3. The eighteenth of March¶
Core Argument¶
Here is a chapter digest of the supplied text.
Lissagaray’s narrative of 18 March 1871 is a meticulous, hour-by-hour reconstruction of how the Thiers government’s pre-dawn attempt to seize the National Guard’s cannon from the working-class heights of Montmartre, Belleville, and the Buttes Chaumont catastrophically backfired, triggering the insurrection that became the Paris Commune. The core argument is that the rising was not a premeditated conspiracy but a spontaneous, defensive reaction to a deliberate act of aggression by a panicked bourgeois government. The chapter’s title is taken from Dufaure’s later parliamentary lie—"nothing provoked the Paris insurrection"—which Lissagaray refutes by documenting the entire operation as a military provocation.
The text opens with the government’s tactical success: General Susbielle’s 6,000 men seize the heights and the cannon by six in the morning with almost no resistance. Yet the operation is fatally flawed by a simple logistical oversight—Vinoy forgot the horses to haul the artillery away. This delay proves decisive. As the faubourgs awaken, the women of Paris, “hardened by the siege,” are the first to act, surrounding the machine-guns and shaming the soldiers. The key turning point is General Lecomte’s threefold order to fire on the crowd at Montmartre; his men refuse, grounding their arms and fraternising. Lecomte is arrested. By eleven o’clock, the people have won at all points, preserving their cannon and seizing thousands of chassepots.
Lissagaray is scathing about the government’s conduct. Thiers, “the little man, quite distracted,” orders a full evacuation of Paris, fleeing by a back stair to Versailles, leaving behind three regiments, six batteries, and all the gunboats. The author contrasts this stampede with the caution of the revolutionary Central Committee, which was taken by surprise and did not occupy any official posts until late in the evening. The chapter’s most harrowing passage details the summary executions of Generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas by the crowd at the Rue des Rosiers. Lissagaray does not excuse these killings but contextualises them: Clément-Thomas was “the man of June, 1848,” the butcher of the earlier workers’ uprising, and Lecomte had given the order to fire that morning. The author notes that the Committee of Vigilance had sent orders to guard Lecomte for trial, but the crowd’s fury outpaced the revolutionaries’ organisation.
The chapter also contains a sustained polemic against the mayors of Paris and the liberal republicans (Jules Ferry, Jules Favre, Picard), who play a duplicitous game—feigning negotiation with the Central Committee while secretly abetting Thiers’s evacuation. Lissagaray dismisses their proposal of Langlois as commander of the National Guard as a “comedy” designed to justify the abandonment of Paris. The Central Committee itself is portrayed as hesitant and overwhelmed by the power that falls upon it, committing the “blunder” of appointing the erratic Lullier as commander-in-chief. The narrative draws heavily on the Enquête sur le 18 Mars (the parliamentary inquiry), which Lissagaray denounces in his footnotes as an “ignorant and malignant résumé of lies,” pointing out its deliberate suppression of evidence and its absurd claim that the Central Committee had ordered the occupation of all administrations by the afternoon. The chapter thus functions as both a dramatic chronicle of a revolutionary day and a forensic rebuttal of the official bourgeois account.