The delegation at the Education department was bound to write one of the finest pages of the Commune, for, after go many years of study and experiments this question should spring forth ready armed from a truly revolutionary brain. The delegation has not left a memoir, a sketch, an address, a line, to bear witness for it in the future. Yet the delegate was a doctor, a student of the German universities. He contented himself with suppressing the crucifixes in the schoolrooms and making an appeal to all those who had studied the question of teaching. A commission was charged to organise primary and professional instruction, whose work consisted in announcing the opening of a school on the 6th May. Another commission for the education of women was named on the day the Versaillese entered Paris.
The administrative action of the delegate was confined to impracticable decrees and a few appointments. Two devoted and talented men, Elie Reclus and B. Gastineau, were charged with the reorganisation of the National Library. They forbade the lending of books, thus putting an end to the scandalous practice by which a privileged few carved out a private library from public collections. The federation of artists, presided over by Courbet, elected member of the Council on the 16th April, occupied itself with the re-opening and superintendence of the museums.
Nothing would be known of the ideas of this revolution on education were it not for a few circulars of the municipalities. Many had reopened the schools abandoned by the Congregationists and the municipal teachers, or driven away the priests who had remained. The municipality of the twentieth arrondissement clothed and fed the children; that of the fourth said, "To teach children to love and respect their fellow-creatures, to inspire them with a love of justice, to teach them that they must instruct themselves in the interests of all, such are the principles of morality on which for the future communal education will be based." "The teachers of the schools and infant asylums," declared the municipality of the seventeenth arrondissement, "will for the future exclusively employ the experimental and scientific method, that which always starts from facts, physical, moral, intellectual." But these vague formulas could not make amends for the want of a complete programme.
Who, then, will speak for the people? The delegation of Labour and Exchange. Exclusively composed of revolutionary Socialists, its purpose was, "The study of all the reforms to be introduced into the public services of the Commune or into the relations of the working men and women with their employers; the revision of the commercial code and customhouse duties; the transformation of all direct and indirect taxes, the establishment of statistics of labour." It intended collecting from the citizens themselves the materials for the decrees to be submitted to the Commune.
The delegate to this department, Leo Frankel, procured the assistance of a commission of initiative composed of workingmen. Registers for offers and demands of work were opened in all the arrondissements. At the request of many journeymen bakers night-work was suppressed, a measure of hygiene as much as of morality. The delegation prepared a project for the suppression of pawnshops, a decree concerning stoppages of wages, and supported the decree relative to workshops abandoned by their runaway masters.
Their plan gratuitously returned the pledged objects to the victims of war and to the necessitous. Those who might refuse to confess this latter title were to receive their pledges in exchange for a promise of repayment in five years. The report terminated with these words: "It is well understood that the suppression of the pawnshops is to be succeeded by a social organisation giving serious guarantees of support to the workmen thrown out of employment. The establishment of the Commune necessitates institutions protecting the workmen from the exploitation of capital."
The decree that abolished stoppages of salaries and wages put an end to one of the most crying iniquities of the capitalist régime, these fines often being inflicted on the most futile pretext by the employer himself, who is thus at once judge and plaintiff.
The decree relative to the deserted workshops made restitution to the mass, dispossessed since centuries, of the property of their own labour. A commission of inquiry named by the Syndical Chambers was to draw up the statistics and the inventory of the deserted workshops to be given back into the hands of the workmen. Thus "the expropriators were in their turn expropriated." The nineteenth century will not pass away without having begun this revolution; every progress in machinery brings it nearer. The more the exploitation of labour concentrates itself in a few hands, the more the working multitude are massed together and disciplined. Soon, conscious and united, the producing class will, like the young France of 1789, have to confront but a handful of privileged appropriators. The most inveterate revolutionary Socialist is the monopolist.
No doubt this decree contained voids and stood in need of an elaborate explanation, especially on the subject of the co-operative societies to which the workshops were to be handed over. It was no more than the other applicable in this hour of strife, and required a number of supplementary decrees; but it at least gave some idea of the claims of the working-class, and had it nothing else on its credit side, by the mere creation of the Commission of Labour and Exchange, the revolution of the 18th March would have done more for the workmen than all the bourgeois Assemblies of France since the 5th May, 1789.
The delegation of Labour wanted to look carefully into the contracts of the commissariat. It demonstrated that in the case of contracts adjudicated to the lowest bidder, the running down of prices falls upon wages and not on the profit of the contractor. "And the Commune is blind enough to lend itself to such manœuvres," said the report, "and at this very moment, when the workingman dares death rather than submit any longer to this exploitation." The delegate demanded that the estimate of charges should specify the cost of labour, that the orders should by preference be given to the workmen's corporations, and the contracting prices fixed by arbitration between the commissariat, the Syndical Chamber of the corporation, and the delegate of Labour.