15. The Commune’s first combats¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter details the first military engagements of the Paris Commune following the disastrous sortie of 3 April, which paradoxically galvanised the movement. The initial panic gave way to a surge in recruitment and fortification; the forts of Issy and Vanves, though damaged, held, and Parisian artillery, including the fine cannon of seven previously spurned by Trochu, forced the Versaillese to evacuate the plateau of Chatillon on 4 April. The narrative centres on the defence of Neuilly and the Porte-Maillot, a position held for forty-eight days by men of extraordinary courage under the plunging fire of Mont-Valérien, which had been recently armed with 24-pounders. The author contrasts this intrepidity with the incompetence of the Commune’s own military leadership. The Executive Commission replaced the hapless Bergeret with the Polish officer Dombrowski, whose cool, Slavonic courage quickly won over the distrustful National Guard. Dombrowski’s night attack at Asnières on 9 April, seizing cannon and storming the castle of Bécon, is presented as a brilliant but isolated deed, unsupported by any coherent strategy.
The chapter offers a sustained polemic against the Commune’s military organisation, personified by the generalissimo Cluseret. His first decree, calling out only unmarried men from seventeen to thirty-five, is condemned for excluding the most energetic defenders, the grey-headed veterans of previous insurrections, and had to be revoked within three days. Cluseret is further attacked for blaming the cannonades for squandering munitions when Paris abounded in powder and shell, and for his paranoid belief that the Versaillese attack masked a Prussian seizure of the right-bank forts. The Council itself is criticised for its chaotic, unprepared proceedings, issuing decrees that were forgotten the next day, creating rival medical services, and debating the abolition of the Vendôme column while Dombrowski made desperate appeals for reinforcements. The result was that Dombrowski held Neuilly, Asnières, and the Gennevilliers peninsula with barely 2,500 men against the best Versaillese troops, and his telegrams for reinforcements were met with only a few hundred men, leading to the eventual loss of Asnières on 18 April.
The chapter also recounts the attempts at conciliation by various bourgeois groups—the National Union of the Syndical Chambers, the Republican Union League for the Rights of Paris, and Freemason lodges—all of which demanded recognition of the Republic and municipal franchises for Paris. These are contrasted with the position of Louis Blanc and the Paris deputies, who, in a lachrymose and jesuitical tone, blamed the Commune for prolonging civil discord and the foreign occupation. The core of the polemic is directed at Thiers, who is shown to have cynically manipulated these negotiations. He promised the delegates of the Union Syndicale that the Republic existed and would not succumb, only to rush to the Assembly and force it to annul a vote granting communes the right to elect their mayors, restricting it to towns under 20,000. To the League, he offered only the demand that Paris disarm, reserving the right to pardon all save the ‘assassins of Clément-Thomas and Lecomte,’ a formula that allowed him to choose his victims. The chapter concludes with the Council publishing the conciliators’ reports in its Officiel, loyally exposing Thiers’s intransigence and the futility of all attempts at compromise.