The Paris Commune: Anarchy in the French Republic

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time france's jules jean protesters frequently referenced the events of 1871. yet the legacy of the commune is more complicated than simple radicalism at a time of inequality it championed things like women's rights and universal education yet its progress was also marked by hostage taking violence and the near destruction of paris itself if they were handing out awards for craziest eight decades in french history the gold medal winner every time would be the 82 years separating 1789 and 1871. in that time the space of one longish life france saw revolutions depose kings empires replaced revolutionaries kings restored empires restored and uncountable years of warfare and neatly bookending it all were two political entities based in paris two radical bodies that shared a name separated by a near century that name was the paris commune established at the dawn of the french revolution in the wake of the storming of the bastille the original commune was an attempt by parisians to run paris for themselves effectively a sovereign entity it was born from decades of frustrations frustrations that came boiling over in the fires of revolution it was radical connected to its community in a way paris leaders had never been before but it was also violent intimately linked to maximilian robespierre and his reign of terror long after it was dismantled both these images of the commune lingered in the french psyche utopia or dystopia depending on which side of the guillotine you happen to be standing it would be these dueling visions of history that influenced its 1871 rebirth okay now we need to fast forward a little here all the way across the various empires republics and revolutions of the 19th century all the way to 1870. as the year dawned france was officially the second french empire under napoleon iii the mustachioed nephew of o.g napoleon now approaching its 18th anniversary the empire seemed strong stable eternal even but that was just on the surface scratched the veneer of napoleon the third's autocratic paradise and you'd find currents of swirling discontent individual eddies of frustration that were something to pull them together could create a maelstrom of revolution sadly for the emperor that something was already on the horizon while the second french empire was skipping gaily into its 18th year a new european power was on the verge of being born over in prussia ottawa bismarck was preparing to place the final cherry atop his cake of nation building over the previous six years the iron chancellor had bulldozed his army across central europe fighting wars to slowly unite the 39 german states under prussia's control now bismarck calculated he needed just one more big war to finish the job one big war to bring the holdout states into his united germany and what better way to fight than with berlin's historical enemy france that july 1870 bismarck engineered a diplomatic incident so insulting to french honor that napoleon iii immediately declared war to which bismarck was all like sucker before absolutely going to town on the empire the franco-russian war was as one-sided as watching a professional youtuber step into a cage with a pissed off version of conor mcgregor that's also armed with cannons the prussians tore through france in early september napoleon iii himself was taken prisoner so enraged were regular folks that they deposed the absent emperor in a bloodless revolution but rather than stop fighting now that their enemy was internal the prussians drove ever deeper into france in mid-september they surrounded the capital it was the beginning of the siege of paris a grueling three-month blockade that cut off the city from the outside world killed 50 000 people and forced the starving citizens to live off rats but its bitter ends would also be the trigger for something far more radical it was from this miserable siege that the second paris commune would soon be born for late 19th century dudes the siege of paris was one of the defining events not until world war ii would another major european city be so completely surrounded cut off and isolated as the rest of france crumbled the citizens of paris were locked in and bombarded a constant rain of artillery shells but the worst didn't come from the prussian army well not directly no the real nightmares were the weather and the hunger as paul gave way to cold and bitter winter conditions became intolerable the city's horses were slaughtered for food when they were gone people turned to eating rats it was a hellish existence three months of starvation disease and deprivation one in which up to 50 000 people died but it was also a hell that would make prisions more fun than ever inside the french capital people were weary and exhausted yes but they were also combative the way they saw it they were the ones on the front lines defending french honor against prussia's war machine this wasn't an atmosphere of despair it was one of patriotism the patriotism of the blitz spirit or the sort that gripped nyc after 9 11. prisions were hurting but so long as they knew it was for something to defeat a common enemy it would all be worth it unfortunately defeating a common enemy was exactly what wasn't gonna happen from a practical perspective a french surrender was inevitable there's simply no way to turn the tide in a war that had gone this badly wrong better to just cut their losses and negotiate with bismarck on february 8 elections for the post-empire national assembly seemed to prove this returning a massive majority of anti-war conservatives at their head was adolf tier who'd once served as prime minister under france's final king in early 1871 though tier's one concern was getting the prussian army off french soul no matter what the cost and you'd better believe that cost was going to be astronomical bismarck demanded a 5 billion franc indemnity equivalent to nearly a quarter of french gdp and the surrender of alsace and lorraine he also insisted prussian troops be allowed to hold a victory parade in paris the same city that just spent three months bombing into oblivion although a few left-wing deputies in the new assembly including the novelist victor hugo protested thierr's only reaction to bismarck's humiliating demands was a whispered when you hit paris of the surrender terms it did so with the force of 10 000 prussian artillery shells after suffering insane deprivation and trauma for their country prisions were now being told by their same country yeah i mean sorry but it was all kind of a nothing ah c'est la vie it was like adolfties and his entire government had personally lined up to kick every single parisian in the testicles in the siege shattered city rumors flew that had sold them out meanwhile below the surface in the capital's collective psyche those currents of discontent began to swirl together to join into a black rolling sea of anger in the working-class districts weapons were stockpiled people talked of attacking the prussians during their victory parade of restoring the city's honor in the end though it would only be after the prussians were gone the paris finally ignited on march the third after two days of parades and celebrations the thirty thousand prussian troops tiers had let into paris marched away by now tensions were a boiling point it would take an incredibly empathetic leader to stop it all spilling over into violence sadly erdogan had all the emotional intelligence of a half-eaten banana rather than stop paris from exploding he would soon be the one to push the detonator [Music] in the two days of prussian victory celebrations the one french fighting force still allowed underarms had been the national guard the defenders of paris during the siege the guard had started out as a middle-class institution before acquiring more and more workers by 1871 it could call on about 400 000 men all of whom the prussians let keep their guns as a way of maintaining order but if the guards stopped angry parisians from attacking the prussians it wasn't for the sake of order it was because plenty of its more radical leaders were already preparing for a much bigger fight one against their own government like everyone else in paris the guardsmen have been outraged at dier's sucky peace deal in protest on february 24th it declared themselves an independent federation under the control of a central committee rather than take orders from the government guardsmen swore only to obey the committee if tiers gave them an order the committee was fine with they'd go along with it but try and pull any more of that surrender monkey crap and these 400 000 disenchanted parisians would fight to remove him from power over the next couple of weeks the guard increased its grip over paris forming alliances with dozens of neighborhood watch groups known as vigilance committees by mid-march the guard was nothing less than an open challenge to the government's shaky authority right in the heart of the french capital so tears responded by moving the capital on march the 10th the government decamped to versailles a calculated snub to the parisians then dies fired off two laws designed to the national guard one cancelling its soldiers salaries and another ending a wartime moratorium on debt collection the result was half a million already pissed off soldiers suddenly being told that not only would their defense of paris now go unpaid but they'd probably also be hauled off to dettis prison you know they're saying an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind well what's happening here is tiers and the guard are taking it in turns to jab out as many eyes as possible each poking the other then being poked back until paris is basically nick cage and the wicked man screaming charitably you could say diez was asserting his right as elected head of government to not have a renegade army in paris threatening a coup uncharitably you could say that he was turning a potential three-mile island into chernobyl the meltdown came on march the 18th the night before tier decided to finally assert his dominance by ordering the regular army to sneak into paris before dawn and seize the guard's stockpile of cannons it was a hell of a reckless move the cannons tier was after weren't just any old weapons during the siege they'd become symbols of all who'd fought and died to protect paris to give a rough analogy this was like the u.s president ordering soldiers to seize the liberty bell while wiping their asses on a bald eagle made of american flags it was insanely provocative it was also really badly planned before dawn on march 18 1871 regular army soldiers located and secured the guard's guns then they realized that no one had brought horses to drag away the heavy cannons they were still standing around scratching their heads like dum-dums when paris woke up and realized what was going on angry mobs formed around the soldiers demanding they release the guns even now the city might have stepped back from the brink had it not been for claude lecompte one of the generals sent to secure the cannons lecorms got spooked by the mob and yelled at his men to open fire the men took one look at the posho on a horse and another at the bloodthirsty mob and said you know what you guys could have him the lynching and execution of lacobt was the moment all hopes this could end peacefully were dashed realizing this was an act of war the guards central committee had no choice but to go all in that morning guardsmen seized key locations across paris as armed caches and government buildings fell the regular army sounded a full retreat abandoning the city for the first time since 1795 paris was back in the hands of the parisians it was the paris commune mark ii a return to the revolutionary year one and this time around things were going to be crazier and bloodier than ever before and just before we continue today's video and get into all of that craziness let me tell you about today's fantastic sponsor squarespace now more than ever people are getting creative with their time reaching deep into their savings accounts to start a new crafts business or any sort of business really or launch a blog and share their opinions with their neighbors with squarespace the world is yours it's the perfect web tool to help you fashion the internet into whatever you want it to be it's the platform to use when you're ready to get started on that new web project you've been thinking about you're looking to get in and out quick without thinking too much about what your website should look like well bam use one of their quick beautiful templates to make a website that's fresh and for you or maybe you're more of a hands-on person lots of ideas and opinions about what exactly your site should look like well squarespace gives you all the customization options you could ever want with no updates no patches no technical nonsense to worry about and once you're done setting 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overthrowing adolf tier at the time it sort of made sense the communards as they would come to be known didn't want to spark a civil war they probably thought tier would reluctantly negotiate they had encountered aunt yeah being an intransient bloodthirsty dead but they would learn soon enough for now the newly created commune focused on making itself seem legitimate on march 26 an election was held under universal suffrage to determine the commune's future the result was a landslide for the radicals while there would be some small business owners and middle class members most of the commune's leadership was made up of an unstable collection of working-class anarchists extreme republicans and neo-jacobians for its entire existence there would be a continuous struggle between these factions with one side wanting to turn paris into a utopia of decentralized voluntary collectivist living and the other just itching to dig up robert pierre wheel out the guillotine and party like it was 1793. still the continuous behind-the-scenes power struggle didn't stop the commune from bringing in a host of new laws laws so radical they'd still be considered progressive today at a time when most of europe considered women to be all-purpose cleaning and baby-making machines the commune was avowedly feminist not only could women vote in elections they held important positions on committees the famous anarchist louise michelle for example was instrumental in organizing health care in other ways too the commune was ahead of its time free day care centers were open for workers education was made free and compulsory separation of church and state was enforced with guns empty buildings were requisitioned for the homeless soldiers and their families were given pensions access to the law was made free for all the death penalty was even abolished with a guillotine symbolically burned to show no rich people would lose their heads in this revolution even the way the commune self-organized was next level progressive at least at first rather than have a leadership structure the commune separated into nine self-organizing commissions where every topic could be discussed and debated until consensus was reached even today a lot of this sounds like a left-wing wish list and this was all happening in 1871. i mean seriously at this stage most of europe were still ruled by kings but we wouldn't want to give the impression that the commune was just all equality in progress they might have abolished the death penalty but the neo-jacobians were still there still dying to put on a powdered wig and cosplay their rosepierre fantasies as early as april the 5th these guys managed to get the lore on hostages past a fancy way of saying they can arbitrarily arrest anyone they thought to be anti-commune well over 200 people were jailed without committing a crime including famously the archbishop of paris businesses deemed unfriendly were extorted they also got the others to agree to restore the republican calendar this was the one the original jacobians had instituted in 1793. from now on this would no longer be 1871 but year 79 yet perhaps the most pressing problem the commune faced wasn't the new jacobians trying to drag it into ultra left-wing authoritarianism but political reality the reality that thierry's versailles government had managed to recover its footing and was now super interested in showing these communad punks who was the boss on april the first group of guardsmen patrolling outside the walls of paris ran into a regular army unit in the skirmish that followed five guardsmen were captured four of them were summarily executed by gunshot it was the first inkling those embarrassed had of adolf tier's new tactics the elected government in versailles wasn't planning to negotiate it wasn't going to go easy this was now a fight for survival and there could only ever be one winner [Music] the tragedy of the paris commune comes in two flavors each distinct but each tasting of the bitterest disappointment the first is just how comically inept they were at war thanks to their anarchist leanings many in the national guard considered voluntary participation and consensus forming among units to be a badge of honor while that's all great in peace time it's less great when adolf tier is amassing a giant army to come and super kill you the commune itself reorganized this trying to put military figures in charge of the national guard but guardsmen themselves are all like go secure that fort one of those armed guys shooting at me from it no thanks i'd just rather sit here and get drunk thank you but maybe next time every time the commune's experienced soldiers tried to institute proper military discipline a whole bunch of guardsmen vanished never to return when they actually did go fight they might deserve the minute the regular army turned up especially now that the regular army was under the command of a bona fide hard ass patrice demo man a future president of france mcmahon was like the answer to why voluntary collective action doesn't work made flesh before the community even been in power a month it encircled paris in a new siege one as psychologically terrifying as anything the prussians had done it's this terror of artillery shells raining down that might explain the commune's second flavor of disappointment how quickly the neo-jacobians took control for these robespierre fanboys the commune's military failures were like ah duh we told you we needed a strong centralized dictatorship didn't you listen even as the anarchists and republicans resisted they set up a secret police force under a 20-something named raul rigo to monitor the population by april 28th as the situation got worse they even pushed through the creation of a five-man dictatorship to run the show it was named the committee of public safety after the old robespierre outfit that had executed so many parisians in the reign of terror and just like that the commune became something few of its founders had ever wanted still we do need to be careful about overdoing the comparisons to robespierre the original committee of public safety was responsible for tens of thousands of executions in paris alone even with their backs against the wall the commune's version would never authorize more than a few dozen yet there's no doubt this change in direction helped hasten the end when the committee of public safety declared itself all powerful the anarchists quit the commune's council in disgust in the national guard the subsequent fight over who guardsmen were meant to answer to caused morale to collapse in short it was that classic staple of left-wing politics facing a common threat not by working together but by descending into ideological warfare some things apparently never change by mid-may it was clear the commune was going off the rails inside the city commandants had started destroying napoleonic and monarchist symbols determined that even if they were going down they'd take as much of the hated past with them as they could not that it was actually clear that the commune was about to fail outside the city marshall mcmahon was privately preparing for a long bitter fight to retake paris so imagine his surprise when on may the 21st a government sympathizer inside the city breathlessly reported that one of the western gates had been left undefended unable to believe his luck mcmahon sent some men to check and then nearly fell over when they reported back that yeah the city was really just wide open in no time at all mcmahon was funneling tens of thousands of soldiers into paris soldiers with orders to shoot to kill and then shoot some more until nothing was left of this wretched commune it was the beginning of the end an end so bitter so bloody it would nearly destroy paris in the end it took mcmahon a week to retake the city known as the bloody week for reasons that are about to become extremely clear it was a time of intense fighting summary executions and great cultural destruction it was also the moment the commune ceased to function in any meaningful way although its end date is technically may 28th the commune more or less disintegrated in the face of the army guardsmen raced back to their old neighborhoods to make their last stand preferring to protect their loved ones rather than join an organized resistance this only made it easier for mcmahon's well-trained army to pick them off neighborhood by neighborhood the first major defeat came on may the 23rd when government troops captured the area where the riot over cannons had sparked the commune's creation two months earlier pointedly the army marched forty captured communards to the exact spot claude le compt had been lynched and mass executed them this bit of brutality nicely set the stage for the following days when 300 commonards surrendered in a church they were lined up and sprayed with machine guns when one field hospital was taken the commander in charge ordered the wounded national guardsmen shot in their beds as the government slaughtered its way across paris secret police chief raul rugo ordered the commune's own hostages killed 50 people including the archbishop of paris were executed in the commune's final days but even that has nothing on the cultural destruction on the evening of may the 23rd the communard soaked the tulare palace in gasoline filled it with gunpowder and blew it sky high it was the beginning of a campaign of annihilation near jacobian leader louis charles de la chuz ordered the burning of all of paris's churches police buildings theaters and fancy homes the palace of justice went up as did the hotel deville some even attempted to set fire to notre dame although the flames were quickly extinguished by may the 25th half of paris was ablaze and the rest was devastated by street to street fighting yet the end was already in sight by now most of the commune's leadership had fled the city those that stayed such as dennis shoes and rigo had died in the fighting on may 27 the final bitter battle in the pierre lachey cemetery ended with 150 communists captured and mass executed the next day with the commune defeated the reprisals began today it's unknown exactly how many people were killed in the bloody weekend its aftermath mainstream estimates placed the number of dead communards during the fighting at around 7000 with up to another 15 000 executed by the army tens of thousands more were send into exile against this staggering death toll the 50 hostages shot by rigo's goons looks almost like small change although the paris commune died of violent death after only two months of existence its effects were felt for decades it was years before the city of lights could be rebuilt from the communard fires and that was just the physical effects as soon as the commune was gone the fight began over its legacy a fight that's still being fought today on the one hand the commune's egalitarianism and working class focus has inspired a whole bunch of people from vladimir lenin to france's modern yellow best protesters you can even see its influence in the usa what was the chop autonomous zone established in seattle during the george floyd protests if not an american echo of 1871. on the other hand the commune's willful destruction of paris has convinced many that it had a dark and violent core one that could have easily veered into dictatorship and it lasted much longer it's unlikely this fight is going to be settled anytime soon today the paris commune occupies a strange place in french history a warning for some an inspiration for others but there's no denying that it remains a fascinating tale a moment when parisians tried to claim their city for themselves and paid the ultimate price for doing so so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to check out our fantastic sponsor squarespace linking to them below and thank you for watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 142,943

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Id: wjx8_ugeMuo

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021