The Commune
Divided
and leaderless, the French generals were strung
along by Bismarck until their defeat became humiliation.
In Paris, the parliamentarian Léon Gambetta attempted to take control of national defence. He fled the besieged capital by hot air balloon in October 1870, landing in Tours on the Loire. Swiftly he assembled a substantial army, but was unable to lead it close enough to Paris to lift the siege. Despite a few small-scale successes, his troops weakened while the Prussian occupation became more secure.
The Prussian headquarters was Versailles, 25 km southwest of Paris. They ranged their troops about 10 km from the walls of the capital and waited. A few heroic French sorties from the besieged city ended in failure – the Parisian forces were mostly conscripts and volunteers, a militia with few trained military men.
A severe winter soon set in. In the capital, rationing was introduced – but too late. Inflation exploded. The population resorted to eating wild and feral animals. Zoo creatures were butchered and sold – elephant's foot, tiger brawn. Deprived of work and wages by the siege, the poorest suffered most. Revolutionary clubs sprang up, brandishing the memory of 1789 when the first post-monarchy government was called the Commune de Paris. Towards the end of January, while the Prussians bombarded the city with their artillery, demonstrations erupted and were repressed by force of arms.
Adolphe Thiers, the head of the French government, was concerned enough to send troops to seize the artillery position at Montmartre from the city militia. They failed as, on the morning of 18 March, local people fraternised with the troops and persuaded them to side with the parisiens.
Barricades were built in the streets and two French generals were shot. (One of them had commanded a murderous assault on revolutionary Paris in 1848.) The government finally fled to Versailles, accompanied – so Thiers claimed – by around 100,000 mainly middle-class Parisians.
In the capital, the remaining population organised elections to the new Commune de Paris. The assembly seems to have been representative: 25 workers, 12 artisans, 6 shopkeepers, 4 office workers, 3 lawyers, 3 doctors, 2 painters, a chemist, a vet, an engineer, an architect. The increasing importance of the popular press was reflected in the election of 12 journalists.
The assembly quickly divided into an authoritarian majority and a more liberal minority. More elections were held, vivid with public debate. Ceremonies and celebrations animated the public buildings. In mid-April, Thiers' house was destroyed. The Vendôme Column – a symbol of imperial tyranny topped with a statue of Napoléon and dressed with bronze bas-reliefs cast from cannon captured from Russian and Austrian armies – was toppled and destroyed.
The Commune banned night work in the boulangeries and placed the abandoned workshops of the commercial middle classes in the hands of cooperatives. Laws of arrest and detention were reformed, technical and vocational schools were set up and free, secular education was offered in northeast Paris.
Meanwhile, outside the blockaded walls, a strange coalition was forming. According to the treaty of surrender, only 40,000 French troops were allowed in the Paris region. But Bismarck released 60,000 French prisoners of war and allowed them to join up with Thiers' meagre army of 12,000 or so.
Now the radical government of the Commune would face a twin siege – the Prussian guns and a French government army bent on re-establishing the rule of the ruling class.
