The Commune
A) Measures for the Working Class
nightwork of journeymen bakers suppressed. (20 April)(1)
the private jurisdiction, usurped by the Seigneurs of mills etc (manufacturers) (employers, great and small) being at the same time judges, executors, gainers and parties in the disputes, that right of a penal code of their own, enabling them to rob the labourers' wages by fines and deductions, as punishment etc, abolished in public and private workshops; penalties impended upon the employers in case they infringe upon this law; fines and deductions extorted since the 18th of March to be paid back to the workmen; (27 April).(2)
Sale of pawned articles at Pawn Shops suspended; (29 March).(3)
A great lot of workshops and manufactures have been closed in Paris; their owners having run away. This is the old method of the industrial capitalists, who consider themselves entitled "by the spontaneous action of the laws of political economy" not only to make a profit out of labour, as the condition of labour, but to stop it altogether and throw the workmen on the pavement — to produce an artificial crisis whenever a victorious revolution threatens the "order" of their "system". The Commune, very wisely, has appointed a Communal commission which in coopera-tion with delegates chosen by the different trades will inquire into the ways of handing over the deserted workshops and manufac-tures to cooperative workmen societies with some indemnity for the capitalist deserters; (16 April)(4) (this commission has also to make statistics of the abandoned workshops);
Commune has given order to the mairies to make no distinction between the femmes called illegitimate, the mothers and widows of national guards, as to the indemnity of 75 centimes(5);
the public prostitutes till now kept for the "men of order" at Paris but for their "safety" kept in penal servitude under the arbitrary rule of the police; the Commune has liberated the prostitutes from this degrading slavery, but swept away the soil upon which, and the men by whom, prostitution flourishes. The higher prostitutes — the cocottes — were, of course, under the rule of order, not the slaves, but the masters of the police and the governors.
There was, of course, no time to reorganize public instruction (education); but by removing the religious and clerical element from it, the Commune has taken the initiative in the mental emancipation of the people. It has appointed a Commission for the organization of education (primary and professional) (28 April). It has ordered that all tools of instruction like books, maps, paper etc be given gratuitously by the schoolmasters who receive them in their turn from the respective mairies to which they belong. No schoolmaster is allowed on any pretext to ask payment from his pupils for these instruments of instruction. (28 April)(6)
Pawnshops(7): under all receipts issued by Mont de Piété before April 25, 1871, the pawned clothes, furniture, linen, books, bedding and implements of labour, valued at not more than 20 francs, may be reclaimed free of charge, beginning from May 12. (May 7)(8)