Last modified: 2004-02-28 by ivan sache
Keywords: paris | commune |
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The French historical period concerning Paris from March to May 1871 is called La Commune de Paris. Most people know it for the insurrection it was. The word commune without a capital C is used in French to designate a municipal territorial administration, and France has more than 36,000 such communes. Using that meaning, the first commune of Paris was set up by the sections of the city in 1789, and it was later replaced by a short-lived insurrectional commune on 10 August 1792. However, this page is dedicated to the 1871 historical period Commune de Paris, hereafter called Commune for the sake of simplicity.
The deep roots of the Commune insurrection are to be found in the dramatic transformations which took place in France during the Second Empire. Industrial advances caused the emergence of an ever increasing working class population with ever declining work and living conditions. In Paris, Baron Haussmann, who had been asked by Napoléon III to transform Paris into a modern city, carried out an urbanism policy which forced the workers to move to its outskirts. This created a segregation between the so-called beaux quartiers (up-scale neighborhoods) and the surrounding suburbs, which were later refered to as the ceinture rouge, literally translated as the "red belt", the red refering to an association with communism and belt refering to the fact that those neighborhoods encircled Paris.
The Prussian siege of Paris during the harsh winter of 1870-1871 increased the grievances the working class held against the government. The final capitulation, signed by Thiers, was taken as an insult to all those who so heroically defended Paris. In fact, those defenders had been armed but had never been given the go ahead to break the siege.
First of all, the executive government (the President of the Republic and the ministers) of the Third Republic had left Paris over the 1870-1871 winter due to the siege. The legislative branch (National Assembly) had initially taken shelter in Bordeaux, but decided to return, however to Versailles rather than Paris. This aborted return increased the reciprocal suspicion between the citizens of Paris and the national political powers. Such suspicion had always existed, especially under the Ancient Regime (before 1789). The local Parliament of Paris and the nobles who headed it has been in permanent conflict with the King of France and his ministers, and the mob of Paris often supported the Paris Parliament and its fight against the King's troops. Dauphin Charles in the XIVth century, King Henri III in the XVIth century, and even child Louis XIV had to leave Paris under the pressure of the masses.
Over that same winter in Paris, shortly after the proclamation of the Third Republic on 4 September 1870, so-called comités de vigilance (vigilance committees) came into being in all of the 20 districts of Paris, working as kinds of provisional, unorganized administrations. Then, delegates appointed by these district committees formed a comité central (central committee). This central committee had a dual agenda: to fight against Prussia until a military victory was accomplished and to set up a Commune appointed by the people.
Meanwhile, there existed a so-called Garde nationale (National Guard), made up of individual citizens of Paris who were to defend just the city. In peacetime, the National Guard was maintained mostly for providing a stable source of income to unemployed citizens of Paris. On 3 March 1871, the members of the National Guard constituted a federation which was directed by its own central commitee. The central committee of the National Guard rapidly merged with