4. The Fall of Paris¶
Core Argument¶
Thiers, unable to raise a reliable army from the provinces, assembled a motley force of sailors, gendarmes, and Papal Zouaves, supplemented by imperialist prisoners released by Bismarck in numbers sufficient to sustain the civil war and keep Versailles dependent on Prussia. The forts were bought, not taken. His conciliation overtures were a ruse: he promised not to send an army, then claimed to accept the republic, while his Rural Assembly drowned his name with roars. Municipal elections on 30 April returned only 8,000 monarchists out of 700,000 councillors, stripping the Assembly of moral authority. Bismarck then forced Thiers to sign the peace treaty of 10 May, which included continued occupation of Paris forts and release of the Bonapartist army for the extermination of Paris, with payment of the first indemnity instalment conditional on ‘pacification’. Thiers promised to spare all but the murderers of Lecomte and Clément Thomas, then declared he would be pitiless. On 22 May, after treachery opened Paris’s gates, he announced the goal reached: victory of order, civilisation, and justice. The ensuing massacre—wholesale slaughter, torture, proscription of a whole class—paralleled Sulla and the Roman Triumvirates. The Commune used fire as a defensive measure, having warned it would make Paris a second Moscow; Thiers had bombarded for six weeks. The execution of sixty-four hostages is contrasted with the bourgeois custom of shooting defenceless prisoners, revived in June 1848.
The Prussians revived hostage-taking, and when Thiers shot Communard prisoners, the Commune was forced to adopt the same practice to protect its own. Thiers is the real murderer of Archbishop Darboy: the Commune repeatedly offered to exchange him and other priests for the single prisoner Blanqui, but Thiers refused, knowing Blanqui would give the Commune a head while the archbishop was more useful dead. Thiers followed Cavaignac’s precedent of June 1848, when the ‘Party of Order’ falsely blamed insurgents for Archbishop Affre’s death, though he was shot by their own soldiers.
The ruling class conspiracy to crush revolution through civil war under foreign patronage culminated in the Paris carnage. Bismarck gloats, seeing it as the extinction of France. Prussia, though neutral and no belligerent, acted as a hired bravo for Versailles, stipulating blood-money of 500 million. This unprecedented breach of international law, instead of outlawing Prussia, incites other governments to hand over escapees to Versailles. The fraternisation of conquering and conquered armies for proletarian massacre proves bourgeois society is crumbling; national war is now exposed as a governmental humbug, thrown aside when class struggle erupts into civil war. No peace is possible between French workers and their appropriators. The International Working Men’s Association is not a secret conspiracy but the bond between advanced workers; it cannot be stamped out without destroying capital’s despotism. Paris’s Commune will be forever celebrated as the harbinger of a new society.