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  The Commune immediately faced challenges both internal and external. First and most immediate, it required funds to operate. Second, not everyone who supported the Commune agreed on the extent of the transformation in Paris it was to oversee – political divisions would remain. Third, while German forces surrounded the northern and eastern ramparts and forts, Thiers’s army, headquartered at Versailles, held the territory to the south and west of Paris. The Germans posed no immediate threat, but Thiers’s army was already planning its attack on Paris.

  How was the Commune to find the money to pay national guardsmen 1.50 francs a day for their service, as well as the many municipal employees? The Commune also had to find a way to make good on its promise to finance some care for the poor. As in other cities and towns in France, the bulk of municipal revenues came from money collected at the octrois (customs barriers) that surrounded Paris. Monies seized at the Hôtel de Ville when the old regime disappeared into the night counted for something. But many more financial resources were required.

  The Commune named François Jourde as delegate for Finance. On 19 March Jourde and Eugène Varlin went to the Bank of France to ask politely for a loan of 700,000 francs. This they received. The Commune also received a credit of well over 16 million francs – though it was a paltry sum compared with the 258 million francs credit Versailles received from the Bank of France, making possible the reconstitution of the French army. The Rothschild banking family also loaned money to the Commune.46 The Commune remained attached to legalism and did not confiscate funds in the Bank of France, which it easily could have done, but it did begin to mint its own coins in mid-April.47

  For the moment, the Commune’s provisional authority proposed no concrete economic or political programme other than affirming that France was a now a republic. Yet the Commune immediately took important measures in the interests of working- and middle-class Parisians. It forbade the expulsion of renters unable to pay their rent, which reassured those who had been frustrated and angered by the National Assembly’s sudden abolition of the moratorium on rents that had kept people in their homes during the siege. Gustave Flaubert, for one, expressed his indignation as a property owner who wanted rents owed paid immediately. He would not have been happy to hear of the comment by a man who informed his landlord in the Eleventh Arrondissement that ‘the Commune would triumph, and would put renters in the place of landlords’. The Commune reassured businesses by coming up with a compromise in the interest of debtors and creditors, phasing repayments for those in debt over three years, whereas the Versailles government had allowed only three months to pay back money owed. It suspended the sale of items that had been exchanged for cash at the Municipal Pawnshop, measures important to so many Parisians.

  The Commune Council, which included about sixty-five men, many of whom were also officials in their own arrondissements, met fifty-seven times during the Commune’s existence. Overlapping administrations, committees, delegates, ideological differences and personal rivalries, however, undermined its efforts.48 (What reassured Élie Reclus least about the Commune was its governing council.) In each of the mairies of the arrondissements, smaller versions of the meetings at the Hôtel de Ville took place, with each mayor, deputy mayor and members of the commissions overseeing local affairs. The very structure of what was in essence a federation of arrondissements meant that coordinating a unified policy at the level of the Commune proved difficult, if not impossible. National Guard units and the existence of the Central Committee of the Federation of the National Guard served to decentralise authority and further complicate coordination of policies ordered by the Commune itself. From the beginning, the Commune was plagued by competing authorities and two opposing visions of the Commune. On the one hand, Proudhonists, who were anarchists and therefore opposed to the very existence of states, saw the Commune as essentially embodying popular democracy and municipal autonomy. The Jacobins, meanwhile, favoured a more authoritarian and realistic structure that seemed increasingly necessary given the challenging military situation.49

  Further diffusing its authority, the Commune established executive ‘commissions’, something like the equivalent of ministries, each run by a ‘delegate’. Commissions were to convene twice a day at the Hôtel de Ville, long and increasingly contentious meetings that often lasted well into the night. The meetings wasted considerable time discussing issues of little or absolutely no importance. A few members seemed caught up in the ceremonial aspects of their limited authority. In an effort to dispel this emphasis on appearance and ceremony, Varlin suggested that the Commune refuse to pay for the fancy uniform complete with military stripes ordered by Eudes. He explained, ‘The Commune does not have money for luxurious clothing.’50

  The Commune’s administrative body quickly decided that it was not democratic to call someone minister of war, so he became ‘Citizen Delegate to the Ministry of War’. Besides ‘War’, the other commissions were ‘Subsistence’, ‘Finance’, ‘Foreign Affairs’, ‘Public Services’, ‘Education’, ‘General Security’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Labour and Exchange’. The latter was headed by Léo Frankel, a small, bespectacled Hungarian watchmaker and member of the International. Speaking French with a strong accent, Frankel lived near faubourg Saint-Antoine, in the heart of artisanal Paris. He insisted that, because workers had made the revolution of 18 March, the Commune would have no meaning if it did not do something for them.51

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  While the Commune was busy setting up its government, Adolphe Thiers was beginning to rebuild the French army in Versailles.52 This would be a challenge. More than 300,000 soldiers and officers, who had surrendered at Sedan and Metz, were still interned in the German states. The Army of the East, camped in Switzerland, largely consisted of Mobile Guard soldiers awaiting demobilisation. By early April, the number of troops reached only 55,000, including those released from German internment, and the three corps had taken the appropriate name of the Army of Versailles. The Volunteers of the Seine provided another 6,000 men. Yet Thiers would bide his time, convinced that well more than 100,000 might be needed.53

  Marshal Patrice de MacMahon seemed the perfect commander-in-chief for the Army of Versailles. A Legitimist hoping for a Bourbon restoration, MacMahon, a decorated veteran of campaigns of conquest and slaughter in Algeria, shared the belief at Versailles that the Commune threatened social order. The marshal’s surrender at Sedan had only somewhat compromised his sterling reputation, for he had been wounded early in the battle.

  On 6 April Thiers named as commanders Paul de Ladmirault, Ernest de Cissey, François du Barail, Justin Clinchant and Félix Douay. Thiers appointed Joseph Vinoy, who had led the unsuccessful effort to capture the National Guard cannons, to command the reserve army. All were politically conservative, including two Legitimists, two Bonapartists and a conservative republican (Ladmirault). The French officer corps remained upper-class and status-proud, retaining the belief that noble blood guaranteed dedication and competence. Senior French officers had rallied to Louis Napoleon and then to his second incarnation as Napoleon III, in part because they feared republicans and socialists. It should come as no surprise, then, that they were eager to take up arms against the Parisian Communards.54

  Whereas conservative republican Jules Simon had described the Versaillais army in its first weeks as being ‘like a Tartar horde’, officers now imposed discipline. Cases of insubordination and, above all, politically motivated dissent – such as when soldiers arriving from Bordeaux shouted for the Commune – were dealt with harshly. Units considered even vaguely sympathetic to Paris were sent to far-flung duty in France or the colonies.

  Morale among soldiers, so devastated just a few months earlier, improved dramatically. It helped that Thiers took a personal interest in improving living conditions for troops, increasing their wine rations fourfold, and tripling that of eau-de-vie. Troops were also bombarded by propaganda attacking the Communards. After first preventing soldiers access to newspapers, the National Assembly
in April voted to provide troops copies of Le Gaulois and Le Soir, which denounced the Commune for challenging the regime of property, religion, social hierarchy and authority. The Communards were presented as the dregs of society, ex-convicts, drunks, vagabonds and thieves, foreigners turned loose by virtue of fiendish plots organised by the International, perhaps in cahoots with Germany.55

  Once the German Empire and the provisional government of France had signed the Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May – under the terms of which France lost Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany, and would have to pay off an enormous indemnity of 5 billion francs, and recognise William I as emperor of Germany – Bismarck released captured French soldiers to join the Army of Versailles. These troops would make up a quarter of the force of 130,000 men available to Thiers. Officers were eager to restore the pride of the French army after the abject humiliation of the catastrophic war against Prussia, although some who had served in the Army of National Defence were squeezed out. With their professional careers on the line, returning officers quickly hitched their wagons to the Versailles caravan. Thiers had no military experience, but this in no way dissuaded him from trying to impose his will on the commanders of the Army of Versailles. Each morning he insisted on meeting with MacMahon and the others, but not with their titular superior, Adolphe Le Flô, minister of war, nor with Vinoy, whose reputation had been stained by the events of 18 March.56

  Thiers and the Army of Versailles’s planned invasion of Paris would not be easy. The city had held out for more than four months during the Prussian siege against an imposing army. It was protected by a wall that ran around its circumference, with ninety-four fortified bastions interspersed. Each could house cannons and machine guns. A moat thirty feet deep and forty-five feet across provided an additional serious obstacle to any invading force. During the Prussian siege, the Government of National Defence had constructed additional fortifications beyond the south-western side of the ramparts, using embankments provided by the railway that ran around the circumference of Paris. Drawbridges could close the gates of the city.

  Moreover, a series of exterior forts had been built during the July Monarchy: Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, Bicêtre and Ivry. Connected in places by trenches and redoubts, they were controlled by Communard forces, with the major exception of the enormous fort of Mont-Valérien west of Paris, which had been retaken by the Versaillais. Ironically these forts had been constructed at the instigation of Thiers. The placement of the forts had generated heated debate, as republican critics noted that their location seemed to reflect a preoccupation with firing into Paris, against insurgent workers – such as those who had risen up on several occasions following the Revolution of 1830 – more than offering useful defence against an invading army. The German army controlled the areas beyond the northern and eastern walls of Paris, including the exterior forts (with the exception of Vincennes to the east, held by the Communards). Supposed German neutrality gave the Communards the advantage of not having to worry about a Versaillais attack from those directions.57

  The Communard delegate for war who would have to prepare for a Versaillais attack was Gustave Cluseret, a Parisian-born graduate of the elite military school of St Cyr. Though not yet fifty, Cluseret had impressive military experience: he had been wounded in Algeria and fought as a commander of the Mobile Guard against the insurgents during the June Days of 1848. He then moved to the left and was placed on inactive duty before fighting for the North in the American Civil War, after which he became an American citizen. Increasingly committed to the social revolution, he returned to France in 1867 and was briefly jailed in 1868 after writing an article that displeased the imperial authorities.

  Cluseret had, in the words of Louis Rossel, another Communard commander, ‘a coarsely handsome face’ but was ‘curt, uncivil in his manner’, leading to accusations that he was dictatorial in his methods. One of the commander’s secretaries described a mood of ‘perpetual improvisation, fundamental incoherence, a chaos trying in vain to organise itself and … a mob-scene where everyone commands and no one obeys’. But he understood the daunting problems of trying to defend Paris with undisciplined National Guard forces vulnerable to the indecision and arguments of their commanders. The National Guard was organised into companies formed within arrondissements, bringing together neighbours, work-mates and friends. Each company now elected a delegate who was to serve as something of a ‘political and military policeman’, searching for disloyal officers, with the right to call meetings to discuss matters deemed important.58 That National Guard companies elected such delegates added to the layers of command and increased the difficulty of the tasks of the overall commander.

  Cluseret believed that, if the National Guard could hold off the Versaillais, some sort of negotiated settlement with the government at Versailles could be reached. The first step, however, was ensuring that the National Guard was ready for the task at hand. With that in mind, he reorganised some National Guard units and reminded arrondissement authorities that he had ultimate authority over battalions. On 7 April, a decree obliged all men between nineteen and forty years to serve in the National Guard. Cluseret urged guardsmen to police their neighbourhoods and force men avoiding service to join the Guard. The Delegate for War created a war council in each National Guard legion, a kind of court-martial, with the goal of imposing discipline and thus countering attempts by the Versaillais to subvert morale. A court-martial tried one commander, who stood accused of refusing to lead his men against line troops at Neuilly. He was condemned to death, but never executed.59

  Cluseret’s attempts to create a real army out of National Guard troops was made more difficult by the limits of his own authority and an increasingly obstructionist National Guard leadership. He denounced the meddling of the Central Committee of the National Guard, which accentuated the division of authority undermining the Commune. The Central Committee continued to send out commands to arrondissement municipalities, ignoring Cluseret’s efforts to centralise his authority. A spate of official proclamations appeared, some extremely contradictory. When on one occasion Cluseret assumed that 1,500 national guardsmen would be awaiting his orders at Gare Saint-Lazare, he found only 200, ‘who did not want to march’. Only about 80,000 men were ready to fight by mid-May, if that.60

  Cluseret anticipated that Thiers’s army would attack the western gates at Point-du-Jour, Auteuil and Passy. With this in mind, he established a battery at Trocadéro, and another near Passy at the Château de la Muette, not far from the Bois-de-Boulogne. Yet, during the Versaillais siege, it became clear that they did no real damage to the Versaillais forces.61

  In late March, the Versaillais sent out an exploratory patrol towards the ramparts and then well beyond the southern fortifications to assess Communard defences. Thiers believed it would take thirty days to have control of the immediate area around the ramparts and to set up cannons there. He remained committed to blasting the ramparts with cannon fire in preparation for an assault, insisting on selecting the targets.62

  The first fighting took place on 30 March, just two days after the Commune was proclaimed, when Versaillais troops moved towards Courbevoie, which lies across the Seine from Neuilly, on an exploratory mission. Coming upon a small Communard perimeter post, Versaillais line troops hesitated. General Gaston Galliffet immediately ordered the artillery to fire, and, when they grumbled, he harangued them, pistol in hand. He then charged forward on his horse, taking some prisoners, as Communard guardsmen fled. Versaillais soldiers grabbed a red flag and threw it at Galliffet’s feet in triumph. The general’s ability to rally the morale of his troops may have been a turning point; the army, at first unwilling to attack their fellow Frenchman, now seemed prepared for an assault on the Communards. Thiers ordered Galliffet’s battalion to return without attempting to take the pont de Neuilly and Porte Maillot, but the skirmish had the intended effect. Commune forces retreated in a panic, while the army’s performance reassured Thiers. He sent off a telegram to provincial auth
orities informing them that ‘the organisation of one of the finest professional armies ever possessed by France is being completed at Versailles; good citizens can take heart’.

  On 2 April, Thiers ordered two army brigades, backed by artillery and commanded by Galliffet, to attack a concentration of national guardsmen at the Rond-Point at Courbevoie. A military surgeon general called Pasquier went forward to negotiate with the Communards. Taking him for a colonel in the gendarmerie because of his uniform, the Communard side shot and killed Pasquier. The fighting that followed between the Communards and Thiers’s army ended with a Versaillais victory, but, because Thiers’s troops then fell back, some Communards conceived of the encounter as a victory. It was anything but that, as the Army of Versailles now held Courbevoie, a key point in the defence of Paris. Pasquier’s death became an early cornerstone of Versaillais propaganda.63

  About thirty Communards were taken prisoner at Courbevoie, as fédérés – the name coming from the Federation of the National Guard – returned in haste to Paris, reaching avenue de Neuilly and then Porte Maillot. Vinoy’s orders were unambiguous: all soldiers, men from the Mobile Guard, or sailors taken prisoner, were to be shot. When news of such executions reached the Hôtel de Ville, the Council of the Commune decided to order a major sortie against the Versaillais. The Blanquists Eudes and Émile Duval were the principal proponents for an attack. Late on 2 April, the Commune informed the National Guard that ‘royalist conspirators’ had attacked, launching civil war.64