Voices of the Paris Commune

Mitchell Abidor

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781629631004
• eBook ISBN: 9781629631820
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations; reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action. As both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working class's three-month rule through their own prism, distant in time and space. Voices of the Paris Commune takes a different tack. In this book only those who were present in the spring of 1871, who lived through and participated in the Commune, are heard.

The Paris Commune had a vibrant press, and it is represented here by its most important newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, edited by Jules Vallès, member of the First International. Like any legitimate government, the Paris Commune held parliamentary sessions and issued daily printed reports of the heated, contentious deliberations that belie any accusation of dictatorship. Included in this collection is the transcript of the debate in the Commune, just days before its final defeat, on the establishing of a Committee of Public Safety and on the fate of the hostages held by the Commune, hostages who would ultimately be killed.

Finally, Voices of the Paris Commune contains a selection from the inquiry carried out twenty years after the event by the intellectual review La Revue Blanche, asking participants to judge the successes and failures of the Paris Commune. This section provides a fascinating range of opinions of this epochal event.

INQUIRY ON THE COMMUNE

In 1897 La Revue Blanche, one of France’s most important and influential literary journals, ran an “Inquiry on the Commune” in two of its issues asking participants the following three questions:

1. What was your role from March 18 to the end of May 1871?

2. What is your opinion of the insurrectionary movement of the Commune, and what do you think of its parliamentary, military, financial, and administrative organization?

3. In your opinion, what has been the influence of the Commune, both then and now, on events and ideas?

The following are chosen from among the dozens of participants.

HENRI ROCHEFORT¹

Q: What was your role during the Commune?

A: I simply did my duty as a journalist. I didn’t take part in the Commune. But since I clearly published my opinion of Versailles, whose conduct I found odious, I was accused of provoking the rebellion.

Q: On March 18?

A: No, later. On March 18 I was in Arcachon, so ill that my death was announced. In Arcachon I received a visit from my children, who were dressed in mourning for their father.

Q: You arrived in Paris?

A: April 2, the day, I think, of Flourens’s sortie. Le Mot d’Ordre, which I was writing for, was suppressed by Ladmirault, that old, vile brute.

Q: Can we do without the epithets?

A: No. Ladmirault was an ignoble brute, as were all the professional soldiers. I ignored the prohibition. The government had slipped away to Versailles. I energetically supported Paris’s rights. I spoke of Thiers’s odious role and his abominable lies. Naturally, all of my sympathies were with the Communal movement, which was both socialist and patriotic. The Commune was a protest against the peace of Bordeaux, a protest against the clerical and reactionary majority that dishonored us, a protest against the abuse of power of an assembly which, named to negotiate peace, had—without a mandate—declared itself constituent. But the Commune became authoritarian and suppressed the newspapers that weren’t devoted to it. Raoul Rigault and Félix Pyat suppressed newspapers; Felix Pyat in particular suppressed newspapers for his own profit. I fought for freedom and good sense, as I did all my life. Raoul Rigault suppressed Le Mot d’Ordre. The pretext was my protest against the hostage decree, or rather its execution. We followed the example given by our African generals who, in the name of the government, had taken hostages there and massacred them. Those who had applauded the massacres and razzias in Africa found the Commune’s conduct odious. I found it natural, but I didn’t want the decree executed. It was this article that later led to me being placed before a military tribunal by the Versaillais. Idiocy! Idiocy! Always the soldiers! All imbeciles. Do you know what they held against me? It’s that in the headline the word “hostages” was typed in capital letters. It’s idiotic. I approved the decree and I protested against its execution. Raoul Rigault wanted to have me arrested. I was warned of this by a young man, a secretary of Rigault’s I think.

Q: Forain?

A: No, not Forain, a member of the Commune’s police. I left. I was arrested in Meaux on the twenty-first.

Q: Was there an order against you from the Versaillais?

A: Not at all; it was from Raoul Rigault. He was an excellent man, quite intelligent. All right. But he was for the fight to the finish. He knew what the Versaillais would do, and he was right. He took no extenuating circumstances into consideration. No quarter! He had participated in my newspaper, but he was a man who would have executed his best friend. If I had been seized by the Commune there was no question what would have happened to me. But in Meaux I was taken by the Versaillais. The commander of the German subdivision wanted to allow me to leave; I remained in prison despite the Prussians. At the court-martial those brutes took no account of what I had to say. I was on the point of being executed; it was a near thing. Perhaps what saved me was Rossel’s arrest, which occurred at just that moment. He went ahead of me. The court-martial had already sentenced members of the Commune to death; it condemned Rossel to death. Perhaps they decided to take it easy on me. I spent five months in prison. After a two-day trial I was sentenced to deportation for life, which in civil matters is equivalent to the death penalty. Even worse, we were dealing with such ignorant judges that they didn’t even know that the death penalty in political matters had been abolished since 1848. Officers! I remember that in prison I was Rossel’s neighbor. I had won over our guard by sharing with him the victuals that were sent to me; he let us talk. I owe him the few good hours that I passed with the unfortunate Rossel, who they didn’t sentence to death but who they assassinated. Note that before ’48 the law punished soldiers who revolted or went over to the enemy with death. Since then the only ones punished with death were traitors: it is by virtue of this law that they killed Rossel. (M. Da Costa, who was present for the interview, observed that of three officers tried and judged by the government of the Third Republic, Rossel, Bazaine, and Dreyfus, only one was sentenced to death: Rossel.)

Rossel was assassinated. I was sentenced to deportation for life to a fortified place as leader of a gang and for inciting to revolt. Jules Simon later told me that Thiers had done all in his power to prevent me from being executed. Cissey the thief, the swindler who poisoned himself, Cissey the general, the minister of war, the supporter of Order and Religion, Cissey demanded that I be executed. In the name of the army he demanded my execution. Thiers defended me. He carried on. He cried. He said that they couldn’t put to death a former member of the government. If they executed members of the government … he … But the fact is, it appears he cried in my behalf. He didn’t even want me deported. In the end he agreed that I be imprisoned on an island outside of France. There are no islands that aren’t outside France. But in the prison prepared for me on Saint-Marguerite, Bazaine was also imprisoned. Edmond Adam showed me a letter from the director of that prison, telling him he wouldn’t be a severe host in my regard but that I would have to do picket duty. You understand that I didn’t want any kind of exceptional treatment, and I feared being a prisoner who was, so to speak, on parole. I was already thinking of escaping. In the midst of all this, on May 24 Thiers was overthrown and I was deported. It’s pointless, isn’t it, to tell you how I escaped, with Jourde, Olivier Pain, Paschal Grousset, Ballière, Granthille; how I lived in London, in Geneva, and finally my return …

Q: Your triumphal return. And your opinion of the Commune?

A: As the Empire had fallen, we believed in the republic. When we ended up with an Assembly even more clerical and reactionary than the preceding ones, we revolted. The majority had exasperated me, and that’s why I tendered my resignation in Bordeaux. The Parisians had had enough. The Commune was the explosion of duped and betrayed republican sentiments. Thiers admitted it: the insurrection was produced by the exasperation of disappointed patriotism. Governments rarely change, and they continue to exasperate the governed.

(Going on to talk about Greece, M. Rochefort shows us a statuette that the Greeks just sent him, and ingeniously explains to us what a Tanagra is.)

Q: But the Commune, your opinion?

A: The Commune, quite simply, is the only honest government there has been in France since Pharamond. The rulers earned fifteen francs a day. Since then they cost us a bit more. I was with them when I was deported. Not a single one of these men had a sou.

Q: But these honest men, do you think that they were able, were well inspired?

A: It depends. There were moderates and extremists. Naturally, it was the extremists who were right. When you want to act you can’t take half measures, or else … Look, the Greeks are hardly anything compared to France, but if they remain boastful up to the bitter end, they’ll likely win out over all the powers.

Q: The administration?

A: I know very little about it.

Q: And the influence of the Commune?

A: Enormous. The massacres by the Versaillais have forever discredited bourgeois society. And then the Commune saved the republic.

Q: That we have.

A: I don’t want to say anything. Nevertheless, it remains the example.

PASCHAL GROUSSET²

Member of the Commune, during the Commune, delegate for external relations, currently deputy

It’s not only a chapter of my life story that you are asking about, it’s a whole volume. The volume is written but will only come out after my death. Let it sleep. In a few words, here are my feelings about March 18.

It’s hardly necessary to affirm that two million men don’t rise up without reason, don’t fight for nine weeks and don’t leave thirty-five thousand corpses on the streets without having good reasons.

For many, these reasons were the result of the long suffering which is the life of seven eighths of a so-called civilized nation. For others they were principally born of anger born of the siege, of a great effort made sterile through official incompetence, of the shame of the capitulation, and also by an agreement made easier by the coming together of civic forces. For most people the dominant idea, the main idea, was the primordial need to defend the republic, directly attacked by a clerical and royalist Assembly.

The republic of our dreams was assuredly not the one we have. We wanted it to be democratic and social, not plutocratic. We wanted to make it a precision instrument of economic transformation. For us, republic was synonymous with regeneration. Amid the smoking ruins of the fatherland it seemed to us necessary and right to completely disqualify the men and institutions who had caused these ruins. We needed new schools, a new morality, and new guides. Work for all, education for all, national defense for all, unshakeable confidence in the destiny of our race: these were the slogans that spontaneously rose from the heart of a bloodied Paris and which in its eyes was embodied by the republic.

The siege left us militarily organized; this is why our revolution was both military and civil. The ruling classes had just given the measure of their criminal incapacity. This is why our revolution was proletarian and marks the pivotal fact of modern times, which is the direct access of the workers to the mysteries of power.

As for the Commune, for us as for those of 1792, it was the chance and provisional organism that is born at moments of crisis to take social evolution in hand and to lead it to its goal.

You already know how the struggle was engaged and what its course was. Thanks to the complicity of Germany, which purposely turned its three hundred thousand prisoners over to the Assembly at Versailles, Paris fell before numbers. But at least, by its heroic effort it gave republican France the time to take itself in hand. Formal commitments were made by Thiers with the delegates of the major, frightened cities. When the blood was washed from our streets it was discovered that Paris’s program was the only practical one.

It is thus that from our holocaust, from our pain, from the tears of our mothers, that the republican pact was solidified. In the meanwhile, the municipal law was voted. On this point as well Paris won the day.

As for the economic transformation, it was put off for a quarter century. But who today would dare to say that it has not remained inevitable? Poverty grows along with mechanical progress. In this beautiful France, thousands of arms have nothing to do. The malaise of every class is betrayed by symptoms that are more obvious with each passing day. The impotence of old formulas, the incoherence of institutions and acts is clear for all to see. The hour is approaching when on this point too the program of March 18 will impose itself by the force of circumstances. For we who wanted to advance it this hour will be that of historic justice.

ÉDOUARD VAILLANT³

Member of the Commune, currently deputy

Without being as clear about it as I am now, I was nevertheless convinced from the beginning of the revolution of March 18, that there should be only one dominant preoccupation and goal: the fight against Versailles. To be or not to be—for the Commune that was the whole question. The facts, the circumstances had posed things in this way. If not to win, it had at least to last. However important it was to make manifest its revolutionary socialist character by all possible acts, nothing could better affirm this character than its very existence, its resistance. It was that and the rage, the fury of capitalism’s reaction; the coalesced efforts against Paris of Versailles and Bismarck.

Those who during the siege had participated in the agitation, in the revolutionary socialist action concentrated at the Corderie, seat of the Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and who, at the cry of “Vive la Commune!” had attacked the Hôtel de Ville on October 8, penetrated it on October 31, and on January 22 had attempted, for the defense of the republic and for the revolution, to seize power, these people were not in a state of uncertainty. Throughout the siege they had seen the revolution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Timeline of the Civil War in France
• Jules Vallès
• Debate in the Commune on the Hostages and the Committee of Public Safety
• Inquiry on the Commune