THE PARIS COMMUNE - An essay in universal history

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An essay in universal history
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Napoleon III’s Second French Empire had greatly increased the prosperity (and hedonism) of its bourgeois citizens while at the same time increasing the poverty of the proletariat. Not that the emperor did not want to help the poor: he tried to introduce various reforms, which, however, were ineffective. Hence his nickname, “the Well-Intentioned”. As he told the English politician Richard Cobden, “It is very difficult in France to make reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms”.34 And another revolution was in the offing…
For it was not only the proletariat who were dissatisfied with Napoleon: the Grand Orient of France decided to overthrow him because of his turning away from Masonry. French national vanity35, combined with Bismarckian cunning and German military superiority, led to the Germans defeating the French at Sedan in 1870 and forcing the abdication of Napoleon, whereupon, after a successful siege of Paris, the Germans were able to dictate a humiliating peace on the French at Versailles on January 18, 1871. The French Masons played their part in this, according to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Karlovich Girs, by informing the Germans of the military secrets of the French army through a Prussian Masonic Agency in Berne.36 A proletarian revolution then broke out in Paris called the Commune. A second siege of Paris ensued, as the army of the republican French government of Adolphe Thiers advanced on Paris from Versailles, which ended in the bloody defeat and slaughter of the Communards…
Let us look a little more closely at the sequence of events… The fall of the Empire was completely unexpected. France faced no great dangers abroad at the time. Indeed, "that June, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Lord Granville gazed out with satisfaction on the world scene and claimed - with reason - that he could not discern 'a cloud in the sky'. In all his experience he had never known 'so great a lull in foreign affairs'. In Paris, Emperor Napoleon III's Prime Minister, Emile Ollivier, echoed Granville by declaring that 'at no period has the maintenance of peace seemed better assured'."37
"The Prussian triumph over Austria in 1866," writes Roger Price, "had altered the European balance of power, and ever since, French public opinion had believed in the likelihood of a war by means of which France could re-assert its authority. When war came in 1870 it was however due to a series of errors by a government operating under pressure from conservative opinion. The hysterical response of the right-wing press to the news of a Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne was a major factor in creating an atmosphere favourable to war. Although both the emperor and Ollivier might have been willing to accept a simple withdrawal of this candidature, conservative deputies demanded guarantees which Bismarck [the Prussian Chancellor], in the infamous Ems telegram, refused in insulting terms. To have accepted this would have meant another humiliating foreign policy reversal and risked parliamentary disapproval which could have thrown into doubt the bases of the recently revised constitution and particularly the emperor's personal power. In this situation Napoleon, although aware that the military preparations were seriously defective, succumbed to pressure from the empress, from the foreign minister the Duc de Gramont, and from the more authoritarian Bonapartists and hoped that victory would further consolidate the regime.
"The initial public response was indeed overwhelmingly positive. With the exception of a very small minority of revolutionary militants even republicans felt bound to rally to the national cause. Huge crowds singing patriotic songs gathered in the streets to see the troops off. The first defeats brought panic. The emperor's response to the developing military crisis was to replace the Ollivier government with one made up of authoritarian Bonapartists under General Cousin-Montauban. This could not alter the fact that the army was better prepared in terms of organisation, training and material for dealing with internal security problems than waging a major European war...
"News of the defeat at Sedan and the capitulation of the emperor and one major army was received in Paris on the evening of 2 September and became public knowledge the following day. This failure utterly discredited the regime. The small group of twenty-seven republican deputies were supported by large crowds in demanding its replacement. On 4 September these invaded the Palais Bourbon and drove out the imperial Corps legislative. In such an uncertain political situation the troops and police responsible for the assembly's security were unwilling to use force against the crowds. Inspired as much by the desire to prevent a take-over by revolutionaries as by the need to replace the imperial administration a group of moderate Parisian deputies proclaimed the republic and established a Provisional Government of National Defence presided over by the military governor of Paris, General Trochu, to continue the war. In the provinces the news of defeat and revolution usually came as a great surprise but there appeared to be no immediate alternative to acceptance of the Parisian initiative. The Empire in its various manifestations had attracted widespread support. Liberalization, together with its clear commitment to law and order had seemed likely to reinforce this. Military defeat however represented governmental failure on a scale sufficient to destroy its legitimacy.38
Mark Almond writes: "The Third Republic, proclaimed on 4 September, tried to rally the defence of France, looking back to the example of the First Republic, eighty years earlier: 'The Republic was victorious over the invasion of 1793. The Republic is declared.' But the dearth of trained soldiers and equipment made resistance to the Germans very difficult, and by 19 September the German army had surrounded and laid siege to Paris.
"The siege was the essential ingredient in the radicalisation of the city's population. The famine and other burdens reduced many of the recently prosperous to penury, even prostitution...
"Some 350,000 men formed a National Guard to defend the city; most of them depended on their soldier's pay for their livelihood because the economy had collapsed during the siege. Attempts to break out of the city failed on 27 October 1870 and 19 January 1871, and provoked demonstrations at the Hôtel de Ville. Already the suspicion was spreading that politicians outside Paris were less devoted to resistance than the people of the capital...
"Despite the efforts of the Parisians to hold out against the besieging army, the French government felt it was futile to continue the war and signed an armistice with Germany on 28 January 1871. This treaty brought an end to the siege but imposed humiliating terms on France, including the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine and a crippling war indemnity of 5 million francs.
"France went to the polls on 8 February to vote for a new government that would (in accordance with the armistice) take responsibility for accepting or rejecting Germany's terms for peace. The results revealed how different Paris was from the rest of France. Paris elected a group of radicals to the Assembly, while monarchists dominated the elections elsewhere. The monarchist majority wanted peace with the Germans, whatever the humiliation.
"To achieve this peace, the Prime Minister, Thiers, had to disarm the National Guard in Paris. He ordered the Guard to hand over its artillery to the regular army on 18 March 1871. But he had already antagonised the Guard by cutting its pay, which hit the poor much as the abolition of national workshops had done in 1848. The poor had also been hit when the new National Assembly voted to end the wartime moratorium on debts and rents. Thus the people of Montmartre, especially the women, rallied to stop their cannons being hauled away. Bloody clashes occurred between the army and the people. The mayor of Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau, was shocked by the violence of the outburst: 'The mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy. Amongst them were chasseurs, soldiers of the line, National Guards, women and children. All were shrieking like wild beasts without realizing what they were doing. I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of madness seemed to have passed over this mob...'
"Several hours of fighting and rioting followed, at the end of which the government troops appeared to be no nearer to capturing the guns of Montmartre. Thiers decided to withdraw his forces and remove the Government from the capital city to Versailles. The rebels in Paris, meanwhile, voted to revive the Commune (on the model of 1792) in defiance of the government.
"Only four members of the Commune represented the recently founded Marxist Workingman's International. Twenty-five out of the Commune's ninety members worked with their hands, but mainly as skilled artisans. They were outnumbered by professionals, such as journalists, radical doctors and teachers. But two-thirds or more of the Commune's members would have described themselves as the heirs of the Jacobins of 1793. Karl Marx himself did not at first recognise the Communards as the proletarian revolutionaries of his future Communist society, but his sympathy with their struggle against the French bourgeoisie encouraged the romanticization of the Communard as a premature Communist revolutionary...
"Nationalism and popular local government rather than social revolution were the rallying cries of the Commune, but the flight from Paris of Thiers' government and most of the wealthy members of society created a new social situation. In the absence of many of the bourgeois elite, Paris fell into the hands of members of the lower orders, who had little experience of administration. Marx noted that the Communards lacked effective leadership. 'They should at once have marched on Versailles,' he wrote, before Thiers had time to complete amassing his army. But the Communards' revolutionary hostility to rank meant that their forces lacked an effective commander-in-chief who might have seized the moment. Spontaneity without strategy was bound to fail.
"From March 1871, two rival authorities existed in France, the national government at Versailles and the Commune in Paris, each with its own armed force and each jockeying for political power. Half-hearted negotiations between the two authorities did take place, but when these broke down Thiers decided to attempt once more to retake the capital. He brought up an army of provincial Frenchmen, suspicious and resentful of what they saw as arrogant Parisians trying to dictate politics to France as so often before. Naturally the Germans looked favourably on any blood-letting among the French that would weaken them further.
"On 2 April, government troops seized Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and began a new siege of Paris. For several weeks Government troops bombarded the fortresses protecting the capital, taking them one by one, and by 21 May the army was able to force its way into Paris through an undefended point to the south-west of the city. Over the next seven days, known as the 'bloody week', the army methodically re-conquered the capital from west to east. Each quartier defended itself, giving the army the opportunity to pick off district after district. In the course of the struggle, the Communards set fire to ancient buildings like the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville. They also shot their hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. Given the anti-clerical tradition of revolution in France he might have seemed an ideal reactionary scapegoat, but Darboy himself was disliked by French conservatives: he had voted against Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council two years earlier and was something of a liberal. The Communards ensured that Paris would not have another liberal archbishop for almost a century...
"As many as 20,000 Communards - including women and children - were killed as the army fought its way forward through the streets of Paris, while another 40,000 insurgents were taken prisoner. About half of these were released soon enough, but 10,000 were transported to the colonies, including the remote New Caledonia in the South Pacific."39
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"The lead in the revolt," writes E.P. Thompson, "with its echoes of 1793 and 1848, was taken by the few thousand followers of the veteran revolutionary, Auguste Blanqui, idol of the Paris underworld of conspirators... But it was neither a mainly communist and Marxist movement, nor even closely connected with the recently formed First International. It was a peculiarly French and Parisian revolt, the apotheosis of the long French revolutionary tradition and an outburst of local pride and distress, fiercely patriotic and anti-German."40
And yet the essence of the revolution was by no means purely French. As the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tiutchev wrote: "The revolution is an illness devouring the West... The revolution is the purest product, the last word and the highest expression of that which we have been accustomed to call, already for three centuries now, the civilization of the West. It is contemporary thought, in all its integrity, from the time of its break with the Church. The thought is as follows: man, in the final analysis, depends only on himself both in the government of his reason and in the government of his will. Every authority comes from man; everything that proclaims itself to be higher than man is either an illusion or deception. In a word, it is the apotheosis of the human I in the most literal meaning of the word... We are quite possibly present at the bankruptcy of the whole civilization... The revolution is not simply an opponent clothed in flesh and blood. It is more than a Principle. It is Spirit, reason, in order to gain victory over it, we must know how to drive it out...
"The revolution is the logical consequence and final end of contemporary civilization, which antichristian rationalism has won from the Roman church. The revolution has in fact become convinced of its complete inability to act as a unifying principle, and has to the same degree become convinced, on the contrary, that it possesses a disintegrating power. On the other hand, the elements of the old society which have been preserved in Europe are still sufficiently alive that, in case of necessity, they can throw everything that has been done by the Revolution back to its point of origin. But they have also been so penetrated by the revolutionary principle, so distorted by it, that they are almost incapable of creating anything that could be accepted by European society as a lawful authority. That is the dilemma which rears its head with all its exceptional importance at the present time... The European West is only half of a great organic whole, but the difficulties undergone by it, difficulties that are from an external point of view insoluble, will acquire their resolution only in its other half,"41 that is, in the Russian Empire.
"These startling events," writes Thompson, "which brought an oriental barbarism into the most civilized and cosmopolitan capital of Europe, had decisive consequences for nascent socialism. Marx wrote his pamphlet on The Civil War in France, which hailed the Commune as the dawn of a new era of direct proletarian revolutionary action and a triumph for his own followers and for the International. Frightened property-owning classes everywhere in Europe took him at his word, and saw in the Commune the beginning of a fresh revolutionary menace. Even a confusion of words contributed to this widespread misinterpretation of the Commune. Communards were assumed to be communists. Capitulards (as the rebels called Thiers and his ministers who 'capitulated' and made peace with Germany) were confused with capitalists. The Marxist analysis of the event as a landmark in the class war was made to fit only by a distortion of both facts and words. It can be regarded more accurately as the last dying flicker of an old tradition, the tradition of the barricades of 1789 and 1848, rather than as the beginning of a new. Never again was Paris to impose her will upon the rest of France, as she had done before 1871. The aftermath of the Commune and of its repression was the exile or imprisonment of all the more revolutionary elements in France; and the new parliamentary republic was erected during their elimination from the scene. It was only after 1879, when the republican parties gained full control of the Republic, that amnesties were granted and more active socialist movements could again operate freely in France."42
"All Europe," writes Barzun, "including many liberals and socialists disavowed the Commune, which was the name chosen by the insurgents to show their organic bond as citizens of the municipality. But Karl Marx in London, seeing the chance for a political stroke, and perhaps also the value of that name, issued a pamphlet that represented the insurgents as a foretaste of the class war to come - the proletariat aroused and about to establish Communism. This was a piece of big-lie propaganda. The Communards were neither proletariat nor Communists. The 'municipal republics' they wanted to set up in the rest of France were the opposite of the central dictatorship of Marx's program. But Marx had rightly judged that the event had given worldwide notoriety to workingmen in arms. The image could be a vivid myth for the Idea of the next revolution."43
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In view of the strong influence exerted by Freemasonry on the Franco-Prussian war, it may be asked whether it exerted a similar influence on the struggle between the Third Republic and the Paris Commune that followed it… The evidence is ambiguous. According to Jasper Ridley, "several of the leaders of the Paris Commune were Freemasons. Benoit Halon, who was a member of Marx's International Working Men's Association (later known as the First International); Felix Pyat; the songwriter Jean Baptiste Clément, who wrote the song 'Le Temps des Cerises' (Cherry Time) about the Commune; Zéphian Camélinat, who survived to become a member of the Communist Party in 1920; and another songwriter, Eugène Pottier, who wrote, among other poems and songs, the words of L'Internationale. But there were Freemasons on the other side. Louis Blanc condemned the Paris Commune, and remained in the National Assembly at Versailles; and from Italy Mazzini strongly condemned the Commune, though Garibaldi supported it.
"On 29 April 1871 some Paris Freemasons set out from Paris to go to Versailles to discuss with [the non-masonic] Thiers ways of ending the civil war between the government and the Commune. They carried their Masonic banners as they walked through the Porte Maillot. On this section of the battlefront the government army was commanded by General Montaudon, who was a Freemason. He ordered a ceasefire to allow the Freemasons from Paris to pass through his lines. They went on to Versailles, where their Masonic brother, Jules Simon, took them to see Thiers; but Thiers insisted that Paris must submit unconditionally to the government at Versailles."44
In general, while Masonic ideas undoubtedly inspired the Commune, Masonry was divided on the Commune itself. This is a phenomenon that we find in most revolutions: while the Masons may be in favour of the idea of revolution as such, when it comes to the actual bloody reality, in which they are likely to lose property if not their own lives, many of them hang back…
And yet it is precisely at this time that we find the leading Masons of the world trying to create a unifying centre. Thus on January 22, 1870 Mazzini wrote to the famous American Mason Albert Pike: “We have to found a Super-Circle which must remain in complete secrecy and to which we will summon the Masons of the higher degrees at our own choice. Regarding our brothers, we have to bind these people by oath in the strictest secrecy. By means of this highest circle, we shall control all the movements of the Freemasons: it will become an international centre which will be the more powerful the fewer people know who rules it.” For Mazzini, in fact, the unification of Italy had never been his main aim, “but only the means to attaining world power”. In reply, on September 20, 1870 Pike signed an agreement with Mazzini, according to which the Supreme Masonic cult, uniting all the Masons of the world, between thirty and forty million throughout the world, would be established in Rome.”45
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