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  On 19 March, Émile Duval warned the Central Committee that resistance against what had transpired was afoot, particularly in the conservative First and Second Arrondissements. He demanded that steps be taken to prevent conservative National Guard units from reaching Versailles. Members of the Committee protested that they did not have a mandate to defend Paris, and refused to transform the body formally into even a provisional revolutionary authority. Yet they agreed to order detachments of guardsmen to assure security at key points, such as the Banque de France and the Tuileries Palace. Paris had to be defended.23

  Members of the Committee issued a proclamation ending the state of siege imposed by Thiers and Vinoy and called on Parisians to organise elections in order to assure the existence of the Republic. Although they were unwilling to formally serve as a provisional government, the Central Committee remained the only real authority, although some of its members were quite unknown to the average Parisian. François Jourde, a committee member from Auvergne who had been a clerk for a notary and then in a bank, later related the sense of surprise and confusion that had followed such a swift victory: ‘We did not know what to do: we did not want to take possession of the Hôtel de Ville. We wanted to build barricades. We were very embarrassed by our authority.’24

  Édouard Moreau, a twenty-seven-year-old Parisian Blanquist who made artificial flowers, presided over the Central Committee. Moreau’s fine features, including long blond hair, earned him the nickname ‘the aristocrat’. The Committee also included the Blanquists Émile Eudes and Duval. Rigault and other Blanquists would run the Prefecture of Police and looked to Alphonse Blanqui as a potential saviour and leader, despite the fact that he was a prisoner of the government of Versailles on an island near Morlaix in Brittany. Rigault put it this way: ‘Nothing can be done without the Old One’, Blanqui.25

  The Committee, led by Moreau, put forth a list of demands to the National Assembly in Versailles. They insisted that Parisians have the right to elect mayors of each of its twenty arrondissements; that the Prefecture of Police be abolished; that the army in Versailles be kept out of Paris; that the National Guard should have the right to elect its officers; that the moratorium on the payment of rents that the National Assembly had arbitrarily ended be continued; and finally that the National Assembly officially proclaim the Republic. Eudes proclaimed that since 18 March Paris ‘has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free. Centralised authority no longer exists.’ The concept of the Commune as a governing entity gained ground when the first issue of the Journel Officiel de la Commune appeared on 20 March. A stridently worded assessment congratulated ‘the proletarians of the capital [who,] amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking the direction of public affairs into their own hands’. The term ‘Commune’, as we have seen, was in the air during the Prussian siege and after the French defeat. Now the victory of the men and women of Montmartre in preventing Thiers’s troops from seizing cannons of the National Guard encouraged insurgent Parisians to believe that the creation of a progressive and even autonomous authority in the capital – the Commune of Paris – was within reach.26

  For the moment, however, the majority of arrondissement mayors and deputy mayors, and deputies representing Paris in the National Assembly, refused to meet with the Central Committee, believing that this would be tantamount to recognising it as a legitimate authority. A minority of the mayors, however, met with the Central Committee at the Hôtel de Ville, including Clemenceau, the mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Clemenceau insisted that the body did not represent Paris and tried to persuade its members to return cannons to the government of Thiers and recognise the authority of the existing mayors. He hoped that the latter could negotiate with the National Assembly. The more conservative arrondissement mayors limited their demands to achieving municipal autonomy.27

  The monarchist-dominated National Assembly met in a secret session on the evening of 22 March to determine how to respond to the uprising in Paris. Thiers and Jules Grévy, a very conservative republican, dominated the proceedings. The monarchist right found support for their demand that calls for volunteers from the provinces be made to defend ‘order and society’. The prevailing mood was reflected by one member, who insisted that ‘The criminals who now dominate Paris have attacked Paris: now they attack society itself.’ No concessions were to be made to ‘a riot’. Thiers and Grévy made clear that they were willing to give the what they considered to be illegal, insurgent authority time to set itself up while a ‘serious army’ could be rebuilt in order to make legitimate a bloody repression. Thiers relished the fact that the possibility of civil war hung over the gathering. When someone challenged Thiers, asking if he would push Paris to civil war, shouts came from the Assembly: ‘It has already begun! It’s here!’ The conservative National Assembly revolted against Paris, and not the other way around. Only days after the people of Paris had taken control of their city, Thiers and the National Assembly were readying for a war that they understood as ‘a class war’ between the bourgeoisie and Parisian workers.28

  Meanwhile many of those elite Parisians who would proudly take the title of ‘the men of order’ followed Thiers to Versailles or retreated to safer places outside the capital. Conservative republicans in Versailles who at first seemed in the difficult position of having to choose between a monarchical restoration and the Commune could now back Thiers, who promised to crush ‘the vile multitude’ in Paris he so detested.

  For conservative republicans, the word ‘Commune’ had become a synonym for ‘communism’. These so-called ‘men of order’ could convince themselves that the members and supporters of the Commune, dubbed the Communards, intended primarily to confiscate and divvy up the property of the wealthy. Thiers, like other anti-Communards, was convinced that members of the International were largely responsible for the insurrection of 18 March.29

  While Thiers and the National Assembly prepared to rebuild the army, counter-revolution was afoot in Paris. Thiers appointed the conservative Admiral Jean-Marie Saisset commander of the National Guard of Paris, a decision sure to outrage many ordinary Parisians. The Bonapartist faithful, the ‘Society of the Friends of Order’, and ‘loyal’ National Guardsmen began to gather around the Bourse, the Opera, and the elegant Grand Hôtel in Paris, rallying around Saisset. On 21 March, a demonstration of about 3,000 ‘Friends of Order’ began on the boulevard des Capucines and marched through several boulevards and streets in conservative neighbourhoods. Versailles loyalists dominated the quartiers between the grands boulevards down to the market of Saint-Honoré, and around the Palais-Royal, the Banque de France and rue Montmartre. Saisset organised another demonstration at place Vendôme the following day. The choice of location was provocative – in front of the headquarters of the National Guard. When Saisset was about to speak, shots in his general direction were fired by counter-demonstrators. Twelve-year-old Gaston Cerfbeer, living on rue Saint-Honoré near rue Royale, looked down to see ‘men of order … running like madmen, beneath our windows’.30

  About twelve people were killed and a number of others were injured in the melee. Saisset’s disorganisation and lack of charisma, as well as rumours that key Orléanists hoped the demonstrations would constitute a first step towards a restoration, helped bring the bloody incident to a close. Most Parisians rejected any possible return to a monarchy. But rather than putting an end to the counter-revolution, the deaths only solidified strong anti-Communard sentiment among conservatives remaining in Paris.

  In the meantime, the National Assembly refused to put the name ‘Republic’ on its proclamations. The government immediately adopted a discourse of denigration, with descriptions of Parisians as ‘wretches’, ‘brigands’, ‘pillagers’ and ‘bandits’. In mid-April, the Assembly reacted to the claims of Paris with a new law on municipalities, stating that in the future the capital would still have no mayor,
but instead would be under the direct administration of the prefect of the Seine. Municipal councilmen would be named for five-year terms, responsible only to the central government that appointed them.31

  Paris’s insurrection stirred some provincial cities. Crowds in Lyon had proclaimed the Republic in August 1870 before this had occurred in Paris on 4 September, also reflecting political radicalisation during the last years of the empire. Demonstrators called for continued war against Prussia, municipal autonomy and social reform. On 22 March, representatives from Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseille and several other cities met with the Central Committee to listen to an account of the Parisian movement for rights. That day, insurgents seized power in Lyon. Marseille, Narbonne, Saint-Étienne, a centre of manufacturing, and the small industrial town of Le Creusot rose up on 24 March, followed by Limoges in early April. All proclaimed short-lived ‘communes’. Benoît Malon and militant socialist, feminist and novelist André Léo penned ‘Appeal to the Workers of the Countryside’, 110,000 copies of which reached the provinces. ‘Brothers,’ went the text, ‘they are fooling you. Our interests are the same!’32

  Some prominent moderate Parisian republicans, such as former deputy Édouard Lockroy, who was a member of the municipal council and had represented the département of the Seine in the National Assembly, and Jean-Baptiste Millière, another deputy, joined Clemenceau in attempting to achieve a compromise with Thiers. However on 23 March, Thiers turned away without compromise the delegation of mayors and deputies who represented Paris. He was playing for time, saying ‘Once already I have pulled France drowning out of a revolution; I am not young enough to do it a second time.’33

  Three groups, the Ligue d’Union républicaine des droits de Paris, Union nationale du commerce et de l’industrie, and the Freemasons, still pressed for conciliation, each hoping that recognition by the Versailles government of the Republic’s existence and an affirmation of the rights of Paris would lead to a negotiated settlement. Thiers insisted that because the Commune had no legitimacy, there was nothing to negotiate. To the Union nationale du commerce et de l’industrie, claiming to represent 6,000 merchants and manufacturers, Thiers demanded that the Communards give up their arms, in other words, surrender.34

  The term ‘Commune’ had in these days several meanings. The Manifesto of the Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements, released several days after events of 18 March, put forward its definition of ‘the Commune … [as] the base of all political states, as the family is the embryo of societies. [The Commune] should be autonomous … [with] its sovereignty complete, just like the individual in the middle of the city.’ With an eye towards economic development and the guarantee of security, Paris should ‘federate itself with all other communes or associations of communes that make up the nation … It is this idea … which has just triumphed on 18 March 1871.’35

  However, much more than municipal autonomy was at stake. Many Parisians believed that the assertion of municipal rights represented the first step towards achieving a ‘democratic and social Republic’. The manifesto asked for the organisation of ‘a system of communal insurance against all social risks’, including unemployment and bankruptcy, as well as a systematic investigation into all possibilities for procuring capital and credit for individual workers in order to end endless ‘pauperism’.36 Thus while some militants limited their demands to municipal rights, others demanded meaningful social reforms.

  On 23 March, the Paris branch of the International Workingmen’s Association threw its support behind the Commune. Its proclamation, written by Albert Theisz, a bronze-worker, optimistically asserted that ‘the independence of the Commune will mean a freely discussed contract which will put an end to class conflict and bring about social equality’. It also echoed prevalent republican demands put forth during the Second Empire: obligatory, free and secular education; the right of assembly and to form associations; and municipal authority over the armed forces, police and public health. As the socialist printer Eugène Varlin had put it, ‘political revolution and social reforms are linked, and cannot go one without the other’.37

  The Protestant minister Élie Reclus captured the hope of many Communards that social reforms could bring them better lives: ‘Lazare, always starving, is no longer content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich, and now he has dared ask for his part of the feast.’ Like his anarchist geographer brother Élisée, Reclus believed that the future of humanity lay in a close connection with nature, without a state. He believed that if workers could organise themselves into associations of producers, they would eventually be able to emancipate themselves from bosses. Yet, although some 300,000 Parisians were now without work in the wake of the war and siege, various associations of workers bravely started up. At the Council of Federated Trade Unions an orator asked, ‘What difference does it make to me that we are victorious over Versailles, if we don’t find the answer to the social problem, if the worker remains in the same conditions?’38

  Louis Barron, the son of a washerwoman, a former soldier, and writer, wanted ‘a social revolution’ so long awaited by many in his generation. He described the world of work from which the Commune took its strength:

  The vast working-class faubourgs, by which one slowly reaches Butte Montmartre or Buttes-Chaumont, these Monts-Aventins of Paris, reflect the mysterious, tumultuous and sad movement of these industrial neighbourhoods … Ordinary people live in these streets, mixing together, walking about, discussing, arguing, killing time. For these thousands of men used to working with tools every day in order to earn enough to eat, unemployment, even if absolute famine is not a consequence, is as difficult as if utter dark impoverishment followed in its wake.39

  Hundreds of thousands of Parisian workers would look to the Commune to bring out reforms that would improve their lives.

  *

  Municipal elections, postponed for four days while some of the mayors unsuccessfully sought a negotiated settlement with Versailles, were held on 26 March. The goal was to elect the governing council of the Commune. Rigault stood as a candidate in the generally reactionary Eighth Arrondissement, which included the Church of the Madeleine, where some of the wealthiest families married and held baptisms, and the Champs-Elysées.40 He assumed that his reputation and newly acquired status as head of the police could win him the election even in a reactionary district, and it did.

  The elections reflected the increasingly divided social and political geography of Paris. They were weighted by population, with the plebeian Eleventh Arrondissement – the most populous, with almost 150,000 residents – and the Eighteenth each electing seven people, while the Sixteenth – the smallest with 42,000 residents – would have but two representatives. Only about half of men voted, in part due to the fact that thousands had fled the city, but also because many were unfamiliar with the candidates or were dissuaded by the fact that Thiers had called for people not to vote.

  The candidates of the revolutionary Left did well in the plebeian arrondissements of eastern and above all north-eastern Paris, where Blanquists, members of the International, and Jacobins were a majority. In Belleville, the anti-clerical national guardsman Gabriel Ranvier, the son of a shoemaker and a clerk, was re-elected mayor of the Twentieth Arrondissement, where he became known as ‘the Christ of Belleville’. He was known for drinking to political change with syrup and not wine, was a frequent speaker in the warehouses of quartiers populaires, and had spent time in prison for his role in the attempted insurrection of 31 October. Like others of similar background, he was determined that Paris should lead the way in the struggle for a just republic.41

  Those now wielding authority in the Commune were men with little or no administrative experience, but they stepped together – debating and quarrelling from the beginning – into the unknown. No dominant figure emerged to lead the Commune, and problems of overlapping authority and rivalries persisted. When the Commune issued decrees, it was up to the mayors, deputy mayors, police and national guard
smen in each arrondissement to enforce them. Of course, not all local mayors and police were willing supporters of the Commune, which meant that there were limits to the Commune’s effective authority and that it had to rely on officials, policemen and national guardsmen no matter how republican they were.42

  The Commune’s first and most pressing task, however, was defending Paris against the Army of Versailles, which was readying for a fight against Communards. Debates raged between ‘realists’ and ‘idealists’, as, much to the chagrin of ‘idealists’, who were eager to establish a just society, ‘realists’ insisted that no real reforms, social or political, could be achieved with determined enemies at the gate. The first decree of the new administrative body of the Commune on 29 March reminded citizens that they were ‘masters of [their] own lives’, warning that ‘criminals’ were ‘fostering a hotbed of monarchist conspiracy at the very gates of the city. They are planning to unleash civil war.’43

  On 28 March, the victorious new authority in the French capital officially proclaimed the Paris Commune at the Hôtel de Ville, as drums, bugles and artillery salvos fired into the air from the nearby quay saluted victory over tyranny. The newly elected members of the governmental council of the Commune stood on a platform, while the National Guard marched by a vast, excited crowd. The colour red was everywhere – scarves, belts, cockades, and the flag waving from the Hôtel de Ville. Rigault had trimmed his beard and was shockingly well-dressed, revelling in his status as head of the police. Jules Vallès described the proclamation of the Commune as ‘making up for twenty years of Empire, six months of defeat and betrayals’. The Commune had from the beginning the overwhelming support of most Parisians.44

  The Central Committee of the National Guard had announced that with the elections of 26 March it was going to cede power to those elected to the Commune. Yet the very next day the Central Committee began to reorganise, after sixteen of its members had been elected to the Commune. The Central Committee, which continued to hold regular meetings, saw itself as the ‘guardian of the revolution’. It warned Parisians to be wary of those favoured by fortune, because only rarely did they consider ‘the workers as brothers’. Arguably a kind of dual sovereignty existed: the Central Committee of the Federation of the National Guard, which had been formally established on 20 March, and the ‘Commune’, the elected governing body of the Commune proclaimed on 28 March.45