Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
By the beginning of the 1870s the new capitalist order was well on its way to global domination. It reigned supreme in the US and through most of western Europe—and these in turn were dictating terms to the rest of the world. Even the Russian tsar had felt compelled to end serfdom in 1861, although he gave half the land to the old feudal class and left the peasantry very much at its mercy. Everywhere the world was being turned upside down.
But events in Paris soon showed that the turning did not need to cease once capitalism was on top. Marx and Engels had written in T
he Communist Manifesto
that ‘the bourgeoisie produces its own gravedigger’. On 18 March 1871 the French bourgeoisie discovered how true this could be.
Four years earlier Louis Napoleon had displayed the splendour of his empire to the monarchs of Europe in a ‘Great Exhibition’, centred on a vast elliptical glass building 482 metres long, with a dome so high ‘that one had to use a machine to reach it’.
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He seemed to have something to celebrate. France had undergone enormous capitalist development since he had overthrown the republic in 1851. Industrial production had doubled as modern industries had grown, and old handicraft production had fallen more than ever under the control of putting-out capitalists who treated the workers much as they would in a factory.
But the emperor’s own power was not as secure as it appeared. It depended on a balancing act. He played rival groups in the ruling class off against one another, and tried to bolster his postion by emulating the exploits of the first Napoleon through military adventures in Italy and Mexico (where he attempted to impose a French nominee, Maximilian, as emperor). None of this could prevent the growth of opposition to his rule. Sections of the bourgeoisie turned bitter as speculation damaged them and filled the pockets of a coterie of financiers close to the emperor. The adventure in Mexico turned into a debacle as Maximilian was executed by a firing squad. Parisian workers, who remembered the massacres of 1848, hated the regime as the cost of living rose ahead of wages. Louis Bonaparte’s own leading official, Haussmann, noted that over the half the population of Paris lived in ‘poverty verging on destitution’ even though they laboured 11 hours a day.
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By 1869 the republican opposition was sweeping the board in elections in Paris and other big cities. Then in July 1870 Louis Bonaparte allowed the Prussian leader Bismarck to provoke him into declaring war.
The French forces suffered a devastating defeat at the battle of Sedan. Louis Bonaparte was completely discredited, and abdicated. Power fell into the hands of the bourgeois republican opposition. But the Prussian army was soon besieging Paris, and Bismarck insisted on punitive terms—a huge financial payment and the handing of French Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia.
Paris held out through five months of siege in conditions of incredible hardship, with people forced to eat dogs and rats to survive, without fuel to warm their homes in sub-zero temperatures. The workers, artisans and their families bore the brunt of the suffering as prices soared.
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They also bore the brunt of defending the city. They poured into the National Guard, raising its size to 350,000—and, by electing their own officers, they did away with its middle class character. Their resistance was soon worrying the republican government as much as the Prussians were. The descendants of the
sans-culottes
of 1792, the children of the fighters of 1848, were armed again. ‘Red’ clubs and revolutionary newspapers flourished, reminding the workers and artisans of how the bourgeois republicans had treated them in 1848. As Karl Marx wrote, ‘Paris armed was the revolution armed.’
The republican government had succeeded in putting down one left wing attempt to overthrow it on 31 October. It just managed to beat back another on 22 January, using regular troops from Brittany to shoot a crowd from the working class area of Belleville. It was terrified it would not succeed next time. The vice-president, Favre, saw ‘civil war only a few yards away, famine a few hours’,
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and decided there was only one way to protect his government. On the night of 23 January he secretly crossed the Prussian lines to discuss terms for a French surrender.
The news caused anger among the poor of Paris. They had suffered for five months for nothing. Then the republican government called elections, at a mere eight days notice, to confirm the decision to surrender. As in 1848, the Paris left had no time to campaign in the rural constituencies where the great bulk of the electorate still lived, and priests and rich landowners were able to exercise a decisive influence over the vote. Of the 675 deputies returned, 400 were monarchists. The bitterness in Paris grew greater still. The betrayal of the siege was being followed by the betrayal of the republic. Then came a third betrayal, the appointment as head of government of 71 year old August Thiers. He now claimed to be a ‘moderate republican’, but he had first made his name by crushing a republican rising in 1834.
For the moment the Parisian masses kept their arms, while the regular army was disbanded under the terms of the agreement with the Prussians. What is more, large numbers of the affluent middle classes took the opportunity to get away from Paris, leaving the National Guard more than ever as a working class body.
Thiers knew a clash with the Parisian masses was inevitable. He recognised they controlled the arms of the National Guard, including 200 cannon, and sent regular soldiers to seize these from the heights of Montmartre. While the soldiers were waiting for horses to move the guns, local people began to argue with them. As Lissagaray recounts, ‘The women…did not wait for the men. They surrounded the machine guns, saying, “This is shameful, what are you doing?”’
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While the soldiers stood, not knowing how to react, a group of 300 National Guards marched past, sounding drums to rouse the population to resistance. As National Guards, women and children surrounded the soldiers, one of the generals, Lecomte, three times gave an order to shoot at the crowd. ‘His men stood still. The crowd advanced, fraternised with them, and Lecomte and his officers were arrested’.
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By three in the afternoon of that day, 18 March, Thiers and his government had fled the capital. One of the world’s great cities was in the hands of armed workers, and this time they were not going to hand it over to a group of middle class politicians.
A new sort of power
The armed masses exercised power at first through the elected leaders of the National Guard—its ‘central committee’. But these were determined not to do anything which could be construed as heading a dictatorship. They organised elections for a new elected body, the Commune, based on universal male suffrage in each locality. Unlike normal parliamentary representatives, those elected were to be subject to immediate recall by their electors and to receive no more than the average wage of a skilled worker. What is more, the elected representatives would not simply pass laws which a hierarchy of highly paid bureaucratic officials would be expected to implement, they were to make sure their own measures were put into effect.
In effect, as Karl Marx pointed out in his defence of the Commune,
The Civil War in France
, they dismantled the old state and replaced it with a new structure of their own, more democratic than any since the rise of class society:
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in communes…The Communal constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging up, the free movement of society…
Its real secret was this. It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the political emancipation of labour.
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Marx noted that, as the representative of the city’s working people, the Commune set about implementing measures in their interests—banning night work in bakeries and the employers’ imposition of fines on employees, handing over to associations of workers any workshops or factories shut down by their owners, providing pensions for widows and free education for every child, and stopping the collection of debts incurred during the siege and eviction for non-payment of rent. The Commune also showed its internationalism by tearing down monuments to militarism and appointing a German worker as its minister of labour.
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It had no chance to show what further measures might be carried out by a workers’ government. For the republican government immediately began organising armed forces to suppress it, and worked with its Prussian ‘enemy’ to do so. It persuaded Bismarck to release French prisoners of war captured the autumn before and untouched by the ferment of ideas in Paris. It gathered them in Versailles, together with new recruits from the countryside, under officers with barely disguised royalist sympathies. By the end of April Thiers had Paris surrounded by an army dedicated to crushing the Commune, and an agreement from Bismarck to allow it to pass through Prussian lines. The Commune faced overwhelming odds. It also faced another problem. Its elected representatives were heroically dedicated to their cause. But they lacked a political understanding of how to respond to the forces gathering against them.
Two major political currents had developed within the workers’ movement in France since the 1830s. First, there was the current associated with August Blanqui. It conceived of the workers’ struggle as a more radical, more socially conscious version of the Jacobinism of 1793. It stressed the role of a highly organised conspiratorial minority acting on behalf of the working class. So Blanqui’s life had been marked by a succession of heroic attempts at insurrection when the mass of workers were not ready for it, followed by long spells in prison while workers took action without him (including imprisonment by the republican government throughout the Commune). The second current grew out of the social teachings of Proudhon. There was a bitter reaction against the experience of Jacobinism by his followers and a rejection of political action. They argued that workers could solve their problems through ‘mutualism’—associations which could set up cooperative businesses—without worrying about the state.
Marx saw both approaches as dangerously inadequate. He had no doubt that workers should learn from the experience of the Great French Revolution, but he believed they had to go far beyond it. There had to be decisive political action, as the Blanquists argued, but it had to be based on organised mass activity, not on heroic actions by small groups. There had to be economic reorganisation of production as the Proudhonists argued, but it could not occur without political revolution. However, Marx was not in a position to influence events in Paris. There were people in the Commune such as the Blanquist Vaillant who were prepared to collaborate with Marx, but there were none who fully accepted his ideas. Both the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Commune were composed not of Marxists, but of Blanquists and Proudhonists—and their decision-making suffered from the deficiencies of both traditions.
The republican government had virtually no forces at its disposal at the time of its flight from Paris on 18 March. It would have been possible for the National Guard to march on Versailles at that point and disperse its forces almost without firing a shot. But the ‘non-political’ Proudhonist tradition led the Commune to spend its time passing fine resolutions while leaving Thiers free to gather troops. When Thiers showed his aggressive intent by beginning to shell Paris on 2 April, they did call for a march on Versailles. But they made no serious preparations for it, sending the National Guard off without proper organisation and lacking the cannon to reply to artillery attacks from the other side. They handed the still weak forces in Versailles an unnecessary victory, and ended all chance of dispersing them easily.
They made a parallel mistake inside Paris itself. The whole of the country’s gold was in the vaults of the Bank of France. The Commune could have seized it, denying funds to Thiers and asserting its own mastery over the country’s economy. But neither the Blanquist nor the Proudhonist tradition allowed for such an assault on the ‘rights of property’. As a result, things were much easier for Thiers than they need have been.
The revenge of the bourgeosie
Thiers took the opportunity to build up an enormous army. It began to bombard the city systematically from forts on the outskirts, defeating the Communard forces in a series of skirmishes, and then broke through into the city itself on 21 May. If Thiers expected an easy conquest, he was to be disappointed. The workers of Paris fought street by street, block by block, building by building. It took Thiers’ troops a week to drive them back from the affluent western part of the city through the centre to the Commune’s stronghold in the east, crushing the last resistance early in the morning on Whit Sunday.
The defeat of the Commune was followed by an orgy of violence almost without precedent in modern times. The bourgeois paper
Le Figaro
boasted, ‘Never has such an opportunity presented itself for curing Paris of the moral gangrene that has been consuming it for the past 25 years’.
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The victorious commanders of the Versailles troops seized the opportunity.
Anyone who had fought for the Commune was shot on the spot—1,900 people between Whit Sunday morning and Whit Monday morning alone (more in one day than in Paris during the whole of the ‘Great Terror’ of 1793-94). Troops patrolled the streets picking up poorer people at will and condemning many to death after 30 second trials because they looked like Communards. A preacher told of witnessing the execution of 25 women accused of pouring boiling water over advancing troops. The London
Times
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