Spectre of Europe - An Alternative Paris Commune Timeline

[Reydan]

Author's Note:
Hi there all, Reydan here. Longtime lurker first-time poster. This is a alternate history I've been working on for a while, but it is my first so comments and ideas are more than welcome.

I'll cite my sources a little later, as I wanted to get the first chapter up and rolling now!

Chapter One – Two Old Men

Louis Auguste Blanqui sat in the physician’s window at Bretenoux and looked out over the sleepy little commune. Little birds flitted about in the still February air, moving from tree to tree, gabled roof to gabled roof. It was quiet. Ever so quiet.

‘I cannot answer for your health if you do take this course of action’ Dr. Simon sighed, running his gnarled hands over each other where he stood by the bed. ‘Your heart is weak. You need rest, not excitement. At your age….’
Blanqui did not turn, but the slight rise and fall of his shoulders, an irritable action, suggested that he was not amenable to this particular line of argument. Simon however, a martyr to his profession, insisted.

‘I will state it plainly for you, my friend. Honestly and openly as you so often demand of those around you. Your heath will not stand much more exertion or excitement. You must be careful, and rest here in the south, or you will not live to see another spring.’

The ram-rod straight back and greyed, close-cropped, hair in front of him did not stir.

‘Please, Monsieur Blanqui…’ he began, but then the figure did move. Blanqui stood, sweeping his shabby coat around him, and turned to face the concerned doctor. Tall and rail thin, piercing eyes swept over Simon in a calculating way.

‘No, my dear Doctor’ he said with a low yet powerful voice. ‘No. Revolution is in the air, so strong and concentrated that one has only to stick out the tongue to taste it. The Emperor has fallen. The war is over. Prussian victory has revealed the weakness of the capitalist system. Now is the time. The time to strike.’

He swept across the room, pausing in the doorway to look back at the Doctor briefly. ‘Paris is in foment, Doctor’ he said imperiously ‘and when I am done, no man in France will be known by the honorific Monsieur.’ His hand tightened on the door knob. ‘We shall all be comrades’.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Halfway across France another old man was having a similar conversation with his Doctor.

‘I do not know, really, why I bothered hauling you halfway across the country for this examination really’ Adolphe Thiers grumbled, lighting his cigar and then reaching out to light that of his companion. ‘I am completely fine. I’m certain it is just a reaction to the chill in the air’.

Doctor Martin, a greying man as round as he was tall, still had a little height on his patron, a man many tipped to head the new post-war Government. Thiers had opposed the war with Prussia and now, in a France stinging from defeat and faced with the loss of territory demanded in the peace treaty, the man looked like a prophet. A latter day Cassandra, foretelling a doom that no-one had believed until it was too late. Doctor Martin had heard that Thiers was likely to win twenty or so Departments in his bid to become the new president.

‘You did right to send for me’ Martin said, puffing away and producing a huge cloud of grey-blue smoke. ‘One cannot be too careful. You are not a young man.’ He caught the twinkling amusement in his old friend’s eyes. ‘Still, I believe you have more than a decade left in you yet old boy!’ Martin chuckled.

They turned as a uniformed officer stepped into the room after tapping softly at the door. ‘They are ready for you downstairs gentlemen’ he said before departing again.

‘Ahh the dangers of political life. So many banquets and feasts to attend’ chuckled Thiers. ‘Much longer in this life and I will be as round and as content as you my friend!’ He patted Martin’s straining waistcoat. ‘Just let me freshen up and then we will proceed’.

Martin puffed away at his cigar, pondering the merits of his new students at the Medical School back in Tolouse. So much potential in those young eyes. He was startled, suddenly, by a crash from the room behind. Standing up sharply and spilling cigar ash over the carpet, he hurried to the bathroom door and yanked it open.

Thiers lay on the tiled floor, blood pooling from a gash on his head. The side of the basin was stained deep red.

‘My God Adolphe!’ Martin exclaimed, kneeling and trying to pull the man up. He called for help and in the shouting and running feet he missed the whispered words of his friend. ‘What was that again my friend?’ he said, leaning closer to the pallid face.

‘I cannot move my legs’ Thiers whispered, his breath hot on Martin’s face. The Doctor looked down. Saw the clenched right arm. The stiff, unmoving droop of the right hand side of his old friend’s face.

‘Dear Christ’ he said in a low, terrible voice.

“Whilst the historiographical tradition has been, in recent decades, to move away from the individual and towards the group and the factor as a means of understanding the past, there is no denying that in these circumstances personal misfortune did shape the 1870s for France. The collapse of Adolphe Thiers on 2nd February 1871 from a massive stroke, from which he never really fully recovered, effectively ruled him out of the Presidential election he had been all but proclaimed the winner of by this point. With the Republicans discredited and in disarray, the only option for an alarmed country was the election of Patrice de Mac-Mahon.”

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Subjects: Modern France and the Restoration, University of California Press, 1976.

“There could have been no Paris Commune without the presence of Auguste Blanqui in Paris in 1871.”

George Rude, Commune, University of Oslo Press, 1980. ​

 

[Reydan]

Cold Februaries

The election of Patrice de MacMahon

With the Republican wing of the Legislative assembly in disarray, and the more moderate centrists broken by the tragedy that had befallen Thiers, the power vacuum at the top of France intensified.

The situation itself did not promote democratic debate. Forty three departments were still occupied by German forces, Paris was isolated by the siege, and in the interest of public security meetings and demonstrations had been banned. In these stultifying conditions, only one clear voice emerged during the 1871 election.

That voice was the commanding tones of the Duke of Magenta, Patrice de MacMahon. In his early sixties, the veteran of the Crimea and the Italian Wars was nursing a wound taken when his army was encircled by the Prussians at Sedan, but nevertheless signalled that he was willing to take control. MacMahon, a devoted monarchist and conservative, felt that only one thing would unite the country in this turmoil – a new monarchy.

Patrice de MacMahon, new leader of France​

And, in the chaos of those cold February days, the stars seemed to have aligned for him. The two rival factions within the Monarchist movement were currently backing the same candidate. The Comte de Chambord, Grandson of Charles X and leader of the Legitimist wing, was only fifty one but in relatively poor health. A persistent bachelor, Chambord also received the support of the Orléanist party in the hopes that he would die without an heir and the two lines would combine in their candidate Phillipe, Comte de Paris. With MacMahon’s hands on the reigns and a Monarchist majority in the Assembly it would be possible, many hoped, to push the new monarchy through. And, in that feverish cold of February, so it turned out to be. The Republican wing of the Assembly was drubbed in the polls.

Final results of the 1871 Legislative Assembly elections:
Republicans
Radical Republicans 38
Moderate Republicans 72
Right
Liberals 53
Orléanists 231
Bonapartists 20
Legitimists 224
Total 675[1]

It was an astonishing victory for MacMahon, erasing the shame of defeat, and it seemed that in a few weeks, when the new Government reassembled in Versailles, a long-awaited new era could begin for France. Pro-Monarchist crowds were allowed back onto the streets, waving banners and chanting “Long Live the Restoration”. Brittany, most Royalist of strongholds, seemed to largely drink itself in a stupor for a whole week after the election.

Henry, Comte de Chambord, now styling himself Henry V​

So overwhelming were the festivities that it took a little while for MacMahon and his government to realise the teething problems of the new Restoration. Chambord, now awaiting coronation as Henry V, was proving a little too intractable. It started with a few minor issues, but very soon missives were flying around the ersatz court at Tours. The new King wanted to return to the Fleur de Lys flag of his ancestors, scrapping the Republican tricolour. His court was instantly swollen with Legitimists and Orleanists who poured out of the woodwork, but MacMahon and his ministers found that the King simply refused to work with those officials trained under the Bonapartist years, narrowing the pool of appointees for top jobs to men who had been in Government before 1850.

“We must be weary lest His Majesty alienate his new subjects before the crown touches his head.”
Minister for the Interior, Charles Beulé, to Prime Minister MacMahon, 1871.

Most crucially, however, and most frustrating for MacMahon, was Henry V’s refusal to move from Tours before the coronation. Never an admirer of Paris, the new King proclaimed his desire to re-occupy the city from the Prussians with crown firmly in place. Little did he know that, around 150 miles away, events in his new capital were beginning to spiral out of control.

Whilst France became a Monarchy, Paris was becoming something else entirely.

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So now the butterflies start to flap their wings. Next post will deal with events in Paris with Blanqui at the helm

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Three – The Madness of March

A French King, and of fresh election, disregarding Paris? Well this will not surely end well... so, subscribed.

Thanks RyuDrago!

A Parisian insurrection which repeats the old mistakes no longer has any chance of success today.
August Blanqui, Manual for an Armed Insurrection, 1866.

Blanqui and the other leaders of the new Commune are proclaimed by the crowd of citizens, National Guard, and mutinous soldiers​

Since the armistice with the Prussians Paris had been in foment. Deprived off food, having suffered a long and draining siege, and with a population swollen by refugees from the occupied territories and stripped of the well-to-do who had fled the city as the Prussians advanced, Paris simmered through the cold of February.

Ballot papers had arrived in the city but, really, the electoral process had been a farce. Too many men cut off from the registers, or unable to prove their identities, meant that turn-out was almost non-existent. Democracy found, instead, a new home in the cafes of the city. Café life had, despite the privations of the siege which had seen even the elephants in the city zoo killed for meat, not abated. And now these little spaces became talking shops. Men and women came together, argued, debated, socialised, and generally connected. It was a fervid atmosphere of defiance. One that Blanqui was only peripherally aware of.

Cloistered in his own rooms near Place de Bastille, Blanqui was instead reconstructing his cadres. Unlike other socialist thinkers of the time, Blanqui cared little for the working-class as a revolutionary force. Everything in his ideology was a call to arms on their behalf, but he had never believed that they themselves would rise up. Revolutions, he told those young earnest men and women who gathered around him in his dingy flat, needed to be led. To be forced. Blanquism was the midwife of the new world, prepared to rip it kicking and screaming into being. Lead, he told his young cadres, and they will follow.

So cloistered was Blanqui that he almost missed his opportunity to lead. The morning of 18th March dawned early, dew crisping the streets, and the people of Montmartre, one of the poorer suburbs of the city, almost missed the heavy tramp of military boots. Some, opening windows to look out, assumed the dark dressed men, huddled up against the cold, were National Guardsmen. But as they climbed the hill to where the battery was parked, rumours began to fly. Around 170 cannons, of the 400 old fashioned pieces left in Paris, had been placed on the hill by the National Guard for safe-keeping. Now, under orders from MacMahon himself, two brigades of regular army infantry were assembling to take the cannons away.

Yet, as his men reached the unguarded heights and began to limber up the guns, General Clement-Thomas realised his mistake. No horses. No wagons. Nothing to draw the guns away. As the morning dew burned away in the sun, crowds began to gather. “Don’t take our guns” shouted women, wrapped in shawls, at the young soldiers. “We have done you no harm” shouted men “ we only want to be safe!”. In other places the atmosphere was less tense, picket lines disrupted by civilians appearing with cups of coffee or baskets of bread, sharing meagre supplies with the hungry soldiers. As the morning wore on and the horses Clement-Thomas had sent for failed to arrive, his officers watched discipline disintegrate. More and more of the men were fraternising with ordinary Parisians.

When the horses did arrive, around midday, the result was electric. The crowd, agitated by the realisation the guns might be taken, began to beg and plead with the soldiers, arguing and cajoling them. “Fix bayonets” the order rippled down the line but, faced with women and children, few men drew the inches of gleaming steel their officers required. Clement-Thomas, having helped crush the 1848 uprising, knew the writing was on the wall. His subaltern’s order to fire on the crowd did not even see a single musket raised and the only things leaving on the horses were Clement-Thomas and his staff, pursued by the jeers and catcalls of both the crowd and his erstwhile soldiers.[1]

Emboldened, the crowd surged towards the Hotel de Ville. It was only the quick actions of Blanqui’s young protégé Emile Eudes, who jerked the old man awake, that allowed the cadres to arrive before the new government of Paris was announced. Nevertheless, Blanqui’s revolutionary zeal and fame afforded him a prominent place – as he arrived the old man was hefted onto the shoulders of the crowd and carried up the stairs to the balcony. There he was proclaimed Provisional President until an election could be held. His deputies, called for by the crowd rather than chosen by the somewhat stunned Blanqui, were the journalist Louis Charles Delescluze and the Radical Republican MP Felix Pyat.

Standing on shaky legs Blanqui proclaimed, in a hoarse voice the tumultuous crowd had to strain to hear, the proclamation of a new people’s government. It would take as its name the traditional body of organisation that had existed since medieval times and achieved so much fame in the French Revolution.

It would be called the Paris Commune.

[1] OTL General Clement-Thomas was captured by some of his men trying to escape in civilian clothes and met a nasty fate. ITTL he'll have a different path to take in life.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Four – 200,000 Rifles

The king may not last long enough to be crowned, though, since Henri seems to be making himself unacceptable in all the same ways he did IOTL.

Thanks Jonathan Edelstein! Yeah, Chambord OTL actually missed his chance to be King through being so intractable.

I don't know much about French history in this era (save for seeing a rather too-long experimental French film ...) So I really have little to add of substance. Bit I'm looking styles this as a chance to learn more! Totally following

Great to hear. Was the film the Peter Watkins one about the Commune by any chance?

Author's Note: Should I keep footnotes about what my changes are ITTL? What do you guys think?


“Blanquism was, in essence, a military creed in 1871. Regardless of what it became later, and what historians have claimed, armed force lay at the heart of Blanqui’s ideas of revolution. No new society without revolution, no revolution without force, no force without arms.”
Francois Furet, Blanqui, University of Nantes Press, 1993.

When the crowds settled down it became clear that, for now, Blanqui was at the helm. Although, this was not what it looked like to contemporaries. The first hours of the Commune’s existence were governed by a flurry of pronouncements from Delescluze and Pyat. Working men’s tools were redeemed from pawn shops. Crèches established. Prisoners freed from the prisons of the capital. And, inevitably, the haphazard Communal election sketched out. All men over the age of eighteen were to be allowed to vote in their arrondissement. Delescluze, the idealist, had wanted a council of 92 – one member for every 20,000 residents of the city – but Pyat and Blanqui had argued him down to a more workable number of 60. Aware that their seizure of power could turn sour at any moment, the triumvirate pushed for the election to be held the following week.

Blanqui, however, was more interested in the existing powerbase. The seizure of power that day had, in effect, left the National Guard Committee in effective control. They had proclaimed the Commune and hoisted the three men around the small table in the Hotel de Ville to prominence. Now, in Blanqui’s mind, they needed to be brought into line. Moulded into an effective tool of revolution.

A National Guard unit poses for a picture at one of the outer forts of Paris​

The National Guard, originally a volunteer force, had been bolstered by conscription during the Prussian siege. It was, officially, a solid force but, as Blanqui well knew, in reality a mess. The force existed more on paper than anywhere else. Its officers, volunteers themselves, had no idea how many men were in their units at any given time, and the men were prone to leaving their posts to have meals at home as they had during the siege. As a political faction, too, the National Guard was riven with factions. Each unit, belonging to an arrondissement of Paris, had its own local loyalties. Blanqui knew, from the reports, that senior officers were much surer about the commitment to the Commune of units from poorer areas of the city than they were of units from the more well-to-do arrondissements.
Blanqui’s solution was three appointments to the Guard.

Louis Rossel, Chief of Staff​

Louis Rossel, only 27, was appointed Chief of Staff. The young officer, trained at one of the leading military academies in the country, was to report directly to Blanqui and given wide-ranging organisational powers over the National Guard. Not a Blanquist exactly, the young man was a fellow traveller.

Jaroslaw Dombrowski, General in Chief
​

Jaroslaw Dombrowski, a Polish revolutionary who had fled the failed uprising against the Czar in 1862, was given direct command of the National Guard as General in Chief. Blanqui was less certain of this appointment, or the cadre of Polish officers Dombrowski brought with him, but was convinced by Delescluze and Pyat. Both more Internationalist than Blanqui, they urged him to make use of the military experience the Poles offered.

General Gustave Cluseret​

The final appointment, Gustave Cluseret, was a more obvious choice. A radical republican and a veteran of the American Civil War, Cluseret had hoped for the top job occupied by Rossel. Instead he was given direct control over the outer ring of fortifications that protected the capitol.

The three men, despite their differences, gelled instantly. Within hours of his appointment Rossel was scouring Paris for the 200,000 rifles and 1100 cannons held there and began to centralise the Commune’s hodge-podge arsenal. Dombrowski, meanwhile, turned up the following morning at 5am to kick the well-dressed members of the respectable 8th Arrondissement National Guard (Champs-Élysées section) out of their barracks for three hours of drill. Cluseret was less predictable in his movements, already a frustration to Commune leadership, but over the first week it was noted that bands of workmen began to remove many of the larger trees from municipal parks around Paris.

Next update - back to the Royalists!

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Five – Assemble in April!

MacMahon, ensconced in Tours for over a week as the Commune took shape in Paris, estimated that he would need 150,000 men to supress the revolt. Little was known about what was happening in the capital. All was chaos, Clement-Thomas’s breathless arrival speaking of another 1848, the streets again filled with barricades and armed paupers. MacMahon had noted, darkly, that neither the cannons nor the majority of Clement-Thomas’s men reappeared over the following days.

The upheaval of the recent war with Prussia had bled France badly, and it was taking all of the new Royal government’s efforts to assemble the shattered remnants of the French Army. It was not all bad. A large contingent of the Breton National Guard had diverted from Paris, wanting nothing to do with the madness of popular insurrection, and been ordered from their bivouacs near Versailles to the marshalling camps at Tours. There they rubbed shoulders with the first regiment of the Foreign Legion, battle hardened after time in Mexico as well as on the Prussian front, and Zouave units from North Africa, their colourful costumes causing them to shiver in the cool spring air.

Soldiers slowly reassemble as the Royal Army in Tours, April 1871​

Macmahon also had most of the cavalry. From his ministry office he could see a squadron polishing their already gleaming cuirasses in the square below.

Polishing for the coronation.

Finally, after significant cajoling and handling from his ministers, Henry V was ready to be crowned. The towering gothic marble of the cathedral at Tours rang to the sounds of preparation already. Crowds of well-dressed hangers on were already beginning to file past the rows of parade-dressed soldiers. MacMahon frowned. No cannons for the salute though. So far only small batteries had been salvaged. The army, scattered to the four winds by the Prussian advance, was only slowly coming back together, and so far MacMahon had a large store of powder and shell but few cannons to fire them.

The door scraped open and the King stood there, resplendent in his uniform for the coronation, and MacMahon shot to his feet.

“Patrice” the King smiled, striding to the window and looking out at the parade ground.

“Your majesty” MacMahon replied, uncertainly, watching his new monarch.

“I have your new Corps commander here” the King said, gesturing to the figure in the doorway.

MacMahon’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the tall moustachioed figure in the doorway. The Marquis of Galliffet stood, rake thin, arms folded across his chest. He did not salute, merely inclining his head and letting the medals on his chest rattle a little. He was a hot-head, though MacMahon. He had been injured too early at Sedan to see Galliffet take part in the series of cavalry charges that tried to break the infantry out of the trap, but he had heard about it. Heard about the screaming bloody chaos of those attacks. Talented, yes, but rapidly promoted from colonel to brigadier then. And now to general?

“The Marquis is leaving” Henry V said, still looking out at the square below. “Taking two thirds of the cavalry. We must stop these godless rebels before they advance on Versailles. Before they damage the precious heritage of our Kingdom.” He turned to face MacMahon and questions died in the Prime Minister’s mouth. The King finally seemed to have found his spine. “Galliffet will establish a perimeter around the city. Secure Versailles. Stop the rot spreading. We will follow on next week”.

Surprised by his King’s sudden activity MacMahon could merely nod and follow him from the room as the bells of the cathedral began to peel.

Across town a huddle of be-suited men stood in the light rain at the railway station.

“I am going” announced Leon Gambetta, hefting the case in his hands.

“But the coronation?” began one of the other men, a younger member of the Radical Republican faction. “If you are not seen to be there?”

“Young man” Gambetta replied, fixing him with a baleful eye. “I did not pronounce a republic in February to see it entombed in April.” He sighed. “I am going to Spain” he said, the set of his face ending conversation as effectively as a full stop.[1]

As the other men trailed away, back towards the Cathedral, Gambetta looked over at the one remaining man. “What about you Louis?” he asked.
The sixty-year old socialist stood there, his heavy coat flapping around him, and looked downcast. “I cannot” he said softly. “Cannot leave France again. I was in exile during the Empire and I will not go again so soon. Nor can I go to Paris. This madness….it is no Republic”. As Gambetta watched the man shook his hand, turned, and made his melancholy way back through the grey streets of the rain-slicked city.[2]

Alone on the platform Gambetta climbed into the train and settled into his seat. A dowdy looking old woman and her frail husband looked reprovingly at him as his coat and hat splashed water into the cabin.

“Look on the bright-side madam” Leon smiled. “At least we are not travelling by balloon”.[3]

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[1] Gambetta did, in 1871 after the Republicans did badly in the polls, go to Spain for a holiday IOTL.

[2] Louis Blanc didn't approve of the Commune IOTL too, despite being a leading socialist. There will be some butterflies with him though.

[3] IOTL Gambetta flew out of Paris, under siege by the Prussians, in a hot air balloon to rally the nation after Sedan.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Six – Onwards to Versailles

“Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slave to heaven of this newly restored French Kingdom, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, musty-legitimism and above all, of the philistine.”
Karl Marx, Private Letter, 12th April 1871

“Bold, ever so bold, and bloody”
The Times of London muses on the Versailles offensive.

The Commune needed to expand or die. Blanqui, by the tail of end of April President of a newly elected Commune of sixty members, was convinced of this. His “party”, if the loose collection of cadres and supporters could be called such, performed moderately well in the election. Eighteen of sixty seats were held by Blanqui and his supporters. A further twenty four were held by International Socialists, devotees of the broad church of left wing groups meeting across Europe in this period, and the rest were filled with an array of trade unionists, independent radicals, and a few erstwhile members of the Radical Republicans. It was a fractious group, torn over how to enact the Revolution in Paris, and it took considerable skill to wield it.

Yet despite Blanqui’s distaste for democracy and the chaos of elections, he found two unlikely allies. Eugene Varlin, a bookbinder and trade unionist, and Leo Frankel, a Hungarian Jew, emerged from the array of Members as leading and earnest voices. Frankel was, given his extraction, an obvious internationalist, whilst Varlin was closer to the ideas of the anarchist Pierre-Jean Proudhon. But both young men supported Blanqui’s call for decisive action.

Just over ten miles from the centre of Paris, to the west, lay the city of Versailles. Home to the opulent palace of the former kings of France, its very existence conferred legitimacy on the new Henry V who had already announced his intention to settle his court there once the “present unrest” as he put it was over. It was also, currently, where a decent stockpile of weapons and material had been assembled by the Royalist Government. Although no out-right hostilities had occurred between the Commune and the Royalists the two sides were wary. This, Blanqui urged the committee, was a matter of strike first or regret later.

Thus, on a warm morning on 2nd May, merry with the excesses of a May Day that had consumed much of the alcohol in Paris’ bars and cafes, a column of 8000 Guardsmen left Paris under the command of another Polish commander Walery Wroblewski. Reaching Versailles around noon, they came up against the 3000 gendarmes guarding the city. The situation was tense, the Communards certain that their “fellow comrades” would not open fire. For a moment or two the lines hesitated, drawn up opposite each other, and then the Gendarme officer ordered his men to fall back, dispersing into the nearby countryside. Wroblewski, shocked, did not look a gift horse in the mouth.[1]

For much of the afternoon his men were given free reign to roam the palace and gardens, feasting on left-over supplies and posing for pictures in the halls and ballrooms of the grand palace. Surprisingly little damage was done, save for a statue of Louis XIV that was toppled by some men from the Entrepot (10th Arrondissement) section with crowbars and hammers. The only productive activity, apart from the posting of sentries, was the detachment of engineers that Rossel had sent with the expedition who, within an hour, had the forty four cannons left behind in the Gendarme camp hitched up and rolling back to Paris.

Overlooking the scene, however, were the gendarmes. Retired in good order they had joined up with the Royalist force arrived under the Marquis of Galliffet. 3000 infantry paired with 15,000 cavalry. Slowly, carefully, Galliffet began to position his men for the strike that evening.


[1] IOTL The Commune did attempt an advance on Versailles, twice, but were beaten back quite easily. Here the gendarmes pull back to allow them into the trap.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Seven – Terrible Surprise: The Battle of Versailles

Well, fuck.

That general better have drilled their soldiers to exaustion, because they'll need it.

You'll have to wait and see!

"Seize them"
Galliffet's only order given during the Battle of Versailles 2-3 May 1871

"It was a night I will never forget, as much as I wish I could. It is etched into my mind."
Emile Georges, Communard National Guardsmen, remembers the battle


It started at dusk, ripples of fire sparking from the muskets of the pickets as they fired into the sky, alerting their units that the Royalists had arrived. Panicked Communard soldiers ran to their unit colours as officers shouted orders. Gendarme soldiers were pushing up the main road of the town in the dying light and it was only quick thinking by a Communard Captain whose detachment had been billeted in a furniture warehouse that their advance towards the railway station was blocked. Soon around 2000 of the National Guardsmen were locked in a sporadic and disorganised fire-fight with Gendarmes across the southern part of the city.

Wroblewski, who had set up his command post in a hotel opposite the famous Palace, dispatched a staff adjunct with a report back to Rossel. Some on his staff were counselling caution, not needing to overextend the Commune’s forces by calling for aid when they were only under attack by a handful of military police. Wroblewski was less convinced – why, he argued, had the Gendarme fallen back earlier if they were planning to fight?
The Communard General, marked out by his red-sash, made it across the cobbled courtyard of the Palace and out into the verdant gardens beyond when the first dragoon cavalry swept over the low ornamental hedges and ploughed into the half assembled ranks of Guardsmen.

The National Guard of Paris was not a veteran force. Trapped behind the city walls it had resisted a siege but largely by existing rather than fighting. Now, taken by complete surprise, it started to waver. It was a company on the right that went first, slashed at by green-coated dragoons its surviving men fled back towards the ornate windows of the palace. Soon a stream of men were following them, Wroblewski and his staff officers caught up in the flood of panicked men. Above their heads a sharp volley from some of the more trained and drilled men on the first floor drove off the attacking cavalry men, but it was becoming clear to the Communards that they were surrounded. The white faces surrounding the general all spoke the same terrified story of realisation.

Down in the streets of the town cuirassiers wheeled and charged, their horses’ hooves sparking on the cobbles as they ran down fleeing Guardsmen. Galliffet’s plan seemed to be working, as the stiffer opposition in the town was chipped away by the terror of the cavalry attack. The Gendarmes, however, were having difficulties. Pushing up the street they were caught by fire from the buildings that struck at cavalrymen and infantry alike, spattering the dusky streets with blood and gore. Pushing back into the houses, those Communards who were not already fleeing into the rapidly approaching night were finding that houses were their best hope for protection.

Back in the courtyard, around those ornate gates, Wroblewski assembled his remaining Guardsmen into a massed column. In the face of cavalry attack his only hope, he told his men in the darkening night, was to push as one back to Paris. It was a terrible advance, many of the survivors remembered afterwards, crawling down the street in a massed column, so thick with men in places that it resembled a dark sinuous snake. At every crossroads his men exchanged fire with cavalrymen circling them, muskets and pistols blazing into the night, and wounded men were dragged or carried with them. This group mopped up surviving pockets of Communards elsewhere, adding them to the formation, as it made its ragged way to the bridge over the river.

Here Galliffet struck. His only artillery, a small battery of horse guns, opened fire. No sooner had the first shells ripped into the tightly packed unit than everyone was running. Screaming shoving terror in the dark of the night as men scrambled back to Paris. The horses were amongst them, slashing and cutting, and when Wroblewski turned to help up a junior officer who had stumbled beside him he was slashed down with a sabre.

Within two hours of the attack, the Communard force was in complete rout and fleeing headfirst for Paris.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Eight – The Ruins of Billancourt

Oh, I'm enjoying this. Please continue

Thanks Zeppelinair!

Damn

Well, I hope those mistakes wisen up the commune's leadership. They are outnumbered and need to act accordingly.

Just wait and see.

Chapter Eight – The Ruins of Billancourt

"Stand firm. Stand here. Stand for each other"
Emile Eudes, Blaquist Deputy, rallies retreating Guardsmen as they flee into the city.

"Heroux,
Come on. Big Victory.
Be quick. Bring horses"
Galliffet's scrawled order to the commander of his rear-guard, Major Henri Heroux.

Boulogne-Billancourt had been a wealthy new suburb of Paris. Part of the Haussmanisation of the city, expanding and modernising the old medieval core, the area had attracted a number of wealthy residents and grand houses. These had all but been destroyed in the Prussian siege. Now Billancourt was a field of ruins and half-destroyed houses across the Seine from the small suburb of Sevres. On the route that the routing Communards needed to take into Paris.

As the ragged remainder of Wroblewski’s column staggered through the darkness, having somehow evaded the pursuing cavalrymen, they were met by flaming torches across the river. Rossel, fuelled by a mixture of adrenaline and ersatz-coffee made from ground-up hazelnuts, had arrayed relief forces across the mouth of the bridge to prevent any Royalist attack. His men were shocked as the remnants of the Versailles column staggered in, and the clerks in his detachment buried their faces in their notebooks so as to avoid his ashen visage.

Of the 8,000 Communard National Guard that had left the city that morning, now, at midnight, around 3,000 were able to stagger back to the bridges. More stragglers, over the following day, made it back into Paris, but a full half of Wroblewski’s force was lost, Wroblewski himself amongst them. In fact, the majority of the force’s staff officers were gone – the most senior remaining officer was a Major from the 13th Arrondissement, a cobbler in day to day life. Many men had lost their rifles in the panicked flight, more had left behind supplies and bivouacs, and as the rain began to drum down onto the assembled men Rossel’s confidence began to fade.

The detachment at the bridge, maybe some 2,000 Rossel had scrapped together at short-notice, huddled in the darkness, watching the road. He almost didn’t notice, scanning the crumpled pages despondently as his men handed them to him, the arrival of the fresh column from the city. “It was only when Jaroslaw swung down from the saddle and splashed me with the rain water from his coat in the process that I became aware of myself” Rossel was to recall years later.

Across the Seine, in the pitch blackness of night, Galliffet was also struck by the circumstance. The fight, although victorious, had been bloody. The infantry attached to his forces had come out worst – of 3,000 maybe 1,700 were combat ready by midnight. Many were dead or wounded, others guarding Communard prisoners, and still more wandering the night-time countryside looing for their units. Col. Fentenoux, commander of the Gendarme detachment, was already sullenly considering the accusations he would later level at Galliffett for so carelessly disregarding his men. But Galliffet was a cavalryman first and foremost and, with around 13,000 of his mounted troops ready for action he felt confident in continuing the attack. Leaving 2,000 to stay behind with the Gendarmes at Versailles, he led the remaining force towards Sevres and the bridge to Paris.

“Dark like a Rome destroyed by Vandals, all echoing ruin and terrible blackness” recalled one of his officers later. The column found Sevres deserted, save for a few alarmed civilians, and pushed on towards the bridge. It, too, was clear, and as they crossed the stone structure Galliffet joked with some of the hussar units about watering their horses in the Tuilleries Gardens the following day. It was the sparkle of campfires to the left that attracted attention, but Galliffet’s men were unable to react before the first shells fell amongst his units. Explosions tore men and animals apart, showering the survivors with rubble from the buildings surrounding them, and it was only quick thinking by the commander of the lead regiment that saw the whole column wheel towards the park where the flashes of fire were coming from.

The Bois de Boulogne, a great park gifted to the city by the now deposed Emperor, was a familiar place for many of Galliffet’s officers for one reason. The Hippodrome de Longchamps was a major favourite of the rich and famous in French society and, before the war, many officers had flocked there to watch the races. Now, as their men cantered onto the edge of the field amid a slight crackle of small arms fire, their grins widened. The Communard artillery was arrayed across the race course from them, lined up and vulnerable with only a few thousand infantry to support. As the odd bullet found its mark Galliffet had his officers line up their men. And then, with the thunder of hooves, they charged.

If any of the cavalrymen recognised the actions of the Communards stepping behind their artillery pieces and beginning to work crank handles is unclear. The existence of the Mitrailleuse had been a closely guarded secret in 1870 to the extent that many of the units issued with them had no idea how to use them against the Prussians. But now, as the cranks turned and the strange putter putter of bullets began to fly, the power of the weapon in the open field became clear. Horses and men tumbled. As the cavalry pressed on, tightly packed into the racecourse, Communard musket fire joined the action. More men fell, reeling, or were sent flying as their horses collapsed. Suddenly a glorious charge was turning into a scattered and chaotic bloodbath and, as the moon came out from behind a cloud to reveal the cannons behind the Communard lines, shells became to hit the rear ranks.

Panic swept through Galliffet’s force, unsupported by any artillery or infantry, and units began to wheel and break off. Those currassiers who did charge home were soon caught in the hedges and jumps of the race course laid out by Dombrowski to trip the horses. As Galliffet’s men began to peel back the Communards advanced, bayonetting horses and men as they went, dragging prisoners from the ground. Retreat turned to rout and, within minutes, thousands of panicked men and animals were streaming back across the bridge into Sevres. Soon all that remained of Galliffet’s force on the Parisian side of the river were the dead, the dying, and the bedraggled prisoners.

For now, as both forces withdrew to consolidate, the first Battle of the French Civil War was over. Stalemate.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Nine: The Law of Suspects

How far are you going with this?

I'm not sure, to be honest. One way or another I will resolve the conflict between the Royalists and the Communards.

Did you have anything you'd like me to cover?

Oooh yeah.

Come on communards, it's rich-eating time!

I feel like I keep answering your points with "you'll see" but...y'know...."you'll see"

Chapter Nine - The Law of Suspects

"Immediately after the publication of the present decree, all suspects within the territory of the Republic and still at large, shall be placed in custody.
The following are deemed suspects:

1– Those who, by their conduct, associations, comments, or writings have shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty..."

Opening text of the original Law of Suspects, 1793.


Paris was in turmoil that morning. The 3rd of May was chaos. Bedraggled soldiers from Wroblewski’s column caused a stir as they were marshaled back to the Hotel de Ville. Much of the city had been up all night, listening anxiously to the booming exchanges coming from the Bois de Boulogne.



As the morning dawned frantic crowds surrounded the deputies as they assembled at the Hotel de Ville, demanding action. Men and women shouted and argued, delivered impromptu speeches from lampposts, and thronged the streets and alleys around the centre of the Commune's government. Unaware of what was going on at Billancourt, the assembly under Blanqui voted almost unanimously for an introduction of the Law of Suspects.



The original law, put in place in the darkest days of the original First Republic, had given the government sweeping powers to arrest and punish anyone suspected of attempting to subvert or overthrow the new revolutionary regime. Now, in the fetid atmosphere of that May morning a young Blanquist deputy stood to argue the case for a new Law of Suspects.

Raoul Rigault

Raoul Rigault was only twenty five, but looked much older, and had been a committed follower of Blanqui from his teenage years. Now, standing in the assembly room with the cries of the crowd ringing outside, he called for the Law of Suspects to be returned. Paris was in danger, he argued, and that required drastic action. The Commune had not been elected unanimously - who knew, Rigault argued, what sorts of people lurked in Paris? What if the column had been betrayed? What if there were traitors within?

Normally those deputies who were not Blanquists, and less committed to dictatorial control, might have objected. But now, in the panic, they voted Rigault as Police Commissioner and fellow, but more moderate, Blanquist Theophile Ferre as his superior Minister of Justice. Rigault left immediately to establish his force, and the Commune turned to the next matter at hand, the unusual commandeering of black paint, straw, and winter coats by General of Defence Clusseret.

Before they could delve too deeply into the general's unusual behaviour, though, they were interrupted by the crowd. The doors of the Hotel de Ville burst open and Rossel was carried in on the shoulders of his men. The Chief of Staff looked as though he had aged a decade, but he was smiling. In the square outside the tramp of boots and grinding of wheels announced the return of his men and guns from Billancourt.

"Organiser of Victory!" the crowd cried, a reference to Lazare Carnot, the technocrat deputy who had supplied the Revolutionary armies from scratch in the 1790s. He had, when he was finally put down, a solid report to read to the deputies in a tired but calm voice.

The Battle of Billancourt had been bloody. The Communards had lost some 300 men, but the Royalists had lost more. Much more. Although the majority of Galliffet's force had escaped, over five thousand men and even more horses were dead or captured. The route into the city was secure, overlooked by one of the forts now commanded by Clusseret, and for now the Commune had avenged its defeat at Versailles.

Yet, beyond the hills surrounding the city, the Royalist army was on the march.
​

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Ten: Straw Soldiers, Brandy Stomachs and Iron Horses

Will we see a surviving Communist France?
The civil war rages on...

Maybe not Communist, but certainly something!

I hope this crisis ends and blanqui bites the dust soon

Someone more internationalist and democratic minded should emerge.

If the commune manages to survive, that is.

Realistically, I think I'm pushing how long Blanqui had in him as it is. He wasn't a well man. Then again, the man might die but the dream may live on...

Interesting Timeline, I'm really liking it.

But unless Lyon (or somewhere else) rises soon the Commune had little hope.

Shhh no spoilers you!

Chapter Ten: Straw Soldiers, Brandy Stomachs and Iron Horses

“In civil disorders, with rare exceptions soldiers march only with loathing, by force and brandy”
August Blanqui, Manual for an Armed Insurrection, 1866.

"Galliffett, Rigault, the Law of Suspects, the events of Marseilles in December - all were emblematic of the spiral of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence in motion in a divided France that was tearing open its own wounds".
Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Revolution in 1870s France, 2001

On the morning of 5th May Wroblewski, his aids and adjuncts, were shaken awake. Dragged, bleary eyed and aching from nights spent under guard in barns outside Versailles under armed guard, they were paraded into the splendour of the palace itself where, before them, a full court was arrayed.
It was a military tribunal, although one of the Justice of the town had been pressured into appearing, and Galliffet sat at its head. His men had taken some 800 prisoners, but he had before him fifty of the most prominent. Officers of the National Guard, including Wroblewski, a Deputy, the young mayor of the 18th Arrondissement Georges Clemenceau, and one woman. Louise Michel, forty years old, was a school-teacher and anarchist who had come to prominence as a leading and vocal part of the Commune. Lobbying, unsuccessfully, for women’s rights to vote in the elections, she had succeeded in getting herself elected onto the National Guard committee of the 18th Arrondissement and had insisted on accompanying the detachment to Versailles. In uniform.

The trial was more of a haranguing assault by Galliffet, who strutted and preened before the assembled press. His men, arrayed around the walls, wanted blood for the events of at the Bois de Boulogne. Wroblewski was largely unable to comment, heavily bandaged and lapsing in and out of consciousness due to a severe sabre wound to the head. He did, via an aide, enter a brief plea for the life of Clemenceau, arguing he had only come on the trip out of a sense of humanitarian duty to his constituent soldiers and that he (rightly) was a reluctant member of the Commune, but this was brushed aside. The only real defiance came from Michel, who, on the sentence of death being handed down, called out:

"Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance."

Within hours Galliffet had all fifty hung from trees on the edge of Sevres, easily in sight of the city fortifications. Nor did he stop there. Of the remaining rank and file he ordered men pulled out for the slightest of reasons. Men with white hair were deemed “seasoned revolutionaries”. Those with watches must have been “functionaries of the Commune”. Survivors remembered him pacing up and down like “a hungry wolf”.

MacMahon arrived in time to stop a second wave of executions but, as the corpses dangled from the trees by the Seine, his observers reported ominous sights. Thousands and thousands of Communards, and hundreds of guns, lined the fortress walls, black outlines against the sun. Any hope of a quick assault died and Macmahon began to plan for a lengthy, and bloody, siege.

He might not have done if he realised that nine of every ten soldiers were made of straw and an even higher proportion of cannons were simply painted wood. Since his appointment Clusseret, General of Defence, had been busy collecting material. Attached to McClellan’s army in the Civil War he had seen first hand how the assault on Virginia in 1862 had been stalled for months by the use of fake men and "Quaker" guns at Centreville. Now, in charge of a huge line of defences with the second-rate soldiers left to him by Rossel, he tried every trick up his sleeve. Meanwhile Rossel himself, along with Dombrowski, were stripping down Communard forces into a “Force Mobile”.

A map showing the German zone of occupation​

The events of 1871, it should be remembered, took place against a backdrop of partial occupation. The north-east of the country, including the area around Paris itself, was nominally occupied by German forces until the 3 Billion Franc war indemnity was paid. This was an advantage for the Commune, for although they were uncertain about the extent to which the Germans might block any force that circled into their area, the Royalists were still more anxious.

The second advantage was the rail network. Largely designed under Napoleon III the French railway network was less developed than the British model but, for the Communards, had one useful feature – every major line emanated from Paris. That was why, on the morning of the 6th May, weighed down by the sombre news of the executions, two trains left Paris. One, packed with Guardsmen and Dombrowski himself, swept southwards. The other, carrying Varlin, the Commune’s Delegate for External Affairs Paschal Grousset, and the rather upset Communard executive of the Central Bank, Francois Jourde, crawled East. It had a number of large carriages, securely guarded by Jourde’s National Guard detachment (all bank clerks in civilian life), and it was heading for Strasbourg.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Eleven - Dreadful Pragmatism

Dreadful Pragmatism

The meeting took place in the Kammerzal House in Strasbourg. Opposite the great cathedral, it had been chosen by Gen. Von Manteuffel, commander of the Army of Occupation, as a definite statement. Alsace Lorraine, occupied by German soldiers, was, the Reich was advocating, thoroughly German. It was not up for discussion at this meeting.

Staff Officers and men of the Army of Occupation, along with throngs of citizens, had gathered to see the arrival of the three men from the radical Commune. In reality they were underwhelming to most – three bearded middle-aged men in slightly crumpled suits with red sashes of office crossing their chests diagonally.

But what they had to say was explosive. Sitting in the old timbered house, Von Manteuffel and his staff were stunned. They had expected the French to shriek and complain, to demand immediate withdrawal and refuse any claims of compensation. Yet what Grousset and Varlin offered was quite the reverse.

France was wracked by Civil War, they stated plainly. The battles outside Paris indicated a long and bitter conflict. A long and bitter conflict that would require the prolonged, expensive, and exposed presence of a German Army of Occupation in France. Unless, of course, the Commune could strike a deal here and now.

What Grousset asked for was two-fold; the withdrawal of the Army of Occupation immediately and at the same time the release of the thousands of prisoners of war held by the victorious German Army into Communard care. It was, he allowed, a tall order, knowing that Bismarck, behind the scenes, would be hesitant. But he was prepared to sweeten the deal.
In exchange, the Commune would offer two things of its own. It would recognize the claim of the German Empire to Alsace Lorraine in perpetuity. And, in addition to this, it would agree to a war indemnity. The Germans wanted five million francs but, a frantic Jourde managed to summon up enough courage to argue them down. This was an immediate offer, the Bank Executive offered ashen-faced, and one that could be begun with a down payment then and there.

The gold reserves of the French Empire had been removed from Paris in 1870 as the Germans advanced, but in the vaults of the National Bank had been close to 100 million in gold coinage. It was now, in bullion boxes guarded by Jourde’s clerks turned Guards, waiting in Strasbourg station.
“The affair seemed to break the hearts of both younger men” one German Officer present recalled later. “Signing over Alsace caused Varlin to clutch the edge of the table and grimace. Handing over the coins seemed to shatter Jourde. But they did it.”

As they returned to the train, ink still drying on the Treaty of Kammerzal, as it became known, Varlin may have recalled Blanqui’s ringing order. “Alsace Lorraine” he had argued in the Committee meeting “is not vital to the Revolution”. He may also have mused on why, then, none of Blanqui’s own faction had been involved in this meeting that might sunder the reputation of the Commune forever.

“Will the French people forgive us for this betrayal?” wrote Jourde in his diary that evening. “Should they?”

We know, however, from the one photograph of the meeting that Grousset was checking his pocket watch. Caught in sepia-stillness, it is unclear why, but it is nice to suspect that he was thinking of the uprising soon to take place in Lyons. Designed, in one blow, to strike at the Royalists and convince the Germans.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Twelve - Lyon and Marseille

Welp, I guess the French lost a big chunk of their industrial capacity.

Actually, it shouldn't be too bad. There wasn't that much of a concentration of industry in the area at this point.

Lyon and Marseille

‘We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda’
Mikhail Bakunin, Letters to a Frenchmen on the Present Crisis, 1870.

‘We are lucky the news of Kammerzal has not yet broken’.
Dombrowski, typically succinct, on the Southern Surge of Communard activity, in a letter back to Rossel. Both men had known about the proposed treaty in advance.

Lyon erupted in action on the morning of the 8th of May. Dombrowski had attempted to disguise the movement of his men southwards, not allowing the train to stop en route, but the knowledge that the force from Paris was on its way stimulated the National Guard of Lyon into action. At 5 a.m. a group marched from their bivouacs on the main boulevard in the east of town to the Hotel de Ville. The surprise was near total, many Royalist functionaries captured or arrested in their offices or beds. By the time that Dombrowski and his force had reached the city, disembarking from trains in ragged order, the red flag of the Commune was flying over the Hotel de ville.

To the distaste of the attached Deputies from Paris, part of Dombrowski’s force, an election had already taken place. Of the twelve seats, only two were held by Blanquists. The remaining ten were: three Internationalists, two trade unionists, a National Guard colonel, an unaffiliated but socialist-inclined Doctor, and three independents. These three were perhaps the most interesting. Two were Republicans. Lyon had been fairly radical before 1870, with a relatively left-wing council, and whilst moderate Republicans were uncertain about the Commune’s intentions, few council men or national guard moderates were prepared to throw off the Commune in favour of a Monarchy. Whilst not necessarily fully endorsing the Commune, they did not oppose it, giving cover for more radical members of their party, such as the two on the Lyon Committee, to work with Paris.

Mikhail Bakunin. Soon to become a major figure in the Communard movement​

The final figure, elected chairman of the council, was the Russian Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. An inspiration to radicals throughout Europe, Bakunin was a calm but passionate voice on the council. Dombrowski, fully prepared to march into either a battlefield or a madhouse, instead found the man organising a vote in the town courtyard, asking the assembled Lyon National Guard if they were prepared to march from the city to secure surrounding areas.

The effect of the fall of Lyon, without a shot, reverberated around Paris. At Saint Etienne, an industrial centre south of Lyon, soldiers and workers occupied the centre of town and elected a radical council. In Amiens National Guardsmen, combined with recently released POWs, took power in the absence of either German or Royalist forces. In the mining centre of Le Creuset the council did not even wait to be forced – Republican members voted themselves into a Commune.

"Good Chap....Good God!" Popular journal Pere Duchene expresses the popularity of Dombrowski in this period​

Marseille was the most turbulent though. Some three thousand armed workers and Guardsmen took the centre of town. Yet here the Royalists resisted. Forces from the Navy, harboured in port, sallied into the centre and began to fight back. What had started as a bloodless coup on the morning of the 9th turned into a day-long running battle as marines and armed sailors, supported by moderate National Guard and police, pushed back. By the end, trapped in the Hotel de Ville, the force of Communards had shrunk to around 400 who, promised their lives, surrendered just before midnight. Commune crushed, the victory at Marseille was as potent a symbol for Royalists as that at Lyon had been for Paris.

Outside Paris, reassured that at least some parts of his southern flank were under control, MacMahon finalised the plans for his assault on Paris.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Thirteen – Fort Mont-Valérien

Yes! Bakunin better be a good counterpoint to the blanquists when blanqui bites the dust. The commune must not descend into tyranny!

I thought you might like that bit!

Chapter Thirteen – Fort Mont-Valérien

"Here I am, here I stay"
Patrice MacMahon, after taking the Malakoff, 1855

"Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have."
General Clement-Thomas on the plan of assault.



Built in 1841 as part of the city’s ring of modern fortifications, the brick and stone walls, the gun emplacements and rifle trenches, of Fort Mont-Valérien on the western side of Paris had withstood three months of Prussian bombardment without much of a scratch. Now, garrisoned by 1,200 men of the 11th Arrondissement National Guard, it was the strongest part of the Commune’s defences. And was where Marshall MacMahon decided to strike.

The Marshall/Prime Minister, defacto army commander outside of Versailles, had been locked into planning this assault for three weeks. He knew that Mont-Valérien was a strong-point but, having captured the Malakoff Redoubt in the Crimea almost twenty years earlier, he was confident. Malakoff had, after all, ended the Russian resistance at Sebastopol. Indeed, in the gallery in Nantes a fine painting of MacMahon himself, standing before the now-abandoned tricolour, announced his victory to the world. With the news of other uprisings taking place in the South and East, MacMahon had to act immediately. Strike at the strongest point, he told his staff, and the resistance in the city would crumble.

MacMahon had a card up his sleeve. For almost two weeks, as Lyon bubbled and Marseille was supressed, his engineers had been digging a tunnel beneath the walls of Mont-Valérien. It had been filthy, horrible, work, but it had paid off. Now, packed beneath the walls, were almost 4000 kg of gunpowder.

Colonel Henri Agréable lays the fuse beneath the Fortress​

Dawn was at 4.30 a.m. on 20th May. At 3.45 a.m. Col. Henri Agréable had slithered down the tunnel to light the fuses before turning on his heel and scrambling back out. Inside the fortress guardsmen snored oblivious. Outside, almost 7,000 men of Clement-Thomas’s Division waited.

The explosion tore the sky apart. Noise shook the sleeping city, smashing over three thousand windows with the shockwave created. The noise could be heard as far away as the coast. Ripping apart most of the western and southern walls of the fortress, over 400 Communards were killed in the initial blast and forty cannon lost. As Clement-Thomas’s zouave units surged forward, racing around the edges of the crater, stunned Communard forces put up little resistance at all. Many were bayonetted or shot at close range in their underclothes as they staggered out of shattered barracks.

By the time dawn broke the skyline over Paris, upwards of 6,000 Royalists were pushing through the shattered remains of the fortress and heading for the Porte Dauphine.

The Battle for Paris had begun.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Fourteen - Desperation

I'm going to deal with the Battle for Paris indepth, but then move things more rapidly forward in time. Hope everyone is still enjoying it.

Chapter Fourteen - Desperation

“The Commune counts on you, count on the Commune!”
Posters put up around Paris on the morning of the 20th May

Blanqui was already awake when panicked aides burst into his apartments to rouse him to the threat. The old man had been awake since midnight, troubled by cold sweats and racing pulse, and had been reading at his desk when the explosion had shaken the city. Unlike his dishevelled aides he was immaculately dressed in a military tunic, white hair tied back, and finger tips stained with ink. He had, already, a detailed plan.

From the start Blanqui had been critical of building barricades. The oldest tactic in Parisian revolutionary history, he had felt they encouraged the defenders to hide and be on the defensive. Reactive rather than active. In agreement with Rossel, only small barricades had been built across the streets. Widened by Haussmann, it was feared that these would not be as easily defended as the original medieval ones were. Instead, learning from their harrowing engagement at Versailles, National Guardsmen were hurrying into the tall elegant buildings and smashing out those few panes of glass left intact by the blast.

Clément-Thomas’ attack was in three columns, each intended to push deep into the heart of Paris. Yet from the start the assault ran into quandaries. The central column, the first through the breach, took advantage of the confusion in the early dawn hours to push deeper into the heart of the city. They were only stopped at the edge of the 8th Arrondisement, the top of the Champs-Elysees where the Arc de Triumph stood, by hastily rallied Communard forces. Here the Blanquist Deputy Eudes, showing careless disregard for his own safety, organised a stubborn resistance. Fighting from barricades around the Arc itself, his men were showered with stone fragments as bullets chipped the stone.

Advance was slow in the 17th Arrondisement. Emerging from the park, Royalist forces were hit by accurate Communard artillery fire that Rossel directed personally. Placing the older, muzzle-loading, cannons in the mouths of the streets he was able to blow holes in the advancing Royalist lines before spiking the guns and falling back as the men surged forward. Picked off by volleys of fire from the Communards in the buildings, Clement-Thomas lost one and then another Brigade Commanders in this sector.

The Southern thrust, the one Clement-Thomas was organising himself, however, stabbed further. His North-African Zouaves, pushing through the parkland, were able to drive back the panicked Communards who spent much of the early hours firing wildly at shadows in the half-light. With rifle-butt and bayonet they cleared the first lines of barricades but soon became bogged down in serious fighting with the rallied defenders that frantic Deputies were rallying section by section and rushing to the front.

By 9 a.m., five hours in, Clement-Thomas was calling for reinforcements to press home his attack and the Second Corps, clambering over the crater, were beginning to filter into the city. Of his 150,000 strong army MacMahon had now committed some 40,000.

The later morning fighting became more desperate. Cobbled streets slicked with blood and debris were taken, lost, and retaken as the Royalist assault stalled in the face of desperate resistance. It was a whirl of small set-pieces. At St. Mary the Virgin, in the 17th Arrondissement, an entire section of Communards were burned alive as Royalist rifle fire ignited the medieval timbers of the church roof. In the 18th, the new Department Store of Joyeux Brothers was held by forty Communards under a Maths Teacher, whose decisive use of positions saw three assaults driven off. The fourth, which surged into the building, was defeated as the final Royalists were driven out of the second storey windows to fall to their deaths in the street below. In the 18th three companies of Zouaves killed Deputy Pyat as he tried to rally hesitating Communards, knocking him down in a volley of musket fire. They were themselves wiped out as a new unit, the female Louise Michel Battalion, swept around the corner and opened fire. One of the women, still in her work-dress, tore the outer skirt off and laid it over Pyat’s bloody corpse before hurrying to rejoin her unit.

Behind the lines, as battle raged, both forces began to become more brutal. Royalist forces were arranging their artillery along the hills outside the city, raining their first shots down into the working-class districts of the city. In the meantime the Commune’s Police, under Rigault, were sweeping up “dissidents”. Chief among these was the Archbishop of Paris himself, who had refused to flee the city and abandon his flock.

When one young Jesuit protested, Rigault turned on him.
“What profession are you?” he asked, glasses gleaming.
“A servant of God” the young man said defiantly.
“And where does this God reside?” Rigault fired back.
“All around us my son” the Priest responded.

Turning to his adjunct with an evil grin, Rigault smirked and ordered “Take this man into custody. He professes to be a servant of one ‘God’ – a tramp with no fixed abode”.

Around them the Battle for Paris raged on.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Fifteen – The Brink

Chapter Fifteen – The Brink

"Remain calm and everything will be saved. We must not be defeated!"
Jaroslaw Dombrowski's Order of the Day for 20th May 1871

"A Death by a Thousand Cuts"
Royalist Captain Emile Florens on the Battle for Paris

At around 1 p.m. units of the Foreign Legion broke through Communard lines and pushed into the Western portions of the 7th Arrondissement. Some of the wealthiest sections of the city, here morale amongst local National Guardsmen was at its lowest. One Communard Deputy, the sixty year old Jules Miot, found an entire company skulking in their barracks rather than fighting. When he began to attempt to move them the officer in charge shot him dead.

Dombrowski’s reforms, however, had stiffened most sections of the Guard. In the North, in the 17th Arrondissement, Rossel could sense the Royalists wavering. They had trained to destroy the barricades they thought the Commune would rely on, smashing through walls to flank positions, but found instead that each time the defenders had fallen back, warned by the units in the buildings, leaving the Royalists caught in a deadly crossfire in the streets. By midday MacMahon had committed a third corps, the 9th under General Georges Boulanger, and now was musing over whether to throw a fourth into the fray. Before he could, however, Rossel led his sections in a vicious counter-attack. Charging from buildings and up ruined streets they drove panicked and disorganised Royalists before them back into the Bois de Boulogne. Stiffer resistance from Boulanger’s units dented the assault, with Rossel losing two fingers of his left hand to a rifle bullet that killed his aide-de-camp, but did not stop the charge. Within minutes troops of both 9th and 4th corps of the Royalist army were stumbling and tripping into the crater in panicked retreat.

Inside Paris the battle was chaotic, and few officers had any concept of what was going on even a few streets away. At the Arc de Triumph, chipped away by rifle fire, Communard soldiers effectively under the command of Deputy Eudes were reduced to firing shards of marble from the Arc, buttons from their uniforms, nails from the furniture in the barricade, and anything else that would fit down the barrels of their antique Napoleonic muskets. Taking heavy casualties, nevertheless they stayed put.

More set pieces sum up these stages of the battle. In the south of the city Guard Mobile from the Royalist army overran a battery of Mitrailleuse, killing the operators, but were unable to work the complicated machinery before a mixed unit of men and women from the 3rd Arrondissement Guard overwhelmed them in turn. In the East Clusseret stripped every man he had from the defences and sending them across Paris apart from one unit of twenty men he ran ragged, ordering them to march up and down the walls to convince the Royalist observers the defences were still manned.

And, in the South, Dombrowski and his men arrived. The trains had been rattle-traps, he recalled later, rushing up from Lyon containing every Communard he could force into a uniform. They surged out, some 13,000 strong, just south of Sevres. MacMahon, his cavalry decimated by the earlier attack at Versailles, had little warning of this attack on his flank.

Suddenly, as the Communard field army surged forward, his command was split. He had some 35,000 troops outside of Paris but, inside, were the majority of his forces. They were stuck in bitter street fighting or, as with Boulanger’s forces, trapped in the crater.

The later stages of the Battle for Paris were brutal. On the outside the battle was, essentially, an old-fashioned engagement of infantry on infantry. The Communards had no cannons or cavalry and MacMahon could not assemble his in time. Coming surging through the wooded hills on the edge of the Seine, Dombrowski’s men rolled up the 8th Corps as if it was butter. Most of the Corps, waiting to be sent into action, had broken for lunch. Many of their rifles weren’t even loaded. Panic rippled through the force, men scrambling up and away in terror. Attempts by officers came to little – General Clinchant was pulled from his horse and taken prisoner within minutes of the attack. Even as MacMahon tried to rally further lines of defence, these were disrupted by fleeing soldiers from the 8th Corps who pushed their way through formations. Soon a retreat was turning to a rout as Royalist soldiers, survivors of the Franco-Prussian war or new conscripts, found they had little stomach for a bloody fight they were losing.

Inside the city the situation for Royalist soldiers grew worse. Rossel had, hand wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage, been directing artillery all day. Now, parked in the Bois de Boulogne, his guns were able to fire almost point-blank into the Royalist rear. Trapped, only pockets of men fought on. Meanwhile, in the crater, a bloodbath was taking place as Communards found themselves able to fire down into the pit where the Royalists were pressed in. With only ladders to escape the depression in the earth, thousands of soldiers were trapped. It was only when, at around 6p.m., with light fading, that Boulanger struggled up with a white flag that firing stopped. Inside the city hold-out units, particularly the Foreign Legion, fought on, but the majority of Royalists were in Communard hands.

Communard Forces celebrate victory in Paris atop a barricade​

Dombrowski, climbing through the crater filled with wounded and dead soldiers to reach the city, met Rossel in the racing pavilion in the park. The organiser of victory, white from blood loss, was being force-fed brandy by his concerned staff whilst a Doctor snipped away the fragments of bone and sinew left of his two main left fingers.

“Too close” was all the sombre Pole had to say, sinking into the chair next to Rossel. The younger man, he remembered later, had looked over to reply and found Dombrowski asleep from utter exhaustion.

By morning a white flag from Versailles had arrived.

Communard losses had been around 7,800, with some 1,400 dead and over 6,00 wounded.

Royalist casualties had been greater. 14,600, with 2,100 dead. A further 22,000 were captured in the rout or amongst those forces trapped in Paris.
Now, finally, it was time to talk.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Sixteen: The Treaty of Ambert

Thanks for all the kind comments guys! Next post will have a map (got to work out how to upload it) and will take stock of the situation more generally before we get on with the story. So any clarifications anyone wants, let me know in the comments!

Chapter Sixteen: The Treaty of Ambert

“Let them pay through the nose and grow anaemic and ripe for defeat, or let them default and pay the Prussian creditor in blood”
Minister of the Interior, Charles Beulé, to his wife, 1871


It took three long weeks, three weeks of mistrust and skirmishing and positioning, for the peace talks to be arranged. The Communards, fearful of being executed, refused to leave their own territory. The Royalists resolutely refused to legitimise their regime by meeting them in Paris.

But the meeting had to happen. Both sides were at breaking point. MacMahon, exhausted, was trying in the countryside beyond Versailles to keep his army together with both hands. These men were conscripts, called up in 1870 to fight Prussians, and now, with the spring turning to summer, were desperate to get back to their farms and villages. They had been in uniform too long and the bitter defeat at the walls of Paris had seen morale plummet. Without access to the Bank of France in Paris, the King was unable to pay his men either, and each night pickets struggled to stop men slipping away into the night. In Paris, meanwhile, the dead were being counted. The Commune’s soldiers were workers and artisans, men it was supposed to serve, and such rates of casualty couldn’t be sustained. Whether they wanted it or not, both sides needed peace.

Finally the sleepy rural town of Ambert, nestled in the centre of the country, was selected. It rotunda market place, small and musty with the smell of grain, provided the venue for the two delegations.

Leading the Communard one was the trio of Leo Frankel , Eugene Varlin, and Emile Eudes, three young men sent by Blanqui and the Assembly to find whatever terms they could. For the Royalist the Minister of the Interior, Charles Beulé, a professor of archaeology, assembled his own weary team.
Debate was painfully slow. For the first day Beulé, under direct orders from MacMahon, refused resolutely any suggestion of power-sharing. Varlin and Eudes, from the outset, had proposed the reunion of the country under a Republic, with the abdication of the King, and new elections. Annoyed, Beulé simply dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “The King is here to stay gentlemen” he announced at one point, to which Eudes snapped “and so are we sir!”. At times the three days of peace talks seemed like a farce, albeit a not particularly funny one. On the morning of the second day the talks almost collapsed when it turned out that the Communards had been tapping the telegraph line of the Royalists, listening in to how their suggestions were being treated back at court. The situation was only diffused when the town clerk came forward to point out that the Royalists were also listening in to the Communards through the thin walls of their hotel room.

It was late on the third day that Frankel laid out the groundwork of the treaty as it became known. Perhaps his status as a foreigner, a Hungarian Jew, allowed him to think what was unthinkable for the other men present – the dismemberment of France. From La Havre in the north, along a strip of land just wide enough to include Paris but exclude Versailles, the border Frankel sketched out found the Loire valley and followed the river as far south as Saint Etienne. Then it crossed land to the Rhone, travelling back up a little to near Lyon, before switching to the Isere and following that river to the Italian border. Standing back, Frankel revealed a map that placed a third of the country, roughly, in the hands of the Commune.

“Many historians have, over the years, questioned the precise nature of the new border” wrote Professor Marc Bloc, in the 1927, “yet this is to misunderstand the nature of France at the time”.

Perhaps the best summary came in the two volumes of Eugen Weber’s Modern France. Peasants into Subjects (1976) and Workers into Comrades (1977) emphasised the split. Crucial is Weber’s discussion of language. In 1871, at the time of the division, he argued, only 30% of France spoke what was considered “French”. Loyalty to the region was much more important than to the nation for many, and played into political concerns. The Royalists had, since before 1789, viewed Paris as chaotic and ungovernable, whilst the Communards, looking back to the 1790s, were able to point to the West and South as essentially anti-Republican.

Whilst all men were, at first, aghast at Frankel’s suggestion, it seemed, the more they talked, to be the only solution. The Communards could never hope, beyond wild dreams, to conquer France entirely, let alone hold it down. The Royalists, meanwhile, lost the prestige of Paris but gained a buffer state.

Ever the opportunist, however, Beulé was able to sting the Communards one last time as they signed. There could be, he said airily as the ink dried, no question of the Kingdom of France paying for a peace treaty they did not agree too. The Communards had agreed it, he said looking at Varlin, so they had better pay.

After three days, it was decided, France would be split in two.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Seventeen – The Return from Icaria

Chapter Seventeen – The Return from Icaria

In the hot autumn of 1871 around 200 Frenchmen, women and children, left the rustling cornfields of Iowa. They had stayed long enough to see out the harvest, selling at a profit in an economy still recovering from its own Civil War, and to sell up their series of farmsteads to Mormon settlers interested in establishing a colony of their own. Then they joined the small but eager exodus to the East Coast and, ultimately, back to France.

The Icarians, followers of a Utopian socialist dream set out by writer Ettienne Cabet in the 1840s were not powerful, numerous, or influential. But they were symbolic of the ideological push and pull migration that was taking place in Francophone communities across both France and the wider world. It is estimated that, as news of the breakup of France and the birth of the Republique Populaire spread, around 9,000 migrants returned to Commune controlled areas. They came from communes and colonies in America, Brazil, South Africa, and Universities and student quarters across Europe, but they all shared a hope that, now, they did not have to leave the land of their birth to establish their vision of socialism.

Across France refugees and migrants flooded back and forth across the new informal borders. Many of those prisoners of war released into Communard hands by the Germans were from the new Kingdom and, apart from a few radicals amongst the ranks and young men with no ties to pull them back, few expressed any interest in staying. There was more uncertainty amongst those who homes were in the new People’s Republic, but the vast majority did just want to return home.

Of those who did move across borders, the majority fleeing to Royalist France were priests. The expected bourgeois mass-exodus did not occur – leaving home was a huge upheaval and, besides, many of those who could have fled had already moved before the Prussians had arrived. Thousands of priests, curates, and bishops, however, fled south and west, the example of the Archbishop of Paris ringing in their ears.

Georges Darboy, swept up by Raoul Rigault and his secret police in the wave of terror following the defeat at Versailles, was dead. Officially, according to Rigault, the Royalists were to blame. The prison he was being held in had been hit by shells and the Archbishop, along with several of his fellows, had been killed in the blast. Theofile Ferre, the Commune’s official prosecutor, still in mourning for the loss of his beloved Louise Michel, investigated in the early hours of the morning after the battle. In private correspondence with Blanqui he was sceptical. ‘I am unsure of the chances of a piece of shrapnel the size and shape of a bullet striking him so perfectly in the forehead’ he demurred, but in public the Commune stuck to the story of accidental death.
The world was not convinced. Pope Pius IX, never a fan of Darboy, nevertheless took the opportunity to condemn the Commune as fervently anti-clerical, avow the King as the rightful ruler of all France, and begin the process of turning Darboy into a saint and martyr of the faith.

This stink, however, was nothing in comparison to the news of the Treaty of Kammerzal. Breaking a week after the armistice, Kammerzal saw public support for the Commune plummet. Even left-wing groups were shaken, clinging only to the hope the Commune represented. “A Disgrace!” announced Le Figaro. “Shame, shame, a thousand times shame” wrote the novelist Victor Hugo to a friend.

Disgraced in the eyes of public opinion the news of Darboy and Kammerzal, together, forced the Commune to turn inwards. Criticised and mistrusted abroad, its executive focused on two things: the upcoming meeting of the Working Man’s International in November that year and, the preceding October, the first ever elections to the Republic’s National Council. Given the political climate, they promised to be a chaotic affair.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Eighteen – Factions and Elections

Thanks guinazacity. The Icarians are silly but I've always had a soft spot for them and wanted to put them in. You'll have to wait to see what happens with Bakunin and Rigault.

Chapter Eighteen – Factions and Elections

There had been no solid plan, in Blanqui’s mind, as to what form of government might emerge from the Commune. Unlike the work of Marx or Bakunin, Blanquism was a creed that preached forceful revolution first, social revolution later. Now that the later was staring him in the face, the old man blinked. He yielded to pressure and relinquished overall control in favour of elections.

In the first chaotic months of the Republic it became rapidly clear that the organic socialist-anarchist structure of society that many activists had hoped would spring to the fore was not unfolding. The regions under their control were, after almost two years of war and occupation, relatively calm, but disordered. Frustration was mounting with a lack of clear direction and there were sporadic incidences of arson and violence, usually around church property.

The planned structure of the new National Council, proposed by the current Assembly, was for every Commune in the Republic to be represented by a number of delegates dependent on population size. Parisian Arrondissements, for instance, would each send one deputy, whilst smaller rural areas would be combined into seats. The tally convened, after much wrangling, was an unwieldy 277 seats.

The election, covered in a variety of regional and “national” newspapers, was a strange affair. Used to squabbling on the fringes of politics, now socialist and anarchist groups were thrust front and centre into the fray. With very few party affiliations, no money, and, for many, no recognition amongst voters outside of Paris itself, alliances and groupings were hard to establish. Roughly, four key groups emerged.

The Blanquists had, with the figure of Blanqui himself and their interest in cadres, a rough party system, although it had never sought mass appeal. Emile Eudes, however, found himself a capable campaign managers and utilised ably a number of key political figures in his campaign. Blanqui himself, clearly, was almost guaranteed a seat in the new Council, whilst Rigault, although problematic for some, was seen by others as the sort of man needed to secure the new state. Blanqui’s cause was bolstered by a series of high-profile arrivals from new groups – the feminist Paule Minck and, in a stroke of surprise to many, the former General Georges Boulanger. Captured at the crater, the general now proclaimed his eyes opened by the cause of the new Republic.

The anarchists had a groundswell of popular support to draw on, with a clearer vision of a utopian world, but predictably floundered when it came to organisation. Bakunin, nominal head of the group, did well to attract a number of prominent figures, including Chairwoman of the Social Credit Bank Nathalie Lemel and the anarchists Elisee Reclus and Elie Reclus (no relation). Anarchists, unlike Blanquists whose appeal was urban and spoke to the desire for order and discipline among voters, appealed instead to rural and poor voters.

Varlin and Frankel, adrift after being exposed as the main authors of Kammerzal, were left in uncertain grounds. The death of Pyat during the Battle for Paris, and the resignation of Delecluze shortly after on health grounds, had left only Blanqui’s voice at the helm. The duo eventually moved towards a centrist position, realising that a more practical socialism was needed to actually run the new state. Their supporters were often young, and educated, but were drawn from across the political spectrum and Varlin, a long term supporter of women’s rights, drew in the growing feminist movement to what became known as the Centrist party.

Finally, given that great swathes of Commune territory had never risen up for the new regime, it was natural that opposition would occur. Blanqui had forbidden, at the urging of the Assembly, openly Royalist or conservative parties in the election, and opposition began instead to coalesce around the moderate Republican Jules Ferry. Given charge of Paris during the war with Germany, Ferry’s star had sunk so low in France that he had considered suicide. Yet, with his hometown of Saint-Dix now on the border with the newly German Lorraine, Ferry found himself in a unique position to rally the forces dissatisfied with the Commune. Watched closely and unpopular with many, his Moderate faction nevertheless competed the election in many constituencies, Ferry himself bravely withstanding verbal and physical abuse on countless hustings.

As, in Paris, preparations for the International Congress drew near, ballot boxes began to arrive at the bullet-scarred Hotel de Ville. Counting up the election resulting took four hundred clerks almost a week…

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Nineteen – Congress

Contains major butterflies.
Also, please let me know if you guys want to see an overview of Europe or more on the Commune or visit the Kingdom in upcoming posts!

Chapter Nineteen – Congress

‘Events have moved so fast I can barely keep you informed quickly enough!’
George Howell, Trade Unionist and part of the British Delegation, writes back to Henry Hyndman, chair of the newly formed Social Democratic Federation.

They came from across the Republic. From Picardy to Lyon to Paris itself. From Portugal and Spain, Italy and Switzerland, the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire and the new German one, from Scandinavia, Ireland, Britain, North America and Russia. Men, and women, workers and intellectuals, they arrived in Paris in their hundreds that mild November, as drizzling rain spattered the roof-tops of the grey city.

Meanwhile, in the new National Council, meeting in the Hotel de Ville, reflected the divided mood of the country.

Of 277 seats the results were as follows:
Blanquists: 131
Anarchist Federation: 98
Centrists: 43
Moderates: 5

It was a frustrating result all-round. Blanqui secured a majority but nothing outright. The anarchists lacked a cohesive structure to mobilise their representatives, their “party” disrupted by hundreds of caucuses and internal groupings and cliques, whilst Varlin and Frankel had, on the back of Kammerzal, received an electoral beating.

Little of this had impact on the delegates arriving from across the world, however, for they had traveled for the International Workingmen’s Congress.

Arrayed in the Great Hall of the Tuilleries Palace, now very much in Commune control, the first day was little more than a rapturous series of self-congratulating of the victorious Communards. Blanqui himself took the standing ovation with aplomb, whilst even Varlin and Frankel received congratulations from more pragmatic and foreign delegates.

By the second day, however, the splits in the Republic were seeping into the International. The organisation had always been diffuse, a mess of ideas, and now, with the nature of a successful revolution to fight over, they became more entrenched and vitriolic.

The key issue that divided the conference was on what had caused the success of the Commune, ideologically speaking. For the Blanquists, most numerous amongst the French delegates, it was obvious – armed force from the cadre had been, as their leader had predicted, decisive. Bakunin, speaking for the assembled anarchists, presented a different view. The people had thrown off their oppressor, the state, he argued. Now was the time for workers and peasants to come together, as they were across France, and replace the state with a more organic structure. The third faction, led by Marx and Engels, argued that workers needed to take over the state itself.

By the second afternoon the verbal duelling became deadly. Eudes’s speech on armed cadres was interrupted by shouts of “What then? What then?” from anarchists in the audience, to which he snapped “You tell me, gentlemen, for you are the obstacles!”. Yet the Blanquists also struggled to keep control of the mood of the meeting, Blanqui himself resolutely refusing to outline any plan he may or may not have had for the reshaping of society.

By the third day, sick of locking horns with a man he knew he couldn’t shift given his successful revolutionary credentials, Bakunin paused, only to find himself under attack from Marx. Marx, hand on lapel, delivered a blistering speech that depicted the anarchists as the roadblock to state construction in the new Republic. “Idle dreamers, careless rakes, third rate nobility flakes, and chronic wastrels” he denounced them, drawing sporadic applause from the Blanquists in the process. It was an assault which had been bubbling away for some time, ever since the International was first convened in 1864. But here, in Paris, Marx had misjudged his audience.

Anarchists had, whatever the current situation in France was, bled and died on the barricades whilst Marx, not even in France, had yet to attract anything even resembling a major following. It fell to one of Bakunin’s disciples, the young Russian Peter Kropotkin who had travelled in the Swiss delegation, to deliver the rebuttal.

‘Karl Marx is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Marx has none. He is drained of thought, anaemic and weak, at a time when the flame of justice and social revolution burns bright. A servant of the state in a time where it is dying.’
Bakunin, later, was to return to this theme. ‘A Doctor desperately trying to pronounce a corpse healthy’ was his verdict on Marx and the state.
The waters shifted quickly. Within the hour the Blanquist faction realised Marx was now a figure onto which they could heap the problems of the peace. They joined in, a withering barrage of verbal attack that was carried in newspapers each day to the eager crowds, that decried this new “Marxism” as out-dated and irrelevant.

Bakunin expels Karl Marx​

By the middle of the fourth day, Bakunin, beaming in triumph, was able to deliver a decisive death-blow. At 1.32p.m. on 6th November 1871 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were expelled from the International.

Whatever shape the politics of the Republic were to take, it was clear that the idea of a centralised working-class state was now dead and buried.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter Twenty – Two Frances: 1871-1883

Chapter Twenty – Two Frances: 1871-1883

Republic Populaire

‘I believe, unlike our Authoritarian friends, that a revolution can only be brought about by the committed, spontaneous, and sustained involvement of the masses’
Mikhail Bakunin, speech in National Council, 1875

‘It was not so much a restructuring or a disintegration of the state – more a haphazard, confused, negotiation played out over a decade of economic upheaval’
George Rude, Commune, University of Oslo Press, 1980.

Deadlock in the National Council throughout the 1870s was what, more than any other influence, shaped the modern Communard nation. On the one hand the Blanquists opposed the filtering out of central power by the Anarchists, but lacked a cohesive vision of what they wanted this power for. On the other hand, the anarchists, even with Bakunin at the nominal helm, were unable to agree on even the name of the National Council (some hating the nationalism they saw inherent in it). Moreover the movement was split between Bakunin’s Collectivists (who believed all property and means of production should be owned by the group) and the Mutualists, followers of recently deceased anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who had not lived to see the Commune, who believed that property could be owned individually or collectively, with labour itself forming a new currency.

It meant that, in reality, small deals and compromises were the order of the day. An uneasy power balance developed, the Centrists and Moderates caught in the middle, whereby the Blanquists pushed through some centralising laws whilst the anarchists sought more freedom. One of the key battlegrounds was over the Communard army. Early on anarchist deputies called for its complete abolition in favour of a militia modelled on the National Guard. A Commission, chaired by the retired Delescluze who was seen as neutral, soon found opposition from within the Guard itself. Rossel and Dombrowski, both appearing as experts, were dubious. Rossel, in particular, was outright aggrieved. With the frontier so close, and Paris in constant danger, he argued, there could be no return to a vague and unreliable system. Eventually, after a 16 month inquiry, a decision was made to compromise. A central core of the army would remain centralised, under Rossel as an impartial chief of staff, but elsewhere every adult man between 16 and 55 was expected to give up one afternoon a week to drill and rifle practice.

Compromise governed almost everything in the early days of the Republic. The rough working order was that most social issues, from sewers to farms to housing, would be run by organically organised collectives supervised by a town or regional (for rural areas) elected Commune that reported via its Deputy to Paris. Major industries and areas of national security, the army, railways, the arms industry, coal mining, would be run on a syndicalist base by the relevant trade unions, whose leaders were to report to a designated Deputy.

The two fringe groups, the Centrists and the Moderates, began to recover during the decade, it is important to point out. The Centrists profited both as middle-men between the two major factions and, as Varlin, Frankel and the young Russian socialist Elisabeth Dmitrief who had joined the group as a Deputy from Amiens in 1874 proved, as silent workhorses. All three took up positions in unflattering “Designations” as the not-quite ministries of the not-quite state were called, Varlin Designate for Railways, and Dmitrief and Frankel for Foreign Relations (non-existent given the Commune’s standing in the world).

Meanwhile the Moderates, never a huge electoral force, were nonetheless a lightning rod for dissatisfied groups.

Kingdom of France

The Kingdom, bruised by the defeat at Paris and the humiliation of dealing a treaty with rebels, similarly retreated inwards in this period. MacMahon clung on for two more years but, an old and now broken man, he retired from the Ministry in late 1873. The King, at least, sympathised, naming him Marshal for Life in the Armed Forces. His successor, Albert Duc de Broglie, worked to bring together a solid, conservative, cabinet that appealed to all the various flavours of monarchism in the nation. The result was a stable, although somewhat stagnant, government that lasted from 1873 until the crisis of 1883.

Unlike in the Republic, affairs in the Kingdom were in no way a compromise. The Republican faction, tainted by the terror the right felt for the left, was all but wiped out over a series of elections. The so-called Ordre Moral governed French thinking in this period and the country swung heavily to a religious, rural, and patriarchal identity that the King, for once, was surprisingly active in establishing. Georges Tannard, his personal secretary, was later to reminisce that the division of the country actually seemed to liberate His Majesty from the anxieties of his rule – he was now left with the loyal and faithful country he had dreamed of.

This combination of Royal approval and the collapse of any opposition meant that the Broglie Government pushed through a series of laws that saw the army strengthened, colonial ambitions re-established, and the school system, rolled out nationally, placed in the hands of the Catholic Church. The Papal Legate, wrote the austere Republican leader Jules Grevy, was the happiest man in all France.

A decade of exhausted peace, the 1870s and first years of the 1880s were, nevertheless, cut through with a simmering tension between the two Frances.