Unquestionably, the revolt was brought about by the ill-judged and arbitrary conduct of the agents of the National Assembly. To attempt to seize the guns of the National Guard as a preliminary to disarming the only Citizen force which the capital had at its disposal was as illegal as it was provocative. It was virtually a declaration of civil war by the reactionaries in control of the national forces. The people of Paris were in no humour to put up with such high-handed action on the part of men who, they knew, were opposed even to the Republic which they nominally served. They resisted the attempt and captured the generals, Lecomte and Thomas, who had ordered the step to be taken.

So far they were quite within their rights, and Clemenceau at first sympathised wholly with the Federals. The Parisians had undergone terrible privations during the siege, they were exasperated by the denunciations that poured in upon them from the provinces, they saw no hope for their recently won liberties unless they themselves were in a position to defend them, they had grave doubts whether they had not been betrayed within and without during the siege itself. It is no wonder that, under such circumstances, they should resent, by force of arms, any attempt to deprive them of the means of effective resistance to reactionary repression.

There was also nothing in the establishment of the Commune itself which was other than a perfectly legitimate effort to organise the city afresh, after the old system had proved utterly incompetent. But the attempt to disarm the population of Montmartre roused passions which it was impossible to quell. Clemenceau, as Mayor of the district, did all that one man could do to save the two generals, Lecomte and ClÉment Thomas, from being killed. With his sound judgment he saw at once that, whether their execution was justifiable or not, it would be regarded as murder by many Republicans whom the cooler heads in Paris desired to conciliate. As was proved afterwards, he exerted all his power to check even the semblance of injustice. But his final intervention to prevent the tragedy of the ChÂteau Rouge came too late, and Lecomte and Thomas, who had not hesitated to risk the massacre of innocent citizens on behalf of a policy of repression, were regarded as the first victims of an infuriated mob.

The outcome of Clemenceau’s own endeavours to save these misguided militarists was that he himself became “suspect” to the heads of the Central Committee of the Commune sitting at the HÔtel de Ville, which had taken control of all Paris. He was the duly elected and extremely popular Radical-Socialist—to use a later designation—Mayor of perhaps the most advanced arrondissement in the capital, he had been sent to Bordeaux by a great majority of his constituents to sit on the extreme left, and, in that capacity, had stoutly defended the rights of Paris; he was strongly in favour of most of the claims made by the leaders of the Commune. But all this went for nothing. The new Committee wanted their own man at Montmartre, and Clemenceau was not that man.

So Mayor of Montmartre he ceased to be, but earnest democrat and devoted friend of the people he remained. Unfortunately, having a wider outlook than most of those who had suddenly come to the front, he could not believe that mere possession of the capital meant attainment of the control of France by the Parisians, or the freeing of his country from German occupation. For once he advocated prudence and suggested compromise. A reasonable arrangement between the administrators of Paris with their municipal forces and the National Assembly with its regular army seemed to Clemenceau a practical necessity of the situation. He therefore urged this policy incessantly upon the Communists. It was an unlucky experience. Pyat, Vermorel and others so strongly resented his moderate counsels that they issued an order for his arrest, with a view to his hasty, if judicial, removal. Failing to lay hold upon Clemenceau himself, they captured a speaking likeness of the Radical doctor in the person of a young Brazilian. Him they were about to shoot, when they discovered that their proposed victim was the wrong man. Possibly these personal adventures in revolutionary democracy under the Commune may have influenced Clemenceau’s views about Socialism in practical affairs in after life.

It is highly creditable to Clemenceau that a few years later one of his greatest speeches was delivered in the National Assembly to obtain, the liberation and the recall from exile of the very same men who would gladly have silenced him for good and all when they were in power. However, he escaped their well-meant attentions, and, leaving Paris, went on a tour of vigorous Radical propaganda through the Provinces.

This was a most important self-imposed mission. Clemenceau, as he showed by his vote at Bordeaux, was strongly in favour of continuing the war and bitterly opposed to any surrender whatever. At the same time he was a thoroughgoing Republican who did not forget that the mass of Frenchmen must have voted for the Empire a few months before, or Napoleon’s plÉbiscite, of course, could not have been so successful, even with the whole of the official machinery in the hands of the Imperialists. Differing from Gambetta afterwards on many points, the coming leader of the advanced Radicals was at this period entirely at one with the man who had not despaired of France when all seemed lost. But in order to carry on the war with any hope of success and to keep the flag of the Republic flying, it was essential that the people of the provincial towns and the peasants should be kept in touch with Paris and be convinced that the only chance of safety and freedom lay in sinking all internecine differences for the sake of unity. No man, not even Gambetta himself, was better qualified for this service. Throughout his tour he kept the independence, welfare and freedom of France as a whole high above all other considerations. But the risks he ran were not trifling. The local reactionists were by no means ready to accept his views. The police was set upon his trail, with great inconvenience to himself. But at no period of his life has Clemenceau considered his personal safety of any account. He had set himself to accomplish certain work which he deemed to be necessary, and he carried it through without reference to the dangers around him. Nor must the success of this propaganda be measured by its immediate results. The great thing in those days of defeat and despair was to keep up the national spirit and to declare that, though the French armies might be beaten again and again, the France of the great Revolution and the Republic should never be crushed down. Believing, as Clemenceau did, in the religion of patriotism and the sacred watchwords of the eighteenth-century upheaval, he spoke with a sincerity that gave to his utterances the value of the highest oratory. The speeches produced a permanent impression on those who heard them, and their effect was felt for many years afterwards.

But this was quite as objectionable to Thiers and the case-hardened reactionists as his previous conduct had been to Pyat and the extremists of the Commune. Men of ability and judgment are apt to be caught between two fires when prejudice and passion take control on both sides. It was, in fact, little short of a miracle that the future Prime Minister of France did not complete his services to his country by dying in the ditch under the wall of PÈre-la-Chaise at the early age of thirty-one.

Few movements have been more grotesquely misrepresented than the Commune of Paris. For many a long year afterwards almost the whole of the propertied classes in Europe spoke of the Communists as if they had been a gang of scoundrels and incendiaries, without a single redeeming quality; while Socialists naturally enough refused to listen to virulent abuse of men most of whom they well knew were inspired by the highest ideals and sacrificed themselves for what they believed to be the good of mankind. At the beginning Paris assuredly had no intention whatever of courting a struggle with the supporters of the Republic at Bordeaux, however reactionary they might be. Such men as Delescluze, Courbet, Beslay, Jourde, CamÉlinat, Vaillant, Longuet, to speak only of a few, were no mere hot-headed revolutionaries regardless of all the facts around them. Paris was admirably administered under their short rule—never nearly so well, according to the testimony of two quite conservative Englishmen who were there at the time. One of these was the famous Oxford sculler and athlete, E. B. Michell, an English barrister and a French avocat; the other was my late brother, Hugh, a Magdalen man like Michell. They both knew Paris well, and both were of the same opinion as to the municipal management under the Commune. Michell in an article in Fraser’s Magazine, then an important review, wrote as follows:

“It is extremely important that the serious lesson which the world may read in the history of the Revolution should not be weakened in its significance or interest by any ill-grounded contempt either for the acts of the Communal leaders or for the sincerity of their motives. We have seen that the army on which the Revolutionists relied, and by means of which they climbed to power, was not, as certain French statesmen pretended, and some English papers would have had us believe, a ‘mere handful of disorderly rebels,’ but a compact force, well drilled, well organised, and valiant when fighting for a cause that they really had at heart. It is equally false and unfair to regard the Communal Assembly as a crew of unintelligent and mischievous conspirators, guided by no definite or reasonable principle, and seeking only their own aggrandisement and the destruction of all the recognised laws of order. Yet it is certain that such an idea respecting the Commune is very generally entertained by ordinary English readers. It may be shown that the policy of this Government, though defaced by many gross abuses and errors, had much in it to deserve the consideration, and even to extort the admiration, of an intelligent and practical statesman. . . .

“Foreign writers have delighted to represent the purposes of the Commune as vague and unintelligible. Even in Paris and at Versailles writers and talkers affected at first to be ignorant of the real projects and principles entertained by the Revolutionists. But the Commune of 1871 has itself destroyed all possibility of mistake upon the subject. It has put to itself and answered the question in the most explicit terms. The Journal Officiel (of Paris) contained, on April 20th, a document worthy of the most careful perusal. It appears in the form of a declaration to the French people, and explains fully enough the main principles and the chief objects which animated the men of the Commune. Without bestowing on this address the ecstatic eulogies to which certain Utopian philosophers have deemed it entitled, we may credit it as being a straightforward, manly, and not altogether unpractical exposÉ of the ideas of modern Communists.

“. . . ‘It is the duty of the Commune to confirm and determine the aspirations and wishes of the people of Paris; to explain, in its true character, the movement of March 18th—a movement which has been up to this time misunderstood, misconstrued, and calumniated by the politicians at Versailles. Once more Paris labours and suffers for the whole of France, for whom she is preparing, by her battles and her devoted sacrifices, an intellectual, moral, administrative, and economic regeneration, an era of glory and prosperity.

“‘What does she demand?

“‘The recognition and consolidation of the Republic as the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the regular and free development of society; the absolute independence of the Commune and its extension to every locality in France; the assurance by this means to each person of his rights in their integrity, to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and capacities as a man, a citizen, and an artificer. The independence of the Commune will have but one limit—the equal right of independence to be enjoyed by the other Communes who shall adhere to the contract. It is the association of these Communes that must secure the unity of France.

“‘The inherent rights of the Commune are these: The right of voting the Communal budget of receipts and expenditure, of regulating and reforming the system of taxation, and of directing local services; the right to organise its own magistracy, the internal police and public education; to administer the property belonging to the Commune; the right of choosing by election or competition, with responsibility and a permanent right of control and revocation, the communal magistrates and officials of all sorts; the right of individual liberty under an absolute guarantee, liberty of conscience and liberty of labour; the right of permanent intervention by the citizens in communal affairs by means of the free manifestation of their ideas, and a free defence of their own interests, guarantees being given for such manifestations by the Commune, which is alone charged with the duty of guarding and securing the free and just right of meeting and of publicity; the right of organising the urban defences and the National Guard, which is to elect its own chiefs, and alone provide for the maintenance of order in the cities.

“‘Paris desires no more than this, with the condition, of course, that she shall find in the Grand Central Administration, composed of delegates from the Federal Communes, the practical recognition and realisation of the same principles. To insure, however, her own independence, and as a natural result of her own freedom of action, Paris reserves to herself the liberty of effecting as she may think fit, in her own sphere, those administrative and economic reforms which her population shall demand, of creating such institutions as are proper for developing and extending education, labour, commerce, and credit; of popularising the enjoyment of power and property in accordance with the necessities of the hour, the wish of all persons interested, and the data furnished by experience. Our enemies deceive themselves or deceive the country when they accuse Paris of desiring to impose its will or its supremacy upon the rest of the nation, and of aspiring to a Dictatorship which would amount to a veritable attack against the independence and sovereignty of other Communes. They deceive themselves or the country when they accuse Paris of seeking the destruction of French unity as established by the Revolution. The unity which has hitherto been imposed upon us by the Empire, the Monarchy, and the Parliamentary Government is nothing but a centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and burdensome. Political unity as desired by Paris is a voluntary association of each local initiative, a free and spontaneous co-operation of all individual energies with one common object—the well-being, liberty, and security of all. The Communal Revolution initiated by the people on the 18th of March inaugurated a new political era, experimental, positive, and scientific. It was the end of the old official and clerical world, of military and bureaucratic rÉgime, of jobbing in monopolies and privileges, to which the working class owed its state of servitude, and our country its misfortunes and disasters.’”

The two Englishmen, coming straight to my house from Paris, gave me a favourable account of the administration of municipal Paris, especially at the time when Cluseret held command.

Others who were there at the same time were similarly impressed. Paris ceased even to be the Corinth of Europe, since all prostitutes had been ordered out of the city. The leaders set an example of moderation in their style of living, which was the more remarkable as they had no authority but their own sense of propriety to limit their expenditure. How little they regarded themselves as relieved from the ordinary rules of the strictest bourgeois social order is apparent, also, from the fact that Jourde and Beslay, who were responsible for the finances of the Commune, actually borrowed £40,000 from the Rothschilds in order to carry on the ordinary business of the Municipality. Yet at the time not less than £60,000,000 in gold, apart from a huge store of silver, was lying at their mercy in the Bank of France; enough, as some cynically said, if judiciously used, to have bought up all M. Thiers’ Government and his army to boot. The fact that the Communists left these vast accumulations untouched proves conclusively that they were the least predatory, some might say the least effective, revolutionists who ever held subversive opinions. In all directions they showed the same spirit. Every department was managed as economically and capably as they could organise it. But always on the most approved bourgeois lines. Many of the reforms they introduced, notably those by CamÉlinat at the Mint, are still maintained.

How, then, did it come about that people of this character and capacity were regarded almost universally as desperate enemies of society, from the moment when they came to the front in their own city? It is the old story of the hatred of the materialist property-owner and profiteer for the idealist who is eager at once to realise the new period of public possession and co-operative well-being. The fact that such an indomitable anarchist-communist as the famous Blanqui, who spent the greater part of his life in prison, took an active part in the Commune and that others of like views were associated with the rising scared all the “respectable” classes, who regarded any attack upon the existing economic and social forms as a crime of the worst description. A tale current at the time puts the matter in a humorous shape. A number of communists, when arrested, were put in gaol with a still larger number of common malefactors. These latter greatly resented this intrusion, boycotted the political prisoners, and, it is said, would have gone so far as to attack their unwelcome companions but for the intervention of the warders. Asked why they exhibited such animosity towards men who had done them no harm, the ordinary criminals took quite a conservative, bourgeois view of their relations to the new-comers. “We,” they said, “have some of us taken things which belonged to other people; but we have never thought for a moment of abolishing the right of property in itself. Not having enough ourselves, we wanted more and laid hands upon what we could get. But these men would take everything and leave nothing for us.” So even the gaolbirds embraced the bourgeois ethic of individual ownership.

Moreover, the International Working Men’s Association had been founded in London in 1864, just seven years before. Although the late Professor Beesly, certainly as far from a violent revolutionist as any man could be, took the chair at the first meeting and English trade unionists of the most sober character constituted the bulk of the members in London, the terror which this organisation inspired in the dominant minority all over Europe was very far indeed in excess of the power which it could at any time exercise. But the names of Marx, the learned German-Jew philosopher, and Bakunin, the Russian peasant-anarchist, were words of dread to the comfortable classes in those days. Marx with Engels had written the celebrated “Communist Manifesto,” at the last period of European disturbance, in 1848, analysing the historic development and approaching downfall of the entire wage-earning system, with a ruthless disregard for the feelings of the bourgeoisie. Its conclusion appealing to the “Workers of the World” to unite was not unnaturally regarded as a direct incitement to combined revolt. Though, therefore, few had read the Manifesto this appeal had echoed far and wide, and the organisation of the International itself was credited with the intention to use the Commune of Paris as the starting-point for a world-wide conflagration. Thus the movement in Paris, which at first had no other object than to secure the stability of the democratic Republic, was regarded as an incendiary revolt, and the brutal outrages of M. Thiers, aided by the mistakes of the Communists themselves, gradually forced extremists to the front. Some were like Delescluze, noble enthusiasts who knew success was impossible, and courted death for their ideal as sowing the seed of success for their great cause of the universal Co-operative Commonwealth in the near future; others were such as FÉlix Pyat, a furious subversionist of the most ruffianly type, who mixed up personal malignity and individual hatred with his every action, and brought discredit on his own comrades. Victory for the Socialist ideals, with the Germans containing one side of Paris and the Versailles troops attacking the other, was impossible—would have been impossible even if the Communists had suppressed their truly fraternal hatreds and had developed a military genius. They did neither. Cluseret showed some inkling of the necessities of the case, but Dombrowski, Rossel and other leaders exhibited no capacity. The wonderful thing about it all was that during the crisis, which lasted two months, Paris was so well administered. The sacrifice of the hostages and the tactics of incendiarism pursued at last, not by the Communist leaders, but by the Anarchist mob broken loose from all control, have hidden from the public at large, who read only the prejudiced accounts of the capitalist press, the real truth about the Commune of Paris.

But whatever may have been done in resistance to the invasion of M. Thiers’ army of reaction, nothing could possibly justify the horrible vengeance wreaked upon the people of Paris by the soldiery and their chiefs. It was a martyrdom of the great city. The coup d’État of Louis Napoleon was child’s play to the hideous butchery ordered and rejoiced in by Thiers, Gallifet and their subordinates. There was not even a pretence of justice in the whole massacre. Thousands of unarmed and innocent men and women were slaughtered in cold blood because Paris was feared by the bloodthirsty clique who regarded her rightly as the main obstacle to their reactionary policy. It was but too clear evidence that, when the rights of property are supposed to be imperilled, all sense of decency or humanity will be outraged by the dominant minority as it was by the slave-owners of old or the nobles of the feudal times.

But the Commune itself, as matters stood, was as hopeless an attempt to “make twelve o’clock at eleven” as has ever been seen on the planet. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was not more certainly foredoomed to failure than was the uprising of the Communists of Paris in 1871. But the Socialists of Europe, like the abolitionists, have celebrated the Commune and deified its martyrs for many a long year. The brave and unselfish champions of the proletariat who then laid down their lives in the hope that their deaths might hasten on the coming of a better day hold the same position in the minds of Socialists that John Brown held among the friends of the negro prior to the great American Civil War. It was an outburst of noble enthusiasm on their part to face certain failure for the “solidarity of the human race.” But those who watched what happened then and afterwards can scarcely escape from the conclusion that the loss of so many of its ablest leaders, and the great discouragement engendered by the horrors of defeat, threw back Socialism itself in France fully twenty years.

Recent experience in several directions has shown the world that enthusiasm and idealism for the great cause of human progress, and the co-ordination of social forces in the interest of the revolutionary majority of mankind, cannot of themselves change the course of events. Unless the stage in economic development has been reached where a new order has already been evolved out of the previous outworn system, it is impossible to realise the ideals of the new period by any sudden attack. Men imbued with the highest conceptions of the future and personally quite honest in their conduct may utterly fail to apply plain common sense to the facts of the present. Dublin, Petrograd and Helsingfors, nearly forty years later, did but enforce the teachings of the Commune of Paris.