16. The Manifesto and the germs of defeat¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Lissagaray dissects the political paralysis that seized the Paris Commune in its second fortnight, arguing that the movement’s defeat was already germinating within its own institutions and ideology. The chapter’s core narrative thrust is the catastrophic failure of the Commune to articulate a coherent programme to the provinces at the decisive moment, compounded by a fetish for legal formalism and petty personal rivalries that crippled the Council.
The by-elections of 16 April provide the evidence: turnout collapsed from 146,000 to 61,000 in the same arrondissements, and from 51,000 to 16,000 in districts whose councillors had deserted. This was the moment, Lissagaray insists, to explain to France what the Commune stood for. Instead, the declaration of 19 April was a derivative, contradictory document, drafted not by the Council’s twelve publicists but by a journalist, Pierre Denis, working from a proposal by the Cri du Peuple. The core of that proposal—Paris as a “Hanseatic town,” a free city holding itself aloof—infected the final text. The declaration demanded “absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all localities,” but said nothing of the powers of the central federation or the reciprocal obligations of communes. Lissagaray’s polemic is savage: this programme would leave the revolution “a monster with a thousand suckers attached to its flank,” because nine-tenths of French communes had fewer than 600 inhabitants and possessed no political life. The rural masses, “thousands of mutes and blind,” could only be saved by the towns, and the towns by Paris. The declaration’s attack on “despotic, unintelligent centralisation” was correct, but its alternative—voluntary association of local initiatives—showed it “knew nothing whatever of the provinces.” The Council voted the declaration after a single reading, without debate, while it had spent four days on overdue commercial bills.
A second infection was the “Casuists” who insisted on absolute majorities for validating elections, even as the Commune was under fire and its best men were dying at the advanced posts. Twenty-six votes against thirteen validated only twenty of thirty-one elections, a decision Lissagaray calls illogical and suicidal. This legalism led Rogeard, a man of “pure and brilliant eloquence,” to resign on a scruple, and allowed Félix Pyat to attempt escape under cover of that resignation. Lissagaray’s portrait of Pyat is venomous: a “Greek” who urged violence in secret sittings while preaching moderation in his paper, who called Vermorel a “spy” and Tridon a “dunghill,” and who only remained when his electors threatened revocation. The chapter’s historical context is the failure of 1848, which Pyat had also fled, and the wider pattern of provincial insurrections that had already been crushed. The theoretical argument is against a naive municipalism that mistakes autonomy for revolution, and against a legalism that treats formal procedure as sacred while the enemy is at the gates. Versailles, Lissagaray notes, was jubilant.