Voices of the Paris Commune by Abidor Mitchell

Author:Abidor, Mitchell [Abidor, Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2015-10-10T07:00:00+00:00

JEAN GRAVE7

Editor of Les Temps Nouveaux, who took no part in the Commune but whose opinion seemed of interest to us, the opinion of a revolutionary of today on the revolutionaries of the past.

What I think of the parliamentary, financial, military, and administrative organization of the Commune can be summed up in just a few words.

It was too parliamentary, financial, military, and administrative and not revolutionary enough.

To start with, while every day the battalions of Federals gathered at their meeting places waiting for the order to march on Versailles, a movement whose urgency was clear to all, the Central Committee, on the pretext that it didn’t have regular power, thought only of organizing elections, while the army of order was reforming in Versailles.

The Commune, once elected, busied itself with passing laws and decrees, most of which were not implemented, because those they were aimed at realized that the Commune legislated much but acted little.

Revolutionaries! That’s nevertheless what they thought they were, but only in words and parades. So little were they really revolutionaries that even invested with the suffrage of the Parisians they continued to consider themselves intruders in the halls of power.

They lacked money, when hundreds of millions slept in the Bank of France. All they would have needed to do would have been to send out against the bank two or three battalions of National Guardsmen to have the Marquis de Ploeuc—who so easily fooled them—go flee into the shadows.

They voted the law on hostages and never dared implement it, while Versailles continued to massacre the Federals who fell into their hands.

I’m not saying that it should have executed the handful of gendarmes and obscure priests it had in its hands. Versailles could have not have cared less: the serious hostages were out of the Commune’s reach. But it had the survey records, the mortgage office, the notary records, everything that regulates bourgeois property. If instead of making threats the Commune had actually set all the paperwork on fire, had taken control of the bank, the same bourgeois who insulted the imprisoned Federals would have forced Thiers to apologize to them on their behalf.

In a revolution, legality is not only a joke but a hindrance; it can only serve the partisans of the order of affairs we want to destroy. It’s not speeches, paperwork, or laws that are needed during a revolutionary period but acts.

Instead of voting for the forfeiture of bosses in flight, they should immediately have placed their workshops in the possession of the workers, who would have put them in operation. And it was the same for everything. Instead of laws and decrees that would have remained dead letters, they needed facts. Then they would have been taken seriously.

They wanted to play at being soldiers, to parade in the uniforms of Jacobin officers, as if revolutionaries had to make a disciplined war.

Attacked by the government of Versailles, they should have contented themselves with defending themselves. But they should only have given up ground foot by

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