V.6. AN OMEN AND A TURNING POINT

MENU: 5.6. An omen and a turning point

SEQUELS 

The Cry of the People, graphic novel by Jacques Tardi (Castermann, 2001-4), after the novel by Jean Vautrin, 2001

In brief

• A foretaste of genocide

• Toward the 20th century

*     *     * 

Next,
A foretaste of genocide

A FORETASTE OF GENOCIDE

A QUASI-LEGAL VIOLENCE 

Improvised courts and firing squads, wherever fighting takes place: an estimated 20, plus the important ones at Châtelet and the Luxembourg.

Internet, no source named

The family head stands quietly, arms folded, a posture that many take up and that Versaillais mention with grudging admiration.

Firing Squad, the Mur des Fédérés, May 28 1871, by E. Bousseau / zoom

"We shot about 40 of those creeps ["canaille," bold in the text.] They all died as soldiers. Some folded their arms and held their heads high. Others opened their tunics and cried, 'Fire!' " 

-- Lissagary citing 

"One of the most violent journals of the Belgian bourgeois against the Commune, l'Etoile,"

and other eye-witness accounts from that and similar sources.: Appendix XXVIII

Dehumanized victims

"All great cities have cages for lions [...] when they are opened the hyenas of '93* and the gorillas of the Commune burst out."

-- Théophile Gautier, a point of view interminably repeated.

*The leaders of the Revolution who sent 2000 people to the guillotine.

Individual responsibility weakened

Killings are organized in phases — arrest, escort to prison, judgement, firing squad. Soldiers may not know the outcome, or tell themselves they don't.

Stoicism 

Victims wait in line to be shot.

  

Merry music as background

When the shootings move toward the eastern frontier, soldiers and victims hear polkas played by Prussian orchestras.

-- Vuillaume, My Red Notebooks: the Hostages of rue Haxo (in French)

Nazi death squads in Eastern Europe make local accordionists play as they shoot.

--  The Einsatzgruppen, documentary on RML (French television), October 2, 2017

Denunciations 

For bounties of 500 francs for information that leads to the capture of a member of the Central Committee or the Commune, and innumerable letters for one's own goals.

-- Louise Michel

"Solid citizens, having taken over, formed purification tribunals in their districts and had their rivals, their creditors, arrested as Communards [...]. The Commune had rejected denunciations, while the police now kept an open register. The avalanche of letters came to 399 823, the official figure, of which 20 at most were signed."

-- Lissagary.
In occupied France the Gestapo received more denunciations than it could follow
(commentary on the The Crow by Henri Clouzot, 1943, Arte, October 18 2019.
(A "crow" was a person who denounced anonymously.)

Transport to prisons in cattle trains, so crowded that prisoners die  

-- Lissagary citing a letter from the geographer Elysée Reclus
Appendix XLVII

The first concentration camp

(At Satory, next to Versailles)

Claretie

"The Prisoners at Versailles — the Roll Call"

Striped pajamas are all that's missing.

*    *    *

Next,
Toward the 20th century

TOWARD THE 20TH CENTURY

THE MASSACRES SHOW THAT REVOLT MUST CEDE TO UNIONS AND STRIKES 

In France,

the terrible repression of La Commune

brings the end of insurrections

and the start of the struggle

between capital and labor,

more deeply and bitterly than elsewhere.

End of this section.

*      *     * 

Next section,

Vl.

The 13th, a Communard bastion transformed

V.1.5. FRATERNITY THAT WORKED

MENU: 5.1.5. Fraternity that worked

IN MOBILIZING THE POOR AND SURMOUNTING EXTRAORDINARY HANDICAPS, COMMUNARDS LEAVE AN EXAMPLE TO PONDER 

They had flaws and made mistakes, but defeat came from the 100,000 p.o.w.s that Bismarck released.

The Barricade at rue Blanche Defended by Women, unsigned, no date / zoom

Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited at any of the times I was there.

In brief

• Parias take charge of their lives

• Leaders we wish we had

• La Commune creates the framework of an egalitarian society

• A rooted memory

• "Friends of the Paris Commune"

*     *     *

Next,

Parias take charge of their lives

PARIAS TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR LIVES

PEOPLE WHO USUALLY STAY ON THE SIDELINES 

MOBILIZE FOR LA COMMUNE 

 The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, 1844

Those tipplers don't organize. As former peasants,

the city seems incomprehensible.

• They feel powerless, dependent and inferior. 

• Palliatives are sociability and living in the present, especially at the tavern.

•  A sense of honor can replace the lack of material goods, and demanding reparation for slights satisfy the ego.

-- The Culture of Poverty by Jeffrey Kaplow, in "The names of kings," 1972: 

Eighteenth-century factors that stay relevant.

• Memories of peasant revolts lead to participating in short-term revolts, not long-term organization.

• But:

• Notorious barflies fight on the barricades: "There's hardly time for a drink at the bar."

-- Vallès

•  Women of modest origin join in. Here an underclass woman contests a middle-class orator. Another exhorts a baby-holding mom:

A Meeting at the Women's Club at the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois by Frédéric Lix  (" Le Monde illustré," May 20, 1871), zoom /  Musée Carnavalet, not  exhibited at the time of my visits. 

• When Belleville's last barricade falls Jules Vallès flees, but no one dares hide him. He comes upon "a canteen lady, in full uniform, a superb creature of 25 with an hourglass figure in her bodice of dark blue. 'I have 15 wounded. You will pass as their doctor.'" She wraps a makes him an omelet, white apron around him, gives him her cart and he escapes.

For more of that story, please click.

Excellent series of Guard photos

• A father enrolls the last of his sons: "I offer him wholeheartedly to the republican fatherland [...] place him in the battalion of your choice and you will make me extremely happy." 

-- Lissagary, citing a letter of a guard of the 13th district,
whose four older sons are fighting already: Appendice IV
Other sources show similar statements.

An irrefutable sign of engagement: Though half the police leave for Versailles and streets are less lighted, there is very little crime.*

-- As remarked by the Reverend William Gibson of the Methodist Mission

and as other American witness confirm (though most oppose the Commune),

 Paris Babylon and the Story of the Paris Commune by Rupert Christiansen, 1994

* To be sure, there would be fewer pickpockets in the absence of the wealthy who leave after the siege. But that does not explain the absence of burglaries (on the contrary) or of violent crime.

. 

Efficient working-class defense

 comes with discipline, camaraderie

and confrontation with the boss,

that is, with industrialization.  

But the poor of La Commune
organize spontaneously a generation before 
tangible conditions encourage them to.

*     *     * 

Next,

Leaders we wish we had 

LEADERS WE WISH WE HAD

IT'S SAID THAT VERY FEW PEOPLE VOLUNTARILY CEDE POWER: BUT THE MEMBERS OF THE GUARDS' CENTRAL COMMITTEE* DID DO SO

*It filled the vacuum when the government fled after March 18.

The proclamation that begins, "Citizens, our mission is over," ends with, "We are sure that if you heed these observations you will finally inaugurate genuine popular representation, you will find representatives who will never think themselves your masters."  

"CITIZENS,

Our mission is over; we will hand over your City Hall to your newly elected representatives.

Helped by your patience and support, we have correctly finished the difficult work taken up in your name. Thank you; solidarity is a vain word no longer: the Republic is assured.  

If our counsel can influence your decisions, let your most zealous servants express what they await from today's vote. 

CITIZENS,

Do not forget that the men who will serve you best are those you choose among yourselves, living your life, suffering from the same difficulties.

Be as aware of the ambitious as of the parvenus; both will think only of their own interest and will always think themselves indispensable.  

Watch out also for those who like to talk and are incapable of action; they will sacrifice everything to an oratorical effect or a smart phrase. — Avoid as well those whom fortune has favored too much, for he who possesses a fortune is rarely ready to view the worker as a brother. .

Finally, seek men who are sincere, men of the People, resolute, active, who go straight and whose honesty is recognized. — Favor those who are not looking for your vote; genuine merit is modest, and it is up to the voters to choose their men, not to them to present themselves. 

The ending is given at the start.  

-- The National Guard Central Committee, City Hall, March 25 1871  

# # #

Though many who sign run for office,

they are so averse to personal interest

 that one can hardly read their names. 

*     *     *

Next,

VICTORIES OF LA COMMUNE

DEDICATED OFFICIALS KEEP THE CONTINENT'S LARGEST CITY AFLOAT* WHILE ALMOST IMMEDIATELY FIGHTING A WAR

*A million and a half inhabitants 

Fight between the Fédérés and Regular Troops West of Paris by Michel Charles Fichot, 1871, zoom

Top functionaries leave for Versailles with archives, equipment and funds, leaving Paris to men with no plan or governing experience:

The Commune at City Hall - The Throne Room

 -- Journal universel

Activity is informal but intense. The men in the foreground have not gone home to sleep.

The elected are journalists, craftspeople or blue-collar workers,

who are often under 30:

The Press during the Commune (in French) / Les Amis de la Commune

Yet with minimal funds they manage a city that has not recovered from the draconian siege, to which Versailles adds a second,* and that is almost immediately at war.

* The Prussians let goods through to pressure Versailles, but it is still a handicap.

"We had to manage war, revolution, the administration of a besieged town and reply to citizens' multiple solicitations, all at the same time. Corrupt businessmen and profiteers had no trouble slipping into the lines."

-- The Banquet of the Famished by Didier Daeninckx, 2012

A novel that follows the sources.

Thiers's "satanic battle plan:" Without functionaries Paris

will have no light or water, sewers will overflow, garbage fill the streets, the dead be unburied: Chaos and epidemics will bring its collapse. 

-- Jules Andrieu (below)

 Yet,

 

• "I have never seen the streets so well swept since the siege as they were this morning. 

 -- The Reverend William Gibson cited in Paris Babylon by Rupert Christiansian, 1994

Though he probably agreed with the American press, that The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy.” 

-- Cited by Heather Cox Richardson, blog of Sept 1 2024

'

• Theaters, restaurants, cafés, museums, schools, universities, scientific research, transportation ... go on as usual.

• The main change: People from blue-collar suburbs come to wealthy neighborhoods...

Illustrated London News (illustration sold on eBay)

             Print sold on the web

 "The Poultry-Seller at Palais-Royal, under the Commune"

(He wears the guards' uniform)

Three musical performances are given simultaneously to succor widows and orphans (on May 11). In the background, the sound of cannons.   

  The elegant street lights, balcony and portal show a fashionable street. 

# # #

Among the officials who make the city function: 

• The Head of Administrative Personnel, Jules Andrieu

-- Notes to serve for a History of the Commune, 1871, re-ed. 2016 (in French)

Jules Andrieu

He is appointed for giving night classes to workers. Though he comes from the bottom of the hierarchy his former superiors agree to serve under him, to let public services continue. 

He works 16-17 hours a day, sleeps on a couch and leaves City Hall for personal reasons only four times in 50 days. 

Like the men sleeping through the din in the image at above and Louise Michel saying, "I almost never slept, when I did it was anywhere, or when there was nothing better to do. Many others did the same."

• The Head of the Postal Services, Albert Theisz, and his auxiliaries 

-- Public services under the Commune,

ed. Les Amis de la Commune (in French).

Albert Theisz

Versailles blocks communication with Paris to hurt its recovery and keep provincials and soldiers from knowing its realities. As well, officials remove the plates for printing stamps, to stop communication within the city.

This engraver on bronze, a member of the First International, mobilizes auxiliaries to deposit mail in points outside the city. They know they will be arrested if caught.

They distribute all the city mail by April 4 and find a plate to print stamps. 

       # # #

Salaries

•  5400 francs a year for deputies, 6000 for Delegates (Ministers) 

• Points of comparaison: specialized workers, about 1000 a year; Theisz's predecessor, 71,000. (Thiesz himself refuses the Delegate's extra pay.)

-- Public Services

# # #

Most employees stick to their jobs although they know the risk.

-- Lissagary 

• The vast majority of postal employees stay in Paris (800 out of 1000), knowing they will be fired if Versailles wins. 

                     -- Public Services

•  Firemen also remain, though they can be shot as deserters (officially they are part of the army): the most prominent will be.

-- Tombs

Guards are thought undisciplined because they want to go home
"to embrace their children, caress their wives, before plunging into the unknown of battle."

-- Vallès

They usually do their duty in spite of the unique absence of sanctions: At worst, they aren't paid.

-- Tombs  

# # #

Left to itself, the society La Commune could have succeeded because:

• Its ambitions were local. It wanted a federation of communes, not a centralized State.

• Industrialization was too new for rooted unions or political parties to smother grass-roots energy.

• It inspired heroism.  

"Long live humanity!"

cried the journalist Jean-Baptiste Millière,
when he was forced to kneel before being shot:
Later revolutionaries would say that call inspired them. 

-- An account of his death: Lissagary, Appendix XXI

-- Engraving after the work of Henri de Montaut, who received the Legion of  Honneur two months later. 

  The Infamous Assassination of Jean-Baptiste Millière, " Friends of the Commune" (in French)

 

Figures like these

contradict the capitalist assertion
that greed is part of human nature.

*     *     *
Next,
The Commune now