The Eighteenth of March – Louise Michel (1896)

From ‘The Rebel: Anarchist-Communist Journal’, Vol.1, No.6, Boston, Mass., March-April, 1896

The eighteenth of March 1871 had been chosen by the wicked gnome Thiers, his accomplices, and his dupes to arouse Paris after having disarmed it, in order to justify a massacre preparatory to some dynastic restoration. The treacherous plan being organized, the traitors and the incapables were caught in their own trap. To them any master seemed preferable to a revolution. But it was no longer the spies of the empire crying “on to Berlin!” when no one wanted war it was a people wishing to be free. They had the revolution. Jules Favre recounts as follows the provocation which they prepared. “Vinoy would have liked to engage the party by suppressing the pay of the National Guard, we thought this plan more dangerous than direct action.”

Direct action was attempted. It was the seizure by those in power of the cannon which the National Guard had bought with their own funds for the defense of Paris neglected by the inertia of the government. The power in the hands of the government of “La Defense Nationale” had no energy but that directed against the people. The proclamation made the day before was similar to those of the empire on some Second of December. An attempt hazarded two nights before to take the cannon from the Place des Vosges had given warning.

They knew by the 31th of October, by the 22nd of January, by all the refusals of defense and all the attempts to surrender of what the bourgeois are capable when they dream of the red Specter of the Revolution. It was imprudent this time for those in power to pit the soldiers against Paris, which did not wish to be disarmed. It was too near all the battles lost by the incapacity of the old generals of the empire, too near, above all, to the opposition of Paris to all the attempts to surrender that had been made until now, to imagine that the army would not make common cause with Paris, which would rather die than surrender. The soldiers who invaded the faubourgs found Montmartre, Belleville standing ready. They were surrounded by the National Guard. Every where the soldiers fraternized with the crowd.

It was not only the popular will to guard the cannon but to have a republic which would not be a continuation of the empire. A post of the National Guard had passed the night at a house in the rue des Rosiers at the summit of the buttes. Suddenly the post was surprised, the soldier on guard at the door fell mortally wounded. The blank charge which ought to have been fired in case of surprise was not made but the alarm was given just the same.

Montmartre assembled like a swarm of bees. At dawn when the alarm bell sounded the tambours beat, the general call to arms. We all charged up the hill knowing that at the top of the hill, under the orders of General Lecomte, were ten thousand men in battle array; we thought to die for liberty or rather thinking no more, we would have scaled the sky itself.

We never noticed the steep and rocky ascent, excited as we were by the tocsin and the hurried rhythm of the charge. There was a clear atmosphere, a splendid dawn like an aurora of deliverance. We knew well though we died, Paris would rise. It was not death that awaited us on the heights of Montmartre, where however they were dragging away the cannon to join them to the others at the Batignolles, already taken. It was the surprise of a popular victory.

Between us and the army, the women of Montmartre threw themselves in front of the cannon. The soldiers retreated; three times General Lecomte ordered them to fire on the crowd, a subaltern stepped out of the ranks, placed himself in front of his company and gave the order: Ground Arms! It was he whom they obeyed (Verdaguerre who, several weeks later was shot at Versailles). The revolution was a fact.

Lecomte had been arrested at the moment, when for the third time he was ordering his soldiers to fire, he was conducted to the rue des Rosiers, where very soon he was rejoined by General Clement Thomas, discovered in civilian’s dress, while taking the plan of the Montmartre barricades.

Their destiny accomplished itself. Both had been condemned to death long since by the survivors of June 1848. Lecomte, who had been continually insulting, the National Guard again remembered the old griefs. Clement Thomas had just been taken in the act of spying. This time popular justice was in accord with the law of war. In addition to this Clement Thomas and Lecomte had some accounts to regulate with their own soldiers. It was the revolution that executed them. In the bloody days of May a crowd of victims who had never taken any part in their death, were shot in revenge for the execution of these two men, who had so often cut into the flesh of multitudes.

The people’s victory would have been complete had they gone to Versailles the evening of the 18th of March to overthrow the reactionary government. Many might have fallen on the way but the slaughter of May would have been avoided.

It was legality that carried the day. The Commune was elected by vote and too much time was lost to have made it yet possible to smother the past in its lair. The Commune, conquered, carried off with it the weaknesses and the hesitations of its profound honesty. The veritable duty would have been to sacrifice every human sentiment to the necessity of holding the people’s victory.

But if la Commune feared to make victims she never feared for her own existence. She sleeps in the red shroud of her wedding with Death.

The day to celebrate la Commune should have been the 28th of May when her life blood was taken, the avenging flames of the conflagration extinguished by streams of blood.

Louise Michel

London, Feb’y. 25, 1896