Chapter XLVII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 9 page 3

The deputies for Paris, we have seen, spoke of the necessity of electing a Municipal Council. After the departure of Admiral Saisset, the Central Committee resolved that this election should immediately take place, and fixed the day for it on their own authority. Most of the Mayors, though the Assembly and the Government withheld their sanction, came to an agreement with the insurgents respecting the arrangements for the election. This culpable weakness was thus described by M. Thiers in a circular addressed to the departments: " An agreement, to which the Government has remained a stranger, has been established between the pretended Commune and the Mayors to appeal to the elections. They will take place without liberty, and will therefore be destitute of moral authority. Let not the country be troubled, but have confidence; order will be re-established at Paris as elsewhere." However, the name of Commune was not yet heard, and was only adopted on the day after the elections; till then only the name Municipal Council was mentioned. Owing to the compliance of the Mayors, a considerable number of respectable bourgeois took part in the voting (March 26), which resulted in the election of eighty-six councillors. Of these, thirteen belonged to the Central Committee; seventeen to the International; twenty to the party of Blanqui, the Radical press, and the ultra-revolutionists; twenty-one were public speakers from the clubs; and the remaining fifteen belonged to the moderate or bourgeois party. Nearly all of these, seeing what strange colleagues they would be associated with, sent in their resignation without having even taken their seats. Six others, among whom was M. Ranc, resigned their seats between the 7th and the 10th April. On the other hand, M. Delescluze and M. Cournet, who, though deputies sitting in the National Assembly, had been elected to the Commune, wrote to the President of the Assembly that they preferred the municipal to the national distinction, and resigned their seats as representatives of the people.

The name of " Commune" was skilfully chosen by the new Government of Paris. For the masses it symbolised the recovery of those municipal franchises which the National Assembly itself had expressed a willingness to concede, and for which the Parisians had vainly sighed during the twenty years of the Napoleonic usurpation. For the Jacobins, it recalled the revolutionary dictatorship of 1792, concentrating all powers in itself, and giving the law to the whole of France. For the adherents of the International, it indicated that the first step was taken towards the reconstitution of society according to correct principles. The Commune, in the Socialist and revolutionary view, is the true political unit, the basis on which alone a just and legitimate structure of government can be raised. We find the following questions and answers in a little republican catechism, published at Paris during the domination of the insurgents: - " What is the Commune?" " The Commune is the union of the individuals inhabiting one and the same locality, and nominating a communal council by election." " How must the social body, on the basis of the Commune, complete the general political organisation?" " Either by the constitution of the department, which is a group of communes, of the province, which is a group of departments, and finally of the State - or otherwise, for every political organisation will be the most rational and the best, which shall protect and maintain the natural rights of the individual, while securing the harmony and safety of the social body."

The Commune held its first sitting at the Hôtel de Ville on the 29th March, which day, reverting to the exploded nomenclature of the first Revolution, it called the 8th Germinal of the year 79. In ancient Greece a democratic revolution in any city was usually signalised by three measures - the re-division of the land, the recall of the exiles, and the extinction of debts. The first measure exceeded the competence of the Commune, hemmed in as it was by Prussians on one side and Versaillists on the other; but to the second and third it made considerable advances. It opened the prisons, and restored liberty to its friends who, out of a noble disregard to the prejudices of proprietors, had become amenable to incarceration, while it filled them again with those guilty and obstinate citizens whom it suspected of " complicity " with the Versailles Government. Of three decrees passed at its first sitting, the first abolished the conscription, and declared that no armed force, other than the National Guard, could be raised in or introduced into Paris. The two other decrees emulated as far as was practicable the glorious Greek ideal of the " extinction of debts; " the first remitted to all tenants three quarters' rent, the second suspended indefinitely the sale of all pledges left unredeemed in the hands of the pawnbroker.

Money was the most pressing want of the new Government; and it will ever remain a marvel that the Bank of France, containing realisable securities to the value of three milliards (£120,000,000 sterling), though placed during sixty-two days at the mercy of the most unscrupulous set of men that ever held the reins of power in modern times, emerged from the hazard comparatively scatheless. A few millions of francs, belonging chiefly to the city of Paris, were all that the Bank was compelled to disburse to the Commune during its term of power. The merit of this happy result is ascribed by the committee of the Assembly f chiefly to the courage, energy, and presence of mind of the deputy-governor of the Bank, aided by the moderation of the Communal delegate, M. Beslay, and the fidelity of the large staff of employes, more than 500 in number, who defended the establishment with arms in their hands, and not one amongst whom proved false to his trust.

The easy triumph of the insurrection on the 18th March, and the kind of sanction which the elections of the 26th imparted to it, seem to have turned the heads of the ringleaders. They believed that they had but to march out in force against Versailles in order to cause the vile, reactionary, rural, monarchical, priest-ridden Assembly to collapse, the troops fraternising with the people as before. On the 2nd April, a large body of National Guards marched out across the bridge of Neuilly to the Rond-point of Courbevoie, and occupied the barracks of that village. Vinoy moved forward the division Bruat and the brigade Daudel to drive them back. The first life sacrificed to the Moloch of civil war was that of a man universally respected and beloved in the army, Surgeon-General Pasquier, who, while riding to join General Vinoy's staff, missed his way, and falling in with a party of Federals, was at once shot down. The troops behaved extremely well; they seemed anxious to show that they could now be depended upon. The barricades which had been constructed at the Rond-point were carried by assault; the barrack was occupied; and the Federals, routed and in great confusion, recrossed the bridge of Neuilly and fled towards Paris along the Avenue de la Grande Armée. Guns were brought up to the Rond-point, and opened fire with great effect on the fugitives, visible for a great distance on the straight line of avenue which connects that point and the Arc de Triomphe. But no sooner had a few shells fallen than the avenue was cleared as if by magic, the Federals taking refuge in the side streets. The Commune notified the engagement to the citizens of Paris in a picturesque and imaginative bulletin, which said that the " royalist conspirators had attacked with the Pontifical Zouaves and the Imperial police; that the Chouans of Charette and the Vendeans of Cathelineau, flanked by the gendarmes of Valentin (the prefect of police), had rained bullets and shells on the inoffensive village of Neuilly, and commenced a civil war."

Nothing daunted by their defeat, the Communal authorities resolved to make a serious attempt the following day (April 3) to reach Versailles. Their army was divided into two columns. The right column, under Flourens, numbering about 30,000 men, marched over the bridge of Neuilly, re-occupied Courbevoie (from which Vinoy had withdrawn the troops on the previous evening), and directed its march towards Rueil, along the north flank of Mont Valérien. The Federals seem to have been misled by erroneous information into the belief that the garrison would not fire upon them. They were soon undeceived. The column had passed the Rond-point of Bergeret, and had just turned to the right along the road leading to Rueil, when from the frowning hill-top above them issued flashes of fire and thick jets of smoke, and well- aimed shells, bursting in their ranks, scattered them in all directions. Flourens, however, succeeded in rallying the greater portion of them, and reached Rueil. Vinoy had by this time formed his plans. He seems to have handled his troops with much skill; sending one portion of them to threaten Rueil in front, he directed another portion to march between Mont Valérien and the Seine below St. Cloud, as if with the intention of cutting off the retreat of the Federals across the bridge of Neuilly. Perceiving the movement, the insurgent troops hastily evacuated Rueil, and made their way back into Paris by the bridge of Asnières. Flourens was found in a house near Nanterre, endeavouring to conceal himself; a scuffle ensued, and he was killed by a sabre-cut on the head. The left column, issuing from the city on the side of Issy, pressed forward in the direction of Villa Coublay. They were soon met by troops from Versailles, and beaten back with little difficulty as far as the redoubt and hill of Chatillon. This redoubt, and also the whole peninsula of Gennevilliers, General Vinoy now resolved to wrest from the Federals, and to drive them back behind the line of forts or within the enceinte, so that the Assembly at Versailles might deliberate in complete security. Accordingly, on the next day (April 4) he sent two brigades against the redoubt of Chatillon, the garrison of which, to the number of 1,500, having lost their commander, Duval, and finding themselves surrounded, laid down their arms. The Federals holding the forts of Issy and Vanves then opened fire on the redoubt; after a time they got the range, and though the troops sheltered themselves as well as they could, many casualties occurred; nor could any reply be made with the light field-pieces which they had brought with them. Presently the brigade La Mariouse attacked and took Clamart; but they also were immediately exposed to a heavy fire from the forts (where the great guns were worked by practised gunners from Vincennes), and suffered heavily. A decided success had been gained; but as he observed the well-sustained fire from the forts, the painful conviction forced itself on Vinoy's mind, that much still remained to be done, and that many precious lives would be sacrificed, before so determined a resistance could be crushed. Siege-guns must be brought up, and the various siege-works constructed by the Prussians must be adapted to the French artillery practice, and utilised for a second siege of Paris!

On the 7tli April, the bridge of Neuilly, which the insurgents held in great force and had barricaded, was stormed by the Versailles troops. There was great loss of officers; Generals Pechot and Besson were both killed. Entrenchments were made at the Paris end of the bridge, and a strong tête-du-pont constructed, from which incessant firing went on till the end of the siege against the Federals who held the adjoining streets. The Commune had now given the chief command of its troops to a Pole earned Dombrowski.

The party of compromise, in spite of the miserable failure of their former efforts, continued to invent various schemes the object of which was to effect an impossible reconciliation between the combatants. They formed themselves into a new association, with the title of "League of the Republican Union for the Rights of Paris," drew out certain terms to which they considered both sides ought to agree, and, with airs of authority which, considering the circumstances, were somewhat ridiculous, summoned both the National Assembly and the Commune to give in their adhesion to the programme. The Commune answered by the terrible "Decree of the Hostages" (April 6), in the preamble to which they declared that they would follow out the principle of retaliation. " The people," they said, " will take an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." The decree contained six articles; the first announced that "Every person charged with complicity with the Versailles Government will be immediately arrested and imprisoned." Such persons were to be tried by a jury, and if the verdict went against them, they were to be " the hostages of the people of Paris." The fifth article ran as follows: - " Every execution of a prisoner of war, or of a partisan of the regular Government of the Commune of Paris, will be immediately followed by the execution of thrice the number of hostages detained in virtue of Article IV., who will be selected by lot." Under this decree the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, whom we last encountered eloquently enforcing the views of the opposition at the Vatican Council, was arrested on a trumpery charge of plotting against the safety of the state, and thrown into prison as a hostage. Father Ducoudray, rector of the school of Sainte Geneviève, Father Olivaint, the saintly superior of the Jesuits' house in the Rue de Sèvres, the much-respected and beloved cure of the Madeleine, Abbé Déguerry, together with the excellent President Bonjean, the banker Jecker, and several other eminent laymen, were also arrested as hostages.

The Government of the Commune showed from the first a marked hostility to religion and its ministers. The ill-treatment, imprisonment, and murder of the Archbishop and so many other virtuous ecclesiastics, who had never done them the slightest harm, or even intrigued against their rule, but whom they detested as teachers of a doctrine radically opposed to their own, are sufficient proof of this. Other manifestations of the same feeling might be cited. The Citizen Le Moussu issued the following energetic order for the 18th Arrondissement: - " Seeing that the priests are a set of bandits, and that churches are dens in which they have morally assassinated the masses while making France crouch under the grasp of the infamous Bonapartes, Favres, and Trochus, the civil delegate of careers at the ex-prefecture of police, orders that the church of St. Peter at Montmartre be closed, and decrees the arrest of the priests and the ignorantines." By the " ignorantines " were meant, we presume, the choristers, acolytes, beadle, and all other persons connected with the church. Arrests of priests were continually being made, and on Sunday the 16th April the Christian religion was put down in Paris so far as the Commune could effect it, the churches being either closed or employed for some secular purpose, and the clergy arrested or dispersed. Calumnies of the most horrible nature were officially propagated in relation to monks and nuns; we need but refer to the story of the convent of Picpus, and the pretended discovery of sixteen dead bodies in the crypt of the church of St. Laurent. The expulsion or arrest of the Christian brothers and the teaching sisters who perform so large a part of the elementary instruction in France having left the schools vacant, the Commune eagerly seized the opportunity of introducing the favourite system of extreme Liberals - secular and compulsory education. Raoul Rigault, Procureur of the Commune and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, announced in the Official Journal that " the Brothers and Sisters of the Christian schools had abandoned their post (!), and the occasion was fitting to inaugurate definitively a system of lay, gratuitous, and obligatory instruction." A decree of the 28th April ordered the Bréa Chapel to be pulled down, because it was "a standing insult to the vanquished of June." The Bréa Chapel was erected in memory of the general of that name, who was assassinated on the 25th June, 1848, while holding a parley with the insurgent ouvriers.