VI.4.1. PARIAS TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR LIVES

PEOPLE WHO USUALLY STAY ON THE SIDELINES 

MOBILIZE FOR LA COMMUNE 

 Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, 1844

Those tipplers don't organize. For 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:

Une séance du Club des femmes dans l'église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerois by F. Lix  (" Le Monde illustré," May 20, 1871), zoom 

--  Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited. 

 

• 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 makes him an omelet, wraps 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 when many of the wealthy leave after the siege. But one would expect burglaries and violent crime to increase, and the opposite happens. 

Twenty years later, workers learn to strike back through discipline, camaraderie and confronting the boss, that is, with industrialization.

But the disinherited of La Commune
organized spontaneously a generation before

tangible conditions favored it.

*     *     * 

Next,

6.4.2. 

Leaders we wish we had