Paris Commune - Rise and Nature

Rise and Nature

The Germans entered Paris briefly and left again without incident, but Paris continued to be in a state of high political excitement. The newly elected National Assembly was in the process of moving to Bordeaux from Versailles (several miles south-west of Paris), having decided that the capital city was too turbulent for them to meet there. Their absence created a power vacuum in Paris as well as suspicion about the National Assembly's intentions, as it had a large royalist majority.

As the Central Committee of the National Guard adopted an increasingly radical stance and steadily gained authority, the government felt that it could not indefinitely allow it to have four hundred cannon at its disposal. So, as a first step, on March 18, 1871, Thiers ordered regular troops to seize the cannon stored on the Butte Montmartre and in other locations across the city. The soldiers, however, whose morale was low, fraternized with National Guards and local residents. The general at Montmartre, Claude-Martin Lecomte, who was later said to have ordered them to fire on the crowd, was dragged from his horse and later shot, together with a General Clément-Thomas (a veteran republican who was now hated as the former commander of the National Guard) who was seized nearby.

Other army units joined the rebellion, which spread so fast that the head of the government, Thiers, ordered an immediate evacuation of Paris by as many of the regular forces as would obey, by the police, and by administrators and specialists of every kind. He fled ahead of them to Versailles. Thiers claimed he had thought about this strategy (to retreat from Paris, and crush the insurrection afterward) for a long time, while meditating on the example of the 1848 Revolution, but he may have panicked. There is no evidence that the government had anticipated the crisis. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now the only effective government in Paris; it arranged elections for a commune, the governments of French cities are often referred to as communes, to be held on March 26.

The 92 members of the Communal Council included a high proportion of skilled workers and several professionals. Many of them were political activists, ranging from reformist republicans, various types of socialists, to the Jacobins who tended to look back nostalgically to the Revolution of 1789.

The veteran leader of the Blanquist group of revolutionary socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, was hoped by his followers to be a potential leader of the revolution, but he had been arrested on March 17 and was held in prison throughout the life of the Commune. The Commune unsuccessfully tried to exchange him, first against Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, then against all 74 hostages it detained, but Thiers flatly refused (see below). The Paris Commune was proclaimed on March 28, although local districts often retained the organizations from the siege.