Chapter One Hundred and Twenty – The Time of Tension – The Commune of France in the Autumn of 1922
“We would prefer to fight with Communard Arms, but they will not give them. Perhaps, then, a Frenchman is after-all just a Frenchman. We must take our arms from the dead we kill in our righteous struggle”.
Ferhat Abbas, ‘On Leadership, Nationalism, and Socialism”,
North African Star, 1922
“I wonder, at times, if the Anarchist aim truly is to pull everything we have built down around our ears for ideology’s sake alone? We have built a powerful state, for workers and farmers, women and men, young and old, capable of defending itself. And what are we to do now, now that we see it pulled down around us and all our sacrifice to safeguard the revolution in Europe overturned? Your last letter said to fight – can you really mean that? Can Monica [Jorda] really mean that too?”
Olivier Martel to Louise LaGrange, 3rd August 1922.
The imprisonment of Henri VI, captured in the chaotic collapse of the frontline around Toulon, was possibly the most inconvenient aspect of the post-war world for the new Communard Government. For, even as the new international government got into the routines of working in Paris, the presence of the monarch in his Lyon prison was presenting headache after headache.
Firstly, he was the subject of daily calls for execution. Citizens’ delegations, particularly from the south coast of France ravaged by the war, called for the King to be punished for his crimes. The Marseilles delegation, who impressed many by their quiet dignity, brought into the convention floor itself a black lacquer box containing a roll on which were inscribed the names of all those who had died during the siege. Yet the governing coalition of Anarcho-Syndicalists, Internationalists, and Pragmatists were profoundly split on the issue, unable to make a decision despite growing unrest. They were anxious not to antagonise the powers of the world still further, after the upheaval of their victory, but equally could not agree on if he should be returned to his young family, given a hard labour sentence, or re-educated.
Delays were the inevitable outcome. ‘Delays, delays, delays’ as Martel put it, touring Catalan constituencies with Jorda and LaGrange earlier that year. The Blanquists had performed poorly in the election, the public wanting a new sweep of things post-war and the legacy of Blanqui himself having less purchase in the expanded electorate of half of Europe. They had clung on, though, in both Wallonia and Catolonia, and maintained huge popularity amongst the armed forces. Jorda’s re-election to the Secretariat of the Radical Fighting Union, the soldiers’ trade union, in May 1922 was such a landslide that the single round of balloting was an embarrassment for the other candidates.
If Henri VI’s presence in France was a headache, his absence, and the absence of so many thousands of colonial soldiers, from his Kingdom was a catastrophe for his Government. Blaise Diagne had secured the almost immediate release of the non-white conscripts of the French and Spanish colonial armies but the Convention had approved his initiative to keep the white soldiers and officers back for the time being. Although Spanish POWs returned home for Christmas 1921, Royalist ones were still held back. Ostensibly this was because of a lack of transport ships, Diagne told the international press; in reality, his ambition was to stir up the oppressed of North Africa.
Algerian Arab rebels 1922. Note the mishmash of former colonial army uniforms and tribal dress
He certainly succeeded. The rebellion of the Rif Tribes, which had begun almost the immediate the Spanish Government sued for peace, spread from Morocco into Algeria. Across French Africa the proportion of white settlers to non-white subjects varied dramatically, with a core of strength for the colonial regime on the Algerian coast around the cities but vast inland hinterlands where only scattered administrators, soldiers, traders, and missionaries flew the fleur de lis. With thousands of white young men sucked from this system, killed, wounded, or prisoner in mainland Europe, the balance of power was shifting. The return of Diagne, with thousands of former colonial black soldiers to the new Dakar Commune saw the flames of insurrection in West Africa begin to begin anew. Whilst in Algeria the young radical Ferhat Abbas mounted a guerrilla insurrection in Atlas mountains that panicked urban white settlers.
If these groups were hoping for aid from a united socialist Europe, though, they hoped in vain. All Diagne received, once he departed himself for Dakar, was a trickle of volunteers grandly titled an “International Brigade”, but really numbering in hundreds and with little more than war-surplus rifles as equipment. The Rif Tribes and Algerian rebels did not even receive these. The central coalition, anxious not to alienate an Italy concerned about its own North African provinces, or an increasingly hostile British Empire, held back. There were also logistical concerns – how could the Commune deliver the weapons to such remote groups without provoking a naval incident?
Practicalities, of course, never make headlines. For the radical opposition it was another betrayal, coming on the heels of the Swiss debacle, that proved the fatal weakness of the post-war government. Even as Jarues, Luxembourg, and Otto Bauer, a mixture of moderate and internationalist, began to get a feel for their coalition-leader positions the Montagnard trio hammered them in the press, in the convention, and in town halls, city squares, factories, and barracks across the Commune and Austria (another Blanquist powerbase).
The crusading fire had never left LaGrange as this speech in Stuttgart shows:
“I hear shouts from the audience…I hear them….cries of…no…no… ‘enough of war….enough of this and that…of fighting and dying…we have done that…we’ve got socialism in Europe now…’ [shouts of dissent from the floor]
“Are you sure comrades? Are you sure? Are you sure enough to beat your swords into ploughshares? To tear down the fortresses and walls? To turn the rolleurs into scrap metal? Are you sure?”
[silence in the hall]
“Because I am not. [scattered applause, some booing]…I am not sure comrades. We are strong together, true, but there is weakness in inaction. Fatal weakness. We have let the Swiss worker be crushed beneath the boot-heel. [More applause]. Are we to let that happen to the Arab or the Black in their hour of need?”
[mixed shouting and catcalling in the hall – German Blanquist Margarete Thuring is heard shouting “they
are our comrades…workers are united!” from the stage to try and silence opponents in the crowd]
“It is simple…comrades…please…comrades…it is simple. Like two families who each have a field. One looks over to the neighbours, seeing them struggle with drought, and say ‘Oh well, that is their problem. We are alright –we should keep what we have to ourselves’. But what do that first family do, comrades, when next year
they are the ones suffering? I find it astounding that these politicians who preach mutualism cannot see past the points of their own noses!”
[Laughter and applause]
“I tell you comrades, because you know from your own heroic revolution – talk is one thing, but force is another. And sometimes, you need hands that know how to wield force. Blanqui did in 1871. Varlin did after the death of Bolaunger. You did. You did!”
[LaGrange lifts her hands]
‘These hands have wielded force comrades – your own Kaiser felt it!”
[More laughter and applause from the audience]
“Are there hands here that can wield force? Let me see them? Are they ready to wield force for Socialism? Are they comrades?!”
[A forest of hands shoot up – more applause from the crowd]