8. Proclamation of the Commune¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 8: Proclamation of the Commune
This chapter narrates the climactic week in which Paris, after the Central Committee’s successful insurrection against Thiers’s government, held free elections and proclaimed the Commune on 28 March 1871. Lissagaray presents this as the tenth time since 1789 that the Parisian workers had “put France upon the right track,” casting the Commune as a national regeneration after the ruin of the Empire and the siege. The central argument is that the Commune was not a factional conspiracy but a spontaneous, overwhelming popular movement for municipal autonomy—the “organic cell” of a genuine republic, as opposed to the “barracks” unity of the bourgeois state.
Key claims are supported by detailed electoral data and crowd estimates. The Central Committee rejected Picard’s law, which gave unequal representation (three councillors per arrondissement regardless of population), and decreed one councillor per 20,000 inhabitants, producing ninety seats. 287,000 men voted—a higher turnout than the February national elections, partly because the wealthy had fled Paris after the siege. Lissagaray stresses the order and liberty of the vote: no police, no protests, open voting in the faubourgs, and the adhesion of the mayors gave it legal cover. He contrasts this with Thiers’s telegraph to the provinces claiming the elections lacked liberty and moral authority, and with the atmosphere at Versailles, where gendarmes confiscated Parisian journals and arrested sympathisers.
The proclamation ceremony itself is described in vivid, almost liturgical detail: 200,000 National Guards, soldiers of the line and marines, red flags and Phrygian caps, the bust of the Republic with a red scarf, the Marseillaise and the cannon. Ranvier’s brief speech—“my heart is too full of joy”—and the cry “In the name of the People the Commune is proclaimed” are given as the founding moment. Lissagaray notes the clever crowd management by Brunel, who rotated battalions through the square so all could acclaim the Commune.
The chapter’s polemical thrust is directed squarely at the Versailles government and its bourgeois republican allies. Thiers’s simultaneous parliamentary cry—“No, France will not let those wretches triumph who would drown her in blood”—is juxtaposed with the peaceful, joyous demonstration. Lissagaray accuses Monarchists, Clericals, Liberals, and Radicals of forming “one army in different uniforms” against the people, their “decentralization” being merely rural and capitalist federalism, their “self-government” the exploitation of the budget. He dismisses the Prussian threat as irrelevant, citing Etienne Marcel and the Convention as precedents for acting under the enemy’s eye. The chapter closes with a bitter verdict: the bourgeoisie, faced with a Paris capable of engendering a new world, had “but one thought—to bleed Paris.”