THE COMMUNE
Unquestionably, the revolt was brought about by the ill-judged and
arbitrary conduct of the agents of the National Assembly. To attempt
to seize the guns of the National Guard as a preliminary to disarming
the only Citizen force which the capital had at its disposal was as
illegal as it was provocative. It was virtually a declaration of civil
war by the reactionaries in control of the national forces. The people
of Paris were in no humour to put up with such high-handed action on
the part of men who, they knew, were opposed even to the Republic which
they nominally served. They resisted the attempt and captured the
generals, Lecomte and Thomas, who had ordered the step to be taken.
So far they were quite within their rights, and Clemenceau at first
sympathised wholly with the Federals. The Parisians had undergone
terrible privations during the siege, they were exasperated by the
denunciations that poured in upon them from the provinces, they saw
no hope for their recently won liberties unless they themselves were
in a position to defend them, they had grave doubts whether they had
not been betrayed within and without during the siege itself. It is no
wonder that, under such circumstances, they should resent, by force of
arms, any attempt to deprive them of the means of effective resistance
to reactionary repression.
There was also nothing in the establishment of the Commune itself which
was other than a perfectly legitimate effort to organise the city
afresh, after the old system had proved utterly incompetent. But the
attempt to disarm the population of Montmartre roused passions which
it was impossible to quell. Clemenceau, as Mayor of the district, did
all that one man could do to save the two generals, Lecomte and Clément
Thomas, from being killed. With his sound judgment he saw at once that,
whether their execution was justifiable or not, it would be regarded as
murder by many Republicans whom the cooler heads in Paris desired to
conciliate. As was proved afterwards, he exerted all his power to check
even the semblance of injustice. But his final intervention to prevent
the tragedy of the Château Rouge came too late, and Lecomte and Thomas,
who had not hesitated to risk the massacre of innocent citizens on
behalf of a policy of repression, were regarded as the first victims of
an infuriated mob.
The outcome of Clemenceau's own endeavours to save these misguided
militarists was that he himself became "suspect" to the heads of the
Central Committee of the Commune sitting at the Hôtel de Ville, which
had taken control of all Paris. He was the duly elected and extremely
popular Radical-Socialist--to use a later designation--Mayor of perhaps
the most advanced arrondissement in the capital, he had been sent to
Bordeaux by a great majority of his constituents to sit on the extreme
left, and, in that capacity, had stoutly defended the rights of Paris;
he was strongly in favour of most of the claims made by the leaders of
the Commune. But all this went for nothing. The new Committee wanted
their own man at Montmartre, and Clemenceau was not that man.
So Mayor of Montmartre he ceased to be, but earnest democrat and
devoted friend of the people he remained. Unfortunately, having a wider
outlook than most of those who had suddenly come to the front, he could
not believe that mere possession of the capital meant attainment of
the control of France by the Parisians, or the freeing of his country
from German occupation. For once he advocated prudence and suggested
compromise. A reasonable arrangement between the administrators of
Paris with their municipal forces and the National Assembly with
its regular army seemed to Clemenceau a practical necessity of
the situation. He therefore urged this policy incessantly upon the
Communists. It was an unlucky experience. Pyat, Vermorel and others so
strongly resented his moderate counsels that they issued an order for
his arrest, with a view to his hasty, if judicial, removal. Failing to
lay hold upon Clemenceau himself, they captured a speaking likeness of
the Radical doctor in the person of a young Brazilian. Him they were
about to shoot, when they discovered that their proposed victim was
the wrong man. Possibly these personal adventures in revolutionary
democracy under the Commune may have influenced Clemenceau's views
about Socialism in practical affairs in after life.
It is highly creditable to Clemenceau that a few years later one of his
greatest speeches was delivered in the National Assembly to obtain, the
liberation and the recall from exile of the very same men who would
gladly have silenced him for good and all when they were in power.
However, he escaped their well-meant attentions, and, leaving Paris,
went on a tour of vigorous Radical propaganda through the Provinces.
This was a most important self-imposed mission. Clemenceau, as he
showed by his vote at Bordeaux, was strongly in favour of continuing
the war and bitterly opposed to any surrender whatever. At the same
time he was a thoroughgoing Republican who did not forget that the mass
of Frenchmen must have voted for the Empire a few months before, or
Napoleon's plébiscite, of course, could not have been so successful,
even with the whole of the official machinery in the hands of the
Imperialists. Differing from Gambetta afterwards on many points, the
coming leader of the advanced Radicals was at this period entirely at
one with the man who had not despaired of France when all seemed lost.
But in order to carry on the war with any hope of success and to keep
the flag of the Republic flying, it was essential that the people of
the provincial towns and the peasants should be kept in touch with
Paris and be convinced that the only chance of safety and freedom
lay in sinking all internecine differences for the sake of unity. No
man, not even Gambetta himself, was better qualified for this service.
Throughout his tour he kept the independence, welfare and freedom of
France as a whole high above all other considerations. But the risks he
ran were not trifling. The local reactionists were by no means ready
to accept his views. The police was set upon his trail, with great
inconvenience to himself. But at no period of his life has Clemenceau
considered his personal safety of any account. He had set himself to
accomplish certain work which he deemed to be necessary, and he carried
it through without reference to the dangers around him. Nor must the
success of this propaganda be measured by its immediate results. The
great thing in those days of defeat and despair was to keep up the
national spirit and to declare that, though the French armies might
be beaten again and again, the France of the great Revolution and
the Republic should never be crushed down. Believing, as Clemenceau
did, in the religion of patriotism and the sacred watchwords of the
eighteenth-century upheaval, he spoke with a sincerity that gave to his
utterances the value of the highest oratory. The speeches produced a
permanent impression on those who heard them, and their effect was felt
for many years afterwards.
But this was quite as objectionable to Thiers and the case-hardened
reactionists as his previous conduct had been to Pyat and the
extremists of the Commune. Men of ability and judgment are apt to be
caught between two fires when prejudice and passion take control on
both sides. It was, in fact, little short of a miracle that the future
Prime Minister of France did not complete his services to his country
by dying in the ditch under the wall of Père-la-Chaise at the early age
of thirty-one.
Few movements have been more grotesquely misrepresented than the
Commune of Paris. For many a long year afterwards almost the whole of
the propertied classes in Europe spoke of the Communists as if they had
been a gang of scoundrels and incendiaries, without a single redeeming
quality; while Socialists naturally enough refused to listen to
virulent abuse of men most of whom they well knew were inspired by the
highest ideals and sacrificed themselves for what they believed to be
the good of mankind. At the beginning Paris assuredly had no intention
whatever of courting a struggle with the supporters of the Republic at
Bordeaux, however reactionary they might be. Such men as Delescluze,
Courbet, Beslay, Jourde, Camélinat, Vaillant, Longuet, to speak only
of a few, were no mere hot-headed revolutionaries regardless of all
the facts around them. Paris was admirably administered under their
short rule--never nearly so well, according to the testimony of two
quite conservative Englishmen who were there at the time. One of these
was the famous Oxford sculler and athlete, E. B. Michell, an English
barrister and a French _avocat_; the other was my late brother, Hugh,
a Magdalen man like Michell. They both knew Paris well, and both were
of the same opinion as to the municipal management under the Commune.
Michell in an article in _Fraser's Magazine_, then an important review,
wrote as follows:
"It is extremely important that the serious lesson which the world
may read in the history of the Revolution should not be weakened in
its significance or interest by any ill-grounded contempt either
for the acts of the Communal leaders or for the sincerity of their
motives. We have seen that the army on which the Revolutionists
relied, and by means of which they climbed to power, was not, as
certain French statesmen pretended, and some English papers would
have had us believe, a 'mere handful of disorderly rebels,' but
a compact force, well drilled, well organised, and valiant when
fighting for a cause that they really had at heart. It is equally
false and unfair to regard the Communal Assembly as a crew of
unintelligent and mischievous conspirators, guided by no definite
or reasonable principle, and seeking only their own aggrandisement
and the destruction of all the recognised laws of order. Yet it is
certain that such an idea respecting the Commune is very generally
entertained by ordinary English readers. It may be shown that the
policy of this Government, though defaced by many gross abuses and
errors, had much in it to deserve the consideration, and even to
extort the admiration, of an intelligent and practical statesman. . . .
"Foreign writers have delighted to represent the purposes of the
Commune as vague and unintelligible. Even in Paris and at Versailles
writers and talkers affected at first to be ignorant of the real
projects and principles entertained by the Revolutionists. But the
Commune of 1871 has itself destroyed all possibility of mistake upon
the subject. It has put to itself and answered the question in the
most explicit terms. The _Journal Officiel_ (of Paris) contained, on
April 20th, a document worthy of the most careful perusal. It appears
in the form of a declaration to the French people, and explains fully
enough the main principles and the chief objects which animated the
men of the Commune. Without bestowing on this address the ecstatic
eulogies to which certain Utopian philosophers have deemed it
entitled, we may credit it as being a straightforward, manly, and not
altogether unpractical _exposé_ of the ideas of modern Communists.
". . . 'It is the duty of the Commune to confirm and determine the
aspirations and wishes of the people of Paris; to explain, in its
true character, the movement of March 18th--a movement which has been
up to this time misunderstood, misconstrued, and calumniated by the
politicians at Versailles. Once more Paris labours and suffers for
the whole of France, for whom she is preparing, by her battles and
her devoted sacrifices, an intellectual, moral, administrative, and
economic regeneration, an era of glory and prosperity.
"'What does she demand?
"'The recognition and consolidation of the Republic as the only form
of government compatible with the rights of the people and the regular
and free development of society; the absolute independence of the
Commune and its extension to every locality in France; the assurance
by this means to each person of his rights in their integrity, to
every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and capacities as
a man, a citizen, and an artificer. The independence of the Commune
will have but one limit--the equal right of independence to be enjoyed
by the other Communes who shall adhere to the contract. It is the
association of these Communes that must secure the unity of France.
"'The inherent rights of the Commune are these: The right of voting
the Communal budget of receipts and expenditure, of regulating and
reforming the system of taxation, and of directing local services; the
right to organise its own magistracy, the internal police and public
education; to administer the property belonging to the Commune; the
right of choosing by election or competition, with responsibility and
a permanent right of control and revocation, the communal magistrates
and officials of all sorts; the right of individual liberty under an
absolute guarantee, liberty of conscience and liberty of labour; the
right of permanent intervention by the citizens in communal affairs by
means of the free manifestation of their ideas, and a free defence of
their own interests, guarantees being given for such manifestations
by the Commune, which is alone charged with the duty of guarding and
securing the free and just right of meeting and of publicity; the
right of organising the urban defences and the National Guard, which
is to elect its own chiefs, and alone provide for the maintenance of
order in the cities.
"'Paris desires no more than this, with the condition, of course,
that she shall find in the Grand Central Administration, composed
of delegates from the Federal Communes, the practical recognition
and realisation of the same principles. To insure, however, her own
independence, and as a natural result of her own freedom of action,
Paris reserves to herself the liberty of effecting as she may think
fit, in her own sphere, those administrative and economic reforms
which her population shall demand, of creating such institutions as
are proper for developing and extending education, labour, commerce,
and credit; of popularising the enjoyment of power and property in
accordance with the necessities of the hour, the wish of all persons
interested, and the data furnished by experience. Our enemies deceive
themselves or deceive the country when they accuse Paris of desiring
to impose its will or its supremacy upon the rest of the nation, and
of aspiring to a Dictatorship which would amount to a veritable attack
against the independence and sovereignty of other Communes. They
deceive themselves or the country when they accuse Paris of seeking
the destruction of French unity as established by the Revolution.
The unity which has hitherto been imposed upon us by the Empire,
the Monarchy, and the Parliamentary Government is nothing but a
centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and burdensome.
Political unity as desired by Paris is a voluntary association of
each local initiative, a free and spontaneous co-operation of all
individual energies with one common object--the well-being, liberty,
and security of all. The Communal Revolution initiated by the people
on the 18th of March inaugurated a new political era, experimental,
positive, and scientific. It was the end of the old official and
clerical world, of military and bureaucratic _régime_, of jobbing in
monopolies and privileges, to which the working class owed its state
of servitude, and our country its misfortunes and disasters.'"
The two Englishmen, coming straight to my house from Paris, gave me a
favourable account of the administration of municipal Paris, especially
at the time when Cluseret held command.
Others who were there at the same time were similarly impressed. Paris
ceased even to be the Corinth of Europe, since all prostitutes had been
ordered out of the city. The leaders set an example of moderation in
their style of living, which was the more remarkable as they had no
authority but their own sense of propriety to limit their expenditure.
How little they regarded themselves as relieved from the ordinary rules
of the strictest bourgeois social order is apparent, also, from the
fact that Jourde and Beslay, who were responsible for the finances of
the Commune, actually borrowed £40,000 from the Rothschilds in order
to carry on the ordinary business of the Municipality. Yet at the
time not less than £60,000,000 in gold, apart from a huge store of
silver, was lying at their mercy in the Bank of France; enough, as some
cynically said, if judiciously used, to have bought up all M. Thiers'
Government and his army to boot. The fact that the Communists left
these vast accumulations untouched proves conclusively that they were
the least predatory, some might say the least effective, revolutionists
who ever held subversive opinions. In all directions they showed the
same spirit. Every department was managed as economically and capably
as they could organise it. But always on the most approved bourgeois
lines. Many of the reforms they introduced, notably those by Camélinat
at the Mint, are still maintained.
How, then, did it come about that people of this character and capacity
were regarded almost universally as desperate enemies of society,
from the moment when they came to the front in their own city? It is
the old story of the hatred of the materialist property-owner and
profiteer for the idealist who is eager at once to realise the new
period of public possession and co-operative well-being. The fact
that such an indomitable anarchist-communist as the famous Blanqui,
who spent the greater part of his life in prison, took an active part
in the Commune and that others of like views were associated with
the rising scared all the "respectable" classes, who regarded any
attack upon the existing economic and social forms as a crime of the
worst description. A tale current at the time puts the matter in a
humorous shape. A number of communists, when arrested, were put in
gaol with a still larger number of common malefactors. These latter
greatly resented this intrusion, boycotted the political prisoners,
and, it is said, would have gone so far as to attack their unwelcome
companions but for the intervention of the warders. Asked why they
exhibited such animosity towards men who had done them no harm, the
ordinary criminals took quite a conservative, bourgeois view of their
relations to the new-comers. "We," they said, "have some of us taken
things which belonged to other people; but we have never thought for a
moment of abolishing the right of property in itself. Not having enough
ourselves, we wanted more and laid hands upon what we could get. But
these men would take everything and leave nothing for us." So even the
gaol-birds embraced the bourgeois ethic of individual ownership.
Moreover, the International Working Men's Association had been founded
in London in 1864, just seven years before. Although the late Professor
Beesly, certainly as far from a violent revolutionist as any man could
be, took the chair at the first meeting and English trade unionists
of the most sober character constituted the bulk of the members in
London, the terror which this organisation inspired in the dominant
minority all over Europe was very far indeed in excess of the power
which it could at any time exercise. But the names of Marx, the learned
German-Jew philosopher, and Bakunin, the Russian peasant-anarchist,
were words of dread to the comfortable classes in those days. Marx
with Engels had written the celebrated "Communist Manifesto," at the
last period of European disturbance, in 1848, analysing the historic
development and approaching downfall of the entire wage-earning system,
with a ruthless disregard for the feelings of the bourgeoisie. Its
conclusion appealing to the "Workers of the World" to unite was not
unnaturally regarded as a direct incitement to combined revolt. Though,
therefore, few had read the Manifesto this appeal had echoed far and
wide, and the organisation of the International itself was credited
with the intention to use the Commune of Paris as the starting-point
for a world-wide conflagration. Thus the movement in Paris, which
at first had no other object than to secure the stability of the
democratic Republic, was regarded as an incendiary revolt, and the
brutal outrages of M. Thiers, aided by the mistakes of the Communists
themselves, gradually forced extremists to the front. Some were like
Delescluze, noble enthusiasts who knew success was impossible, and
courted death for their ideal as sowing the seed of success for their
great cause of the universal Co-operative Commonwealth in the near
future; others were such as Félix Pyat, a furious subversionist of the
most ruffianly type, who mixed up personal malignity and individual
hatred with his every action, and brought discredit on his own
comrades. Victory for the Socialist ideals, with the Germans containing
one side of Paris and the Versailles troops attacking the other,
was impossible--would have been impossible even if the Communists
had suppressed their truly fraternal hatreds and had developed a
military genius. They did neither. Cluseret showed some inkling of
the necessities of the case, but Dombrowski, Rossel and other leaders
exhibited no capacity. The wonderful thing about it all was that during
the crisis, which lasted two months, Paris was so well administered.
The sacrifice of the hostages and the tactics of incendiarism pursued
at last, not by the Communist leaders, but by the Anarchist mob broken
loose from all control, have hidden from the public at large, who read
only the prejudiced accounts of the capitalist press, the real truth
about the Commune of Paris.
But whatever may have been done in resistance to the invasion of M.
Thiers' army of reaction, nothing could possibly justify the horrible
vengeance wreaked upon the people of Paris by the soldiery and their
chiefs. It was a martyrdom of the great city. The _coup d'état_ of
Louis Napoleon was child's play to the hideous butchery ordered and
rejoiced in by Thiers, Gallifet and their subordinates. There was not
even a pretence of justice in the whole massacre. Thousands of unarmed
and innocent men and women were slaughtered in cold blood because
Paris was feared by the bloodthirsty clique who regarded her rightly
as the main obstacle to their reactionary policy. It was but too
clear evidence that, when the rights of property are supposed to be
imperilled, all sense of decency or humanity will be outraged by the
dominant minority as it was by the slave-owners of old or the nobles
of the feudal times.
But the Commune itself, as matters stood, was as hopeless an attempt to
"make twelve o'clock at eleven" as has ever been seen on the planet.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was not more certainly foredoomed
to failure than was the uprising of the Communists of Paris in 1871.
But the Socialists of Europe, like the abolitionists, have celebrated
the Commune and deified its martyrs for many a long year. The brave
and unselfish champions of the proletariat who then laid down their
lives in the hope that their deaths might hasten on the coming of a
better day hold the same position in the minds of Socialists that John
Brown held among the friends of the negro prior to the great American
Civil War. It was an outburst of noble enthusiasm on their part to
face certain failure for the "solidarity of the human race." But those
who watched what happened then and afterwards can scarcely escape from
the conclusion that the loss of so many of its ablest leaders, and the
great discouragement engendered by the horrors of defeat, threw back
Socialism itself in France fully twenty years.
Recent experience in several directions has shown the world that
enthusiasm and idealism for the great cause of human progress, and the
co-ordination of social forces in the interest of the revolutionary
majority of mankind, cannot of themselves change the course of events.
Unless the stage in economic development has been reached where a new
order has already been evolved out of the previous outworn system, it
is impossible to realise the ideals of the new period by any sudden
attack. Men imbued with the highest conceptions of the future and
personally quite honest in their conduct may utterly fail to apply
plain common sense to the facts of the present. Dublin, Petrograd and
Helsingfors, nearly forty years later, did but enforce the teachings of
the Commune of Paris.