Ancient history

The Paris Commune, the last of the revolutions

The Fire at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, by Theodor Hoffbauer • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

At dawn on March 18, 1871, a regular column of the army, commanded by Generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas, reached the top of the Montmartre hill, in Paris, to seize the 200 guns installed on this strategic point. by the National Guard, the city's citizens' militia. They are almost immediately surrounded by hundreds of workers, women, children, who gather to hinder the operation. The confusion is soon general. Soldiers put sticks in the air and fraternize with the Parisians, others try to resist and a few shots are fired. The crowd, scandalized that they are trying to disarm the city, manhandles officers and seizes the two generals, who are shot in a garden on the hill. When the news broke, barricades went up all over the outraged capital. The government, led by Adolphe Thiers, immediately left Paris, which had never been seen, even during other revolutionary periods, and took refuge in Versailles. The Paris Commune, the largest popular uprising in 19 th Europe century, has just begun.

An elected government

It will last seventy-two days, during which the capital frees itself from the elected assembly and the government to give itself a new authority. This was first made up of the Federation Committee of the National Guard, the body that coordinated the activities of this militia made up of all the citizens of the city, hence the name "federates" that the communards. But this Committee, which moved to the Town Hall, is concerned about legality. From March 26, he organizes elections to have an elected municipal council. Abstention, recommended by the government, is high (52%), but 230,000 Parisians nevertheless go to the polls and elect a council very largely dominated by revolutionary activists and journalists, which legitimizes the insurrection of March 18. The new municipal council takes the title of Commune of Paris, in reference to that constituted in 1792, during the glorious hours of the French Revolution.

The new Paris Commune was officially proclaimed on March 28, 1871, to popular euphoria and jubilation. One of its first acts was to affirm the “rights of Paris”, while inviting the other municipalities of the country to join it in a free federation. In Lyons, Marseilles, Narbonne, Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, unrest broke out, but was quickly repressed. Paris therefore remains alone in the running against the government, installed in Versailles and determined to wage, in the words of General Galliffet, "a war without truce or pity against these assassins".

Women on the barricades

How did Paris experience these extraordinary weeks? An apparent calm reigns during the first times. The Commune seeks above all to ensure the supply of the city, already tested by the siege of the Prussian army which had lasted all winter, to find money to pay salaries and to prepare for the civil war which is to come. announcement. Social and political reforms are therefore temporarily put in the background. But an original climate is nevertheless noticeable, especially in the working-class neighborhoods to the north and east, where political effervescence is strong.

Meetings and enthusiastic discussions multiply in clubs and churches. The revolutionary symbols – red flag and Phrygian cap – reappear. We call each other home, we give ourselves the “citizen”, we put the revolutionary calendar back into force:March 1871 is over, here we are suddenly in “Germinal year 79”! Pamphlets, pamphlets and newspapers were distributed by the thousands, dominated by Le Cri du peuple by Jules Vallès, The Watchword de Rochefort, The Avenger by Félix Pyat or Father Duchêne , an old sans-culotte sheet that is then resuscitated. We are debating vehemently the reforms to come and the means to snatch victory.

A particular atmosphere reigns in Paris:already tested by the Prussian siege, the city is preparing for the civil war, in a sensitive political effervescence.

Almost all the men wear the uniform of the National Guard, whose pay – 30 cents a day – allows many families to survive. The election of officers, the district commissions, the making of flags, the surveillance of the streets dominate daily life. The first skirmishes of the civil war, at the beginning of April, aroused endless discussions. The mobilization of women was also important, particularly within the Union of Women for the Defense of Paris, and many of them threw themselves headlong into the insurrection. We thus see them wearing uniforms, carrying guns and working at the barricades. However, this does little to shift gender boundaries:most of them fill conventional roles (nurses, canteens, teachers…), and none claim political rights.

Debates around the main principles

However, measures characterize the government of the Commune. Some are symbolic, such as the destruction of the Vendôme column (which commemorated the victories of Napoleon I st ) or the house of Adolphe Thiers. Others are taken to respond to a difficult social situation:moratorium on rents, suspension of the sale of objects pledged to the pawnshop, abolition of salary deductions and night work for bakers. Finally, others, such as the separation of Church and State, the abolition of standing armies, or even the notion of "imperative mandate" and of "delegated" and therefore revocable power, testify to more ideological orientations. .

All the members of the Commune find themselves on a few strong principles:attachment to the Republic, which we wish to be democratic, social and fraternal, anticlericalism, the need for secular and free education, respect for property , the ideal of a free association of cooperatives. Several commissions have been set up to reflect on these questions. But all the projects are paralyzed by the budgetary rigor (the legalism of the Commune encourages it to respect the reserves of the Bank of France) and by the ideological dissensions which separate the "majority", partisans of a central role of the State in the Jacobin tradition, of the "minority", close to the positions of Proudhon and the internationalists, who oppose the maintenance of institutions deemed "bourgeois".

Versailles versus Paris

This "cherry season" came to an abrupt end on May 21, when Versailles troops opened a breach in the south-west rampart of Paris, near the Porte de Saint-Cloud. The next day, 130,000 soldiers descend on the city. Then begins the "bloody week", the most deadly days in the history of the capital. It is she who transforms the Commune into a tragic epic and a symbol of universal revolution. The Versailles army advanced rapidly from west to east and, despite the 900 barricades erected to stop it, only encountered strong resistance in the workers' strongholds to the north-east of the city.

More than the fighting, it is the repression ordered by the officers that causes the massacres. Hundreds of insurgents are killed without trial:those who are taken with arms in their hands, those who have powder on their fingers or bruises on their shoulders. On May 24, most of the capital was reinvested. To delay the advance of the troops, the Commune decided to set fire to many buildings, symbols of the monarchy or of the hated social order:the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, the Prefecture of police, the Palais de justice, the ministry of Finance, and even the Hôtel de Ville which is on fire with all its archives. An apocalypse of fire and blood seems to befall the city.

The summary executions perpetrated by the Versaillese were met with reprisals by the communards, who killed M gr Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, then, rue Haxo, around fifty hostages, including 24 priests. Desperate fighting took place at the Panthéon and above all at Belleville, where the last barricades, such as that in the rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, fell on 28 May. Then begins the time of denunciations, arrests and executions of prisoners. In the Père-Lachaise cemetery, along this wall which has remained famous under the name of "Wall of the Federates", 137 of them were thus shot. 6,000 to 7,000 insurgents were killed during this terrible week of fighting and repression. "Paris is delivered," declared General Mac-Mahon, who commanded the Versailles army. Order, work, security will be reborn. »

Repression extends

This carnage was followed by what Thiers described as "the greatest judicial enterprise of the 19th th century ". Nearly 40,000 people are arrested and herded into military camps. The 24 courts-martial brought together for the occasion brought 12,500 people to appear, pronounced 93 death sentences and more than 4,000 deportation sentences, most of which were served in New Caledonia. The luckiest, who have managed to hide or escape, take the painful path of exile in Switzerland, Belgium or England.

An astonishing overflow of hatred attaches itself to the Commune and to the Communards. In Paris, while a law prohibits any representation of the event, the government organizes a grandiose funeral for M gr Darboy and encourages the construction on the Montmartre hill, where it all began, of an expiatory basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart. It was not until 1880 that power, definitively passed into the hands of the Republicans, decided to grant amnesty to the insurgents of 1871.

Analysis of an urban revolution

“What is the Commune, this sphinx which puts the bourgeois understanding to such a severe test? asks Karl Marx in The Civil War in France , a short hot-drafted pamphlet. Understanding the meaning of this event requires precisely restoring its context. The Commune is first and foremost an urban revolution, inseparable from a certain Parisian pride, attached to municipal freedoms and the history of a capital city. The huge Haussmann project, which began in 1852, profoundly transformed – “embellished” – Paris, but also contributed to relegating to the new northern districts (Montmartre, Belleville, Ménilmontant) and south (Glacière, Grenelle) most of workers and popular classes. It is therefore not surprising that it was in these neighborhoods that investment and resistance were strongest:the Commune was also the political reconquest of the city by its working classes.

But the Paris Commune is also a patriotic reaction. Since the French Revolution and the mass levies of 1792, patriotism has been “leftist”. The Republic proclaimed on September 4, 1870, when the Prussian armies invaded the country, intended to save a nation that Napoleon III had unnecessarily endangered. But from the end of September, Paris was surrounded and had to undergo a long siege which lasted until the end of January. The ordeal was difficult:in addition to the bombardments, the Parisians had to face a very harsh winter (it was down to -14°C), restrictions and famine. But they held on, and the men, all or almost all enrolled in the National Guard (it had nearly 340,000 volunteers during the siege), showed great determination. This is why the armistice signed on January 28, 1871 with Bismarck outraged many Parisians, especially since Thiers and the Assembly agreed to let the Prussians parade on the Champs-Élysées on 1 st March, supreme humiliation for the resistant city. It is understandable in these conditions that the operation of March 18, intended to deprive Paris of its guns, set fire to the powder.

Autopsy of a myth

These reactions were all the more lively as the new Assembly, elected in February 1871, and the government which emanated from it, were very largely dominated by the monarchists, who emerged victorious in the elections. Patriotic and republican, the capital struggled to accept the authority of this new power which signed a preliminary treaty on February 26 providing for the loss of three departments and the payment of a large war indemnity. That this government of “capitulators”, which has moreover just decreed the end of the moratorium on rents, decides to disarm the National Guard and to settle in Versailles, speaks well of its reactionary nature. The insurrection of the people of Paris therefore imposed itself, in 1871 as in 1793, as "the most sacred right, the most indispensable duty". This is why the Commune offers perhaps the only example of a democratically elected revolution against a democratically elected government.

Finally, we must insist on the vigor of the revolutionary tradition, which links the Commune to the “Parisian days” of 1830, 1832, 1848, and even more to the memories of the “Great Revolution”. Contrary to the analyzes of Marx, who wanted to see in it "the finally found political form" of the emancipation of the working class, or those of Engels and Lenin who spoke of it as the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the Commune was not a proletarian revolution. The Parisian insurgents, whom we know well thanks to the files of the councils of war, all belonged to this people of artisans, shopkeepers, skilled workers, small bosses who characterize the revolutions of the XIX e century. Their dream was that of a democratic and universal republic, heir to 1793 and 1848. If it has since become a real myth, which deeply inspired the communist and anarchist movements of the 20 th century, the Paris Commune rather marked the end of a cycle that began in 1789. As the historian François Furet wrote:“In this burning Paris, the French Revolution bids farewell to History. »

Find out more
Free Paris 1871, J. Rougerie, Le Seuil, 1971.
The Paris Commune, W. Serman, Fayard, 1986.
Paris, bivouac of revolutions:the Commune of 1871, R. Tombs, Libertalia, 2014.

Vandalism, provocation and desperation
Symbol of freedoms Parisians, the Hôtel de Ville de Paris had been built at the beginning of the 16 th century and enlarged at the beginning of the 19 th century. It was on its steps that the victorious revolutions had, in 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1871, proclaimed the new regimes. The Communards decided to set it on fire on May 28, 1871, when all was already lost, in a gesture of ultimate provocation and vandalism, preferring to destroy this symbol than to return it to the adversary. The fire devoured the Paris archives (including the civil status registers) and the library. The current Town Hall, rebuilt between 1872 and 1884 by the architects Ballu and Deperthes, was largely inspired by the destroyed building.

The Federated Wall
It was on this part of the Père-Lachaise cemetery that 137 insurgents of the Commune, taken up in arms after violent fighting, were shot without trial on May 28, 1871, then thrown in a mass grave opened by Versailles soldiers. Symbol of the repression of the "bloody week", this wall has become the main place of memory of the event. From 1880, the survivors of the Commune, soon relayed by militant trade unionists, anarchists and communists, made the "climb to the wall" the great ritual of the labor movement, still alive today. Above all, this fervor speaks of the importance of the Commune in the imaginations of the revolution. It has established itself as a real myth, claimed as much by Marx or Lenin (whose embalmed body is girded with a flag of the Commune) as by the anarchists and students of 1968. The wall was classified as a historical monument in 1983 .

The Fall of an Iniquitous Symbol
The Commune destroyed several buildings considered to be emblems of oppression. Among them, the Vendôme column, in the center of the square of the same name, erected in 1808 to commemorate the victory of Napoleon I st at Austerlitz. It was covered with bronze from the cannons taken during this battle and crowned with a statue of Napoleon dressed as a Roman general. A decree of the Commune described it as "a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult from the victors to the vanquished, a perpetual attack on one of the three great principles of French Republic, fraternity”.

National defeat and humiliation
The Franco-Prussian War began on July 19, 1870. The pretext was the candidacy of a German prince for the throne of Spain, which aroused in France the fear of encirclement. In reality, this war is wanted by Bismarck to accelerate the unification of the German states, and by Napoleon III who dreams of being a European arbiter. But the French armies were quickly overwhelmed. Captured at Sedan on September 2, Napoleon III abdicated. The Republic, proclaimed on September 4, declares “the fatherland in danger”. But it quickly broke down, and the government had to sign the armistice on January 28, 1871, provoking a feeling of humiliation, especially among the Parisians, who suffered a long siege of more than four months.