Revolutions - 8.7- Year 79

Episode Date: June 17, 2018

🎶Tonight I'm gonna party like it's the year seventy-nine 🎶

Hello, and welcome to revolutions. Episode 8.7, Year 79. Last time, we talked about the Paris Commune trying to get off the ground. And remember, there were two competing visions for the commune, decentralized anarchism or centralized dictatorship. And then beyond that fundamental organizational dispute, there was the question of, were they going to inward and focus on creating a new social order, or were they going to look outward? And notice that about 15 miles away in Versailles, Adolf Thier and his conservative government were building an army to make sure that that new social order was eradicated like a virus before it had a chance

to spread. We ended last week with a series of skirmishes to the west of Paris, followed up by one large and embarrassing defeat for the National Guard on April the 3rd, all of which proved that there was just no getting away from the outside world. The neo-jackabins and Blancis on the communal council convinced their colleagues that they were going to have to fight Versailles for the right to exist. And so in early April 1871, the commune lurched decisively in the direction of centralized dictatorship. Unfortunately, what the Paris commune wound up getting was neither a dictatorship nor anarchism, but rather an unstable mix of both that would bring chaos and ultimately defeat.

So first things first on the road to dictatorship, the leaders of the commune responded to the shocking executions of the captured National Guardsmen that we talked about at the end of last week by promulgating the decree on hostages on April the 5th. This decree said that anyone suspected of complicity with the Versailles government could be arrested, jailed, and tried before a revolutionary tribunal. The job of identifying those potentially guilty of complicity with the Versailles government was handed to a 25-year-old hardcore Blanciste by the name of Raoul Riego. Rigo had emerged from the Left Bank student radical groups of the late empire, and he'd become an adherent of Blankist theories of revolutionary action.

That meant that he spent most of his young life under police surveillance. Mostly out of a sense of self-preservation, Rigo learned how the police networks operate. and he engaged in counter-spying to stay one step ahead of the authorities. This constant study of the police led Rigo to conclude that when the revolution came, that revolutionary police work might just be his calling. He looked forward to rooting out reactionary enemies of the people and protecting the revolution using all the same techniques that had once been used on him and his comrades. When the Second Empire was abolished in September of 1870,

Rigo presented himself as the perfect candidate to be the new plightonelieu. prefect of police. But his offer was declined. He was much too unstable and radical for the respectable Republicans in charge of the government of national defense. But after March the 18th, Rigo marched down to the police headquarters, installed himself in the prefect's office, and more or less self-declared himself the new prefect of police. And with his Blanke's comrades, now ascendant, he got the job. But this very perpetuation of the police apparatus was resists. He was resists. He was resisted by Prudonis and more democratic-minded socialists, who were under the impression that one of the big things to be done after the revolution would be to abolish the police outright. But Rigo successfully argued that there were at that very moment thousands of men and women inside of Paris who were enemies of the commune and who had to be identified and detained.

This wasn't just paranoia. Those enemies are out there right now plotting against us. and Oigo told them, if you shut down the police, you may as well just open up the gates. And so, the communal council allowed him to proceed with his work, with the anarchist grumbling that the coercive dictatorship that hated was being built piece by piece right in front of their eyes. Now, after the decree on hostages was promulgated, the Versailles government and its ideological errors right down to this very day, try to make it sound like the reign of terror was now back. But mostly what the commune wanted was for Paris to arrest and hold the friends of Versailles,

to prevent Versailles from executing the friends of Paris. So between April the 5th and May the 23rd, no one held in the commune's custody was harmed, because remember one of the first things they had done was abolished the death penalty. In fact, on April the 7th, they had ritually burned a guillotine in the Place von Dome. Now, there were those who wanted to bring back the terror, but they never really held power in the Paris Commune. And as radical as he was, Rigaud never pressed to execute any of those that he had arrested. The hostages were meant to be leveraged, not liquidated.

And in fact, after locating and arresting the Archbishop of Paris, the commune tried to leverage him for the first time on April the 12th. They offered to trade him straight up for Blonkey. Adolf Thier said no. But even as he rooted out the enemies of the commune, there were plenty in the commune who thought Rigo was the real threat, because his police state tactics flew in the face of all the democratic anarchist principles that were supposed to be at the heart of this thing.

So the next move towards dictatorship was to put the war effort under a single overall commander. For that job, the communal council tapped Gustav Paul Clusory. Clusory was appointed the new war delegate or war commissioner, depending on what terminology you want to use. But the point was to have one man overseeing all the military operations in the city. Now, Klusare had vaguely radical and socialist political leanings, but mostly he was a professional soldier of fortune. He had joined the French army way back in 1843 and had been elevated to Captain of the Mobile Guards

after the February 1848 revolution. But then he was on the suppression side of the June Day's uprising, something that would be held against him in the future. But he was also an opponent of Louis Napoleon and briefly went into exile after the 1851 coup. Clusoré then returned to the army to fight in Crimea and then departed the French service and just kind of wandered around. He fought in a French volunteer legion supporting Resorgimento alongside Garibaldi in 1860. Then he went to the United States and joined the Union Army and fought in the American Civil War

under John C. Fremont and George McClellan before resigning in 1863. Then he enjoyed a sojourn with with Irish Republicans during their uprising in 1867. Then he came back to France, where he once again ran afoul of the imperial authorities, so he went back to the United States and then came home for the last time upon hearing about the proclamation of the Third Republic in September of 1870. After the events of March the 18th, 1871, Cloussoré presented himself to the Paris Commune. Since he was vaguely socialist and easily the most experienced soldier who had presented himself to the Paris Commune, the commune appointed him to run the war effort against Versailles. But being a professional soldier by trade, Cloucaire had very different ideas about how to run a war

than the men and women who had lived through the siege of Paris, the humiliation of the armistice, and developed the National Guard into a democratic institution of citizens under arms. Cloussare looked at this rabble who questioned everything, elected their own officers, drank way too much, and assumed that their service was voluntary and that they could quit any time they wanted, and said, yeah, this is never going to work. So Cloussoray set to work trying to turn the National Guard into a real army, which made him very unpopular. Nobody wanted to serve in a real army. So his first unpopular reform was to declare everyone over the age of 40 fit only for the reserves.

which rippled through the ranks as an unnecessary attack on revolutionary solidarity. But then he compounded this on popularity by saying not only are male Parisians, ages 17 to 35, the only ones fit for service, that service is now going to be compulsory. And this, of course, stabbed right at the heart of the voluntary system of democratic self-organization that was supposed to be at the center of the commune. He also tried to undo the damage done by the system of electing officers, as officers were usually elected not on merit, but by who promised the most or demanded the least. It's not that Clouceret was necessarily wrong in his diagnosis of what needed to be done.

I mean, George Washington would have nodded along with all of this. His hatred of Democratic militias is well documented. But Cluceret was wrong for that time and place, and his attempt to create a top-down military organization out of a bunch of bottom-up social Democrats, crippled morale in the ranks. Now, in the end, though, it didn't really matter, because in his final analysis, Cloussoré determined that there was no way for Paris to win the war against Versailles in any meaningful sense. All they could hope for was to hold out long enough for the rest of France to pressure the Versailles government

to break off the fight and come to peaceful terms. So that was his overall strategy. And this, too, was not 100% wrong-headed. Cloussoré had arrived in Paris only after the events of March the 18th. Before that, he had spent time in Lyon and Marseille, and knew that Paris had a lot of sympathizers out there. In fact, after March the 18th, cities across France had declared their own revolutionary communes in solidarity. Now, none of those communes would stick. But in towns across France, elections held in April and May of 1871 produced a lot of new local counselors.

and by one calculation, 8,000 of those new counselors supported Versailles, while 290,000 did not. The elections on February that had brought Adolf Tier and the Conservative National Assembly to power had been held under duress, under German occupation. It had not been widely publicized, and so it's not like Versailles had some clear mandate from the people. So it wasn't crazy in April of 1871 to think that at the end of the day, the rest of France would rally to the people of Paris rather than these conservative royalists in Versailles, especially if they started killing the people of Paris. And certainly the possibility that the rest of France would follow Paris led Tierra and the Versailles government to actively avoid doing anything to provoke the spread

of revolution. The biggest consequence being that they did not ram through the return of the monarchy. Ditching the Republic was likely to cause even more revolutionary unrest out there that would require more troops to patrol the provinces, and Tier did not have those troops to spare. He needed those troops to crush Paris before anyone could stop him. To lead the effort to crush Paris, Tierre made probably his single best decision of the whole conflict. For the post of Commander-in-Chief of the growing army at Versailles, he appointed Marshal Patrice McMahon. McMahon was one of the few senior officers to emerge from the Franco-Prussian War with his

reputation enhanced rather than diminished. Now, he had been one of the overall commanders of the first phase of the war under the Emperor, but he had been badly wounded at the Battle of Saddam and had only been recently released from his convalescence as a German prisoner of war. So he was seen more as a noble victim than an architect of France's defeat. But the key thing is that McMahon was both popular throughout France and inside the rank and file of the army. Now, even if Tier and the National Assembly were suspect. Marshall McMahon was someone everyone could get behind. His appointment both lessen the possibility of provincial revolt and mutiny inside the army. And mutiny inside the army was a real possibility. Their discipline and morale had been in the toilet ever since

the armistice with Germany had been signed. McMahon was already well on his way to becoming president of France. With their civil war now clearly underway, Thierre and McMahon, started methodically advancing on Paris from both the west and the south, with most of the early combat focused on the suburban village of Nui to the west of Paris. Clucet had determined that the commune's forces, now often referred to as the Federals, named after the Federation of the National Guard, would never go on the offensive. Instead, they would dig in, build barricades, and hold out, which, after this order was given, they did remarkably well. The National Guard always seemed to do better when they were holding their ground,

rather than trying to advance and take new ground. This, however, led to heavy artillery bombardments from the Versailles forces that forced residents of Nui into their cellars, where they would wind up spending the next few miserable weeks listening to their village get raised to the ground by artillery fire. Having lived through all the German shelling, the residents of Nui were now being done in by French shelling. Klusare, meanwhile,

move some artillery batteries to the west end of Paris, which invited deeper probing from McMahon's artillery into the western neighborhoods of Paris. And those bombs dropping in the west end of Paris was a touch ironic because that's where the enemies of the commune were concentrated. If Versailles had any friends in Paris, that's where they all were, and now they were getting bombed day and night. Many residents became convinced that Cloucauxer was orchestrating his defense of Paris to ensure that the enemies of the commune bore the brunt of the attack. But probably it was just a coincidence. I mean, the West is just where the fighting was taking place at that moment. But the Versailles forces were also coming up at Paris from the south, and they were securing

control of the surrounding suburbs. Now, Tierra knew the fortifications of Paris by heart. The walls, after all, had been commissioned during his time as Prime Minister during the July monarchy. I mean, they were called the Tierre Walls. And he knew that the weakest spot was in the extreme southwest of the city, at the gate at Puan de Jure, on the right bank of the Sen. But to attack this weak spot in the Paris fortifications, the Versailles forces needed to capture and control the fort overlooking that spot, and that would be the critical fortress of the whole campaign. Fort EC. Fort EC was currently occupied by National Guard companies, led by a working-class Blunkist, Colonel Meggi, who had just been sprung from a prison in Marseilles where he was serving a

20-year sentence for killing a police officer. Meggie was put in charge of the fortress on April the 13th, and he walked with nervous alarm as the Versailles forces advanced. He begged for reinforcements, but either due to miscommunication, incompetence, or a lack of available troops, probably all three at once, no reinforcements were forthcoming. Meanwhile, back in Nui, the two sides declared a 12-hour truce on April the 25th to finally allow the beleaguered residents to emerge from their cellars and evacuate. But Thierre used his 12 hours to move as much artillery as possible down to Fort E.C., which would now be the focal point of the war. So when the truce expired in Dwe, fighting did not really resume there. It resumed at Fort E.C., which came under a super

intense three-day and three-night bombardment. The Versailles General in charge of this bombardment, offered Colonel Meggie the chance to withdraw unharmed if he and his men just evacuated the fortress. With his men already on the verge of bolting after enduring these bombardments, Colonel Maggie took the deal, and he evacuated the fortress before dawn on April the 30th. But when someone raced to tell War Commissioner Closer at the news that Fort E.C. was being evacuated, the severity of the situation finally dawned on him, and he personally raced at the head of 200 men to retake the fort. and he got there and he got inside before the Versailles forces realized that it had even been abandoned in the first place.

But despite this moment of quick-thinking bravery, the now false news spread that the fort had fallen to the enemy. And Cloussorres' enemies took the opportunity to get rid of him, unpopular for his heavy-handed attempts to turn the National Guard into a regular army, and with a combative personality that had earned him very few friends on either the Central Committee of the National Guard or the communal council, The terrible news that Fort EC had fallen led the council to vote to dismiss Clucere from his post and arrest him on charges of possibly being complicit with the enemy. So this led to a very awkward scene the next morning when Clouciay presented himself at the Hotel DeVille to report that the fort had not in fact fallen, that he had held it. And when he got there, he was told, sorry, we've already dismissed you. And, oh, by the way, you're also under arrest.

Now, the supposed fall of Fort E.C., which hasn't actually fallen yet, led to a fundamental reorganization of the commune's government. On April the 28th, so when the bombardment was still underway, an old Jacobin on the communal council proposed that the interlocking system of separate commissions and the separation of powers was going to doom them all. What they needed was a single executive committee who would have the widest possible powers to take radical and energetic actions. This is what the neo-jacobins and the Blanquies had always wanted the commune to be. And with the news around Paris growing ever tighter, they now managed to bring it to fruition. And since we're talking here about men who saw the Paris commune as the heir of the original revolutionary commune, men who idolized Robespierre,

it should come as no surprise that they very self-consciously dubbed this new executive committee, the Committee of Public Safety. That's right, the Committee of Public Safety is coming back. This proposal divided the communal council as the vision of the commune as a revolutionary dictatorship just kept advancing. So over the objection of a minority of members who argued that this is the end of the commune, the council voted 4523 to concentrate power in five men who would sit on an executive committee and who would be able to do what was necessary to survive the Civil War. And so it's clear that of the three main groups of revolutionaries we've been talking about, the neo-jackabins, the Prudonists and the Blanquists. It's the neo-jackabins who are coming out on top.

We now have widespread police surveillance and revolutionary tribunals. We have a committee of public safety. It's clear that rather than building something new, they were rebuilding 1793. And indeed, with the old Republican calendar back in effect, the revived committee of public safety exalted itself as the government of 15 Floreal, year 79. Meanwhile, to replace Clucorre as war commissioner, the new Committee of Public Safety appointed his former chief of staff, Louis Rosel, to take over. Rosel was just 26 years old. A captain during the Franco-Prussian war, he was fiercely patriotic and had been disgusted first with Emperor Louis Napoleon's disastrous campaigns and then the subsequent failures

of the government of national defense. He hated the armistice with a passion, almost in time. entirely apolitical. Hoselle had joined the Paris Commune, not because he was a socialist or a revolutionary, but because they represented that part of France that had not capitulated, that part of France that had been betrayed by the treacherous politicians. And if Paris could supplant the Versailles government, then maybe they could repudiate the hated armistice and restore France's honor. Hoselle had served as Cloucaire's chief of staff, and as an apolitical soldier, he mostly just tried to widen and deepen Klusauray's program to turn the National Guard into a regular army.

Rozel found the National Guard to be disobedient, frequently drunk, constantly absent without leave, and just coming and going as they saw fit. So taking up his command, Roel tried to be even stricter. Not only would service be compulsory, but he planned to house the guardsmen in central barracks to improve discipline and oversight. He also wanted to end completely the election of office. He also wanted to end completely the election of office. because with things as they were, an officer couldn't give an unpopular order for fear of being immediately voted out of his office. Now, Rocell isn't going to last long enough to see any of this through. So his lasting impact comes from his concern that no matter what, the army of Versailles would breach the walls of Paris. So he ordered the commencement of new barricade fortifications inside the

ring of the Tierre wall, especially around the high ground of Mamantra and the Pantheon. That, at least, would prove to be a very prescient order. By now, though, the Central Committee of the Federation of the National Guard was furious. Once so eager to cede power to an elected council right after March the 18th, the Central Committee decided now that after a month of failures and the attempts by first Klosur and now Rossell to fundamentally undermine the democratic and revolutionary spirit of the Guard, they were hereby taking over the conduct of the war for themselves. and since every National Guardsman had pledged to listen to the Central Committee above all other authorities,

what was anybody else going to do about it? But this declaration coincides with the arrival of the new Committee of Public Safety, who say, actually, we have just been vested with all power. And then Roessette was in the middle of it, saying, well, I've been made Commander-in-Chief, and so I have the autonomous authority to do as I see fit. And he, in fact, started maneuvering to have the Central Committee of the National Guard abolished completely. He said, I'm the real soldier here. You lot are just a bunch of bumbling civilians who don't know anything. This tug of war at the top of the Paris commune led morale in the rank and file to continue to plummet.

Every morning, some battalion would muster and fewer and fewer men would turn out. Even officers stopped showing up. So at a moment when the commune was going to need every man in Paris to ward off the Versailles army, no one was volunteering. forced conscription was being ignored. 20% of the existing National Guard was currently absent without leave. Those who remained felt like maybe they were the chumps here. The only fool's dumb enough to keep trying to fight for a lost cause.

Plus, with Rocell, the Central Committee, the Committee of Public Safety, military commissioners, battalion commanders, company commanders, all claiming authority and issuing off in contradictory orders, it was impossible to know what to do or why. Living under eight different bosses is an intolerable burden. I mean, God help you if you don't put the new cover sheet on your TPS reports. This intolerable state of affairs did not last very long, though. Adolf Tier announced a renewed general offensive that would be focused on finally capturing Fort E.C. And the fighting that had entered a lull at the southwest end of Paris renewed with a heavy bombardment of the fort that was now little more than a pile of rubble.

The few remaining guardsmen inside concluded that staying would be suicide, and so they abandoned the fort for good on the morning of May 9th. And just as the perceived fall of Fort E.C. had caused a reorganization of the commune's command structure, the actual fall of Fort E.C. had the same effect. Now, there is some evidence that Hoselle briefly contemplated a coup to oust all the bumbling, talk-heavy committees, but he couldn't get anyone to go along with him. So instead, he submitted a letter of resignation, saying that the communal council was an obstacle to his work, and that it was either resign or remove them from power. And since he did not want to remove them from power, or because he couldn't get anyone to help him remove them from power, he resigned. Of course, it also kind of sounds like the Committee of Public Safety was preparing to dismiss

and arrest him, just as they had done with Kluzouca and tipped off, Rosel resigned, and went underground, later slipping out of the city under an assumed identity. To replace Kossel, the commune's leadership went in a totally different direction. They had tried professional soldiers who did not understand the nature of revolutionary politics, so this time they went with a man who understood the nature of revolutionary politics, even if he had literally no experience with military affairs. This was the political and spiritual leader of the neo-jackabins, Louis Shaw de la Cruz. Now 61 years old, Delacluse has actually been around for quite a while. As a young radical in Paris, he had participated in the July Revolution of 1830.

But his standard revolutionary weapon was the pen, and his articles, critical of the July monarchy, forced him into exile in 1836. He was allowed to return in 1840, and then joyfully cheered on the February Revolution of 1848. But he hated the violent reactionary turn of the June days, and he was arrested in 1849 for his relentless criticisms of General Cavaniac, the butcher of the June days, and that got him exiled. Delacluse was also, of course, a relentless critic of Prince President Bonaparte slash Emperor Napoleon III, and when he tried to secretly slip back into France in 1853, Delacluse was arrested, and he spent the next six years imprisoned on Devil's Island.

But luckily, he was amnestied in the first round of the Emperor's liberalizing efforts in 1860, and he was allowed to come home again. Now, I mentioned Delacluse briefly in episode 8.2, because he returned to his journalistic career, but ran afoul of the imperial authorities again, when he publicized a subscription drive to erect a monument to a deputy who had been killed opposing the coup of 1851. As you can imagine, the imperial authorities were not thrilled about this, and so they were. arrested Delacluse and shut down his newspaper. You remember when we talked about this? Leon Gambata was his lawyer. And thanks to the trial, Gambita's political start took off, and Delacluse had to go back into exile. The collapse of the Second Empire, though, brought Delacluse racing back to Paris and he wasted no time getting back to work. He was one of the principal ring leaders of the first failed insurrection of October the 31st when they attempted

to overthrow the government of national defense, and then he was targeted for arrest in the subsequent crackdowns. After the March 18 revolution, he was elected into the communal council, but by now the toll of the siege had exacerbated the tuberculosis he had contracted while imprisoned on Devil's Island. He was a dying man at this point, and he tried to avoid taking any office with major responsibilities because they were just beyond his physical capacity. But now his fellow Neo-Jacubans pressed him to become the new war commissioner, to revive the spirit of the Leveon Mass and the revolutionary spirit of 1793, to make the year 79 as glorious as the year two. We need passion and inspiration, not demands for lifeless obedience to apolitical soldiers.

And though these arguments were not without merit, and Delacluse did accept the post, his complete and total lack of any military experience at all is going to be a problem. And this is one of those things that the Paris Commune and the new Committee of Public Safety did not have that their forebearers in year two did. The original LeVay on Mass worked because France had both the relentless political energy of Ropes-Pierre and Saint-Just, but also the organizing military genius of L'Azard-Carno. The new Paris Commune never found a way to combine those two elements. And so, having failed at trying to emphasize the military side of things, they would now emphasize the political side. but it wasn't going to work any better. Both political energy and military know-how are necessary. I mean, if you want to win a revolutionary war.

And speaking of the Committee of Public Safety, the fall of Fort E.C. also led to the reorganization of the Committee of Public Safety, making this now the fourth government for Paris in the last six weeks. With the original committee remembers replaced by a new set of leaders, the committee would now meet in round-the-clock permanent sessions, and not even bother reporting to the General Communal Council. The Council, in fact, was now basically dead. It only met three times a week, and plenty of delegates wondered what the point of it was anymore. On May the 15th, the intent dissatisfaction of those minority members who had hated the dictatorial turn of the commune, they hated the Neo-Jacup and Revival, those 23 members who had voted against it,

arrived at the Hotel DeVille to present a formal protest. But they found that the majority of the council had decided to meet, in different chambers without even bothering to tell this minority group. In an offended huff, the minority members resigned on mass and made their criticism of the direction of the Paris commune publicly known. In response, the Committee of Public Safety declared on that same day that it was all powerful and that it was above all authority and everyone now had to answer to them. This led to a breach in the unity of the commune at the worst possible moment. With things looking grim, and everyone at everyone else's throats.

The possibility that this was going to end with the glorious construction of a new social order was fading fast. So, partly because the darkness was at least subconsciously creeping in, the leaders of the commune started approving destructive measures, to at least tear down symbols of the old social order before the commune was crushed. On May the 12th, the home of Adolf Tier was looted and then systematically destroyed. On May the 16th, that Napoleonic column and the Place Van Dome was, pulled down. This effort spearheaded by the great painter, Gustav Courbert, who opposed the column both for political and aesthetic reasons, and who had been lobbying to have it torn down since the

September Revolution. The commune's leadership also approved the destruction of the Chappelle Expector, which housed the remains of Louis XVIth and Marie Antoinette, but this particular order was never carried out. However, as we will see next week, these acts of physical destruction were just the beginning. And just as the Ostman reforms had remade the face of Paris, the commune would finish the job. Next week will be our last episode of the series on the Paris Commune. Then, when I come back from my break, I will be living in Paris, except not talking about Paris anymore. I'll be talking about the Mexican Revolution, which, yes, I agree is very weird timing.

But that's the way it went. But before we get to that, we need to bring the Paris Commune. to its final tragic conclusion. And next week will be the infamous week, known as the Bloody Week.