Read Online The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne - Free Book Online

discontent under the Second Empire, philosophical and political, that at the moment were less easily classified. Workers who had the time and strength to think began to be gnawed by the fear that, as the gulf between patron and employee widened, not only was the latter’s relative prosperity diminishing, but also any say he might have in the actual development of the new industrial system, which was turning out increasingly to his disadvantage. It was a fear that was by no means confined to the French worker, as 1848 had shown, but there lay a particular, dangerous legacy behind French frustrations. After each of the three major uprisings within the past century, the Great Revolution of 1789, the July Days of 1830, and the Februaryand June uprisings of 1848, the French workers felt in retrospect that they had been swindled. It was mostly their blood that had flowed at the barricades, but on each occasion the bourgeoisie had somehow slyly reaped the benefits. The resentment was particularly keen among Paris workers, who with some justification regarded themselves as initiators of all three revolutions; and above all their memories smouldered from the most recent one. During the June insurrection of 1848 a higher proportion than ever before of the several thousands killed in Paris were workers. In the resistance to the coup d’état of December 1851, which Louis-Napoleon himself quelled with unmitigated brutality, some 160 were killed in Paris, most of them workers, and in the regime of terror that followed 26,000 were arrested and transported in hulks. Henceforth the Parisian proletariat, more politically conscious than any other, would never forgive Louis-Napoleon for destroying the Republic they had created; nor would they forget the way the petit bourgeois had betrayed them when they were so brutally mown down on these last occasions. Only three ingredients were required to spark off a new and even more menacing explosion: a diminution of the vigilant police state, weapons, and organization.
    The last of these three requirements, organization—something virtually unknown to workers in the past—was growing apace, feeding upon at the same time as it nourished their resentments. Louis-Napoleon’s attitude towards it was disastrously ambiguous and contradictory. At first he granted the workers the right to strike (which they used to the full), but forbade them the right to affiliate. Gradually, half-heartedly—partly as a manœuvre to play the workers off against the growing power of the Orleanist bourgeoisie—he permitted the workers to form unions under close police supervision. But below the surface things were already seething. In 1863 French representatives attended the first meeting of the International Working Men’s Association, organized by Karl Marx whose new and more violent teachings were beginning to replace, in France, those of the venerated Socialist, Proudhon. In 1867, the year of the Great Exhibition, the International held its second Congress; Das Kapital was published, and Marx’s supporters staged their first successful demonstrations in Paris. Though still in its infancy, with its receipts for 1867 totalling only £67 and Marx himself regarding most of its 70,000 members as ‘ragamuffins’, by 1870 the French branch of the International was capable of organizing a big strike at Creusot; more important, it had established itself as a centre for revolutionary propaganda and conspiracy.
    The opponents of Louis-Napoleon were, however, by no means confined to those who wore blue smocks. Undoubtedly the façade ofthe Second Empire owed much of its frivolous brilliance to the fact that the mass of the bourgeoisie turned to the pursuit of pleasure as an outlet for energies that would otherwise have been channelled into political activities, were these not so heavily restricted under the Empire. At the same time this façade successfully, but treacherously, concealed the mounting resentments below, which