SCENE FROM THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.
Events of great moment, as may be seen, were occurring with startling rapidity. Before the surrender of Bazaine the advance of the German army had appeared before Paris and on September 19 the siege of that city began. Soon it was so closely invested that food could not enter and the only way out was by balloon. The German bombardment did little damage to the great city, which was defended obstinately. But the Germans had a powerful ally within, where the grisly demon of famine threatened the defenders.
Meanwhile Gambetta, the most ardent patriot left to France, was seeking with nervous energy to raise fresh armies in the south; Garibaldi, his sword free from duty in Italy, had come to the aid of France; all patriots were called to the ranks and a struggle of some importance took place. But all this practically ceased on the 28th of January, 1871, when an armistice brought the hopeless resistance of Paris to an end. Almost at once the war died out on all sides, the Germans occupied all the forts around Paris, and France lay at the mercy of Germany, after a struggle of six months' duration.
The first siege of Paris had terminated; a second and more desperately contested one was at hand. On March 13 the German army around Paris, which had been given the triumph of a march into the conquered city, set out on its return home and the authorities of the new republic prepared to take possession of their freed capital.
They were to find the task one of unlooked-for difficulty. On March 18 the revolutionary element of the city rose en masse, organized under the name of the Commune, took possession of Paris, and prepared to defend it to the death against the leaders of the new-formed government, whom they contemned as aristocrats.
The story of the Commune is a shameful and terrible one. Beginning in a fraternization of the National Guard with the mob, its advent was sealed with murder. In a contest on the 18th for the possession of some cannon General Lecomte ordered his men to fire on the insurgents. They refused. A gentleman standing in a crowd of angry men on the street corner said: "General Lecomte is right." He was immediately seized and quickly recognised as General Clément Thomas, a brave officer who had done gallant service during the siege. This sufficed him nothing with the mob. He and General Lecomte were at once dragged away to prison. At 4 o'clock that same day they were brought out by a party of the insurgent National Guards, and after a mock trial were taken to a walled enclosure and shot down in cold blood. They were the first victims of the mob, which had early begun to burn its bridges behind it.
On the following day the leaders of the outbreak met at the Hôtel-de-Ville. They all belonged to the International, a secret society formed for the abolition of property, religion, rulers, government, and the upper classes, and the reduction of the community to a state of anarchy or something resembling it. They called upon the citizens to meet in their sections and elect a commune—the new form of government advocated by the Anarchists, in which destruction of all existing institutions was to precede reconstruction from the bottom upwards.
Events now moved rapidly. A delegation from the few men of note left in Paris proceeded to Versailles, where the government of the republic was in session, and demanded that special municipal rights should be given to the people of Paris. The refusal of this request precipitated the insurrection. The furious people at once elected a revolutionary government, choosing the most extreme of the revolutionists, who organized what was called the Council of the Commune. This consisted of eighty members, of varied nationality, seventy of them never having been heard of in Paris before. They had risen from the bottom of the deep sea of anarchy to assume control.