committed to the Republic and to continuing the war. Blanquists were active in the Central Committee, meeting in clubs in Montmartre and in the Sixth Arrondissement.21

  It was also in September that ‘Commune’ began to be heard in the context of the ‘revolutionary nationalism’ that followed the outbreak of the war. The historical precedent was the ‘revolutionary Commune’ that took power in August 1792, when France had been besieged by foreign states. Now demands for popular sovereignty and Parisian self-government emerged as part of the definition of what a desired ‘Commune’ was meant to be, even as Prussian troops threatened the capital. For people on the political left, the Commune’s role would be expanded to include major social reforms. Thus ‘Commune’ would take on different meanings to different people, depending on their allegiances.22

  On 15 September, the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements signed a wall poster calling for the arming of all Parisians and ‘popular control’ over defence, food supply and lodgings. This was part of an explosion of demands for municipal autonomy in the early days of the Republic, a desire that had emerged in the context of heavy-handed imperial centralisation under Napoleon III. Calls for municipal autonomy were even louder given the threat of a Prussian invasion. In the tradition of the French Revolution, and most recently in the public meeting movement that had begun in 1868, republicans believed that popular organisation alone would permit the defence of Paris against enemy troops surrounding the city. Political clubs and the vigilance committees therefore put forth calls for an ‘all-out war’ (guerre à l’outrance) in defence of Paris. To make things a little easier for ordinary Parisians readying for war, the Government of National Defence on 30 September declared a moratorium on the payment of rents and instructed the Municipal Pawnshop (Mont-de-Piété) to return pawned items at no cost if they were worth less than 15 francs.23

  The armies of Prussia and its allies laid siege to Paris from 19 September, while other enemy forces moved away from the city towards the Loire River. On 10 October, a Prussian force of 28,000 men attacked a position held by the reconstituted French Army of the Loire, its numbers swollen by a flood of volunteers. The Prussian troops carried the day and captured Orléans. The French army withdrew, grew in strength to about 70,000 men, and retook that city. However, the arrival of more Prussian troops from north-eastern France led to more French defeats in the Loire region and at Le Mans on 11–12 January 1871.24

  The Prussians had allowed Napoleon III to depart for exile in Great Britain, the third French head of state (following King Charles X after the Revolution of 1830 and King Louis-Philippe after that of 1848) to be sent packing across the English Channel.

  With Prussian forces besieging Paris, the arrondissement ‘vigilance committees’ selected ‘delegates’ to an all-Parisian Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by left-wing republicans and socialists. The Government of National Defence named new mayors for each arrondissement. The republican Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements also demanded participation in decisions concerning the defence of Paris. National guard units began to tighten their organisation and achieved imposing authority in the neighbourhoods from which they had been recruited.

  One Parisian, Félix Belly, opened up an office hoping to attract enough women – 30,000 – to fill ten battalions, each of eight companies. These all-female defence units would be attired in black trousers and blouses and hats with orange bands and would promise not to drink or smoke. Belly’s egalitarian units never materialised, however. He briefly needed protection from neighbours who complained about the noise, and the plan quickly evaporated when Trochu banned the new units.25

  The young republican Sutter-Laumann, conscripted into the army, described the strange sense of security that existed in Paris during the siege. The army assumed that the exterior forts could keep the Prussian troops at bay, but they would soon be proven wrong. Sutter-Laumann’s baptism of fire was in a sortie on the route de Neuilly-sur-Marne, followed by several other episodes of fighting. The Parisian population had began to manifest ‘considerable irritation’, Sutter-Laumann noticed, as Prussian troops easily fended off the sorties.26
/>   In early October, Gambetta, the minister of the interior, courageously flew over the Prussian lines in a balloon, and raised a sizable army that continued the fight against the enemy. And then incredible news arrived from Lorraine. On 27 October, Bazaine inexplicably surrendered his army of 155,000 soldiers at Metz. This virtually ended any hope of relieving the besieged Parisians and defeating the Prussians and their allies. Rumours of treason abounded, particularly when it became known that the French commander had been secretly negotiating with his Prussian counterparts.

  Parisians were quick to react. On 31 October, Sutter-Laumann heard shouts of ‘Long live the Commune!’ in faubourg Saint-Denis, as Paris, hungry and freezing, held out. Angry workers charged down the hill from Belleville and other plebeian quartiers into central Paris and the Hôtel de Ville, goaded by members of radical clubs and vigilance committees who called for insurrection. Blanquists stormed into the Hôtel de Ville. Gustave Lefrançais, a national guard officer, jumped on a table and proclaimed the end of the Government of National Defence, just two months after it had been proclaimed. The militants announced a new government, headed by old names from the Revolution of 1848: Félix Pyat and Charles Delescluze, as well as the inveterate revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. Gustave Flourens arrived with some national guardsmen and pushed Lefrançais off centre stage, adding new members to the government. Flourens and Lefrançais hated each other and the latter simply went home. Rigault had arrived as well, and Blanqui ordered him to take men to the Prefecture of Police to secure it.

  But soon the workers returned to their quartiers in north and north-eastern Paris, many thinking that they had succeeded in overthrowing the provisional government, and only Flourens’s group of guardsmen remained at the Hôtel de Ville. Trochu and Jules Ferry, another member of the provisional government, took advantage of the crowd’s departure and the next day regained control of the municipal building. Blanqui barely escaped a manhunt organised by the police of the re-established Government of National Defence.27

  Following the attempted insurrection on 31 October, militants organised even more political clubs, driven as much by political desires as by despair during the ongoing siege. Hunger gnawed, as soaring food prices defied the best efforts of arrondissement officials to deal with the situation by handing out ration cards and distributing what food could be found. Club speakers denounced hoarders and made more heated demands for a ‘revolutionary Commune’. A republican Central Committee was formed, led by prominent militants who had spoken in public meetings during the last two years of the empire. The results of a plebiscite on 3 November and municipal elections two days later may have reflected the ascendancy of moderate voices, but they did nothing to still the militancy of the left, increasingly based in working-class quartiers. Some arrondissement mayors encouraged the creation of producers’ cooperatives and vigilance committees that played a role in the allocation of food and weapons. Blanquists and other revolutionaries began to form their own clubs, firming up the relationship between militant intellectuals such as Rigault and Parisian workers.28

  At the beginning of the siege, Parisian families had ridden the train around Paris’s walled circumference and picnicked near the ramparts, before they realised that Prussian shells could actually kill them. The ‘Scientific Committee’ of the Government of National Defence received many suggestions beginning early in the siege about how Parisians might extricate themselves from the siege. Ideas submitted were laughable and included letting loose ‘all the more ferocious beasts from the zoo – so that the enemy would be poisoned, asphyxiated, or devoured’. Another proposed the construction of a ‘musical mitrailleuse’ that would lure unsuspecting Prussian soldiers by playing Wagner and Schubert, and then mow them down; another arming the thousands of prostitutes of Paris with ‘prussic fingers’ – needles filled with poison that would be injected into the Prussians at a crucial moment during a close encounter.29

  But reality set in after Bazaine’s surrender, as the siege continued and the weather worsened. The only mail going in or out of Paris was transported by sixty-five balloon flights that flew over enemy lines. Pigeons carried messages beyond the Prussian lines. By late October, all became deadly serious, as the weather became unbearably cold, the Seine froze, and food supplies dwindled. A military attempt to break out of Paris – a ‘Grand Sortie’ – and inflict damage on enemy forces failed miserably on 31 October, the same day of the failed political insurrection. The French lost more than 5,000 troops, twice that of their German adversaries.

  Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal on 8 December: ‘People are talking only of what they eat, what they can eat, and what there is to eat … Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon.’ Signs advertising ‘canine and feline butchers’ began to appear. Pet-owners had to guard their dogs instead of the reverse. Mice and even rats began to be eaten, an American claiming that the latter tasted rather like a bird. Slices of zoo animals, such as bear, deer, antelopes, and giraffes, ended up on Parisian plates. The very elderly and very young suffered most, with small coffins being carried through the streets an increasingly common sight.30

  The long siege had further isolated Paris – politically as well as economically – from the provinces, particularly the west of France. In Paris the conservative L’Opinion nationale on 1 January regretted that some quartiers had fallen into the hands of ‘Communeux’, a bourgeois fear that ‘evoked the Terror’ of the French Revolution. For conservatives who remained in Paris, any mention of a ‘Commune’ began to take on a terrifying aspect.31

  On the morning of 6 January, Parisians awoke to see another bright red poster plastered on the buildings that read, ‘Make way for the Paris Commune!’ Rigault was among the signatories of this affiche rouge. The Club Favié of Belleville approved the resolution: ‘The Commune is the right of the people … it is the levée en masse and the punishment of traitors. The Commune, finally … is the Commune.’ In club meetings the term ‘Commune’ was still being heard in the sense of municipal rights, but now with a more progressive turn, with Paris and its teeming working-class neighbourhoods imagined as the centre of a democratic and social republic. The vigilance committee of the Eighteenth Arrondissement proclaimed that ‘the quartiers are the fundamental base of the democratic Republic’.32

  Another military defeat heightened calls for a Commune. On 18 January, a force of 100,000 troops commanded by Trochu attempted to break out of Paris and defeat Prussian forces. The result was a catastrophe, with the loss of more than 4,000 men killed or wounded. This led to a frenzied demonstration that verged on insurrection on 22 January. Crowds shouted against Trochu. Blanquists called for the proclamation of a Commune. Blanqui himself sat in a café near the Hôtel de Ville, and from the windows of the latter, shots ordered by the moderate republican Gustave Chaudey, a friend of Rigault, greeted the demonstration. The gunfire left five dead on the pavement below, including another of Rigault’s friends, Théophile Sapia, his blood drenching Rigault. The crowd quickly dispersed, but this latest mobilisation of the Left and the violence that followed only increased the gap between the Left and conservatives in the Government of National Defence.33

  On 28 January, the Government of National Defence agreed to an armistice with the Prussians and their allies that would finally end the siege. Jules Favre signed the surrender two days later, meeting Bismarck in Versailles. Paris had held on for four months, but Prussian cannons had destroyed parts of the city and Parisians had suffered enormously. Unsurprisingly, most Parisians remained against any concessions to the Prussians, although Bismarck now allowed convoys of food to enter the capital. The terms of the armistice were harsh and outraged Parisians, among many other French people. France would owe an enormous indemnity to the new German empire, which was proclaimed, to the great humiliation of France, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Château de Versailles. Even worse, by the Treaty of Versailles signed by Thiers and Bismarck on 26 February – later formalised by the Treaty of Frankfurt on 6 May – France wou
ld lose the relatively prosperous region of Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany.34 Léon Gambetta resigned in disgust from what was left of the Government of National Defence on 1 March. Prussian forces remained camped around Paris, with ready access to the city.

  After the armistice, the French Government of National Defence, which had utterly failed in its mission of defending France, immediately called for elections for a new National Assembly which would create a new regime. Despite protests from republicans that such a short time between military capitulation and elections would favour monarchists, the elections were scheduled for early February. Republicans and socialists organised a Central Committee of the National Guard to defend the Republic, now clearly threatened by the possibility that monarchists would dominate the new National Assembly.35 They appeared ready to take matters into their own hands.

  The national elections on 8 February, the results of which were somewhat of an aberration because of the exceptional circumstances and lack of preparation, returned overwhelmingly conservative, monarchist deputies to the National Assembly, which was to meet not in Paris but in Bordeaux. In sharp contrast, thirty-six of forty-three deputies elected from Paris were republicans, most who believed that France, led by Paris, should keep fighting the Prussians. Yet in Paris revolutionary candidates won only 50,000 of 329,000 votes (15.2 per cent) and accounted for only seven of the forty-three men elected. Le Rappel on 8 February commented: ‘It is no longer an army you are facing … it is no longer Germany … It is more. It is monarchy, it is despotism.’36 And on cue, on 17 February 1871, the National Assembly meeting in Bordeaux voted Adolphe Thiers executive powers.