The Commune Becomes More Radical

Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1995), pp.217-218.

Communards were spoiling for Armageddon as fervently as right-wing deputies [of the Provisonal Government at Versailles]. A movement whose initial goal had been municipal independence soon consecrated the rift between the ancien regime and the new order. "The communal revolution . . . inaugurates a new era of scientific, positive , experimental politics," the Commune proclaimed on April 19 in a manifesto: "It's the end of the old governmental and clerical world, of militarism, of bureaucracy, of exploitation, of speculation, of monopolies, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude and the nation its disasters. May this great, beloved fatherland deceived by lies and calumnies reassure itself! The struggle between Paris and Versailles is of a kind that cannot end in illusory compromises: the outcome will be unambiguous. Victory pursued with irrepressible energy by the National Guards, is our aim and our due. We appeal to France!"

Throughout April, decrees rained thick and fast. Rent unpaid since October 1870 was canceled. The grace period on overdue bills was extended three years. Night work for bakery workers was made illegal. A Labor and Exchange Commission authorized producers' cooperatives, of which forty-three had come into existence by May 14, to take over deserted ateliers. Mortmain property [that owned by the Church] was nationalized when church was separated from state. And anticlericalism fostered secular education. "Religious or dogmatic instruction should . . . immediately and radically be suppressed, for both sexes, in all schools and establishments supported by the taxpayer," demanded Education Nouvelle, a group whose leader subsequently helped individual school districts reform their curricula. "Further, liturgical objects and religious images should be removed from public view. Neither prayers, nor dogma, nor anything that pertains to the individual conscience should be taught or practiced in common. Only one method should hold sway, the experimental or scientific, which is based upon the observation of facts, whatever their nature -- physical, moral, intellectual." As priests and nuns were, of course, religious images incarnate, most removed themselves from the classroom (except in western Paris, where wealth defended tradition), forcing Edouard Vaillant, the Commune's commissioner of education, to open a recruitment center for teachers, or soi-disant [so-called] teachers, at City Hall.

Little newspapers (some, like Le  Père  Duchesne, with names that evoked the first  Revolution) multiplied as fast as cooperatives, but many big ones vanished overnight, for the Commune, despite its professed libertarianism, brooked no opposition from the bourgeois press. Freedom stopped where treason began, and treason began wherever an editor fought shy of direct democracy. First to disappear were Le Figaro  and Le  Gaulois. On April  14 the Comité de Sûreté Générale [the Committee on General Security] had Paris-Journal, Le Journal des débats, Le Constitutionnel, and La Liberté close shop. Two weeks later another purge silenced La Cloche Le  Soir, Le Bien public,  and L'Opinion  nationale, with the Sûreté explaining how dangerous it would be to countenance, in besieged Paris "newspapers that  openly preach civil war, give the  enemy strategic information, and calumniate defenders of the Republic."  Paranoia took command as Versailles crept closer, and on May 5, when La Petite Presse, Le Petit Journal, and Le Temps followed their brethren to the scaffold, they were dubbed "the most active auxiliaries of the enemies of Paris and the Republic."