The workload of the Commune leaders was usually enormous. In theory, the churches were allowed to continue their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public political meetings during the evenings. [107] On 25 May, during the Bloody Week, he wrote: "A monstrous act; they’ve set fire to Paris. Those without fiscal power, the loosest form of intercommunality. The National Guard disintegrated, with many soldiers changing into civilian clothes and fleeing the city, leaving between 10,000 and 15,000 Communards to defend the barricades. Twenty thousand Communards were killed in the fighting or executed on the spot; thousands of survivors were deported to the penal islands, while others escaped into exile. Later in October, General Louis Jules Trochu launched a series of armed attacks to break the German siege, with heavy losses and no success. When the echoes of the last shots have ceased, it will take a great deal of gentleness to heal the million people suffering nightmares, those who have emerged, shivering from the fire and massacre.[110]. His last reported words were: "Do they still say I was a traitor?"[71]. The most extreme example of this is Paris, where the urbanized area sprawls over 396 communes. This was approved by Thiers, who felt that to negotiate a future peace treaty the Germans were demanding war reparations of five billion francs; the gold reserves would be needed to keep the franc stable and pay the indemnity. Soon after the Paris Commune took power in Paris, revolutionary and socialist groups in several other French cities tried to establish their own communes.

[9], During the war and the siege of Paris, various members of the middle- and upper-classes departed the city; at the same time there was an influx of refugees from parts of France occupied by the Germans. During the Civil War, the French navy was divided as was the rest of the nation. 2007).[5]. A bitter battle took place between about 1,500 national guardsmen from the 13th arrondissement and the Mouffetard district, commanded by Walery Wroblewski, a Polish exile who had participated in the uprising against the Russians, against three brigades commanded by General de Cissey. In 1971 the Marcellin law offered support and money from the government to entice the communes to merge freely with each other, but the law had only a limited effect (only about 1,300 communes agreed to merge with others). Countless rural communes that had hundreds of inhabitants at the time of the French Revolution now have only a hundred inhabitants or less. The consequence of the change, however, was that tens of thousands of villages which had never had legal "personality" (contrary to the chartered cities) suddenly became legal entities for the first time in their history. On 24 May, a delegation of national guardsmen and Gustave Genton, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, came to the new headquarters of the Commune at the city hall of the 11th arrondissment and demanded the immediate execution of the hostages held at the prison of La Roquette. On 19 September, National Guard units from the main working-class neighbourhoods—Belleville, Menilmontant, La Villette, Montrouge, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the Faubourg du Temple—marched to the centre of the city and demanded that a new government, a Commune, be elected. General Cissey resumed the intense bombardment of the fort. Marx and Engels, Bakunin, and later Lenin, tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune. Vinoy urged that they wait until Germany had released the French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full strength. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Unlike most other European countries, which stringently merged their communes to better reflect modern-day densities of population (such as Germany and Italy around 1970), dramatically decreasing the number of communes in the process – the Gemeinden of West Germany were decreased from 24,400 to 8,400 in the space of a few years – France only carried out mergers at the margin, and those were mostly carried out during the 19th century. In Paris, however, the republican candidates dominated, winning 234,000 votes against 77,000 for the Bonapartists. The governor of the prison, M. François, refused to give up the Archbishop without a specific order from the Commune. In many areas, rich communes have joined with other rich communes and have refused to let in poorer communes, for fear that their citizens would be overtaxed to the benefit of poorer suburbs. [16] The regulars were also supported by the Garde Mobile, new recruits with little training or experience. Vacqueyras in Provence,showing double French/Provençal name. On 31 October, the leaders of the main revolutionary groups in Paris, including Blanqui, Félix Pyat and Louis Charles Delescluze, called new demonstrations at the Hotel de Ville against General Trochu and the government. In September and October Adolphe Thiers, the leader of the National Assembly conservatives, had toured Europe, consulting with the foreign ministers of Britain, Russia, and Austria, and found that none of them were willing to support France against the Germans. Anarchists participated actively in the establishment of the Paris Commune. They had been engaged in a day-long artillery duel with the regular army. The attack was first launched on the morning of 2 April by five battalions who crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly. Revolutionary factions included Proudhonists (an early form of moderate anarchism), members of the international socialists, Blanquists, and more libertarian republicans. Overseas territory At Jules Favre's request, Bismarck agreed not to disarm the National Guard, so that order could be maintained in the city. On 8 October, several thousand soldiers from the National Guard, led by Eugène Varlin of the First International, marched to the centre chanting 'Long Live the Commune!

", This page was last edited on 21 October 2020, at 14:06. Additionally, tens of thousands were taken as prisoners by the army, many of whom were executed. Clavier and Gois took them instead to Rue Haxo. In many places, the local feudal lord (seigneur) still had a major influence in the village’s affairs, collecting taxes from tenant-villagers and ordering them to work the corvée, controlling which fields were to be used and when, and how much of the harvest should be given to him. 17,000 of them were Parisian, and 73,000 from the provinces. Delescluze and the remaining leaders of the Commune, about 20 in all, were at the city hall of the 13th arrondissement on Place Voltaire. Tensions escalated: Internationalists elected a new committee and put forth a more radical programme, the authorities imprisoned their leaders, and a more revolutionary perspective was taken to the International's 1868 Brussels Congress.