Terrorist Ideas of the Commune

We cannot speak of the Committee of Public Safety without thinking of the Regime of Terror, which represented the very soul of that body in 1793. It was only natural that the Opposition arising over the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety should find its continuation in the question of terrorism. The Jacobins were, from the very start, as much in favour of recognising terrorism as a fighting means as the Internationalists were of repudiating it. Even in the very first meeting of the Commune its opposition was noticeable. A member proposed the abolition of the death penalty. “He wants to says the head of Venoy (the General of Versailles) was the retort they levelled at him.

Before the federation of, the International, Frankel formulated on April 29th the policy of the International, saying: “We wish to establish the rights of the workers, and that is only possible by persuasion and moral force.”

On the other side were people like the dramatic critic Pyat, the accountant Ferré and the student Raoul Rigault, who in their bloodthirsty demands were insatiable. In principle all Jacobins had to support Terrorist measures, but in actual practice there was little of these measures to be seen. Few could escape the humanitarian spirit which inspired the whole of democracy, bourgeois as well as proletarian. Moreover, the conditions which obtained at the time of the Second Paris Commune were not those that produced Terrorism at the time of the First Commune.

The Second Commune did not set about the impossible task of erecting a communal system on bourgeois lines which should serve the interests of the proletariat, and, further, it confined the application of its power to Paris, of which city the majority were certainly on its side. Thus it was not necessary for then to intimidate their opponents by resorting to forceful measures. The enemy who was really dangerous to the Commune stood outside the confines of their communal life, and was not to be affected by recourse to Terrorism. Thus the motive for putting Terrorist tradition into practice was lacking. What Raoul Rigault and Ferré in the Committee of Public Safety accomplished by their suppression of the Press and by their arrests was much more a mere bad imitation of the Empire than of the Reign of Terror, which proceeded on entirely different lines. The Blanquist student, Rigault, gained his laurels under the Empire in a continuous fight with the police, whose tricks he knew perfectly well.

Even before March 9, that is, before the insurrection, Lauser said of him: “Those who know him have told me the most astonishing things about his mad ways, and the cunning with which he spied out the police to frustrate all their persecutions, and indeed himself to play the part of the Prefect of Police of Paris.” (Under the Paris Commune – a Diary, Leipzig, 1878, p.18.)

On March 18 he had received official orders to act as the Prefect of Police of Paris. His first act was to take up a position at the Prefecture of Police on the night of March 18. His police system very soon met with lively opposition from all parties, but especially from the Internationalists. This system had little to do with the principles of 1793, although at the time he was working on a History of the Commune of 1793.

On the other hand, we must not attribute the execution of Generals Thomas and Clement to the Commune. As we have already shown, these executions took place before the Commune existed and in spite of the opposition of the Central Committee.

There was only one measure adopted by the Commune which can be described as Terrorist, and that was the arresting of hostages, undertaken to intimidate the enemy by oppressing the defenceless. That the taking of hostages is a hopeless method of procedure, which seldom prevents cruelties from taking place, and more often increases the barbarity of the fight which caused it, has often enough been proved in experience.

But it was difficult for the Commune to do anything else, unless it wished to suffer patiently and without protest that the men at Versailles should shoot the prisoners they had taken. In numerous cases this actually took place after April 3rd.

As the result of the indignation, which arose on account of the execution of the prisoners Puteaux and Chatillon, as well as of Duval, who was one of the officers of the National Guard taken prisoner by the Versailles troops during the attack on April 3, several members of the Commune insisted that one should forthwith shoot a number of the reactionaries, who, for the most part, were taken from the clergy of Paris. Other Jacobins, and particularly Delescluse, indignant at these excesses, proposed the decree concerning hostages. It was decided to oppose the Versailles elements on the bloody way into which they had blindly stumbled. By means of an implicit understanding, however, it was agreed that this decree should not be carried out. (Fiaux, Civil War of 1871, p.246.)

This decree, therefore, arose not out of an attempt to destroy human life, but to save it. On the one hand, to force the Versailles commanders to stop all further executions, and on the other, to make the Versaillais renounce the idea of immediate reprisals.

“Ever noble and righteous even in its anger,” so ran the proclamation of the Commune of April 5th, “the peoples view with horror the shedding of blood as well as civil war. But it is its duty to defend itself from barbaric attacks of its enemies; it must therefore act on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Journal Officiel, April 6th, p.169.)

In reality the Commune showed itself to be very noble and righteous, but it did not act in accordance with the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!

The decree issued by the Commune concerning hostages determined that any persons accused of being in agreement with Versailles should be immediately denounced and arrested. A court of justice was to be set up within the space of twenty-four hours to hear the accused, and within forty-eight hours pass judgment on him. No accused person was to be shot, but kept as hostage. Likewise all prisoners of war were to be brought before this same tribunal, which would thereupon decide whether they were to be set free or detained as hostages. Finally, it was decided that every execution practised on a fighter or follower of the Commune, who had been caught by the Versailles command, should be followed by the execution of three times the number of hostages. This last and most terrible decision of the decree really remained a dead letter. It was never put into practice by the Commune, although those in command at Versailles, after short interruptions, continued to shoot the prisoners they had caught, and seemed quite unconcerned by the fact that, by their action, they had jeopardised the lives of their friends, who had been kept as hostages in Paris. Thiers did his best to incite the Commune to slaughter. He knew perfectly well that every hostage shot rendered a service, not to the Commune, but to himself; because it roused public opinion at large, which was still governed by bourgeois thought and feeling, and coolly accepted the shooting of numberless prisoners at Versailles, whereas it waxed violently indignant over the mere arresting of hostages in Paris. This miserable attitude was shown by Thiers in the affair of the exchange of hostages.

After the decree of April 5th, there were taken as hostages in Paris a number of the clergy, a banker, Jecker, the originator of the Mexican Expedition, as well as the President of the Cour de Cessation, Bonjean. But the Commune proposed an exchange. They wished to set at liberty the arrested clergy, among them the Archbishop Darboy, the Pastor Deguerry, and the Vicar-General Lagarde, as well as President Bonjean, provided the Versailles Government would deliver up Blanqui, who was then under arrest. They were good-natured enough to allow the Vicar-General Lagarde to proceed to Versailles on April 12th with a letter of Darboy’s to Thiers, after he had sworn, to return if the deliberations should came to grief. But before that, on April 8th, Darboy had already addressed a letter to Thiers, and implored him to shoot no more prisoners. Thiers remained silent. On April 13th a Paris newspaper, L’Affranchi, published this letter. Whereupon Thiers replied; but with a lie, since he characterised all news about executions as being mere libel. The answer to the second letter, which Lagarde had handed in, was not received until the end of April. But the Vicar-General, in spite of his oath, was cautious enough not to return to brave the vengeance of the lion. In this answer Blanqui’s release was refused, but the Archbishop was comforted with the assurance that the lives of hostages were not in danger. Further attempts on the part of the Papal Nuncio and of the American Ambassador, Washburn, to intervene in favour of an exchange remained equally without success. Therefore Thiers was responsible for the fact that the above-named, with the exception of Lagarde, were still to be found as hostages in the prisons of Mazas, when the Commune broke up and lost the power to protect them. He was quite right in his assertion which, by the way, entirely disproved his libellous statement about the brutality of the Commune, that the lives of the hostages were not in danger. But it was he himself who laboured to overthrow the protecting bodyguard of the hostages, namely the regime of the Commune, indeed, under circumstances which placed the lives of these hostages in the gravest danger. Through some treacherous act, the Versailles troops forced their way into Paris on a Sunday, May 21st, quite by surprise, at the very time when a popular concert was in full swing in the Garden of the Tuileries, and at the conclusion of which concert an officer of the General Staff invited the audience to come again the following Sunday, adding:

Thiers promised to march into Paris yesterday. He did not come, nor will he ever come.” At that very moment the Versailles troops entered Paris. The inhabitants were so panic stricken, and the troops of the Commune so exhausted; that the Versailles army would probably have succeeded, by means of a rapid and determined advance, in occupying the whole of Paris without any serious opposition. But they entered very slowly, and this gave the defenders of the Commune time to gather together for a furious street fight, which lasted the whole of the week, the famous terrible May week.” This succeeded all the more in bringing passions to fever heat, since the Versailles commanders gave no pardon, and not only shot down all those who were arrested with weapons in their hands, but even all the suspects. Many historians of the Commune point out that this slow advance of the Versailles troops had the result of increasing the opposition, and likewise the number of those who fell, thus enhancing the immensity of the defeat.

Paris could have been taken in twenty-four hours if the army had proceeded along the quays of the left bank. It would have met with opposition only from the Ministry of Marine at Montmartre and at Ménilmontant. By means of its slow advance into Paris it gave time for the opposition to organise. They made eight and ten times as many prisoners as there were fighters, and they shot more men than actually stood behind the barricades, whereas the army lost only 600 dead and 7,000 wounded. (G. Bourgin, L’Histoire de la Commune, p.108.)

The number of dead on the side of the Commune exceeded 20,000, put by some at 30,000. The Chief of Military Justice, General Appert, counted 17,000 dead. The number of victims who did not come to the knowledge of the authorities cannot be fixed, but amounted to at least 3,000.

It is not to be wandered at that, in this fearful storm, the thirst for vengeance in many cases gained the upper hand. It became the more furious the more power it lost and the less able it was to avoid defeat. It was only after the Commune had ceased to exist that the execution of hostages began. On May 21st the Versailles troops entered Paris; on the 22nd street fighting began; on the 24th the last shot was fired. In this respect, although the executions were more the result of desperate rage and blind revenge than of premeditated action, the opposition between Jacobins and the Internationalists became obvious. The beginning of the executions was made by the fanatic Blanquist, Raoul Rigault. He ordered a number pf gendarmes, who were arrested on March 18, along with an editor, by name Chaudey, caught in the middle of April, to be executed on the night of May 23. Chaudey had caused the crowd to be fired upon on January 22, during which affray Sapia, a friend of Rigault was killed by his side. On the 24th Rigault himself was arrested and shot. At the same time the old Blanquist, Genton, demanded the execution of six hostages, among them the Archbishop Darboy, President Bonjean, and pastor Dugeurry, already known to us. The Blanquist, Ferré, gave him the authority.

The firing party of the execution was composed almost exclusively of young people, practically children. In most cases those taking part in these crimes were hardly more than adolescent young men, excited through the vice rampant in the towns, and whose passions, which had grown faster than their beards, left no place open for the feeling of responsibility. (Fiaux, Civil War, p.528.)

Unfortunately we cannot make the same observation to-day in Germany in the case of those who would justify by practice the right of war.

On the 26th it was again the Blanquist, Ferré, who arranged that forty-eight hostages, mostly priests, secret police, and gendarmes, who had fired on the crowd on March 18th, should be handed over to Colonel Gois, likewise a Blanquist. He took them along with him, followed by an armed crowd who were in utter disorder, since they could hope for no pardon, and since they were themselves doomed to death. In desperate rage they fell upon the hostages and killed them one after the other. In vain the Internationalists, Varlin and Serailler, tried to rescue them. They themselves were very nearly lynched by the furious crowd; who accused them of belonging to the Versailles Party. On May 28th this same Varlin, who had risked his life to save the hostages, was arrested by the Versailles command as a result of the denunciation of a priest, who had recognised him in the street, and he was forthwith shot.

Of the countless victims who succumbed to the murderous lusts of the victors, both during the fight and after it, those bourgeois elements that waxed indignant over the terrorism of the Commune had nothing to say. On the contrary, they had not words enough to express their furious condemnation, when they came to speak of the five dozen hostages who, after the downfall of the Commune, fell victims to the vengeance and irresponsibility of some of the Versailles Party.

It is this very account of the affair with the hostages that proves most clearly how far removed the Commune was from any form of terrorism. In the whole of history there is no mention of a civil war, hardly of a national war, in which one side, in spite of the murderous inhumanity of the other side, upheld in practice the principles of humanity with such noble determination, and in such contrast to the bloodthirsty phrases of a few of the “ Radicalinskis,” such as appeared in the French Civil War of 1871. This is the reason why the Second Paris Commune ended quite differently from the First, which had formed such a fearful Regime of Terror.

The Regime of Terror of the First Commune fell to pieces, without the workers of Paris offering any opposition. Indeed, its fall was felt as a relief by some, and by many even greeted with satisfaction. When, on the Ninth Thermidor, 1794, the forces of the two opposing Parties came into contact, the followers of Robespierre turned tail before a single shot was fired, and fled. On the other hand, the Parisians clung to the Second Paris Commune with fanatical tenacity to the very end. The fiercest street fighting was necessary for a whole week, before it could be overcome. The number of victims, of dead, wounded, prisoners and escaped, which resulted from the death struggle of the Commune, reached the number of 100,000. (In July, 1871, the number was put at 90,000 – Bourgin, La Commune, p.183.)

The Second Commune was torn asunder by violent opposition. We have seen this in the enmity of the two parties engaged in the last struggle. But never did one of these parties ever oppress the other by terrorist means. The Maximalists (“Bolshevik” means Maximalist in English) and the Minimalists (Russian “Mensheviks”) fought together, in spite of all, to the bitter end; and so all factions of Socialism in the Commune foresaw the necessity of common representation of the whole of the fighting proletariat. In recognising this they combined the views of Marx and Bakunin, Lassalle and Eisenach. The first government of the proletariat has engraved itself deep in the hearts of those who craved for the emancipation of humanity. The powerful effect of this “dictatorship of the proletariat” on the fight for emancipation in all countries was due, not a little, to the fact that it was inspired throughout with a spirit of humanity, which animated the working classes of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 7 |