Paris Commune
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Paris Commune
In March 1871, Montmartre saw the first sparks fly in what would become the great conflagration of the Paris Commune. After Napoléon III’s disastrous campaign against the Prussians in the summer of 1870, and the declaration of the Third Republic in September of the same year. Paris finally tell to the Prussian army on January 28, 1871, after a four-month siege. Peace terms were agreed by the end of February, and the Prussians withdrew, leaving the new Republic in the hands of shaky conservative administration. Paris’s situation was last secure of all, as the city’s workers – and their armed representatives in the National Guard – had been disenfranchised by the February settlement, and were not inclined to respect it. The new Prime Minister, Adolphe Thiers, dispatched the body of regular troops under General Lecomte to take possession of 170 guns, which the National Guard controlled on the high ground of the Butte Montmartre. Although the troops seized the guns easily in the darkness before dawn, they had failed to bring any horses to tow them away. That gave the revolutionary Louise Michel time to raise the alarm.
An angry crowd of workers and National Guard members quickly gathered. They persuaded the troops to take no action and arrested General Lecomte, along with another general, Clément Thomas, who was notorious for the part he had played in the brutal repression of the 1848 republican uprising. The two generals were shot and mutilated in the garden of no. 36 rue du Chevaller-de-la-Barre, behind the Sacré-Coeur. Across the city, soldiers and the National Guard members joined the rebellion, and, by the following morning, a panicking government had decamped to Versalles, leaving the Hotél de Ville and the whole of the city in the hands of the National Guard. The rebels quickly proclaimed a revolutionary Commune, decreasing the separation of church and state, the enfranchisement of women and numerous measures to protect worker’s rights.
By the beginning of April, the Communards were under attack from Theirs’ army, its numbers newly swelled by prisoners of war helpfully released by the Prussians. Isolated and ill equipped, they didn’t stand a chance. In the notorious semaine sanglante, of May 21 – 28, something like 25,000 Communards died – no one knows the exact figure – which some 10,000 executed or deported. The cost to Paris was also severe. Today the Communards are commemorated in Pére Lachaise cemetery (see p.238), and in the continuing fervor of the French Left; since 1871, not to be revolutionary has somehow seemed a betrayal of the dead.
