Paris Commune (French Revolution)

Hôtel de Ville, Paris, on 9 Thermidor

The Paris Commune during the French Revolution was the government of Paris from 1789 until 1795. Established in the Hôtel de Ville just after the storming of the Bastille, it consisted of 144 delegates elected by the 48 divisions of the city. Before its formal establishment, there had been much popular discontent on the streets of Paris over who represented the true Commune, and who had the right to rule the Parisian people. ^[1] The first mayor was Jean Sylvain Bailly, a relatively moderate Feuillant who supported consitutional monarchy. He was succeeded in November 1791 by Pétion de Villeneuve after Bailly's unpopular use of the National Guard to disperse a riotous assembly in the Champ de Mars (17 July 1791). By 1792, the Commune was dominated by those Jacobins who were not in the Legislative Assembly due to the Self-Denying Ordinance.

Legislative Origins and Early History

When Louis XVI acscended to the throne, he initially sought to establish better relations with a Paris that had felt subordinated by Versailles, and in 1774 he restored the Parlement of Paris - a court of nobles that had previously been abolished. However its powers were limited, and economic pressures meant that Versailles imposed austerity measures on the military and policing structures of Paris, incentivising disloyalty to the crown amongst soldiers and the police^[2]. This coupled with the perceived frivolity of royal spending encouraged popular anger, and radical pamphleteering and meetings started to become a key part of the Parisian bourgeous intellectual culture. Amidst this anger and the wider contemporary social upheavals in France, on June 25th 1789 12 representatives from three different parts of the city voted in favour of creating a united Parisian municipality. Further reforms proposed by Nicolas de Bonneville aimed to create a Parisian Bourgeois Guard that would later become a National Guard (and was composed of 48,000 citizens) and a Commune that would have its own assembly which named itself L'Assemblée Générale des Électeurs de la Commune de Paris and was established on July 11th ^[3]. On the 20th July, each district of Paris elected 2 representatives, creating an assembly of 120 representatives who primarily came from the Third Estate. To further this revolutionary establishment of an autonomous Paris as the assembly asserted itself, Paris itself was divided into Revolutionary Sections, and Louis XVI himself gave permission for this on May 21st 1790. Each section was granted its own popular militia, civil committee, and revolutionary committee. These sections acted as intermediaries between local populations (largely sans-culottes) and the legislative Paris Commune, and initially tended to deal with legal and civil concerns, but by 1792, the sections were becoming increasingly radicalised and focused on political issues and struggles. The distinctions between an active and passive citizen were abolished by the Commune on the 25th July 1792 as the Commune became increasingly Jacobin in its orientation, and ideas of full citizenship were beginning to take root.

The Communard Insurrection of 1792

In the earlier days of the Commune, Feuillist and then Girondin bourgeois Republican forces had dominated, but an increasing Jacobin presence amongst the Parisian political class became increasingly militant in its desire to establish control of the Commune, and it succeeded in doing so formally as part of an organised seizure of power in August 1792, and as a result of this, the Paris Commune became insurrectionary in the summer of 1792, essentially refusing to take orders from the central French government. On the night of 9 August 1792 (spurred by the issue of the Brunswick Manifesto on 25 July) a new revolutionary Commune, led by Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Jacques Hébert took possession of the Hôtel de Ville; the next day insurgents assailed the Tuileries, where the royal family resided. During the ensuing constitutional crisis, the collapsing Legislative Assembly of France was heavily dependent on the Commune for the effective power that allowed it to continue to function as a legislature. The all-powerful Commune demanded custody of the royal family, imprisoning them in the Temple fortress. A list of "opponents of the Revolution" was drawn up, the gates to the city were sealed, and on 28 August the citizens were subjected to domiciliary visits, ostensibly in a search for muskets. It took charge of routine civic functions but is best known for mobilizing the people towards direct democracy and insurrection when it deemed the Revolution to be in danger, as well as for its campaign to dechristianize the country. This campaign of dechristianisation was spearheaded by many prominent figures within the Commune, such as the minister of war Jean-Nicolas Pache who sought to disseminate the work of Jacques Hébert by purchasing thousands of copies of his books and his radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne for free distribution to the public. ^[4] The Hébertists amongst the Communards managed to successfully transform Notre-Dame and numerous other churches into a Temple of Reason, further entrenching the Commune's political commitment to the Cult of Reason. As the Commune became increasingly radical and Jacobin-dominated it adopted radical left Montagnard ideas and policies, and was headed by Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and Hébert himself from November 1792 until their overthrow and eventual execution as part of the Thermidorian coup in July 1794.

The Thermidorian Reaction and Decline of the Commune

It was not until 1792 that the government had a formal cabinet in place, with the appointment of the Ministers of the French National Convention and the decision of the Commissioners of the Committee of Public Safety in 1794 to take charge of administrative departments, but the increased and consolidated power of the National Convention by 1794 now meant that they could challenge the insurrectionary and often hostile power of the Paris Commune. The ousting of Robespierre on 27th July 1794 (or 9 Thermidor II in the revolutionary calendar), marked a huge organised counter-revolution against the radical left and Robespierre himself from the National Convention, and this naturally spelt trouble for the Paris Commune. When he was detained, the troops of the Paris Commune who were largely loyal to him organised an attempt to liberate him, which was in turn met by a counter-attack from Convention forces. They barricaded themselves into the Hotel de Ville, and on the 28th July the Convention forces succeeded in capturing Robespierre and the supporters who remained with him, and executed them on the same day. 70 members of the Paris Commune were also executed shortly after this on July 29th, as were many members of Jacobin and Montagnard clubs - marking the beginning of the White Terror. With the execution of most of its members, the Commune was effectively a proxy of the National Convention, and subject to its direct rule. The government of the republic was then succeeded by the French Directory in November 1795.

Notes