The Paris Commune was a time of big dreams.
In all, sixty-four hostages held by the Commune perished,
some executed, others killed in the streets. Estimates of supporters of the
Commune who were killed in fighting, summarily executed, or gunned down
afterward ranged as high as 25,000 or more. The Versaillais forces set the
number at 17,000. An exact "body count" is not possible, as bodies
were covered with lime, tossed into the river, or were in burning buildings.
The best estimate would be somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000. That’s lots of
people, considerably more than the sixty-four hostages who perished at the
hands of the Communards.
Hippolyte Taine, a conservative historian, was sure that the
Commune was a proletarian revolution. On April 5 he wrote that most
fundamentally the "present insurrection" was socialist: "The
boss and the bourgeois exploit us, therefore we must suppress them. Superiority
and special status do not exist. Me, a worker, I have abilities, and if I want,
I can become the head of a business, a magistrate, a general. By good fortune,
we have rifles, let's use them to establish a republic in which workers like us
become cabinet ministers and presidents."
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The re-organization of work remained a significant goal for
Communard militants. The "Declaration of the French people" of April
19 called for the creation of institutions that would provide ordinary people
with credit, facilitating "access to property" and "freedom of
labor." Ideas and even concrete projects for the "organization of
work" were in the air, amid confidence that the defense of the National
Guard cannons on March 18 had inaugurated a new era, full of possibilities that
would make Paris and the world a better place.
The idea that revolution could bring about reforms that
would reduce or even eliminate the considerable differences in conditions of
life, opportunities, and expectations remained entrenched in the collective
memory of Parisian workers.
As Eugène Varlin
stated, "We want to overthrow exploitation of workers by the right to work
[le droit au travail] and the association of workers in corporation."
Workers hoped that newly established cooperatives would reflect the
organization of the Commune itself: decentralized and locally governed. The
anarchist Proudhon's influence was apparent in many workers' organizations in
many trades. The Proudhonists and Blanquists imagined that France, like Paris,
would evolve into a federation of communes, becoming a free country just as
Paris had for the moment become a free city (ville libre). Such echoes could be
heard at the meeting of women in Trinity Church on May 12, when a speaker
thundered, "The day of justice approaches with giant strides. . . . The
workshops in which you are packed will belong to you; the tools that are put
into your hands will be yours; the gain resulting from your efforts, from your
troubles, and from the loss of your health will be shared among you.
Proletarians, you will be reborn."
The regulations established by a workshop set up in the
Louvre to repair and convert weapons reflected how some workers envisioned
manufacturing operating in the future. Foremen and charge-hands (who supervised
lathes) were to be elected, just as the National Guard units elected officers.
The regulations also laid out the responsibilities of the administrative
council, to consist of the manager, the foreman, a charge-hand, and one worker
"elected from each workbench," which would set salaries and wages and
ensure that the workday did not exceed ten hours. The Commune ordered a survey
of workshops abandoned by employers who had fled Paris so that workers'
cooperatives could ultimately take them over, which indeed happened in a few
in- stances. A small cooperative iron foundry started up in Grenelle. Members
moved into one workshop after four days and another after two weeks. The
cooperative, employing about 250 workers, produced shells crucial to the city's
defense against Thiers. Workers elected "managing directors"—not a
very socialist term—led by thirty-nine-year-old Pierre Marc, who had inherited
a foundry from his father. The cooperative paid rent to the previous owner of
the shop, and its workers earned less than their counterparts employed by the
Commune's Louvre shell factory. Producers' cooperatives were thus organized
along traditional class lines, and workers were expected to show up with their
livret, (a record book of employment), which they had been required to have
with them since 1803, despite wide resentment of this obligation.
The Commune also endeavored to improve working conditions.
The abolition of night baking by a decree issued on April 20 was one such
concrete social measure in the interest of labor taken by the Commune. The
debate centered on advantages for bakers and the fact that workers' virtual
nighttime enslavement benefited "the aristocracy of the belly." Some
master bakers resisted, fearing the loss of clients, and the application of the
measure was postponed until May 3, with another decree the next day threatening
to seize bread produced before 5 a.m. and distribute it to the poor. Many Parisians
still demanded warm croissants first thing in the morning, however, making it
difficult for the Commune to enforce the measure. Other Communard decrees
established a maximum salary for municipal employees (6,000 francs a year),
prohibited employers from taking assessed fines from workers' wages (an
increasingly common practice during the Second Empire), and established labor
exchanges in each arrondissement.
Given the circumstances and ideological divisions among
Communard leaders, it is not surprising that no full-fledged attempt to
transform the economy took place, despite the role of socialists who ultimately
wanted workers to control the tools of their trades. Yet most Communards
accepted the idea of private property. Moreover, for Blanquists, a complete
social revolution would have to wait until political power was secured.
Even though the structure of the economy remained relatively
unchanged, the status of women improved by leaps and bounds. Indeed, the
solidarity and militancy of Parisian women, who had suffered such hardship
during the Prussian siege, jumps out as one of the most remarkable aspects of
the Paris Commune. Women, taking pride in their role as citoyennes, pressured
the Commune to attend to their rights and demands and pushed for an energetic
defense of the capital. Citoyenne Destrée proclaimed in a club, "The
social revolution will not be operative until women are equal to men. Until
then, you have only the appearance of revolution." Élisabeth Dmitrieff,
who had helped organize cooperatives in Geneva and then arrived in Paris in
late March as a representative of the International, called for the elimination
of all competition and for equal salaries for male and female workers, as well
as a reduction in work hours. She also demanded the creation of workshops for
unemployed women and asked that funds go to aid nascent working-class
associations. She stated, "The work of women was the most exploited of all
in the social order of the past. . . . Its immediate reorganization is
urgent."
British journalist Frederic Harrison assessed the Communards
in Paris, writing, "The 'insurgents' ... are simply the people of Paris,
mainly and at first working men, but now largely recruited from the trading and
professional classes. The 'Commune' has been organized with extraordinary
skill, the public services are efficiently carried on, and order has been for
the most part preserved." In his view, the Commune, while being "one
of the least cruel, has been perhaps the ablest revolutionary government of modern
times." Most Communards hailed from the world of Parisian work and
included artisans and craftsmen who produced articles de Paris and jewelry.
Their numbers included skilled and semiskilled workers—many working with wood,
or in shoemaking, printing, or the small-scale production of metals—as well as
construction workers, day laborers, and domestic servants. Shopkeepers, clerks,
and men in the liberal professions were also well represented. They were among
"the people" who had suffered during the siege and felt threatened by
monarchist machinations. Of female Communards, 70 percent came from the world
of women's work, particularly textiles and the clothing trades. Louise Michel
saw no problem with incorporating prostitutes into the corps of women nursing
injured fighters: "Who has more right than these women, the most pitiful
of the old order's victims, to give their lives for the new?"
The more working class neighborhoods of Paris led the way in
support of the Commune. The social geography of Paris reflected a divide
between the more prosperous western half of the city and the People's Paris of
the eastern districts, as well as between the center and the proletarian
periphery. Baron Georges Haussmann's massive urban projects during the Second
Empire had only intensified the divide, but with the uprising on March 18, the
periphery had arguably conquered the beaux quartiers. This is not to say that
there were none who opposed the Commune in poorer arrondissements like the
Eleventh, Twelfth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth or that there were no
devoted Communards in the relatively more privileged Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth
Arrondissements. The Second Arrondissement embodied the social and political
divide that existed even within relatively prosperous districts. The western
parts of the arrondissement were more bourgeois, more anti-Communard, and
highly suspicious of proletarian Belleville and its national guardsmen and the
Vengeurs de Flourens, a military unit named in honor of the martyred Communard,
who came down to parade in the conservative quartiers below. In the early weeks
of the Commune, many residents advocated conciliation and a negotiated
settlement and voted for moderate representatives in the election of March 26.
The more plebeian eastern neighborhoods of the Second Arrondissement sent
delegates to the Commune; the middle-class residents to the west did not.
Around 12,000 people required living assistance in the arrondissement and were
more likely to be guardsmen whose families' depended on the 1.50 franc daily
payment. A mechanic put it this way: "I have seven children, and my wife
was ill. I had no other means of feeding my family."
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