7. The Central Committee forces the mayors to capitulate¶
Core Argument¶
The Central Committee of the National Guard, having consolidated its authority after the insurrection of 18 March, faced a dual challenge: the obstruction of Parisian mayors and deputies who refused to recognise its legitimacy, and the threat of economic strangulation from Versailles. This chapter narrates the Committee’s decisive victory over these forces, culminating in the mayors’ capitulation and the scheduling of municipal elections for 26 March.
The Committee moved on multiple fronts. It declared elections impossible for 22 March and rescheduled them for the 26th, announcing that ‘the reaction, excited by your mayors and your deputies, has declared war on us’. It forcibly replaced mayors and adjuncts in several arrondissements, seized railway lines at Batignolles to prevent occupation of the Saint-Lazare station, and sent battalions to the Bank of France, which yielded to the demand for funds. The Committee also published reassuring despatches from the Prussian commander at Compiègne, who promised German passivity so long as Paris remained non-hostile—a direct rebuttal of Jules Favre’s threats of Prussian intervention.
The mayors, authorised by Thiers, appointed Admiral Saisset as commander of the National Guard, alongside Langlois and Schoelcher. They established their headquarters at the Grand Hôtel and distributed pay to attract guardsmen. But the camp of the Bourse visibly shrank: women came to fetch their husbands; Bonapartist officers alienated moderate Republicans; and Saisset’s own placard announcing that the Assembly had granted full municipal franchise and officer elections was a ‘gigantic hoax’ that only mystified Versailles. Desertions multiplied.
On 24 March, the Committee named three generals—Brunel, Duval, and Eudes—and ordered Brunel to seize the mairies of the first and second arrondissements. At the mairie of the Louvre, Brunel advanced cannon, and the adjuncts capitulated, agreeing to elections on 30 March. The bourgeois and popular battalions fraternised, marching together through the boulevards. But the Central Committee rejected this compromise, insisting on the 26th. Ranvier and Arnold delivered this ultimatum to the mairie of the second arrondissement; the mayors, many of whom later admitted they sought only to gain time for Versailles to rearm, refused. Dubail spent the night preparing machine-guns and issuing calls to arms.
The crisis broke on Saturday 25 March. The Committee placarded that elections would take place on the 26th. Paris, which had believed peace concluded, turned against the mayors. The ranks of Dubail’s ‘soldiers of order’ dwindled hourly. When Ranvier returned for a final decision, news arrived that the Duc d’Aumale had been proclaimed lieutenant-general at Versailles—a revelation that convinced several mayors the Republic itself was at stake. They capitulated. Tirard, acting on Thiers’s private advice—‘Do not continue a useless resistance. I am reorganising the army. I hope in a fortnight or three weeks we shall have a sufficient force to relieve Paris’—advised electors to vote.
The chapter concludes with a polemical contrast between the ‘mandarins of the tribune’—Louis Blanc’s group, who ‘ran away appalled’ when the revolution they had sung rose before them—and the obscure working men of the Central Committee, who ‘had safely anchored the revolution of 18 March’. The author defends the Committee against the charge that it should have marched on Versailles immediately, arguing that the government would have fled to Fontainebleau, and that the popular battalions were too ill-provided to hold both Versailles and Paris. The Committee’s two grave faults were allowing the escape of the army and functionaries, and the loss of Mont-Valérien. Nevertheless, it left its successor ‘all the means necessary to disarm the enemy’.