The Third Address
May, 1871
[Paris Workers' Revolution
& Thiers' Reactionary Massacres]
Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary
conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed.
On this point, the Bordeaux Assembly [National Assembly] was sincerity itself. If
the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the surrender
of Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy the
Decembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme, and Aurelles
de Paladine the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge
of doubt.
But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament
of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on a pretext
which was the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies. The artillery of
the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the state, and to the
state it must be returned. The fact was this: From the very day of the
capitulation, by which Bismarck's prisoners had signed the surrender of
France, but reserved to themselves a numerous bodyguard for the express
purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reorganized
themselves and intrusted their supreme control to a Central Committee elected
by their whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations.
On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee
took measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette,
of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards
in and about the very quarters the Prussians were to occupy. That artillery
had been furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard. As their
private property, it was officially recognized in the capitulation of January
28, and on that very title exempted from the general surrender, into the
hands of the conqueror, or arms belonging to the government. And Thiers
was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest pretext for initiating the
war against Paris, that he had to resort to the flagrant lie of the artillery
of the National Guard being state property!
The seizure of her artillery was evidently but to serve as the
preliminary to the general disarmament of Paris, and, therefore, of the
Revolution of September 4. But that revolution had become the legal status
of France. The republic, its work, was recognized by the conqueror in the
terms of the capitulation. After the capitulation, it was acknowledged
by all foreign powers, and in its name, the National Assembly had been
summoned. The Paris working men's revolution of September 4 was the only
legal title of the National Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of its executive.
Without it, the National Assembly would at once have to give way to the
Corps Legislatif elected in 1869 by universal suffrage under French,
not under Prussian, rule, and forcibly dispersed by the arm of the revolution.
Thiers and his ticket-of-leave men would have had to capitulate for safe
conducts signed by Louis Bonaparte, to save them from a voyage to Cayenne[A],
The National Assembly, with its power of attorney to settle the terms of
peace with Prussia, was but an incident of that revolution, the true embodiment
of which was still armed Paris, which had initiated it, undergone for it
a five-months' siege, with its horrors of famine, and made her prolonged
resistance, despite Trochu's plan, the basis of an obstinate war of defence
in the provinces. And Paris was now either to lay down her arms at the
insulting behest of the rebellious slaveholders of Bordeaux, and acknowledge
that her Revolution of September 4 meant nothing but a simple transfer
of power from Louis Bonaparte to his royal rivals; or she had to stand
forward as the self-sacrificing champion of France, whose salvation from
ruin and who regeneration were impossible without the revolutionary overthrow
of the political and social conditions that had engendered the Second Empire,
and under its fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated
by a five-months' famine, did not hesitate one moment. She heroically resolved
to run all the hazards of a resistance against French conspirators, even
with Prussian cannon frowning upon her from her own forts. Still, in its
abhorrence of the civil war into which Paris was to be goaded, the Central
Committee continued to persist in a merely defensive attitude, despite
the provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations of the Executive, and
the menacing concentration of troops in and around Paris.
Thiers opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, at the head of a
multitude of sergents-de-ville, and some regiments of the line,
upon a nocturnal expedition against Montmartre, there to seize, by surprise,
the artillery of the National Guard. It is well known how this attempt
broke down before the resistance of the National Guard and the fraternization
of the line with the people. Aurelles de Paldine had printed beforehand
his bulletin of victory, and Thiers held ready the placards announcing
his measures of coup d'etat. Now these had to be replaced by Thiers' appeals,
imparting his magnanimous resolve to leave the National Guard in the possession
of their arms, with which, he said, he felt sure they would rally round
the government against the rebels. Out of 300,000 National guards, only
300 responded to this summons to rally around little Thiers against themselves.
The glorious working men's Revolution of March 18 took undisputed sway
of Paris. The Central Committee was its provisional government. Europe
seemed, for a moment, to doubt whether its recent sensational performances
of state and war had any reality in them, or whether they were the dreams
of a long bygone past.
From March 18 to the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris,
the proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of violence in
which the revolutions — and still more the counter-revolutions — of the
"better classes" abound, that no facts were left to its opponents to cry
out about, but the executions of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas, and
the affair of the Place Vendome.
One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the nocturnal attempt
against Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st line
regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place Pigalle, and on their
refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children,
his own men shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under
the training of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely
to change the very moment these soldiers change sides. The same men executed
Clement Thomas.
"General" Clement Thomas, a malcontent ex-quartermaster-sergeant,
had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe's reign, enlisted at the office
of the republican newspaper Le National, there to serve in the double
capacity of responsible man-of-straw (gerant responsable) and of
duelling bully to that very combative journal. After the February Revolution,
the men of the National having got into power, they metamorphosed
this old quarter-master-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery
of June — of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters,
and became one of the most dastardly executioners. Then he and his generalship
disappeared for a long time, to again rise to the surface on November 1,
1870. The day before, the Government of National Defence, caught at the
Hotel de Ville, had solemnly pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens,
and other representatives of the working class, to abdicate their usurped
power into the hands of a commune to be freely elected by Paris.[B] Instead
of keeping their word, they let loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who
now replaced the Corsicans of Bonaparte.[C] General Tamisier alone, refusing
to sully his name by such a breach of faith, resigned the commandership-in-chief
of the National Guard, and in his place Clement Thomas for once became
again a general. During the whole of his tenure of command, he made war,
not upon the Prussians, but upon the Paris National Guard. He prevented
their general armament, pitted the bourgeois battalions against the working
men's battalions, weeded out officers hostile to Trochu's "plan", and disbanded,
under the stigma of cowardice, the very same proletarian battalions whose
heroism has now astonished their most inveterate enemies. Clement Thomas
felt quite proud of having reconquered his June pre-eminence as the personal
enemy of the working class of Paris. Only a few days before March 18, he
laid before the War Minister, Leflo, a plan of his own for "finishing off
la fine fleur [the cream] of the Paris canaille". After Vinoy's
rout, he must needs appear upon the scene of action in the quality of an
amateur spy. The Central Committee and the Paris working men were as much
responsible for the killing of Clement Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess
of Wales for the fate of the people crushed to death on the day of her
entrance into London.
The massacre of unarmed citizens in Place Vendome is a myth which
M. Thiers and the Rurals persistently ignored in the Assembly, entrusting
its propagation exclusively to the servants' hall of European journalism.
"The men of order", the reactionists of Paris, trembled at the victory
of march 18. To them, it was the signal of popular retribution at last
arriving. The ghosts of the victims assassinated at their hands from the
days of June 1848, down to January 22, 1871,[D] arose before their faces.
Their panic was their only punishment. Even the sergents-de-ville,
instead of being disarmed and locke up, as ought to have been done, had
the gates of Paris flung open wide for their safe retreat to Versailles.
The men of order were left not only unharmed, but allowed to rally and
quietly seize more than one strong hold in the very centre of Paris. This
indulgence of the Central Committee — this magnanimity of the armed working
men — so strangely at variance with the habits of the "Party of Order",
the latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence
their silly plan to try, under the cloak of an unarmed demonstration, what
Vinoy had failed to perform with his cannon and mitrailleuses. On
March 22, a riotous mob of swells started from the quarters of luxury,
all the petits creves in their ranks, and at their head the notorious
familiars of the empire — the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, Henri de Pene, etc.
Under the cowardly pretence of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly
armed with the weapons of the bravo, fell into marching order, ill-treated
and disarmed the detached patrols and sentries of the National Guard they
met with on their progress, and, on debouching from the Rue de la Paix,
with the cry of "Down with the Central Committee! Down with the assassins!
The National Assembly forever!" attempted to break through the line drawn
up there, and thus to carry by surprise the headquarters of the National
Guard in the Place Vendome. In reply to their pistol-shots, the regular
sommations (the French equivalent of the English Riot Act)[E] were
made, and, proving ineffective, fire was commanded by the general [Bergeret] of the
National Guard. One volley dispersed into wild flight the silly coxcombs,
who expected that the mere exhibition of their "respectability" would have
the same effect upon the Revolution of Paris as Joshua's trumpets upon
the walls of Jericho. The runaways left behind them two National Guards
killed, nine severely wounded (among them a member of the Central Committee [Maljournal]),
and the whole scene of their exploit strewn with revolvers, daggers, and
sword-canes, in evidence of the "unarmed" character of their "pacific"
demonstration. When, on June 13, 1849, the National Guard made a really
pacific demonstration in protest against the felonious assault of French
troops upon Rome, Changarnier, then general of the Party of Order, was
acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by M. Thiers, as the
savior of society,for having launched his troops from all sides upon these
unarmed men, to shoot and sabre them down, and to trample them under their
horses' feet. Paris, then was placed under a state of siege. Dufaure hurried
through the Assembly new laws of repression. New arrests, new proscriptions
— a new reign of terror set in. But the lower orders manage these things
otherwise. The Central Committee of 1871 simply ignored the heroes of the
"pacific demonstration"; so much so, that only two days later, they were
enabled to muster under Admiral Saisset, for that armed demonstration,
crowned by the famous stampede to Versailles. In their reluctance to continue
the civil war opened by Theirs' burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the
Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake
in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and
thus putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead
of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the
ballot box, on March 26. The day of the election of the Commune. Then,
in the mairies of Paris, they exchanged land words of conciliation
with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows
to exterminate them in due time.
Now, look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened his second
campaign against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian
prisoners brought into versailles was subjected to revolting atrocities,
while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers' pockets, strolled
about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst of
their ladies of honor (?) applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of
the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in
cold blood; our brave friend, General Duval, the iron-founder, was shot
without any form of trial. Galifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious
for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasted
in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of national
Guards, with their captain and lieutenant, surprised and disarmed by his
Chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was appointed by Thiers, Grand Cross of
the Legion of Honor, for his general order to shoot down every soldier
of the line taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmaret, the Gendarme,
was decorated for the treacherous butcher-like chopping in pieces of the
high-souled and chivalrous Flourens, who had saved the heads of the Government
of Defence on October 31, 1870.[F] "The encouraging particulars" of his assassination
were triumphantly expatiated upon by Thiers in the National Assembly. With
the elated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb permitted to play the part
of a Tamerlane, he denied the rebels the right of neutrality for ambulances.
Nothing more horrid than that monkey allowed for a time to give full fling
to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by Voltaire.[Candide, Ch. 22](See news articles)
After the decree of the Commune of April 7, ordering reprisals
and declaring it to be the duty "to protect Paris against the cannibal
exploits of the Versailles banditti, and to demand an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth",[G] Thiers did not stop the barbarous treatment of prisoners,
moreover, insulting them in his bulletins as follows: "Never have more
degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gazes of
honest men" — honest, like Thiers himself nd his ministerial ticket-of-leave
men. Still, the shooting of prisoners was suspended for a time. Hardly,
however, had Thiers and his Decembrist generals [of the December 2, 1851 coup by Louis Bonaparte] become aware that the Communal
decree of reprisals was but an empty threat, that even their gendarme spies
caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards, that even sergents-de-ville,
taken with incendiary shells upon them, were spared — when the wholesale
shooting of prisoners was resumed nd carried on uninterruptedly to the
end. houses to which National Guards had fled were surrounded by gendarmes,
inundated with petroleum (which here occurs for the first time in this
war), and then set fire to, the charred corpses being afterwards brought
out by the ambulance of the Press at the Ternes. Four National Guards having
surrendered to a troop of mounted Chasseurs at Belle Epine,on April 25,
were afterwards shot down, one after another, by the captain, a worthy
man of Gallifet's. One of his four victims, left for dead, Scheffer, crawled
back to the Parisian outposts, and deposed to this fact before a commission
of the Commune. When Tolain interpellated the War Minister upon the report
of this commission, the Rurals drowned his voice and forbade Leflo to answer.
It would be an insult to their "glorious" army to speak of its deeds. The
flippant tone in which Thiers' bulletin announced the bayoneting of the
Federals, surprised asleep at Moulin Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades
at Clamart shocked the nerves even of the not over-sensitive London Times.
But it would be ludicrous today to attempt recounting the merely preliminary
atrocities committed by the bombarders of Paris and the fomenters of a
slaveholders' rebellion protected by foreign invasion. Amidst all these
horrors, Thiers, forgetful of his parliamentary laments on the terrible
responsibility weighing down his dwarfish shoulders, boasts in his bulletins
that l'Assemblee siege paisiblement (the Assembly continues meeting
in peace), and proves by his constant carousals, now with Decembrist generals,
now with German princes, that his digestion is not troubled in the least,
not even by the ghosts of Lecomte and Clement Thomas.
Chapter 5: [The Paris Commune]
[A]
A town in French Guiana (Northern South America), penal settlement and place of exile.
[B]
On October 31, 1870, upon the receipt of news that the Government of National Defense had decided to start negotiations with the Prussians, the Paris workers and revolutionary sections of the National Guard rose up in revolt. They seized the town hall and set up their revolutionary government — the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Blanqui. Under pressure from the workers the Government of National Defense promised to resign and schedule national elections to the Commune for November 1. The government then, with the aid of some loyal battalions of the National Guard, seized the town hall by force of arms and re-established its domination.
[C]
Bretons — Breton Mobile Guard which Trochu used as gendarmes to put down the revolutionary movement in Paris.
Corsicans — constituted a considerable part of the gendarmes corps during the Second Empire.
[D]
On January 22, 1871, the Paris proletariat and the National Guards held a revolutionary demonstration initiated by the Blanquists. They demanded the overthrow of the government and the establishment of a Commune. By order of the Government of National Defense, the Breton Mobile Guard, which was defending the town hall, opened fire on the demonstrators. After massacring the workers, the government began preparations to surrender Paris to the Germans.
[E]
Sommations (a preliminary demand to disburse) — under the laws of most bourgeois states, this demand is repeated three times, following which the armed police are entitled to resort to force. The Riot Act was introduced in England in 1715. It prohibited "rebel gatherings" of more than 12 people in a group, giving the authorities the right to use force if the crowd did not disperse within an hour after the reading out of the sommations three times.
[F]
On October 31, Flourens prevented the members of the Government of National Defense from being shot, as had been demanded by one of the insurrectionists.
[G]
A reference to the decree on hostages adopted by the Commune on April 5, 1871. (Marx gives the date of its publication in the English press.) Under this decree, all persons found guilty of being in contact with Versailles were declared hostages. By this decree the Commune sought to prevent Communards from being shot by the Versaillists.