The rappel was at once beaten. The colonel of cuirassiers, Billet, who, accompanied by orderlies, rode through the town, was hemmed in by the people, and constrained to cry, "Vive la République!" At five o'clock the whole National Guard was in arms on the Place de la Mairie. The officers met in the Hôtel-de-Ville, where a councillor proposed to proclaim the Commune. The mayor objected, but the cry resounded on all sides. Captain Coissac took upon himself to go to the station in order to stop the train ready for the departure of the troops. The other officers consulted their companies, which answered with one unanimous cry, "Vive Paris! A bas Versailles!" Soon after, the battalions, filing off before the Hôtel-de-Ville, preceded by two municipal councillors in their official costume, went to ask the general for the release of the soldiers arrested during the course of the day. The general gave the order to set them free, and at the same time sent word to Colonel Billet to prepare against the insurrection. From the Place Tourny the Federals repaired to the prefecture, occupying it in spite of the resistance of the Conservative National Guards, and commenced throwing up some barricades. A few soldiers arriving from the Rue des Prisons, several citizens adjured the officers not to commence a civil war. These hesitated, retired, when Colonel Billet, at the head of about fifty cuirassiers, debouched on the Place de l'Eglise St. Michel, and ordered his men to advance and draw swords. They fired their pistols, the Federals answered, and the colonel was mortally wounded. His horse turning about, carried its rider as far as the Place St. Pierre, the other horses following, and the Federals thus remained masters of the field. But lacking organisation, they disbanded in the night and left the prefecture. The next day the company that occupied the station seeing themselves abandoned withdrew. The arrests began, and many were obliged to hide.
Thus the revolts of the great towns died out one by one like the lateral craters of an exhausted volcano. The revolutionists of the provinces showed themselves everywhere completely disorganised, without any faculty to wield power. Everywhere victorious at the outset, the workmen had only known how to pronounce for Paris. But at least they showed some vitality, generosity, and pride. Eighty years of bourgeois domination had not been able to transform them into a nation of mercenaries; while the Radicals, who either combated or held aloof from them, once more attested the decrepitude, the egotism of the middle-class, always ready to betray the workingmen to the "upper" classes.
FOOTNOTES:
[114] "The general commanding the department and the procureur-general, aware that I had for thirty years been the friend of the man who commanded the Commune at Narbonne, came to solicit my intervention to induce him to submit. It was arranged that if I did not succeed I should immediately send a telegram to General Robinet, in order that the military authorities might act in consequence. At midnight I sent the telegram.... You do not know me; it is thanks to my personal influence that order was maintained at Carcassonne."—Speech of M. Marcou to the Assembly in answer to M. de Gavardie, Sitting of the 27th January 1874.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GREAT RESOURCES OF THE COMMUNE—THE GREAT WEAKNESS OF THE COUNCIL—NOMINATION OF CLUSERET—DECREE CONCERNING THE HOSTAGES—THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE—THE BANK.
After an armistice of seventy days, Paris again took up the struggle for France single-handed. It was no longer the territory only which she strove for, but the very ground-work of the nation. Victorious, her victory would not be sterile as those of the battlefield; regenerated, the people would set to the great work of remaking the social edifice; vanquished, all liberty would be quenched, the bourgeoisie turn its whips into scorpions, and a generation glide into the grave.