AHC: French Army joins/supports Paris Commune?

The challenge is to get the French army (or at least a sizable portion of it) to join (defect to the Commune's National Guard) and/or indirectly support the Communards during sydicalist uprising in 1871.

Depending on your PoD, and with this Bolshevik-esqe turn of events, what time of post was France could we be looking at?
 
Whilst I'm tempted to just link to my timeline and leave it at that...

The problem is that the National Guard [essentially a localised militia] and the French Army [a professional and conscripted military force] were very different. The Prussian siege of 1870 had left Paris cut off from the rest of France and whilst this bred the circumstances of the Commune it also meant that the ideology did not really spread very far.

Thiers and the Republican Government were quite canny with how they approached the Commune - they brought soldiers from the provinces who were more skeptical about Paris and the sort of radical socialism that the city represented. Men who were less likely, they thought, to be tempted to switch sides.

One of my PODs was to remove Thiers, have the monarchists triumph in the election, and thus make the republican 'soft' left more ambivalent to the Commune through their shared anti-monarchism and anti-catholicism. Really, though, you need the Commune's leaders to be more effective and more united in the early days of the revolution. They need to hold the outer forts of Paris, they need to be more organized in resisting the anti-Commune strike that was coming, and they need to be better at forging links with the other insurrections bubbling in places like Lyon, Marseilles, and St Etienne. If they can win the Battle for Paris then who knows what might happen next.

As for what post-1871 France would look like, I'll just say read my timeline.
 
As Reydan says Thiers was quite sharp about chosing units that were unlikely to have much sympathy with the Communards while having the Monarchists run the show and thus alienate the soft left is a good start you really need another call upon loyal, rural, conservative troops that in OTL were used against Paris. Maybe the Italian's try and grab Savoy while France is busy?
 
As Reydan says Thiers was quite sharp about chosing units that were unlikely to have much sympathy with the Communards while having the Monarchists run the show and thus alienate the soft left is a good start you really need another call upon loyal, rural, conservative troops that in OTL were used against Paris. Maybe the Italian's try and grab Savoy while France is busy?

I agree. I don't want to make this into just an 'In my timeline I did this and that...', but the way I got around this was by having the Royalists botch their recruitment and the Germans not release many of the POWs who were used against the Commune. This meant that the army sent against Paris was smaller, less prepared, and less committed.
 
I agree. I don't want to make this into just an 'In my timeline I did this and that...', but the way I got around this was by having the Royalists botch their recruitment and the Germans not release many of the POWs who were used against the Commune. This meant that the army sent against Paris was smaller, less prepared, and less committed.
Perhaps you should link to it in your sig?
Please?
 
When is your PoD limit?

If is is before France surrender, it is quite easy. But the commune will be nothing like OTL (and likely will not call itself the Commune)

If it is after the Thiers government left Paris and the Paris garrison leave the city, it is much harder.
 
Very hard, as Thiers handpicked elements of the regular French Army (many liberated from Prussian POW camps) and added units of anti-commune parisian volunteers.
 
When is your PoD limit?

If is is before France surrender, it is quite easy. But the commune will be nothing like OTL (and likely will not call itself the Commune)

If it is after the Thiers government left Paris and the Paris garrison leave the city, it is much harder.

Very hard, as Thiers handpicked elements of the regular French Army (many liberated from Prussian POW camps) and added units of anti-commune parisian volunteers.

I think you need a fairly early PoD that has as less broad government, either Royalist or narrowly Republican that isn't allowed to recruit POW's and is forced to use urban conscripts against the Commune in order to get defections. But you have the basic problem that the Commune has linked appeal and that the Catholic rural/small town majority are opposed to it meaning it won't be hard to volunteers to fight it.
 
Perhaps you should link to it in your sig?
Please?

I think you need a fairly early PoD that has as less broad government, either Royalist or narrowly Republican that isn't allowed to recruit POW's and is forced to use urban conscripts against the Commune in order to get defections. But you have the basic problem that the Commune has linked appeal and that the Catholic rural/small town majority are opposed to it meaning it won't be hard to volunteers to fight it.

This is, for the record, basically what I tried to achieve with the beginnings of my timeline:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...an-alternative-paris-commune-timeline.364109/
 
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