Photograph of a barricade during the uprising of March 18, 1871 • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS In September 1870 one of the most terrible episodes in its history began for Paris. The capital, which had just given France a republican regime, was besieged by the Prussian armies. During this siege of five months, 58,000 people will find death, swept away by hunger and the cold much more surely than by cannonballs. On January 28, 1871, the bloodless city capitulated. However, part of the public remains hostile to peace. Contrary to the province, the capital mainly wishes to continue the war. On March 28, this part of public opinion took power and proclaimed the Paris Commune. Supporters of “la Sociale” The first decisions of the Commune will be to cancel the rents due since the beginning of the conflict in order to relieve the poorest, to separate the Church and the State, to prohibit night work and to make compulsory and free education of all children, boys and girls. Parisian power will therefore be subjected to a new siege:that led from Versailles by Adolphe Thiers, then head of state, under the mocking eye of the Prussians. This fratricidal war between the French ended on May 28, 1871 in an atmosphere of apocalypse, where federates and Versailles clashed for several days on the barricades that line the streets of Paris delivered to the flames. At the end of this "bloody week", the Communards were defeated. Their fate will be sealed at gunpoint or before a military tribunal. Who are these men whose only mouth is "the Social", this dream Republic where the workers would live with dignity from the fruits of their labor? Communards are not miserable workers. They are mostly skilled workers, craftsmen in a city with many workshops. Cabinetmakers, locksmiths, jewellers, engravers, sculptors, perfumers and even typographers, they represent the working class aristocracy. At their side, we also find bourgeois, “intellectuals”, even if the word is still little used. They are journalists like Henri Rochefort, the founder of the newspaper La Lanterne , writers like Jules Vallès, who would publish L’Insurgé , literary testimony of his experience of the Commune, professors or lawyers like Georges Clemenceau, even if the latter quickly dissociated himself from the movement because of the violence, which he disapproved of. All are politicized on the left and feel heirs to the revolutionary tradition that shook Paris in 1789, in 1830, in 1848. Louise Michel, the “Red Virgin” What will become of these historical losers? Some die in the last street fights. Woe to the speaker who is a little too well known and who will be lynched without judgment in a square or at the foot of a wall, like Eugène Varlin. Those who are arrested will be judged at Versailles. Louise Michel, a teacher who took part in the fighting despite her gender, initially escaped arrest. The Versaillese went to her house, where they arrested her mother. The now famous "Red Virgin" surrenders to her adversaries to free the innocent old woman. Jean Allemane, a typographer by profession and a fighter for the Commune, was arrested on the denunciation of a neighbour. Like Henri Rochefort, Louise Michel and Jean Allemane will be sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia, where there is a French penal colony. Some prisoners awaiting trial are imprisoned on pontoons, ships too dilapidated to go to sea and moored at the quay in war ports such as Rochefort, Brest or Toulon. You can't stand there. This is where the great geographer Élisée Reclus will spend several months before his trial. Jean Allemane recounts his deportation in his Memoirs of a Communard published in 1906. Handcuffed in Paris, he was taken by train to Toulon to undergo the regime of convicts, before leaving for New Caledonia on the ship La Virginie . A ring was attached to his left ankle to which was riveted a chain weighing 6 kilos, which he kept until 1878. Political prisoners were mixed with common law prisoners. The food is served in a large tub where everyone eats with their fingers, and they drink one after the other from the common canister. For a cigarette smoked in secret, for a refusal to obey, one is suspended by the hands or by the feet for several hours. Prison, penal colony or exile Henri Rochefort underwent a less harsh regime, that of the prison in a fortified enclosure on the Ducos peninsula, where most of the prisoners withered away, prey to idleness, since work was prohibited there. Henri Rochefort develops a spectacular escape in 1874 and manages to reach Australia. He will sell the story of his deportation and his adventures to the New York Herald , an American newspaper. Meanwhile, Louise Michel, like most women, is subject to a more liberal regime. She obtained the authorization to open a school in Noumea, as well as that of carrying out two scientific missions to study the Caledonian populations and their environment. Finally, some of the communards escape arrest and choose exile. Thus the sculptor Jules Dalou, whose works are still visible on the Place de la Nation and at the Palais-Bourbon, will find the writer Jules Vallès in London. The first is sentenced to hard labor for life, the second is sentenced to death in absentia. Victor Hugo, who had returned from his long exile under the Second Empire, tirelessly demanded amnesty for political prisoners. On July 11, 1880, total amnesty was voted. The most humble deportees will remain in New Caledonia, where their family has sometimes accompanied them. Today, their descendants know this page of history well. As for the most famous, they return to France to resume the political fight there with more peaceful methods. Jean Allemane is one of the founders of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party, which will be closer to Jean Jaurès. Having become a deputy, he died in 1935, on the eve of the Popular Front. Louise Michel will travel across the country to give conferences and support causes that seem just to her. In 1905, several thousand people followed his coffin. Barely ten years after his own return from exile under the Second Empire, Victor Hugo tirelessly called for amnesty for political prisoners, particularly from the Senate, where he was elected. The geographer Élisée Reclus benefited from a reduction in sentence long before the others. And for good reason:he is one of the most famous authors of his time. Inventor of modern geography, he published before the siege a bestseller entitled The Earth . Arrested in April, he was sentenced to deportation. The most illustrious geographers in Europe, English, Belgian and even German, wrote a petition to ask for the revision of his trial. Faced with the emotion of these great pens, his sentence was commuted to banishment in 1872. It was therefore in Switzerland that Reclus worked on his major work, Universal Geography in 19 volumes. But it is probably the famous painter Gustave Courbet who will have the most astonishing fate:as delegate to the Fine Arts of the Commune, he is considered responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme column and will have to personally pay the rebuilding of the monument for an amount of 323,091.68 gold francs. His death in 1877 interrupted the ongoing negotiations for the spreading of this debt over 30 years... Find out more The Headquarters and the Commune of Paris. Actors and witnesses tell. 1870-1871, A. Frerejean, C. L’Hoër, L’Archipel, 2020.The Commune and the Communards, J. Rougerie, Gallimard (Folio), 2018. Victims and Convicts • 6 hostages shot by the Commune on May 24.• Between 15,000 and 20,000 died during the "bloody week".• 147 Communards shot in front of the Federated Wall on May 28.• About 50,000 people arrested, including 38,000 at the end of May.• 26 death sentences carried out.• 7,851 men and 65 women sentenced to simple deportation or to a fortified enclosure or to forced labor in New Caledonia. How old were they in May 1871? Henri Rochefort:40 years old Jules Vallès:38 Georges Clemenceau:29 Eugene Varlin:31 Louise Michel:40 years old Élisée Reclus:41 Jean Allemane:27 Jules Dalou:32 Gustave Courbet:51 The commitment of Victor Hugo On May 22, 1876, the writer, then elected senator, defended his amnesty bill before the senate. “When everyone has, more or less, wanted the good and done the bad […] what we implore, what we want, is appeasement; and, gentlemen, there is only appeasement, it is oblivion. Gentlemen, in political language, oblivion is called amnesty. I ask for amnesty. I ask for it full and complete. Without conditions. Without restrictions. […] We must close the whole wound. We must extinguish all hatred. »
