5. Reorganization of the Public Services¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Lissagaray pivots from the political drama of the Central Committee’s stand-off with the mayors to the practical exigencies of administration. The chapter’s core argument is that the Parisian revolutionaries, far from being the chaotic and incompetent usurpers depicted by their enemies, demonstrated a remarkable capacity for spontaneous organisation and improvisation in the face of a deliberate campaign of sabotage by the fleeing Versailles government. The narrative thrust is one of a besieged but resourceful power, forced to extemporise every function of urban life, and succeeding through popular energy and common sense.
The key claim is that the Central Committee inherited a deliberately dismantled administrative machine. Lissagaray lists the abandoned functions: taxes, street lighting, markets, public charity, and the telegraph. The military intendance had left six thousand sick in hospitals without funds. Mayors had absconded with seals, registers, and cash. This was not mere chaos but a calculated strategy by Thiers, who, Lissagaray notes with scorn, “tried to disorganize even the management of the cemeteries.” The evidence for the Committee’s success is the swift restoration of services. The committees of arrondissements supplied personnel to the mairies, and “men of common sense and energy” proved superior to routine. The most acute difficulty—paying the 300,000 unemployed who relied on the thirty sous—was overcome through a deft negotiation with the Bank of France. Governor Rouland, adopting a pragmatic stance, advanced a million francs, a transaction Lissagaray presents as the bank prudently recognising a de facto government, though he notes the Radicals later saw it as a Bonapartist manoeuvre to keep the revolution afloat.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of 1848 and 1831. Lissagaray explicitly compares the situation to the Lyons proletarian uprising of 1831, which failed in self-government, and contrasts the greater difficulty faced by Paris. The spectre of June 1848—when the provinces rushed to crush the Parisian insurrection—haunts the calculations of Thiers and his ministers. The polemic is directed squarely at Jules Favre’s sneer that the insurgents would be “unable to steer their own ship,” a quote used as the chapter’s epigraph. Lissagaray also attacks the Versailles Assembly’s hypocrisy, particularly Trochu’s “monstrous scene” of accusing the revolutionaries of treason he himself had committed. The chapter closes with a damning operational failure: the Central Committee’s delegate Lullier falsely reported occupying Mont-Valérien, the key fort, which Thiers had foolishly dismissed as strategically valueless before belatedly reoccupying it. This single error is presented as a critical lapse in an otherwise impressive display of proletarian administration.