Revolutions - 8.5- The Cannons

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

On March 18, 1871 the government of Adolphe Thiers attempted to seize control of the National Guard's cannons. It didn't go well.   Fundraiser! revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com

And welcome to revolutions. Episode 8.5, The Cannons. Before we get going today, I want to remind everybody that this is the very last week of the fundraiser. Everything will wrap up on June the 9th, so please get your orders in by then. Then I will place my big bulk t-shirt order and start sending out the books that so many of you have so generously taken off my hands. When that begins to happen, you will get an email confirmation. that your order is on the way. So if you would like to have an order on the way, this is the final week to do it. This is the final push of the Revolutions podcast

is moving to Paris fundraiser. I thank you also very much for your support. So we left off last time with the convening of a new National Assembly for France on February the 13th, 1871, an assembly that was dominated by a huge majority of conservative monarchists, either Legitimus, who supported the return of the Bourbons after a 40-year hiatus, or Orleanists, who supported the return of the Orlean after a 22-year hiatus. But turning France back into a monarchy was not really the dominant issue of the recent election. The dominant issue was war or peace. These conservatives had been elected not because they promised to bring back a king,

but because they promised to bring back peace. Now, more left-wing candidates and radical Republicans had run on a platform of rejecting the recently signed armistice and continuing to fight the Germans. But after six months of just getting destroyed by the Germans, the vast majority of France wanted peace. As I said at the end of last week's episode, this new assembly appointed the now positively ancient Adolf Tier to head an executive ministry, whose first principal objective would be to bring the Franco-Prussian war to an end. and though I think it's an exaggeration to say that Tiers's attitude was peace at any price. Peace at just about any price? That sounds about right.

The resulting armistice has gone down in history as a key turning point in the cycles of Franco-German conflict that would define not just European history, but world history, for the next 75-odd years. Unlike his stance towards the Austrians just five years earlier, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck really wanted to hobble France economically, politically, and emotionally. So he first of all demanded a massive indemnity payment of $5 billion. This was an astronomical sum of money. Now, to help you understand how big this amount was, a friend of the show Nick Bunker pointed me to a paper written a few years back that calculated the size of the French indemnity to be 23% of France's G.

GDP. To put that in perspective, the GDP of the United States here in the year of our Lord 2018 is $18 or $19 trillion. So that indemnity is roughly the equivalent of $4 trillion. Now, that is a very rough calculation and does not take in other factors like previous debt load of the state or any of that stuff. But still, that's the scale of this demand. It is shockingly huge. In Bismarck's estimation, the indemnity was meant to cripple France's ability to project military power for at least a generation, which would give the new German Empire time to solidify without further troubles on their Western Front.

But there was also no emotional reason to this. The amount of the indemnity was calculated to be the per capita equivalent of the indemnity Emperor Napoleon I had imposed on the Prussians way back in 1807. Bismarck was a proud Prussian patriot, and he was taking the opportunity to get even for one of his nation's greatest humiliations. So getting even and rubbing each other's noses in it will be the hallmark of this period of Franco-German relations. The other big piece of the armistice, though, was the demand that France cede the provinces of Alsace and most of Lorraine. The territory existed on the west banks of the

Rhine and Moselle rivers, and they were demanded for three principal reasons. First, there was a military rationale, and that was to secure control of a buffer zone that would hinder French attempts to invade Germany in the future. Second, there was an economic rationale. The region was prospering, and transferring it would be a double whammy that subtracting that productivity from France and adding it to Germany would only further hinder France's ability to do anything but slink back into the just quietly trying to fit in mode of French foreign policy that had prevailed under the restoration and July monarchies. And the third reason, of course, was to rub France's nose in it. We're taking it, because we can. Tierre met these demands by saying first it is going to be impossible for us to make

that large of an indemnity payment, to which Bismarck retorted, if you can't find the five billion francs, maybe we can. And that settled that. As for Alas-Lorraine, well, the Germans already occupied it, and the French had been overwhelmingly defeated, and there was nothing they could do about it, unless they wanted to go back to war. And at this moment, that was even more unthinkable than losing a peace of the nation. On February the 26th, Thier presented the armistice to the National Assembly for approval. Now, the Assembly was not wholly conservative, and there were contingents of defiant radical Republicans, mostly representing Paris itself, who were shocked at the terms and they howled

betrayal. And first of all, footnote alert, Garibaldi was among those defiant Republicans elected to the Assembly. He was eligible because he had been born in Nice, which was now a part of France. But his credentials were challenged, and he was booed when he tried to speak, so he withdrew disillusioned. The great author, Victor Hugo, was also among those radical Republicans elected, and he accurately and passionately predicted the seeds of a future war. He also promised that because the Germans had so helpfully rid the French of their emperor, that soon enough, the French would

do the same for the Germans. Now, even the conservatives in the assembly swallowed a lot of nauseated shame as they reckoned with the terms of the armistice, but they voted for it anyway, because there was no alternative. Most of the radical Paris contingent resigned and discussed, and they made their way back home, where they would soon have to decide just how many affronts to their honor they would be willing to endure until they all snapped. So back in Paris, these guys rejoined a population that was reeling and disoriented, transitioning from one state of shock to just a different state of shock. The psychological devastation of the siege of Paris was profound. Four months of horror had left them emaciated, hollow-eyed, and literally shell-shocked from the German artillery.

The months of no information had led to wild rumors and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, which went from crazy talk to just sort of taken for granted. It was taken for granted that the rich had hoarded food, that the military leaders of Paris had staged fake breakouts meant to kill national guardsmen to break Paris's spirit. It was taken. taken for granted that the National Assembly believe the working classes were the real enemy, not the Germans. Now that the siege was over, it was hard not to believe that they hadn't been betrayed or sold out or something. Mostly, it was just hard to absorb that it had all been for nothing. Now, much to the city's general relief, food did come pouring in from all sides. First, it was

German army rations, and then meat, produce, and other supplies delivered in large part thanks to British humanitarian efforts. But even his life kind of sort of return to normal. Emotions remained decidedly mixed. As the food and necessities of life recirculated, it did so unequally. The middle and upper class parts of the city really did kind of return to normal. Food was on the shelves and not rat was back on the menu. But the working class neighborhood still struggled to feed themselves as if the siege was still on.

And the left-wing leaders, the Blanc Yeasts, the Prudonists, the Neo-Jackians, the Neodiacos, all of whom had suffered along with the rest, now found a ready audience, an audience more willing to listen to their calls for revolution. Now, as has been the case in every French revolution we've discussed here on the podcast, the National Guard is actually going to be the key to that revolution. We saw the left-wing insurrections of October the 31st and January the 22nd fail, because for all of Blonkey's ideological commitment to the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, a few hundred or a few thousand guys were not going to be enough to sustain a revolutionary uprising.

For that, you needed far larger, more coherent, and better armed organizations. And that is what the National Guard is about to provide. Now, during the siege, the National Guard of Paris had grown to 1,300 companies, organized into 260 battalions, coming out to just under 400,000 men. Most of them were between the ages of 25 and 35, and they had joined. joined up not just because it was their patriotic duty, but also because you got one and a half francs per day in pay, making service in the National Guard during the siege akin to a working dole. It was one of the very few steady paychecks that could be had during the siege.

Now, because the National Guard had such a strong reputation as being the middle-class bourgeois defenders of the social order, the Blancis and the Prudonists, the left-wing socialist types, stayed away during the early part of the war. But they quickly clued into the fact that this iteration of the National Guard was dominated by the working classes. The Blancis in particular recognized this democratic shift in membership, and they debated whether to treat the Guard as a rival or to join the service and try to take it over from the inside. After their failed October the 31st insurrection, there's no question that they embraced the latter option. With many of the left-wing political clubs shut down and their papers shuddered, national guard meetings, became one of the last free and open spaces left to debate politics. So over the course of the

torturous winter of 1870, 1871, the National Guard became more overtly radical in its politics. Now, the Guard had a senior commander appointed by the Government of National Defense, a one general Clement Tomah, but as the siege neared its conclusion, he privately admitted that at this point he had very little real authority. The end of the siege radicalized the National Guard still further. Not only were the ranks now full of overtly revolutionary members, but even regular run-of-the-mill guardsmen had developed an espritic core and a belief that they were integral to the patriotic defense of the Republic.

To say that they were disgruntled that the slippery politicians had surrendered would be a massive understatement. Most absolutely took it for granted that they had all been betrayed. Adding to the radicalization was the removal of more conservative elements now that the blockade was lifted. As soon as the siege was over, most middle and upper-class Parisians took the first opportunity they could to get the hell out of this stinking, starving, disease-ridden metropolis they had all been trapped in for four months, and about 100,000 residents of Paris departed the city in the first weeks of February. Those among them who had served in the National Guard represented that more traditional bourgeois, defense, the social order worldview. A worldview, now absent from discussion, held amongst the rank and file

of the guard. That rank and file was now tilting further in the direction of radical lower class politics. Now, these discussions took place inside the standing company committees that had remained in permanent session since the beginning of the siege. These various committees had kept in continuous contact with each other, and as the siege of Paris gave way to the betrayal of Paris, they sought to create a more bottom-up organizational structure to respond to the needs of the guardsmen, their families, and the people of Paris, rather than the hated generals and politicians. Although they did have one of those hated politicians to thank for one of the most critical pieces of all this. Mayor of Paris, Jules Féry, had secured from Bismarck a concession that

while the regular army was to be disarmed, the National Guard in Paris would stay under arms to maintain order inside the city. So, the National Guard remained legally armed and on duty. Clearly, Ferri had not realized that the Guard was already well on its way, not towards maintaining order, but advancing revolution. Even before the armistice was signed, the results of the election of February 8th had alarmed the members of the National Guard. A week later, on February the 15th, 1871, the first central meeting of delegates sent by the various companies and battalions declared themselves to be the Federation of the National Guard, and they proclaimed that they stood for a republic, personal freedom, and social equality.

Then, another week later, on February the 24th, 7,200 delegates representing the 1,300 companies and 260 battalions of the National Guard met for another mass meeting. At this meeting, the delegates agreed to a series of dramatic and provocative declarations. All officers of the National Guard and all delegates to the Federation were to be elected by the rank and file members, and they would be subject to immediate recall by that same rank and file. This cemented the orientation of the leadership of the National Guard, away from top-down orders from the national government and towards the bottom-up demands of their own members. They also voted to create a central committee of 38 members,

nearly half of whom were avowedly Blankist, anarchist, or revolutionary socialists. The assembled delegates also pledged to obey all orders issued by this central committee, and further, to only obey orders from this central committee. So, if some nationally appointed commander issued an order to the National Guard, maybe they'd obey it, maybe they wouldn't, but the Central Committee would have the final word. This, as I say, is incredibly provocative. as they're just sort of inventing their own chain of command here. They also all agreed to hold regular bi-weekly committee meetings at every level

from the central committee on down to the neighborhood company, all of whom would stay in constant communication with each other. So with the creation of the Federation of the National Guard, we have finally a well-armed, well-organized, and now overtly radical political organization that would soon merge with the civilian and predominantly prudonist vigilance committees that we talked about last week to form the core of the Paris commune. Accompanying these meetings over February 24th, 25th, and 26th,

anniversaries of the three days of the February 1848 revolution, huge demonstrations and speeches and marches were held mostly around the pasta la Bastille, with hundreds of thousands of participants. Paris was beginning to take itself over. So with Paris bursting with this aggravated, self-confident, angry, armed, paranoid, bitter, exuberant energy, the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck decided to go forward with a very risky demonstration. As a part of that whole rubbing each other's noses in it thing, 30,000 German troops would parade triumphantly through the streets of Paris. Now, the decision to march

through Paris was in many ways like deciding to run through puddles of gasoline waving a blowtorch around. And when news leaked to the Parisians of what was being planned, the Federal of the National Guard started to prepare to resist this humiliation. The triumphal parade was planned for March the 1st, and so in the last days of February, National Guard companies prepared to meet the Germans. They gathered up all their cannons from the west end of the city and massed them in the northern working class neighborhoods. Then they began drawing up battle plans to physically prevent this German parade.

But here's the twist. These preparations alarmed the more radical revolutionary, especially Blonkey and his guise. Those left-wing revolutionary leaders, many of whom were now sitting on the Central Committee, the Federation of the National Guard, argued to the point of begging that they must not fire even a single shot at the Germans, that to do so would surely trigger a full-blown sack of the Capitol, and what chance did they have against 30,000 veteran German infantry and cavalry? So this humiliation had to be borne with disciplined restraint. Otherwise, the people would surely be crushed by the German war machine, leaving them, and this is the important part, too weak

to face the real enemy, Adolf Tier and his government of conservative royalist sellouts. Just as the national government had long since decided that the revolutionary working classes were more of an enemy than the Germans, so too had those lower class revolutionaries concluded the same thing. Let the Germans have their march, and when they are gone, we will be ready to wage the really important battle, for control of Paris and for control of France. Now, the Germans are not stupid. They knew full well that the north of Paris was heavily armed and hostile, so the parade route was carefully planned. They would start at the west end of the city, at the Ach de Triumph, and then march down the Chames-Ele-E to the Twilery Palace, and there they would

make a celebratory camp in the gardens. It was all still incredibly risky, but if the German army confined itself to these richer parts at Paris, they would still be merely standing in puddles of gasoline rather than diving into a swimming pool of gasoline. And so it was that on March the 1st, 1871, 30,000 German soldiers entered Paris in perfect order wearing their most resplendent uniforms. They marched down the Champs-Hilis and did so under the watch of curious Parisians, who could not help but come down to observe this spectacle. And much to everyone's surprise, Nothing happened. The Germans got to the tuileries where they bivouacked and held more celebrations amongst themselves. The only resistance they encountered was passive. All cafes and shops in the area

were closed, with tricolored flags or black mourning flags hung in the windows. The worst violence was an occasional beating inflicted upon some shopkeeper who did do business with the Germans, or a citizen who seemed too friendly with these conquerors. The German army spent the rest of March the 1st and all of March the 2nd occupying central Paris. Then at dawn on March the 3rd, Paris awoke to the sound of German trumpets. The army picked itself up and marched back out of the city. And that was that. The gasoline had not been lit into a blaze of violent insurrectionary fire.

That fire was now being wholly reserved for the real enemy, the government of Adolf Tierre. Appearing quite eager to prove the very worst Parisian suspicions. The National Assembly then took a number of incredibly provocative steps that all but guaranteed that that fire was going to break out. First, on March the 10th, the Assembly voted to adjourn from its wartime seat in Bordeaux and reconvene not in Paris. Instead, they voted to make Versailles, the capital of the Third Republic. Versailles had not been the capital of France since October of 1789, when the women of Paris had come and fetched Louis the 16th, and Marie Antoinette.

Through the Revolution, the Consulate, the First Empire, the Restoration Monarchy, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and now the Third Republic, Paris had been the capital. To go back to Versailles, the seat of the Aseigne regime, what are you talking about? When Paris got the news, there were two big takeaways. First, it was yet another in a long string of slights and humiliations that were being inflicted upon Paris. But the other, more subtle takeaway, was that clearly the new government did not consider itself strong enough to survive in Paris. So moving to Versailles was not a show of strength.

It was a declaration of weakness. After this symbolic provocation, the assembly then hit Paris with a more direct attack. Now, both because the National Assembly was made up of richer landlord types, and because they were under enormous pressure from the banking community, who would be the ones financing the coming indemnity payments, the National Assembly passed the law of maturities on March the 13th. This law lifted the wartime moratorium on rent and debt collection. During the siege of Paris, failure to pay rent or your debts had been legally excused because, first of all, no one had any money, and second of all, it would have been impossible to collect anyway. The law of maturities canceled that moratorium, and not only that, canceled it overnight.

Well, technically over two nights. Everyone in Paris had 48 hours to pay off their debts and their back rent, and after that landlords, creditors, and the police could go to work collecting what they were owed. Not in six weeks, not by the end of the year, now. Then, to add injury to injury, the assembly voted to end the salary of the national guardsmen. Now, obviously, this was the first step towards turning it back into an organization of prosperous middle-class defenders of the social order, but the immediate impact was for a guardsman to be told practically in the same breath, all your debts and back rent are now due, and, oh, by the way, no more paycheck either. I mean, it's almost like the government was intentionally trying to provoke an insurrection. I don't think that they were, but it's hard to see how they could have done a better job

if that had been the plan. Okay, so by the middle of March 1871, all the pieces are in place. Even as Mayor Jules Ferry assured the government that the situation in Paris was fine, it's normal, everything's great. In reality, the official administrators of Paris, that is, those that were appointed by the national government, had no effective control over the city. Farrie himself sat in the Hotel de Ville and was ignored. General Clement Tomphe had resigned his post.

as commander of the National Guard in part because he knew he wielded no real authority. As a replacement, Tierre appointed a new head of the National Guard, General Orel de Paladin. And this appointment was also incredibly provocative, as the general was a reactionary bonapartist, whose working motto was order and respect of law and property. So his appointment, too, was ignored by the organization he now ostensibly led. And when the general arrived in Paris to take up his post, he summoned the commanders of the 260 battalions to an initial meeting. Only 30 showed up.

So the government and the armed forces of Paris were out of the hands of the top-down, quote-unquote, official leadership, and instead were being controlled by all of these self-organized, bottom-up groups, the Central Committee of the Vigilance Committees, the Central Committee of the Federation of the National Guard, both of whom, by the way, now make their headquarters in the same building. These central committees were supported by radical, socialist, and anarchist political clubs who further organized and directed the people in the poorer sections of the city, all of whom now went to bed each night and woke up each morning, burning with resentful bitterness,

the financial threat of rent and debt collection that now hung over their heads, their fear that the republic was about to be handed back to a king, the knowledge that the rest of France planned to have Paris suffer for not, nothing. And they were all led by a group of leaders in Versailles who clearly saw them not as fellow citizens, but as enemies to be crushed. And then, of course, there were still lingering rage over how unequally Paris had suffered through the siege, that the rich had feasted while the poor had starved. So all we need now is a spark to light this powder keg. Or I guess I should stick with this swimming pool full of gasoline metaphor I've got going. While whatever is about to burst into

flames on March the 18th, 1871, Adolf Thier gave orders for everyone to start running around Paris, waving a blowtorch. The final provocation that triggered the revolutionary uprising that led to the creation of the Paris Commune was the struggle to control the National Guard's canons. We are talking here about the 400-odd cannons that had either been acquired by or purchased by the National Guard during the siege. In many cases, these canons had been paid for by the Parisians themselves, who took up voluntary subscriptions when the government of national defense dragged its feet, giving the people the weapons of national defense. So it was with an understandable degree of pride that the Federation of the National Guard claimed both contractual and spiritual ownership over the guns.

They now rightly feared that the government planned to come and take them away. And as I just said, while the Germans were preparing to enter Paris, the Central Committee of the National Guard had ordered all the cannons clustered into the northern working-class neighborhoods. Now that the Germans were gone, these cannons came to stand as the symbol in the struggle for control of Paris. For Thier and his government, the cannon stood for the defiance of Paris. It was bad enough that these citizens had rifles to also control artillery. That was out of the question. The monopoly on the use of military force is one of the foundational powers of any legitimate government, and Tier was determined to secure his legitimacy by securing the guns of Paris.

For the Parisians, though, the canons were the physical symbol of the last shredded bits of their honor and dignity. They stood for democratic control of power, for getting to keep what you yourself have paid for and died for. they stood for the people succeeding where the government had so spectacularly failed over the last eight months. To try to take them away would be the act of reactionary tyrants looking to crush the people. So to boil all of this down, for the government, taking control of the cannons represented the triumph of order. For the National Guard, retaining control of the canons, represented the triumph of liberty, gallate, and fraternity. The National Assembly was set to reconvene in Versailles on March the 20th, and in the days leading up to their inaugural session, Tierre, most of his fellow ministers and senior army generals, were in Paris making preparations. After all, those were the headquarters of most of the ministries. For Tier, one of the principal preparations to be made would be securing control of the National Guard cannons.

So in a meeting with the ministry and those generals on March the 17th, Tier announced that the next day, the gun's would be removed from Paris. Leaders in both the regular army and the civilian government tried to convince Tier to either accept a compromise where the guard would be allowed to at least keep some of the cannons or to wait until the crisis atmosphere had dissipated. But Tier would not be deterred. He believed that immediately sending in the regular army to haul the cannons away would catch Paris by surprise and rob them of major firepower if, and more likely when,

a showdown came for control of Paris. Just because the assembly would be meeting in Versailles, that did not mean that controlling Paris was not of paramount importance. Tierre wanted it done now to prove that order was the order of the day. The general said, look, the troops at our disposal are mostly new recruits, they are not trained, they are not well disciplined, and they are as likely to mutiny as follow orders. But at the end of this contentious meeting,

Tierre said, we take the guns in the morning. Everything will go according to plan. Paris might howl in the days to come, but those howls will not be backed by artillery, and that's the important thing. Needless to say, we would not be here talking about all of this today if things had actually gone as planned. Now, one thing did go right for Thierre. Along with the law of maturities, the National Assembly had also set down new press laws designed to shut down more radical newspapers, and they also reissued a arrest warrants for various seditious leaders, including, most especially, the arch-revolutionary Louis August Blanke. Blanke had been in and out of hiding since October the 31st, but he was located

and arrested on that same March the 17th and hauled off far away to a prison in Normandy. In all retrospective looks at the rise and fall of the Paris Commune, the abrupt absence of Blonkey at this critical hour is considered incredibly important. There are other times. There are other timelines in the multiverse where Blonkey is there to act as the single charismatic leader that commune would so desperately need. But in our timeline, he was simply not there. And Tierra himself understood the power and potential that Blankey represented, and as we'll see, he will be willing to accept major sacrifices to ensure that Blonky is not allowed to leave prison before the commune is subdued. Before dawn, on March the 18th, 1871, four columns numbering about

15,000 total men, a mix of regular army and state police, marched out in separate directions. One column secured the Hotel de Ville, another secured the Place de la Bastille, a third went up to Belleville, while the fourth and final column under General Claude Lecombe went up to Monmouth to collect the largest cache of 170 cannon. With this operation, getting started at about 3 o'clock in the morning, the rank and vile soldiers were not very happy about this mission, and plenty of officers shared their unhappy misgivings. When General Lecombe arrived at Mamatra, a few National Guardsmen on duty were spooked off into a hasty retreat, though in the initial confusion one of their number was shot, wounded, and taken into custody. But by four o'clock in the morning, the guns of Mamantre were secure.

So far, so good. But now we come to the critical blunder of the whole operation. typical of the French army of the late empire. Whoever was in charge of making sure the column had horses to pull away the cannons had not made sure that they had horses to pull away the cannons. So there were no horses, and the soldiers had to just sit around and wait until some horses showed up. And this right here is the difference between hauling the cannons away before Paris woke up and Paris waking up to find the army trying to haul away their cannons. When word spread, toxin bells started ringing, and the people of Paris woke up and flooded out into the streets.

Now, the other cannons had mostly been secured, but there were still columns out at the Bastille and at the Hotel de Ville, where they were soon surrounded by angry mobs. General Lacomps' column up at Montre became an obvious focal point, and the soldiers there were hit by a mix of menacing threats, but also persuasive coaxing. Like, what are you doing? Working for these jerks, don't be the tool of tyrants. Come on over to our side. Come on over to the light. And this persuasive coaxing worked on the relatively new recruits of the 88th regiment. These guys mutinied on the spot. They turn their rifles upside down, butts in the air, to signal to everyone that they were not going to fight. Into this confusion strode the young mayor of the 18th arrondissement.

A1, Dr. George Clemenceau. future Prime Minister of France and one of the principal architects of the Treaty of Versailles, a.k.a. getting back to the old rubbing their noses in it thing. But at this point, he's still just an eager young Republican politician on the rise. When Claimon-So arrived, he urged General Lecombe to hand over the wounded guardsmen, and then for God's sake get the guns out of here. But Lecombe refused to hand the prisoner over, and as for hauling the guns away, well, he still didn't have any horses. With the crowd getting awfully hostile, Lecomte resolved to fight his way out, and he gave his men the order to fire, but his men refused to fire, even after multiple demands. So General Lecomte totally lost control of the situation, and instead of blasting his way through the rabble, he was pulled from his horse and taken into custody at the Chateau Rouge, a large brick building that gives its name to the whole neighborhood, even to this day.

Clemenceau attempted to fix a compromise to keep the peace, but cooler heads gave way to hotter heads. The leaders of the neighborhood vigilance committee came down. They claimed jurisdiction over, well, everything, and then they took General Lecompton to their own custody, transferring him into a house that they controlled. By now it was mid-afternoon, and unbeknownst to everyone up on Monta, Adolf Thier had decided that the operation had failed. It wasn't going to work. So he went for Plan B. And Plan B was actually a plan that he had recommended to King Louis Philippe way back on the first day of the February Revolution in 1848, to pull all the regular troops out of Paris to prevent further mutinies and fraternizing with the rabble.

And then, when they had concentrated a good 40 or 50,000 men, they would storm back into Paris and take the city by force. This had essentially been the tactics used in the June days, and Tierre planned to repeat them. to sterner and bloodier effect. So Thierre and anyone else connected to the national government fled the city as quickly as possible, and all the army columns were ordered to remaster in the center of town, and then to much jeering and laughter they retreated, leaving Paris to the Parisians.

Abandoned to his fate, General Lecompt met his fate. Though he did not meet it alone. General Clement Tomah, the previous leader of the National Guard, guy who had been appointed by the Committee of National Defense, and only so recently resigned his position, was spotted in plainclothes. He was apprehended and deposited in the same house as Lecomte at about four in the afternoon. Now, it's hard to tell what would have happened to Lecomte had Clement Toma not been deposited right next to him, but Clement Toma was at this point despised. His leadership during

the siege had earned him much ill-will, and he was among those being accused of having sold Paris out. Mobs surrounded the building that held the two generals. These mobs called for their trial and execution, with the former being a reading of charges and the latter a foregone conclusion. With the trial and execution not coming quickly enough, this mob finally burst in, and with all order gone, a call went out asking who thought the generals should be executed. A massive show of hands was the only trial that ever took place.

General Clement Tomah was beaten with rifle butts and then dragged into a garden where he was shot, and then his lifeless body shot some more. The coroner identified more than 40 slugs in the corpse. Lecombe was pushed out after him and shot in the back, with bullets later determined to have only been available to regular army troops, meaning that he was likely executed by his own men. The execution of the generals put Paris well past the point of no return, and the various central committees and political clubs had already sprung into action trying to seize the moment. None of them had planned for this.

It's very rare to have a truly revolutionary moment that is planned and staged from the beginning. It's usually just something that gets out of hand. But revolutionary insurrection was now at hand. Some National Guard companies rushed down to the Pantheon to take control of the gunpowder store there, while others mobbed the Hotel de Ville, where the very isolated and no doubt very scared, Mayor Jules Faireri remained. With what few guards and soldiers that remained on the premises now deserting their posts, Ferri himself managed to sneak out a back window using a ladder, and then he too snuck out of the city.

Behind him, the Hotel de Ville was surrounded by well over 20,000 national guardsmen, who then took control of the building. Once inside, though, they did not raise the tricolour flag as their revolutionary forebearers. had done. The tricolor was now the flag of empire, of hypocritical tyrants, exploitive bosses, and sell-out politicians. No. This time when the flag went up, it was the red flag of revolutionary socialism. The Paris commune was born.