Revolutions - 8.6- The Commune

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

The Paris Commune was formally inaugurated on March 28, 1871. Unfortunately no one could agree on what that meant.  

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 8.6, The Commune. First of all, the fundraiser is officially closed, at least on the T-shirt and library side. All those orders are now being processed, and everything will begin shipping soon. But just so you know, both history of realm appendices are still out there and will still be available. They can still be found at Revolutionspodcast fundraiser.com. So if you haven't bought those yet, you can still do so right now or whenever you feel like it. I want to thank everyone so much for your support as we make our move to France in holy crap less than a month now.

So we need to get back to it because after today's episode, there will only be two episodes left in this Paris commune series. Then I will take a break. Then I will move to Paris. And then once I'm in Paris, I will start talking about, that's right. The Mexican Revolution, because that's just the way this is all working out. As I've said before, the Mexican Revolution is one of the revolutions that made me want to start the Revolutions podcast in the first place, so I'm really excited to tell you all about it when we get there.

But getting back to Paris, the Paris of the past, that is, the events of March the 18th, 1871 caught the left-wing revolutionaries of Paris completely off guard. for all the planning, organizing, dreaming, and multiple failed insurrections during the siege of Paris, when the revolutionary zero hour arrived, it was a total shock. They had no idea Adolf Thierre was planning to seize the National Guard cannons. He had played that one so close to his vest that not even the ministers of state or senior military officers knew it was going to happen until about 12 hours before the operation was launched. For Thierre, it was critical to catch the Parisians by,

surprise. And one thing we can say for sure is that he caught them by surprise. Had it not been for the simple failure to have horses there to haul the cannons away, we might not be here talking about the Paris commune today. But there were no horses, so the cannons could not be moved, so the Parisians flooded the streets, Tier ordered a retreat, and the revolution began. The fact that the revolution of March 18, 1871 was carried out by spontaneous mass mobilization, in many ways disproved Blanke's assertion that a dedicated vanguard of hardcore revolutionaries was the only thing that could topple a government. They had now tried that route multiple times and failed every time.

And when the deal finally went down, the Blanquist's were all in bed. It was the spontaneous energy of the mobs that actually secured the revolution, which is something that we have actually seen here on the podcast over and over again. The flight of Adolf Tier and the evacuation of the regular army from Paris opened up a political vacuum, a vacuum that was initially filled by the Central Committee of the Federation of the National Guard. And to be fair to the Blanquists, though they were asleep when the revolution arrived, they were quick to hop out of bed, and they were critical to directing the energy of the mob and the National Guard in an increasingly revolutionary direction. After all, most of them now serve,

as officers in neighborhood National Guard companies, and they made up nearly half the membership of the National Guard's Central Committee. So by the end of March the 18th, 20,000 National Guardsmen were occupying the Hotel de Ville. Elsewhere, local battalions secured physical control of their own neighborhoods, and then plunged into the center of Paris to take over all the key government buildings, the ministries of finance, the interior, war, and justice. On the morning of March the 19th, Paris was essentially under armed occupation by the National Guard, and so the Central Committee of the National Guard became, by default, the provisional government of Paris. With this responsibility having defaulted into their lap, the 38 members of the Central Committee

had to decide what to do with it. And the first big debate was whether to press forward with armed insurrection and immediately march on Versailles to finish the job, or to hold elections, to transfer political sovereignty as quickly as possible to a democratically elected city council. The Blancis on the committee, as you might expect, argued forcefully that the only way to go was to march on Versailles and overthrow Tierra. They must strike now while the iron was hot. But they did not form a majority on the committee, and the proposal to march on Versailles was resisted by less aggressive Republicans and Lodonists who wanted to avoid declaring war on Versailles, not embrace it. They argued that in the wake of the dramatic events of March the 18th, that Paris must not provoke

the national government to further violent backlash. If this revolution is going to succeed, we need to immediately secure its legitimacy by having the people elect a council to represent their interests and negotiate a peaceful understanding with Thier and the government in Versailles. After a lengthy and heated debate over the night of March the 18th and 19th, the Central Committee voted to proceed with a... elections rather than March on Versailles. Now, in hindsight, this looks like it may have been a mistake. On the morning of March the 19th, the Versailles government was at its weakest. The troops there were

demoralized, they lacked discipline, and there were only about 20,000 of them. Teher's own personal authority was shaken badly by the failure of this operation that he had forced through over so many objections from his fellow ministers and those senior military officers. If the central Committee had ordered a mass march on Versailles, they might have totally decapitated the national government. But we will never know what might have happened, because they did not do it. And by the time they did order a march on Versailles, it was already too late. As the Central Committee was holding these deliberations as the de facto provisional government of Paris, there was another group that was raising a ruckus and claiming that they were the real official government of Paris. I'm talking about

the 20 mayors of the Paris' auld Though the government of national defense had appointed Jules Réry to be the mayor of Paris back in September, they still maintain the traditional administrative institution of each arrondissement having its own mayor. Having taken up office in the days after the abolition of the Second Empire and the Declaration of the Third Republic, these mayors were mostly drawn from the respectable Republican opposition set that had dominated the government of national defense. They had suffered through the siege, they hated the conservative royalists in the National Assembly, they felt betrayed by the armistice, and they were now furious at Thierre for having provoked this insurrection. Their leading voice was George Clamonso, who, remember last week, was the mayor

of the 18th Elandisman, and he was in the thick of that showdown upon Montre. But these guys were hardly radical socialist revolutionaries, and they did not want Paris to fall into the hands of radical socialist revolutionaries. So after March the 18th, this group of 20 local mayors asserted that they had far more claimed to being an official government body than the Central Committee of the National Guard did. And the Central Committee was standoffish and had no intention of taking orders from these mayors. But luckily, in the beginning, they did all mostly share a desire to de-escalate the situation, to come to an agreement with Thierre and to avoid a civil war.

So when a delegation of these mayors, led, of course, by claim on so, trundled off to Versailles to try to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis, the National Guard did not stand in their way. But there was not going to be any deal. If Thierre had refused to compromise with Paris before the events of March the 18th, he certainly wasn't going to compromise with them now. The delegation of mayors found themselves in a tough spot right away. During an address that they made to the National Assembly, cat calls interrupted them. And a group of delegates yelled out, long live France. And the mayor shouted back, yes, long live the republic. And they were booed. So if the Versailles government was hostile to the idea of a republic,

you can imagine how they felt about the idea of Paris turning into a democratic socialist commune. Which, I should add, is not even what the mayors were trying to sell. Yes, they were radical Democrats, but they were not socialists or anarchists. The terms they offered were heavily watered down. They said, give the Parisians the right to run their own affairs. Let us elect not just our political officers, but also our judges and our police. The most revolutionary demand they made was to abolish the standing imperial army and replace it with an expanded National Guard. Above all, though, they stressed that Paris did not want to take over France, and that certainly they did not want to fight a civil war with the Versailles government. But the guys on the National Assembly were not having it.

All compromises and terms were rejected out of hand. And in this moment, if there was an extremist, intransigent wing anywhere in this crisis, it was these guys in Versailles. Certainly they appeared to be more resolute and vindictive and bloody-minded towards the insurrectionary Parisians than they had ever been towards the recently departed Germans. They had given away the store to the Germans, and yet they would not give a crumb of moldy bread to the Parisians. At least, that's what the Parisians walked away believing.

So back in Paris, the mayors and the Central Committee continued to vie for power. The mayors claimed that they were still the legitimate government, but the Central Committee said, nah, we are the sovereign caretakers, and we will keep order until elections can be held for the establishment of this new thing that will be called the Paris Commune. Those elections were scheduled for March the 23rd. But on the day before those elections were to take place, a large demonstration came parading out of the richer Western districts of the city. city. This demonstration was organized by social conservatives who were horrified by the insurrection of March the 18th, and they wanted those now claiming to run Paris to do nothing to provoke a war. They organized themselves as the Friends of Peace, and they carried

various pro-peace banners towards the Posse von Dome. With its massive imperial column towering over the square, erected originally by Napoleon I to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz, the square had always been associated with the Bonaparts, but it had also held the traditional headquarters of the National Guard, and that's who these demonstrators were going to see. The National Guard, of course, had been occupying the square since March the 18th, and when the Friends of Peace tried to enter, they were blocked. A brief standoff ensued between the unarmed demonstrators, well, mostly unarmed, those that did have weapons were mostly carrying concealed pistols, and the fully armed National Guard, until, you guessed it, a shot went off, no one knows who fired it, and no one knows why.

I think that's about the 57th time I've said that so far on the show, but it's happened again. It was almost certainly the National Guard who fired first, but once one shot went off more followed, 12 were killed and dozens more wounded. After this bloody confrontation, the National Guard fully asserted their political authority against the mayors. The Central Committee issued a proclamation that they were the official government until the election was held. The mayors had no authority. They were drawn from the defunct and discredited government of national defense. The elections were postponed until March the 26th, and in the meantime, the National Guard occupied the various mayor's offices deemed to be fomenting anti-communist activity, especially in the richer first and second arrondissement, and the 18th, where Claymonsso found himself.

ousted from office. But though they increased their political hold, the Central Committee was really not looking to become the lawful government of Paris. They really did just want to be the caretakers until a communal council, which is what they were now calling it, could be elected. So the election was finally held on March the 26th on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. With Paris having shed so many residents since the end of the siege, though, they were down to just 485,000 voters. Tierre and his allies in Versailles spread the word that the national government considered this election illegal and probably treason, and they urged residents to boycott the vote. But this was only heated in those richer western quarters of the city, the quarters that had

produced the Friends of Peace, and in the end, only 230,000 voters participated. 92 seats were up for grabs, and since it was mostly the respectable defenders of the social order who chose not to vote. Guess who won? That's right, radical opponents of the social order. Just a few months earlier, Paris had held elections to the National Assembly, and all the left-wing candidates had gotten trounced. This time, they swept into power. Of those elected, just about half came from the neo-jacobin wing, or as they styled themselves now, independent revolutionaries. Eight or nine were dedicated Blancisks, another 20 or so were Polo Odonis-style anarchists. Of the respectable Republicans, about 20 were elected, but most wound up

either refusing to serve or resigning shortly after the council convened. So all told, somewhere between 60 and 70 guys actually served on the communal council. Claimon'sso attempted to run, but he only got 750 boats. Rebuked by both the conservatives in Versailles and the left-wing revolutionaries now ascendant in Paris, a depressed claimant so lamented that he felt caught between two madmen. And probably the most interesting result of this election, though, was that so far here on the revolution's podcast, we have seen plenty of executive committees and provisional governments and national assemblies that have taken the reins of power in the wake of some revolutionary incident. And one common feature of all of those, across time and space, is that they

are usually dominated by a certain socioeconomic segment of society, the middle-class professionals. And usually, they are drawn from members of a single profession. Say it with me now, it's the lawyers. And the pattern is the same over and over. The lower classes provide the shock troops, and then when whatever government has been overthrown is overthrown, a bunch of middle-class lawyers take over and run the government. From London in 1642 to Boston in 1775 to Paris in 17, That's how it went over and over again. Now, 1848 had finally seen the admission of a genuine actual working-class leader. Remember, that was Al Baer.

But even he was just a token to keep the mobs quiet after the February Revolution, and he never had any real power. But in the communal council elections of March 1871, we have 33 elected members from the working class. Now, the council was not all working class. there were five small business owners and 19 men who you could call clerks or secretaries or some other white-collar functionary, also 12 journalists. But still, this is not your standard revolutionary assembly of lawyers. The winners were announced on March the 27th, and on March the 28th, 1871, a big ceremony was held at the Hotel de Ville to inaugurate the first session of the Council of the Paris Commune. But that then brings us to a really big question. What the hell is the Paris Commune?

What did people think it was? What did the men gathering in the Hotel de Ville think they were doing? Was the commune meant simply to be an autonomous city government tasked with municipal administration, keeping the lights on, arranging for the needs of the people, guaranteeing fair wage and work laws? Or was it supposed to be something more ambitious? An attempt to fundamentally reorganize society in a new and revolutionary way. Now, during the siege, invoking the commune had been a slogan to rally the people, but everyone filled in the blanks on what they thought the commune meant.

And now that they had achieved their goal of establishing, quote-unquote, the commune, it turns out that it meant very different things to different people. This question of what is the commune was caught up in a further specific divide between the anarchists and Prudonis on the communal council and the Blancisists and Neo-Jacubans. The Prudonists believed that they were there merely to serve as the central discussion space for a decentralized democratic system of voluntary self-organization. For them, the commune was about moving forward with the anarchist dream of creating a non-state

or an anti-state, the replacement of the heretofore unchallenged assumption that political power, whatever its base and whatever its goals, could only be expressed through coercion and force. In this sense, the Paris Commune was supposed to be something wholly new in the world, the dawning of a new age, men not coerced, but voluntarily governing themselves. But as the Prudonis look forward to a utopian future, the Blancisks' and Neo-Jacobans look to revive a glorious past. For them, the Paris Commune was the direct descendant, in fact the full revival of, the original Paris commune that had existed from 1789 to 1795. With Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety as their acknowledged idols,

their vision of the commune was 180 degrees from the Plodonists. They wanted the commune to be a revolutionary dictatorship. They wanted to embrace coercion and force as the only way to destroy the enemies of the people and advance society towards its democratic and socialist future. How else could they overcome those who opposed them? them. This then led directly to a further debate over whether their aim was to control Paris or to control France. The Blankees and Neo-Jacubans took it for granted that this was all just a step towards toppling the national government in Versailles and taking over the whole nation.

The Prudonis, meanwhile, still wanted to avoid violent conflict and said, we need to make it clear that we make no claims to jurisdiction beyond the city limits of Paris. The larger revolution will succeed by inspiring other cities to follow our lead and create their own democratic and anarchist communes. When that happens, the national government will simply slip into irrelevance. So that's a pretty big contrast in visions. But one thing they all tended to have in common was an instinctive aversion to autocracy. And so there was never much of a push, even from the Blancis, to elevate one man to a sole dictatorship, to bring out the Paris commune version of Simone Bolok. Levar. Even as a temporary measure, they wanted no part of it. So they voted an honorary presidency

to the imprisoned Blonkey, but then they ditched all the executive branch-style offices like mayor and president or commander-in-chief. Instead, the commune would be run by interlocking commissions. There would be a pseudo-ministery with nine named commissioners who would oversee different departments. So there was a war commission, a finance commission, and a justice commission, all overseen by a central executive commission. But the guiding principle was that this would be a cooperative venture with lots of discussion and group decision-making. The prudonists hoped to extend this principle of decentralized group decision-making by publishing all the minutes of their discussions and debates. But the Blancis and Neo-Jacobins managed to keep the commune's deliberation secret by arguing that, well, like it or not, we're probably at war right now. And publishing our deliberations and our plans, that's just

handing our enemies the blueprint to defeat us. So the commune's discussions were kept secret. But it didn't really resolve the question of whether or not the commune was at war. So just as the Central Committee had been forced to deal with the question of, do we fight a war or hold elections, now the question is, do we focus on social reforms or do we focus on physical reforms or do we focus on physically defending Paris. As I just said, there were plenty on the communal council who believed that war could be avoided, that it was not inevitable, that if they just focused on their own backyard, that is Paris, that there would be no cause for the government in Versailles to attack them. So we must focus on social services, building a complete alternate government, we must inspire workers

with a new vision of society. The Blancis and the more aggressive neo-jackabins, however, were by this point going out of their minds. You're talking about focusing on equal wages and social reform when there is literally an army massing just 15 miles away? And in the fullness of historical hindsight, they were totally right. The idea that Adolf Tier and the conservative royalists in Versailles, who had just blown off a compromise with the mayors of Paris, planned anything but the violent suppression of Paris. Well, that's just a fantasy wrapped up in a whole other fantasy. War was coming. Adolf Tierre would make sure of it. So while the communal counselors were divided about what to do next, the guys in Versailles were not.

Whether moderate Republican, orally honest, legitimate, or even embittered Bonapartist, they all agreed that Paris had to be crushed. For them, it was clear. This isn't about monarchy or republic, municipal autonomy or centralization, open democracy, or closed oligarchy. This was about a fundamental threat to the social order. It had to be destroyed. Commenting a few weeks later, after the real fighting had begun,

Jules Fairey, the ousted mayor of Paris, said, I may be a liberal, a lawyer, and a Republican, but watching the reprisal doled out to Paris was like watching the sword of the archangel. That was the attitude of the government in Versailles. Some in the communal council were trying to avoid provoking a war, never quite realizing that their very existence was provocation enough. Tier had now upped his estimate and believed that it would take 150,000 men to subdue Paris.

And every day that the commune dawdled, Tierre called in more and more troops. Some of these came from provincial garrisons, but most especially, they came from released prisoners of war. Jules Favre, the foreign minister of the government of national defense, wrote to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck begging for the POWs to be released faster and faster. He promised that those troops would be used to crush the insurrectionaries in Paris and to restore the social order. So the Germans obliged, and the POW release was sped up. So in Versailles, clearly, there is an army massing to crush social revolution. The fantasy that war was not coming may have been idealistic

and noble, but it did not face facts, and it proved to be a fatal error of judgment. Though it's hard to say exactly how fatal this error of judgment was, since it's hard to say whether there was even an alternative to Versailles winning the coming Civil War. I mean, maybe nothing could have prevented their victory. But by not responding vigorously to the military threat in the first days after March the 18th, the slim chance of victory all but winked out of existence. Part of the problem was the leadership in the National Guard itself. The Central Committee had a plaintiff named Charles Lullier to be the over-reux. all commander-in-chief of the Guard, but unfortunately he was among those who believed that civil war was very unlikely. But surely they would all come to terms before the shooting began.

So his preparations were limited, bordering on outright malpractice. The most obvious failure was that to the west of Paris, the regular army had withdrawn from the defensive fortresses on the afternoon of March the 18th. That was when everyone retreated back to Versailles. Rather than order the immediate occupation of the most critical of these fortresses. That was Mont Valerian. Lollier, um, did not. For three days, this critical fortress set empty, held by no one. Recovering their footing, the regular army reoccupied it a few days later. So, when Lullier finally got around to ordering a detachment to go take over the fortress on March the 21st, these guys found it already reoccupied.

It really was a stunning failure of judgment and initiative. Lullier goes down as quite the goat of the Paris Commune. One of the key works we draw from is a history of the Paris Commune, written a few years later by a guy named Prospera Olivier Lesaguerre, a communard who managed to live through the revolution, and later wound up engaged to Karl Marx's niece, but that's another story. He called General Lillier a crack-brained alcoholic. While these non-preparations for war were underway,

the commune did get going on their project of social reform by sending out a flurry of decrees and directives, some of which were implemented immediately, and others went down in history as merely aspirational, since they never really got a chance to implement them. Now, first off, they answered some bread and butter issues. They overruled the law of maturities and absolved residents of Paris from their debts and back rent from the siege. They also ordered that pawn shops had to return any tools that workers had pawned during the siege, at least up to a value of 20 francs. And then probably most importantly, they restored the pay of the National Guard and ordered pensions for widows and orphans of those who had been killed during the siege.

Then moving on to more forward-looking reforms, they granted workers the right to take over any business that was owned by somebody who had abandoned Paris and run it for themselves. And those owners who remained were ordered to stop the practice of fining workers or docking pay for various infractions. Then the Neo-Jacubans managed to get through an order to restore not just the Paris Commune, but also the old Republican calendar, which turned the revolutionary date of March 18, 1871, into 27 Vontos, year 79, if you're using the wrong rule, that is. But the commune also tossed aside one of the key tools of the Committee of Public Safety and the original commune. they abolished the death penalty.

The enemies of this new commune were to be arrested, but not executed, and this was a stance that would be tested when the Versailles government showed no such mercy towards those that they captured. This new commune also demonstrated one other symbolic break with the original commune. They ratified the decision to abandon the tricolored flag, which was now the flag of empire, reactionary conservatism, and bourgeois capitalist oppression. Instead, the red flag of socialism would be the flag of the Paris Commune. But though this was all very working-class-centered and aimed at laying the groundwork for either a socialist or an anarchist society, depending on who you talk to, there was one great revolutionary trigger that they refused to pull, and that came in their policy towards the Bank of France.

This policy, along with the unwillingness to face the inevitability of civil war, was later identified, by future communists and socialists and anarchists as one of the commune's greatest mistakes. The Bank of France was the National Bank of France. It was chartered by the government, but privately owned and operated. Its headquarters and vaults obviously sat right smack dab in the middle of Paris. Now, before the Germans had completed their envelopment of Paris back in the fall of 1770, most of the gold reserves had been carted out of the city. But left behind in the vaults were nearly 90 million franc worth of gold coins and another 160 million in banknotes, all of which was just sitting there when the commune took over. Now the communal council had named

a guy named Francois Gord, a pretty competent financial clerk, to be their financial commissioner. And he did his best to work with the Bank of France, not again. against it. The tax receipts of Paris were always deposited in an official account at the bank, and Jord wanted to limit himself to drawing from that account only, rather than raiding other people's accounts or the bank reserves themselves. But the expenses of the commune, especially the reinstated National Guard salaries, ran double what they were taking in in taxes. So something had to be done. The radicals said that's easy. You just go over to the bank and raid their reserves. I mean, hell, Cordon himself said that when the revolution comes, the first thing you do is take down the banks.

But Giorne resisted. He argued that if they did that, then the value of all the bank notes and paper currency would just collapse. So instead, he negotiated with the bank officers still in Paris and arranged a 400,000 franc per day loan. And this loan was actually approved by Adolf Tier, who figured it was better to have these lunatics take out loans than walking. off with all the gold. And probably he couldn't believe his good fortune. Marx was especially hard on this decision. And it really does seem to fall into Robespierre's category of you can't have a revolution without a revolution. If you're going to try to create a new social anarchist society that marks the dawn of a new era of human civilization, kind of feels like you shouldn't be trying to placate banks, one of the key institutions

of the old mode of human civilization that you are trying to overthrow. Just saying. Slightly more revolutionary was their treatment of the Catholic Church. Among all the leftist revolutionaries, the Neo-Jacubans, the Blanquist, the Poulodonists, there was a strong antipathy towards the church, which they all believed was the institution of the conservative social order par excellence. The sooner the church was removed from the picture, the better. On April 2nd, the communal council issued a decree denouncing the church for its complete

in the monarchy's crimes. By monarchy, they meant most recently the Second Empire, but before that the July monarchy, before that the Restoration Monarchy, before that the First Empire, and before that the Ancien regime. So they declared the total separation of church and state. Now, the commune would not go as far as the extreme de-Christianization that some of the most radical acolytes of the First Revolution undertook over the winter of 1793, 1794, but it was the most anti-Christian program France had seen since that brief period. Education was taken away from the church and handed over to secular instructors. Church property was targeted for confiscation.

All priests and nuns were considered potential counter-revolutionary agents, and their churches and nunneries were considered possible headquarters for anti-communist activity. These properties were searched and searched again, and over 25 were closed down over the next few weeks. And also over the next few weeks, the commune arrested 200 priests, nuns, and other high church officials caught in Paris, and then they were all held as hostages, including, most famously, the Archbishop of Paris himself. Now, while this was all going on, the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Military Commission of the Communal Council were trying to organize some kind of defense of Paris. On the plus side, they did control a city that was so well fortified that even the Germans didn't feel like storming it. And after Tierre had tried to take away the 400-odd National Guard cannon, he had been forced to abandon another 800 regular army artillery pieces that had been set up around Paris. But that was where the good news ended.

As we discussed last week, at the height of the siege, membership in the National Guard was just shy of 400,000. But now, after all the middle and upper class members had skipped town, others who had been in it just for the wages stopped showing up, and those who had served to fight Germans, not wage a revolutionary civil war against their fellow countrymen, the nominal strength of the Guard was down to 200,000. And that was just on paper. It's estimated at the end of March 1871, Paris could only call on about 50,000 really committed and at least decently trained and armed National Guard's men. And on top of that, the democratized we discuss and vote on everything and encourage self-government style of running things meant that the pledge the delegates had made to obey the Central Committee in all things was hard to enforce in practice. Many battalions and companies out there operated in their own way and in their own time. Not once in the battle for Paris, for example, would all the artillery of Paris be under a single commander? Everyone had their own pieces of artillery and would use them as they saw fit, thank you very much. And it, of course, did not help that what senior leadership the National Guard did have, and they were trying to bring some overall command and discipline into this, were guys like Lillier,

who inspired very little confidence. All hope that a civil war might be avoided, evaporated on either March the 30th or March the 31st, depending on which book you read, National Guardsmen patrolling outside the Bull walls of Paris ran into detachments of regular army that were sent by the Versailles government to reconnoiter the approaches to Paris. This skirmish, however, did not quite end the fantasy that this was not going to wind up with Frenchmen firing bullets at each other. On April 1st, a joint meeting of the Military Commission, the Executive Commission, and the Central Committee of the National Guard, determined that within five days they had to go on the offensive

or risk losing the initiative. But the first five battalions of National Guard who marched out of Paris marched out still mostly convinced that when it came down to it, that the rank and file of the regular army would not fire at them. Using the events of March the 18th as their guide, these guardsmen believed that they could convince the companies of the regular army to mutiny rather than accept an order to fire on their fellow citizens. So when they encounter the regular army,

the National Guard attempted to fraternity. with them, and they were genuinely shocked when these soldiers opened fire instead. Now, in this skirmish, there were only a few wounded and dead on either side. But the thing that really shattered the illusion about what was going on here came after five guardsmen were captured. An order had come down from Versailles to summarily execute any deserters from the regular army who were caught amongst the Parisian forces. Two of these captured guardsmen were, in fact, deserters, and they were summarily executed.

But the commander then took this a step further, and decided to shoot two more of the guardsmen who were caught, quote unquote, under arms. No trial, just summary execution. And this set the precedent for the rest of the coming civil war. The Versailles troops would treat any Parisian caught under arms as traitors to France. So they were guilty of treason just by virtue of the fact of being out there, and they were summarily executed. This stands in stark contrast to the communal council who has just abolished the death penalty. So in the fight to come, it would be the forces of order rather than the forces of revolution, who would engage in bloody atrocities to achieve their ends.

The following day dealt an even more terrible blow to the morale of the commune. On the morning of April 3rd, possibly as many as 40,000 guardsmen marched out of Paris. Their aim was to be at Versailles and capture it within 24 hours. But the planning for this march had been atrocious, and their intelligence even worse. They had no cavalry, no artillery, no ambulances, and not enough supplies. They also somehow believed that all the fortresses beyond Paris were under National Guard control, not realizing somehow that, for example, Mon Valerian had been retaken by the regular army a week and a half earlier.

So when these columns advanced beyond the ring of forts, they got blasted by the artillery from the forts. The National Guardsman broke and fled back to the city. The commune would never again go on the offensive, and they prepared for a thought that was utterly appalling to all of them, having just emerged from a brutal four-month-long siege, the second siege of Paris was about to begin.