The Paris Commune 1871

Robert Tombs

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317883845
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia francesa

The Paris Commune was the biggest and last popular revolution in western Europe - ending the cycle of revolutions that started in 1789. The Parisians, reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War set up their own revolutionary administration. Government troops eventually retook the city and took a terrible revenge: thousands died in the bloodbath that followed. The short-lived Commune and its repression cast a long shadow. It exposed deep divisions in French society and became a potent inspiration for the radical left. This stirring new study written with great zest, and a vivid sense of time and place lets the reader experience these tumultuous events at first hand and provides a comprehensive synthesis of recent research in both French and English.

CHAPTER ONE

Paris, Bivouac of the Revolution

Paris in the era of Revolutions, 1789–1871

Whatever conclusions we shall reach about the meaning of the Commune in European and even world history, our starting point is its significance as the final episode in the cycle of political conflict that centred on Paris between 14 July 1789, when the Bastille was stormed, and 28 May 1871, when, a mile and a half to the north, the last Communard combatants were killed, captured or dispersed. Contemporaries were perfectly conscious of continuities from the past. The very name ‘Commune’ echoes the revolutionary Paris city government of 1792, as that of Fédérés (commonly given to the Communard National Guards) recalls their revolutionary predecessors; keen revolutionaries in 1871 adopted the 1793 revolutionary calendar, which placed them in Year 79; and the Commune’s most open ideological split occurred over whether to set up a Committee of Public Safety inspired by that of 1793.

Paris had been a political powder-keg since the middle of the eighteenth century. First, the basic, age-old difficulty was supplying food to an outsize urban population when transport was slow and surplus agricultural production unreliable: dear bread meant trouble. This was only, and incompletely, solved in the middle of the nineteenth century by railways, commercial development and agricultural improvements: the price of bread was still in the 1860s a matter of serious concern to governments as well as consumers. Second, it was materially very difficult to maintain order among a mobile, growing and sometimes turbulent population. The civilian police force was much smaller than in London until the mid-1850s, and its back-up forces could do more harm than good: the part-time National Guard was less than wholly reliable, and to use regular troops was to risk inflaming the situation.

Third was the element that distinguished Paris from other large cities, its unique political significance. During the eight decades that followed the fall of the Bastille, Paris was the arena in which the outcome of France’s internal struggles had repeatedly been decided by fighting in the streets. There were several reasons for the capital’s primacy. Political power had been concentrated there since the king and National Assembly had been forcibly brought from Versailles in October 1789. To this was added the centralization of administration carried out by the First Republic and Napoleon I. Cultural life, including publishing, the theatre and the visual arts, was largely Parisian. It was the national information centre from which books and newspapers went out to inform and instruct la province: ‘opinion is made in Paris,’ wrote Balzac; ‘it is manufactured with ink and paper’. Paris enjoyed exceptional economic and cultural importance as France’s only very large centre of population. By 1850 it contained 1.2 million people, more than the other 14 large towns combined, and it accounted for one-quarter of the country’s total wealth.

Consequently, since 1789 it had acquired an ascendancy, paralleled in no other country, as a huge permanent constituent assembly, a collective sovereign, which claimed the right to decide in times of crisis the political destiny of the nation, as it had done in August 1792, July 1830 and February 1848 by dethroning three kings. A large part of its population over several generations had thus become aware of and actively involved in political life, often in its most dramatic forms: demonstrating, barricading streets, fighting the police and army, forcing their way into palaces and parliaments, chasing out or installing governments.

Who composed Paris’s population? Nearly two-thirds worked in industry and commerce. In the 1860s there were over 450,000 male and female manual workers, 120,000 white-collar workers, 140,000 employers (mainly self-employed master-craftsmen and shopkeepers) and 100,000 servants. In all, more than one-fifth of all French workers were concentrated in Paris.¹ It was France’s largest industrial centre, specializing in highly skilled craft manufacture (furniture, clothing, jewellery, printing, machine making), its largest permanent building site (which drew in locksmiths, masons, carpenters and labourers) and its largest commercial centre, employing an army of shopkeepers, clerks, merchants, brokers and transport workers. Economic fluctuations therefore caused bankruptcy, unemployment, hardship and discontent on a huge scale. A relatively high proportion of these small businessmen, self-employed artisans, skilled journeymen and white-collar workers were literate and politically aware, solidly organized and determined to defend their craft interests and political rights, making probably the largest concentration of political activity anywhere in the world.

It seemed clear to contemporaries – and it has been broadly confirmed by historical research – who composed the active revolutionary force in Paris: ordinary working people. Although other groups tried to get involved, usually as would-be leaders – including politicians, journalists, intellectuals, even students – the great majority of those who fought, were killed or wounded, received medals in case of success or were prosecuted in case of failure were skilled male workers in their twenties and thirties, including white-collar workers and independent craftsmen or shopkeepers. As we shall see in detail in chapter 4, this was as true in 1871 as in 1848 or 1830.

However, agreement about who the revolutionaries were did not prevent disagreement, among contemporaries and historians, as to their motives. Sympathizers saw them as naturally virtuous and patriotic fighters for liberty, uncorrupted by ‘bourgeois’ vices. Conservatives saw them as the ‘dangerous classes’, idle, drunken and criminal, always on the lookout for an excuse to plunder. Many Marxists (though not Marx) have searched for signs that they were the embryo of a new ‘proletariat’ from the most modern and large-scale industries, fighting a class war against the capitalist bourgeoisie. Republicans of the time, and republican historians since, have seen them essentially as citizens fighting for political rights, the vanguard of a historic trend towards a Republic. Social historians have tended to stress poverty, unemployment, harsh living conditions and the decline of traditional craft industry leading to class consciousness. Recent urban sociologists have focused on the effects of the sweeping urban changes of the 1860s. Some feminist historians have seen the women who played a much-noticed part in revolt at certain moments as claiming an aggressive, new and consciously political role in a previously male preserve.

There have, then, been many hypotheses to explain the high level of politicization and radicalization of the Parisian people. Before considering them further, we should discard some of the simplest, seemingly common-sense, arguments. For example, if we assume that city life, with its relative freedom from constraint and openness to ideas, somehow naturally or inevitably creates radical and republican sympathies, we would face the question of why the inhabitants of all other great industrializing cities, whether in Europe then or in the developing world today, have not been equally rebellious. If we stress the hardship of Parisian workers as a cause of their militancy, we would face the problem that they were relatively well off by the standards of their own time or even by those of Third World cities today. We are, in short, attempting to explain a very unusual, probably unique, history.

It has often been suggested that a fundamental cause of Parisian radicalism was a long-drawn-out decline in the city’s speciality, artisan industry: that capitalism, foreign competition, mechanization, commercialization and division of labour were causing a devaluation of craft skills, and a creeping ‘proletarianization’. Christopher Johnson argued this in the case of tailoring: ready-made clothing using semiskilled labour was undermining the prosperity and status of highly skilled bespoke tailors, hence their prominence in the socialist experiments of 1848.² However, this can be disputed as a general explanation of Parisian militancy. As Tony Judt and Lenard Berlanstein have pointed out, in few areas could machinery or unskilled labour replace the work of the Parisian worker elite. The traditional crafts continued to flourish, while industrialization opened up well-paid skilled occupations in new expanding industries such as engineering.³

Rather than simple decline and proletarianization, it seems likely that, within the traditional craft industries, there was an unremitting attempt to keep up with commercial competition by reorganizing, increasing productivity and cutting costs, and that this was a recurring cause of friction between large and small producers, between merchants and subcontractors, between employers and employees, and between men and women. This in its turn gave rise to tensions between the State and the various interest groups, which demanded assistance (such as wage guarantees or bans on machinery) or at least benevolent neutrality (especially by permitting workers’ organizations and strikes). The inability of governments to control economic change and satisfy the often conflicting demands of discontented groups led many workers and small businessmen into opposition to a succession of regimes, seen as at best inadequate and at worst unjust and hostile to their needs.

The very high level of skill and literacy of many of these workers, and their craft esprit de corps, buttressed by strong family and corporate traditions, strengthened their defence of their status, economic independence and collective control over their craft. This often meant political demands for cheap credit and other forms of assistance for independent craftsmen, or alternatively (not necessarily very different in practice) inspired a concept of non-authoritarian decentralized socialist ‘association’, meaning independent producers’ cooperatives regulated by workers themselves and protected by the State. This vision was most influentially expounded by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1840s and ’50s, and his influence remained strong after his death in 1865. Briefly, during the Second Republic in 1848, an attempt had been made to introduce such a system. Skilled workers’ strong sense of their own worth as citizens and ‘producers’, attachment to self-help, thirst for practical education and belief in social and scientific ‘progress’ also caused them to sympathize with democratic and, particularly from 1848 onwards, with anticlerical and radical republican politics, which expounded those same values.

Parisian radicalism was certainly intensified by economic circumstances. Rising food prices were crucial in the 1790s. Former soldiers, probably many of them out of work, were active in 1815 and 1830. Printers, their jobs threatened by new press censorship, were the first to demonstrate in 1830. Severe economic crisis in the late 1840s, blamed on the ‘bourgeois’ government’s encouragement of speculative investment, brought the overthrow of the July Monarchy in February 1848 and the proclamation of the Second Republic. Unemployed workers revolted in June 1848. These ‘June Days’, the biggest insurrection Paris had yet seen and in some ways similar (as contemporaries realized) to the Commune, broke out when the National Workshops – a large job-creation scheme with socialist overtones – were closed down by a suspicious and cash-strapped government. Thousands of workers fought, motivated by economic need and also by a sense of political betrayal. They were crushed by the army and the pro-government National Guard in the worst and bloodiest defeat of the Paris Left so far. Many hundreds were killed and 5,000 prisoners were transported to the colonies.

Economic grievances are not alone sufficient to explain popular revolt, however. None of these events were merely hunger riots. The participants were not the poorest and hungriest people. Economic grievances had to be seen as having political causes and political remedies, rather than being merely acts of God: otherwise, why blame a government for harvest failures or trade recessions? When mass revolt occurred, as in Paris in 1830 and 1848, and in Lyons in 1834 – it was always against governments seen as indifferent to the economic welfare of ordinary people, and in response to government actions seen as oppressive and unjust.

The State – its laws, its actions – was always the main catalyst of Parisian radicalism. The Revolution had abolished craft guilds and forbidden workers’ associations in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. William Sewell and Roger V. Gould have argued that corporate craft traditions nevertheless survived clandestinely, often masquerading as friendly societies. These were able to enforce closed shops, make collective agreements and organize strikes.⁴ Governments often tolerated, or were unable to prevent, this activity. But in times of economic crisis, political instability or open labour militancy, successive governments, fearing sedition and revolution, repressed workers’ organizations, arrested leaders, broke up meetings and protected strike-breakers. These repeated and often violent clashes with the State tended to push workers into opposition, and even towards revolutionary utopianism. This radicalization of workers is particularly clear in the 1830s and ’40s, when disillusioned workers in Paris and other cities such as Lyons moved from support for the new ‘citizen king’ Louis-Philippe to republicanism, Bonapartism and socialism.

Yet these circumstances, paralleled in other cities and countries, seem inadequate fully to explain Paris’s unique political history. There remains the cultural dimension: ideas, expectations, loyalties, resentments and patterns of behaviour learnt and transmitted within the Parisian population over several generations, which François Furet has summed up as ‘a tremendous over-investment in politics’.⁵ The repeated experience of revolution from 1789 onwards, far from invariably positive but on the contrary marked by frequent suffering, repression and disappointment, had nevertheless implanted the idea of the possibility of change through popular political action, and created a repertory of ideas, language, actions and symbols through which revolutionary aspirations could be expressed. No regime was regarded as legitimate or permanent. In short, Parisians knew that revolution was possible, and knew how to carry it out. Although not all Parisians, or even Parisian workers, were revolutionaries, there were always a few thousand who did support revolutionary groups, either secretly under government repression, or publicly when political life was freer, as in 1848 and the late 1860s.

Revolutionary action came to follow a familiar ritual, in the same places, with the same sequence of symbolic acts. Crowds would gather in the streets, with spontaneous speeches, marches and banners. Police and troops would sooner or later try to disperse them, often half-heartedly. Stones would be thrown, and then – often a fateful moment – shots fired. Then church bells would be tolled and drums beaten to call people to arms; bodies of victims might be paraded through the streets. There would be attacks on gunsmiths’ shops and police posts to seize arms. Barricades, from 1830 onwards the unmistakable symbol of insurrection, would be hastily thrown up using paving stones, upturned carts, trees, old furniture, ‘the people’s castoffs’, in Victor Hugo’s words, ‘that door! that grating! that awning! that doorframe! that broken stove! that cracked stewpot!’ Barricades set the scene for serious conflict, as happened in 1827, 1830, 1832, 1834, 1839, 1848, 1849, 1851 – and of course 1871. The outcome would be decided by the reaction of the army and the Paris National Guard, a part-time citizens’ militia recruited mostly among the middle classes, though expanded to include workers in times of crisis in 1814, 1830, 1848 and 1870. If the National Guard sided with the insurgents, the army and police would be unwilling, and perhaps unable, to deal with the uprising. Once the forces of order gave way, the revolutionary crowd would go on the offensive, attacking and occupying the centres and symbols of political power: the Château des Tuileries, the royal residence; the Palais Bourbon, the parliament building; and the Hôtel de Ville, seat of the Paris city government, where, at the heart of Parisian popular power, would-be leaders pr...