The Paris Commune and the Versailles government begin to diverge

Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1995), pp.210-213.

In his biography of the writer Emile Zola, Frederick Brown describes the tensions that began to develop from the radical Paris Commune that was increasingly controlled by the poor classes in the city who had suffered particularly badly during the siege of the city and the conservative provisional government that was still working to create the new Third Republic in Versailles on the outskirts of the capital. The Versailles conservatives wanted to return the economy back to normal as soon as possible and were willing to give the Germans everything that they were asking for, whereas the Communards felt that those who had suffered the most in the last months of the war should continue to be supported and that the resistance against the German demands should continue.
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Versailles conveyed a political message that alarmed republicans, but of greater immediate consequence was the Assembly's decision to end two moratoria that had alleviated the suffering of trapped and unem­ployed Parisians since September  1870, one suspending payment due on promissory notes, the other deferring house rent. It could not have behaved  more  callously. When,  impoverished  by  siege,  Paris  most needed  a helping hand, rural France showed her  a mailed  fist, and survivors of Prussian cannon fire now found themselves condemned to bankruptcy, eviction, or both. "Very bravely but not with impunity had  the  Parisians  suffered  . . . the  privations  and  emotions  of  the siege," wrote the Vicomte de Meaux, a prominent  royalist. "At first we provincials couldn't reason with them. It seemed as if we did not even speak the same language and that they were prey to a kind of sickness, what we called 'fortress' fever." Like Monsieur de Meaux, who saw patriarchal order threatened by wild-eyed savaes, many oth­ erwise humane legislators did not let their humanity hinder them from abolishing the small stipend that fed National Guards or authorizing the State Pawnshop to sell material deposited during the siege. These callous measures, which promised  further misery to several hundred thousand inhabitants of an economic wasteland , alienated the capital en masse. Debt-encumbered  shopkeepers, idle workers,  and artisans with tools in hock made common cause against an enemy all the more vengeful for being  French. Indeed, German soldiers camped  outside Paris became mere spectators as hatred of the foreigner turned inward. To be sure, the legislature might not have been quite so stiff-necked had Paris not challenged its authority. After the elections of February 8, republicans in Paris presumed that the Assembly's provincial dep­ uties  would  restore  monarchical  government,  and  their  indignation voiced itself through the National Guard, which emerged as a quasi­political organism when on February 24 delegates from some two hun­ dred National Guard battalions ratified statutes of federation. Swearing never to surrender arms or to recognize any commander-in-chief chosen by Thiers, this counter-Assembly held a kind of revival meeting at the Place  de la  Bastille, where beneath  the  monument  lay workers killed exactly twenty-three years earlier, on February 24, 1848. Orators harangued  large  crowds  and  for  three  days  National  Guard  bands played  martial music, lowering their banners as they trooped past a Liberty draped in red cloth. Army regulars joined  them, along with several thousand Parisian mobiles, who then sought to rally sailors at the naval barracks across town.

The authorities felt helpless in the whirlwind of what soon became a full-scale revolt. Policemen avoided working-class districts, where some been set upon violently. A mob forced the warden of  Sainte­ Pelagie to free demonstrators interned since January, and another raided the Gobelins police barracks for its stock of chassepot rifles. Pillaging spread throughout the city, which armed itself against inva­ sion. Until Bismarck agreed not to occupy Paris, National Guards kept close watch at artillery parks situated on Montmartre and Belleville, ready to fire away, and rumors of a Prussian entry were announced by drummers beating rappels. Drums beat everywhere. But less ominous sounds also rent the air during this monthlong interregnum. Vendors appeared in their thousands as Paris came to resemble a huge kermis, half festive and half bellicose. "At one end of the square in front of City Hall, on the river side, besotted National Guards wearing immor­ telles in their buttonholes march to a tambour and salute the old mon­ ument with the cry of 'Vive la Republique,' " noted Edmond de Goncourt two days before the Bordeaux Assembly ratified treaty terms. "Along the rue de Rivoli, every imaginable product may be found displayed on the sidewalk, while vehicles transport death and replenishment in the street: hearses cross wagons laden with dried codfish.

Adolphe Thiers rode up from Bordeaux in high dudgeon, and his reappearance was a spark to tinder. Although this eloquent Provenc;:al had fought hard against Napoleon III, working-class Frenchmen hated him for sins older than the Second Empire: he still bore the nickname "Pere Transnonain" almost forty years after the "massacre of the rue Transnonain," when as Louis Philippe's interior minister he had or­ dered General Bugeaud to crush striking Lyonnais silk workers. People had also not forgotten his denunciation of the "vile multitude" in June 1848, when yet another massacre took place, nor his advocacy of an electoral law with residence requirements calculated to disenfranchise some two hundred thousand Parisians. Thiers may have shrunk since then, but the little man who had written volumes about Napoleon I had yielded nothing of his belief in the sacredness of private property. All five feet of him argued a political vision that impeached the nomad, the immigrant, the socialist, the crowd. "We have always desired free­ dom," he once proclaimed. "Not the freedom of factions  but  that which shelters affairs of state from the twofold influence of Courts and of Streets."

Far from seeking to assuage the National Guard or the Central Committee it elected midway through March, Thiers resolved  to  sweep aside this mutinous group with a coup de main and subjugate Paris before the Assembly reconvened in Versailles. His chief objective was the gun park atop Montmartre, where 171 cannon made a formidable battery. Early on the morning of March 18, General Paturel cordoned off lower Montmartre between Clichy and Pigalle, as troops led by General Lecomte marched south  from  Clignancourt.  The  operation ran smoothly until they seized the guns.  It then  became  clear  that since they were without equipment to transport heavy artillery down­ hill nothing had been accomplished, and time spent in summoning horse teams proved fatal. At dawn Montmartre was still asleep, but two hours later the army found itself marooned in a sea of villagers, among whom women greatly outnumbered men. "By the time a column of National Guards arrived the essential distance between troops and citizens had become  gravely compromised," writes one historian.

Two National Guard officers stepped forward to parley with the line. The rest of the Guards and the soldiers who had already joined with them raised the butts of command. Women from the crowd thrust themselves between the two groups, shouting to the troops, "Will you fire on us? On your brothers? Our husband s? Our children?" Four times Lecomte vainly ordered his men to fire. In this expectant silence warrant officer Verdaguer called on his fellow soldiers to ground their arms and the crowd surged forward to embrace the troops, crying "Long live the line." The gendarmes were overrun and disarmed before they could fire, the officers were pulled off their horses and Lecomte himself was seized. By nine in the morning it was all over.

 Neither the National Guard nor Montmartre's mayor, Georges Clemenceau, could control the mob, which vented its rage on Lecomte and on a retired general named Clement Thomas, whom curiosity had drawn to the Boulevard de Clichy. "Everyone was shrieking like wild beasts, without realizing what they were doing," Clemenceau re­ counted. "I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust." The bodies of both generals were found at night­ fall riddled with bullets.

For Thiers, reports of troops breaking ranks all over town brought back memories of February 1848. On that occasion he had urged King Louis Philippe to leave Paris and recapture it from without. Louis Philippe had rejected his advice, but now God alone stood above Thiers. No sooner had he beaten a retreat than he issued general evac­ uation orders, spurning colleagues who felt that the army should en­ trench itself at the Ecole Militaire or in the Bois de Boulogne. Forty thousand men were thus marched out of Paris, never to serve again. Up from the provinces came fresh recruits "uncontaminated" by the capital, and before long 100,000 men occupied camps around Ver­ sailles. The day of reckoning was imminent, Thiers proclaimed on March 20, reassuring not only antirevolutionary Parisians stranded in a hostile environment but Bismarck as well, whose patience with quar­ relsome Frenchmen had worn thin. Forty-eight hours later, Versailles took over where Germany had left off several months earlier, after the armistice. It declared Paris under siege once again.

Adolf Thiers and the Provisional Government that was Engaged in Creating the Third Republic at Versailles

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