23. The ‘Lefts’ betray Paris¶
Core Argument¶
After 18 March, Thiers found himself stripped of army, cannon, and major towns. He survived by cynically exploiting the word ‘Republic’, using the recognised leaders of the Republican party as his frontmen. From 23 March, Louis Blanc, Schoelcher and other radical exiles went to Versailles, insulted the Central Committee, and served Thiers as bottle-holders. When provincial republicans saw these figures siding with Versailles and received neither programme nor emissaries from Paris, they turned away.
Provincial agitation nonetheless spread through twenty departments in April: Lille, Lyons, Rouen, Grenoble, Nîmes, Bordeaux, and rural areas saw red flags, disturbances, and attempts to stop troop movements. Thiers received all deputations with bonhomie, then sent them to the Extreme Left deputies, who endorsed his words. Louis Blanc declared Paris’s cause compromised by criminal combat; the radicals told delegates Paris must disarm first. The delegates returned to the provinces preaching abandonment of the Commune to save the Republic.
Lyons rose on 30 April. The Guillotière erected barricades and a Revolutionary Commission installed itself in the mairie. Valentin and Crouzat brought troops and cannon; the Riot Act was read, the mairie stormed. Soldiers killed about a hundred of their own men in darkness. The movement for a congress of towns to end the civil war then emerged from Bordeaux and Lyons. Thiers forbade it, Picard denounced it from the tribune, and the Radical organisers capitulated. Gambetta retired to Spain. By 10 May, having signed the Peace of Frankfurt and isolated Paris from the provinces, Thiers faced the capital alone.
The text argues that the French Assembly and its ministers, notably Picard and Dufaure, cynically proclaimed the Republic in official despatches and proclamations while simultaneously acting against Paris. Dufaure admitted in 1875 that he had assembled a 150,000-strong military force from the defeated army, sufficient to crush Paris but not to suppress other republican towns, which would have resisted if they suspected a monarchist agenda. The author draws a parallel with Robespierre, who declared successive popular movements ‘inopportune’ — the republican outburst of 1791, the famished people of Paris, demands for social articles in the 1793 Constitution, the commissars, anti-Church agitation, the Socialists and Jacques Roux, the popular societies, and figures like Clootz and Hébert — only to be himself declared inopportune and devoured by the bourgeoisie once he had purged and muzzled the revolutionary forces for them.