Paris commune 1871
( part 2/3)
The Revolt Begins
Hire continued existence of an armed prole¬tariat in the city was regarded as a menace by Thiers. In the early morning hours of March 18 he launched a clandestine military operation to steal the National Guard's cannon at Mont- martre. But before the cannon could be dragged off, the federal troops were met by an aroused citizenry, who rushed to the defense of the guns which had been bought with money raised dur¬ing the siege by public subscription.
Men, women and children crowded around and fraternized with the soldiers. Three times the generals leading the expedition ordered their troops to fire on the crowd. Three times they refused. Finally they turned their guns on the real enemy, shooting down the commander who had given the orders to fire.
TTie defense of the cannon marked the initial stage in the revolt The federal forces promptly withdrew to Versailles, along with the govern¬ment and other reactionary elements.
The Communards' failure to press their advan-tage by attacking the retreating army, and thus disarming the dass of plunder- i ers tagging behind it, proved to be a fatal error. In a letter to Dr. L. Kugelmann, dated April 12, Marx observed that the workers of Paris "should have marched at once on Versailles, after first Vincy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retreated. The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start the civil war..."
Workers' Government Elected
On March 19, Paris awakened a free city, to the joy of its inhabitants. The sole power in Paris lay with the Central Committee of the National Guard, which hastened to divest itself of the authority that had fallen to it After one brief postponement, elections to a Communal CouiKil were held on March 26. Of the 101 members elected, 21 were declared Socialists, members of the International Work- ingman's Association, while the remainder were -advanced radical and Jacobin type." On the 28th of March, the Commune was proclaimed and workers celebrated throughout the city.
The Commune immediately began to adopt measures for the social welfare of the workers, at the expense of the propertied class. Describ¬ing tho forces steering the Commune in a socialist direction, Lenin wrote, "...In modern society the proletariat, enslaved economically by capital, cannot dominate politically unless it breaks the chains which fetter it to capital. This is why the movement of tho Commune inevitably had to take on a socialist coloring, Le., to begin striving for the overthrow of tho power of the bourgeoisie, the power of capital, to destroy the very foundations of the present social order." .
What were the acts that so enraged the bour-geoisie? The first decree of the Commune was to abolish the standing army and substitute for it the "armed people* Conscription was ended. The sale of objects pledged in pawnshops was suspended; landlords were forbidden to evict tenants until further notice; overdue bills were extended for a month; rents due from October 1870 to April 1871 were wiped out; bakers were freed from night work; the separation of church and state was declared; the guillotine was pub¬licly burned; government salaries were set at the level of average workers' wages; workshops and factories that had either been abandoned or shut down were ordered reopened under the control of workers' associations and fudges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable."
Military Defeats, Social Advances
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie was preparing for vengeance against the Parisians. Suppressing national differences, Thiers and the Prussian Bismarck, whose forces were still outside Paris' gates, conspired to crush this spark of commu¬nism. French prisoners of war were released by the Prussians and consigned to the Versailles army.
On April 2, the Commune did make a belated sortie against Versailles. But one of the two columns, consisting of 40,000 workers in all, was betrayed by treacherous leaders and de¬feated at Chattalion. In what was only the har¬binger of the future slaughter, two workers* leaders were shot on the spot, as were members of the federal army found fighting on the side of the Communards. The prisoners taken were marched to Versailles, where they were subject¬ed to vile abuse and imprisoned under inhuman conditions.
But the Parisians were not demoralized by the defeat. It merely strengthened their deter¬mination to carry on a defensive war.
Defenders of the Commune.
Meanwhile, life in the city continued to take on new character and meaning. In his work on the Paris Commune, Marx described the changes brought about by the workers in con¬trol of Paris: "No longer was Paris the ren¬dezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serf-owners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the
morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in facts for the first time since the days of February, 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind. We/ said a member of the Commune, 'hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems, indeed, as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its con¬servative friends.'*
But the entire owning class, the factory* own¬ers, the landlords, the small shopkeepers, the bankers and large capitalists, allied with the Prussians and reactionaries from rural Prance, were prepared to crush the Commune with all tho hatred and viciousness characteristic of the bourgeoisie when its interests are threatened. The Commune's petty bourgeois allies deserted it Revolts in the provinces also failed and work¬ers in Paris were left to fight alone.
By now defeat was unavoidable. Although the Versailles army consisted largely of beaten and demoralized men, the Communards were even less equipped or prepared to wage a civil war. The poorly disciplined worker-soldiers had no cavalry, few horses and few skilled artillerymen. Most of all, they lacked experienced soldiers capable of organizing them to defend the city.
Strategic and Political Errors
Despite the bravery with which they fought, the Communards made strategic errors that insured their eventual defeat Their military leadership was so incompetent that it failed to occupy the fortress on Mont Valorien overlook¬ing the valley of the Seine after it was aban¬doned by the retreating Versailles army on March 18. Though Thiers also failed to see the strategic importance of Mont Valorien, his gen-erals prevailed and the army soon reoccupied it
But most devastating to their cause was the Communards' failure, in all too many cases, to recognize that they were engaged in a life-and- death struggle with a class enemy that would marshal every resource at its disposal to anni¬hilate them. As historians of the Commune have noted, the Parisian workers *^uld not believe the enemy was irrevocably the enemy."
Especially in the early stages» precious time was wasted in parliamentary debate. The Commune sought to legalize its existence, despite the fact that it was actually engaged in a war against bourgeois legality.
Instead of seizing the Bank of France, the Parisian workers left it untouched. Describing this as a "portentous political error," Frederick Engels said, "The Bank in the hands of the Commune—that was worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the entire French bourgeoisie upon the Versailles government in the interest of peace with the Commune."
Workers retained hope that they could defeat Thiers' army in street fighting. But prepara¬tions were not made and an air of unreality per¬meated the city. After being turned back in fighting on May 20, the Versailles army entered Paris through the gate of St Cloud on Sunday, May 21, while in another part of the city a con¬cert was being held to raise money for widows and orphans of the Commune.
Bourgeoisie's Revenge
The alarm was sounded, national guardsmen were dispersed to fight individually in their own districts and barricades were hurriedly thrown up. But by 1\iesday, Montmartrc had fall¬en and the butchery had begun. By Sunday the 28th, it was all over except for the vengeance of the Versailles legions, urged on by the bourgeois press. Men, women and children were summarily shot, others were impris-oned, some were shot after trials and others were deported.
The revenge visited on the Com¬munards by the resurgent bourgeoisie was barbaric. As compiled by the his¬torian Lissagaray, the casualties , included: Twenty-five thousand men, women and children killed during the battle or after, three thousand at least dead in the prisons, the pontoons, the forts, or in con¬sequence of maladies contracted during their captivity, thirteen thousand seven hundred con-demned, most of them for life; seventy thousand women, children and old men deprived of their natural supporters or thrown out of France; one hundred and eleven thousand victims at least That is the balance slieet of the bourgeois ven¬geance for the solitary insurrection of the 18th March.*
After the bourgeoisie had taken its brutal revenge, Thiers declared, •'Now we have finished with socialism for a long time."' But such opti¬mism was premature. A decade later a new gen¬eration of Socialists had arisen in France and their agitation forced the bourgeoisie to release the Communards still imprisoned or exiled.
Lessons of the Commune
Six months before the Paris Commune, Karl Marx warned that the time was not ripe for the French working class to attempt the overthrow of the new Republican government Yet once the movement of French workers began in March 1871, Marx hailed it enthusiastically, support¬ing the Communards against all the distortions and attacks of the bourgeoisie and its press.
In a letter to Dr. L. Kugelmann (April 12), Marx praised the Communards in glowing terms: 'AVhat elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in the^e Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath the Prussian bayonet«, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not at the gates of Paris. History has no like example of a like greatness. If they are defeated, only their 'good nature' will be to blame."
All too soon the Commune was defeated. But as noted before, it was the kind of defeat that "makes success possible." Alongside a legacy of heroism, the Commune left an historic, practi¬cal example from which Socialists, beginning with Marx, have drawn many lessons in their efforts to continue what the Paris Commune began.
Post je objavljen 17.01.2012. u 14:04 sati.