13. The Commune is defeated at Marseilles and Narbonne¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter chronicles the final suppression of the provincial insurrections that followed the Paris Commune, focusing on the defeats at Marseilles and Narbonne as the last embers of a broader revolutionary wave. The core argument is that these revolts, while initially successful, were doomed by the complete disorganisation and lack of revolutionary capacity among the provincial working class. The revolutionaries, though victorious at the outset, could do little more than declare their solidarity with Paris; they possessed no faculty to wield power or sustain a seizure of the state apparatus.
The narrative details how the movement in Marseilles, after an initial triumph, was crushed by the arrival of loyalist troops under General Espivent de la Villeboisnet. The author emphasises the cowardice and brutality of the bourgeois reaction, describing how the middle-class National Guard units, who had initially fraternised with the workers, swiftly turned on them once the regular army arrived. The fighting is depicted as a one-sided massacre, with the workers’ barricades poorly defended and their leadership paralysed. At Narbonne, the pattern repeated: a brief occupation of the town hall by revolutionaries, a proclamation of the Commune, and then a rapid collapse when faced with military force. The author notes that the provincial revolutionaries “showed themselves completely disorganised, without any faculty to wield power.”
The chapter draws on the immediate historical context of the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second Empire, presenting the provincial uprisings as a desperate, uncoordinated echo of the Parisian insurrection. The theoretical context is a Marxist critique of bourgeois republicanism. The key polemic is directed squarely at the Radicals—the moderate, middle-class republicans who either actively combated the workers’ movement or held aloof from it. They are accused of attesting to the “decrepitude, the egotism of the middle-class, always ready to betray the working men to the ‘upper’ classes.” This is a fundamental indictment of the liberal bourgeoisie as a class incapable of genuine revolutionary action, willing to side with monarchists and reactionaries rather than see the proletariat seize power. The chapter’s narrative thrust is thus not merely a military history of defeat, but a political lesson in class betrayal and the necessity of a disciplined, centralised revolutionary organisation—a lesson the provincial Communards fatally lacked.