Persian Empire 1845

Chapter 559 The Paris Commune
By October, Paris had been besieged for over four months. Food supplies were exhausted, and the government attempted to defeat the Prussian army from the north and east and defend the capital, but all attempts were repelled by the Prussian forces.

On October 26, the French government in Paris negotiated a ceasefire with the Prussians. Paris was starving, and Gambit's army was struggling through a series of disasters. French Foreign Minister Favre traveled to Versailles to discuss peace terms with Bismarck. Bismarck agreed to end the siege and allow food convoys to enter Paris immediately, on the condition that the French government hand over several key fortresses outside Paris to the Prussians. Without these fortresses, the French army would no longer be able to defend Paris.

On November 4, after running out of food and fuel supplies, the Paris garrison surrendered. The National Guard retained its weapons, while Prussian troops occupied parts of Paris’s fortifications to prevent the possibility of resuming hostilities.

On the carriage back to Paris, Favre, tears streaming down his face, collapsed into his daughter's arms as the gunfire around Paris fell silent at midnight. Powerful France had suffered its greatest humiliation since 1814.

The citizens of Paris, however, could not accept such a surrender. They further formed a "Central Committee" of self-defense forces and were prepared to fight the enemy to the death in the armed conflict that would ensue after the Prussian army entered the city.

Meanwhile, the government of defense also changed its leadership. Adolf Thiers, who had served as prime minister during the July Monarchy, came to power. He realized that in the current unstable situation, the Central Committee had become another center of political and military power. He was also worried that the workers might arm themselves with weapons from the National Guard, thus provoking the Prussians.

To secure his power, Thiers fled to Versailles with members of the National Assembly and others, causing the city's population to surge from 40,000 to 250,000. To ensure a swift end to the war, Thiers and Bismarck initialed a peace treaty on November 18th, which was to be formally confirmed by parliament once the political system stabilized.

The treaty stipulated the cession of Alsace-Lorraine and reparations, the specific amount of which was yet to be determined. Bismarck was demanding 100 billion francs, reportedly at the behest of the Austrian Emperor, who claimed France could produce 350 billion francs within a year. The Prime Minister, though skeptical, was certain this would secure the other side's agreement to the subsequent offers.

As expected, Thiers was furious upon hearing the figure and immediately offered 15 billion francs, which Bismarck rejected. The two sides engaged in lengthy discussions on the issue, with no final decision yet reached. Meanwhile, the political landscape in Paris had changed dramatically.

Winter came unusually early this year; the Seine is completely frozen over, and nighttime temperatures are approaching minus twenty degrees Celsius!
Masses of people, lacking food and clothing, froze to death, while the government, which had already fled, ignored the fate of the city's millions of residents.

As the National Guard Central Committee adopted a more aggressive stance and its authority steadily grew, the government felt it could no longer allow it to freely control the more than 400 cannons indefinitely. Therefore, as a first step, Thiers ordered the regular army to seize the cannons stored on Montmartre Hill and elsewhere in the city.

The demoralized soldiers not only disobeyed orders but also became like brothers with the National Guard and local residents. General Claude Lecomte of Montmartre was pulled from his horse and later testified that he had ordered his soldiers to fire on the National Guard and the civilian crowd, for which he was executed.

Many other units joined the rebellion, which quickly escalated. The head of government, Thiers, ordered an immediate retreat of all remaining regular troops, police, and administrative and technical personnel. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now the only effective government in Paris: it organized elections on December 3rd. The Paris Commune was born. Its 92 members included a high proportion of skilled workers and some experts. Many were politically active, belonging to factions ranging from republican reformists to various types of socialists, and even Jacobins hoping to restore the dictatorship of the French Revolution of 1789. Louis-Auguste Blanqué, leader of the Blanquists, was elected chairman of the Paris Commune Committee.

This was truly a world-shaking event; before this, no one had imagined that workers would establish their own government. It was generally believed that they needed guidance from the upper classes, but the birth of the commune overturned this theory.

The Commune adopted the red flag and the tricolor flag with red borders used during the Second Republic as its symbolic emblem, and reinstated "La Marseillaise," which had been banned during the Second Empire, as the national anthem. In 1848, during the Second French Republic, radicals and socialists used the red flag and the tricolor flag with red ribbons as their identifier to distinguish themselves from politically neutral republicans, as these neutral, liberal Girondins had done during the 1789 Revolution.

Despite its many internal differences, the council has done a good job of managing the basic public affairs of a city of two million people; it has also been able to reach consensus on some policies, including the separation of church and state, gender equality, factory nationalization, and restrictions on the salaries of highly educated individuals.

The Commune troops, also known as the National Guard, engaged in a small-scale conflict with the regular Versailles Army. Neither side truly wanted to start a large-scale civil war, but neither side wanted to negotiate either.

The outskirts of Courbes, near the city, fell to government forces, and the Commune's armed expedition to Versailles, which had already been postponed, failed. Resistance and survival became the primary considerations, and the Commune leadership made efforts to transform the National Guard into an effective resistance force.

Abroad, trade unions and socialist organizations, including in Germany, held rallies and disseminated messages of support. But all hope for genuine assistance from other French cities was quickly dashed. Thiers and his cabinet in Versailles managed to prevent any information from leaking out of Paris; and the French provinces and countryside had always been skeptical of the movement in the metropolitan areas. The movements in Narbonne, Limoges, and Marseille were swiftly crushed.

As the situation deteriorated further, a branch of parliament won an election and decided to create a "Committee for Public Safety," modeled after the Jacobins of the same name established in 1792. In theory, it was extremely powerful and ruthless, but in practice it was not so effective.

Strong local loyalty, which used to be an advantage for the commune, has now become a disadvantage: without a unified and planned defense, each neighborhood fights for its own survival and will eventually be breached one by one.

(End of this chapter)