Installment I
Installment II
Installment III
Installment IV
Tempur Heroica, 1876-1883.
The peace proceedings at Brussels were imbued with a certain urgency for some parties, none more so than the Emperor of the French. Napoleon III retained the loyalty of much of his army (what was left of it) but at home things were rapidly degenerating. Reports were spotty, but in Paris things appeared black, with mobs running wild and a ‘Garde nationale’ seizing control of some of the fortresses. Much of the government had evacuated the city, including the empress and Adolphe Thiers, one of Napoleon’s chief remaining statesmen. What was even more troubling were the messages indicating that many of the troops stationed in the city to protect it from the Germans were joining the rebels and opening up the forts around Paris to the mob…in any event, the Emperor’s presence was absolutely necessary, preferably at the head of a large military force. Napoleon excused himself from the Brussels negotiations early, after putting in a pro forma appearance, and immediately joined Justin Clinchant and the army at Verdun. While the duc de Gramont was left at Brussels to carry on the proceedings, Napoleon began to move on rebellious Paris.
Public dissatisfaction with the war had turned ugly in the early months of 1876, and after the disaster of Alfeld and the collapse of France’s allies things got worse. The military governor of Paris, Claude Lecomte, had been instated after the collapse of MacMahon’s army, when the government was terrified at the thought of a German army besieging Paris. Lecomte had ordered the arming of civilians in order to make up the manpower losses by MacMahon and to ‘hold the line’ until Ducrot’s army returned from Italy. While the danger seemed imminent, there were few problems with the new Garde nationale, but with the armistice at Warstein things got much worse. The disaffected working classes of the city now had guns, and they were not afraid to use them. The failure of the Imperial government to win the war, despite the slight gain in territory, along with the previous social injustices perpetuated by even the Liberal Empire of the last few years, served as a rallying point for the communards. Several personalities began to gather adherents as they preached against the failures of the government; Louis Blanqui, Theophile Ferre, and Louis Rossel were present at a somewhat spontaneous gathering at the Champ de Mars on the twelfth of May that exploded into armed revolt after a botched attempt to disperse them by Lecomte’s men. A scuffle between the mob and a few of the soldiers ended with Ferre being shot and a massive retaliation by the crowd. Rossel, taking charge, convinced many of the soldiers to stand down, and with their help the mob seized the Invalides. Within a day other suburbs were revolting as well, especially Montmartre, where a major artillery park and ammunition dump was seized by the communards. That day, the 13th of May, saw the mass government evacuation, and the abandonment by the few troops still loyal to the Emperor of their posts. Blanqui, put in unofficial charge of the commune of Paris, helped direct the establishment of a revolutionary council and the seizure of the Paris forts. Before the week was out, the commune was securely in control of the area and essentially had the run of the place, calling out to other cities to begin their own social revolutions.
Blanqui saw Paris as a beacon and a sign to all those on the fence in the rest of the country, nay – the world – to begin the mass proletarian uprising against their oppressors, but outside of a few cities (Limoges and Lyons chief among these) in the Empire not much actually happened. Paris had always been distrusted by the rest of the country for its more radical stance, and by and large the revolution was confined to that single city, much as it had been in the earlier stages of the 1789 Revolution. Still, even the slightest hint of revolt set Napoleon off, and rebellious outlying cities were soon crushed. Uneasy about his ability to destroy the commune, the Emperor made his way first to Meaux and then sent to his ally Maximiliano for reinforcements. The Spanish king was somewhat embittered over Spain’s lackluster performance in the war and already had inklings that he would receive very little for his pains. Still, he was aware that a rebellious Paris spelled disaster for his northern neighbor, and a stable France was better than one exporting revolution as it had in the 18th century. So Maximiliano dispatched a corps under Blanco y Erenas – which was in northern Italy with Ducrot, making its way back home after the armistice – to go to Paris and assist Napoleon in crushing the dissidents. Such dithering on the part of the Emperor did allow him time to build up his position, true, but it also allowed the revolutionaries to strengthen their own hand. Already the weapons from the captured Paris forts were being spread throughout the city, with makeshift barricades bristling with artillery and mitrailleuses being placed all over Paris. (The barricades were harder to make than they had been in years past due to the wider Parisian boulevards that had been built due to the Haussmann reforms, but the revolutionaries had time now that Napoleon refused to march on Paris quickly.) Paris was a fortress. Louis Rossel strengthened its defenses by clearing Versailles during the week of 16-23 May, using the captured mitrailleuses to deadly effect.
Within Paris itself, the communards also used their breathing room to make good on their pledges and enact reforms. Using the red flag of 1848 as their banner to replace the imperial tricolor, an attempt was made to organize elections allowing all in the arrondissements to vote for members of the revolutionary council, including women. Blanqui led the effort to secure the ending of night work, especially in Paris bakeries, and the cancellation of debts; all enterprises abandoned by their owners in the mass exodus of the thirteenth were to be taken over by their workers. In addition, Church property was seized. Services were only to be allowed providing that the church turn itself over to the revolutionaries for public meetings every evening. Obviously the old concordat with the Pope was abrogated. To help strengthen ties with the old Revolutions and erase those with the discarded Imperial and Royal governments, Blanqui and his cohorts reestablished the Revolutionary Calendar of the First Republic. Schools were run somewhat efficiently – considering how many of the educational authorities in the city were now either dead or scattered around the countryside – and increasingly decatholicized education. Much of this required money, but many of the communards were timid about robbing the Paris banks, which contained billions of francs; eventually, Blanqui pushed it through and forced the banks to give up their reserve to the Commune. With the vast influx of cash, the council immediately began to disagree about what to spend it
on; several parties were in favor of dividing it among the entire commune while others, worried about the Emperor’s reaction, wanted to spend money on defense. Still others believed that the money was necessary to enforce the social reforms…the debate lasted for two days before it was shelved, because by then a full month had passed since the initial seizure of power, and the Emperor was finally approaching Paris at speed. Already on the eighth of June the fort of Romainville was being attacked by Loyalist troops using what heavy artillery they had (for the mitrailleuse was largely useless in that situation). Methodically, Clinchant’s army plus the troops that Ducrot had finally managed to bring up from Italy began hammering away at the communard-controlled forts. Resistance was sharp, though, and after five days of constant siege the Loyalists had only secured the fort of Aubervilliers.
The Loyalist concentration on the region north of the Seine allowed impromptu minister of war Rossel to move his own troops that way en masse, which did a terrific job of halting Napoleon’s advance. While the communards failed to retake Aubervilliers, the critical fort of Romainville was still holding out and the main defensive wall of Paris had not yet been attacked significantly. Thus the communards enjoyed about a week of relative success, beating back the renewed Loyalist assault, until the sixteenth, when Spanish troops finally reached Versailles and began attacking from the rear. Versailles itself was overwhelmed as the few communard troops that were there fled to the southern forts. With most of the mobile communard ‘army’ – made up of the defectors from Lecomte’s army – defending the northern forts, the south was forced to rely on the Garde nationale, which was decidedly inadequate for defense. It only took until the eighteenth of June for the Spanish to break through the great Parisian wall, and as soon as they were inside the city it was every arrondissement for itself. The neighborhood loyalty that had thus far helped the communards gain control of Paris and work well together now backfired. Blanqui attempted to maintain central control but was largely ignored after the controversy over the bank robberies, while Rossel was killed while overseeing the defense of the fort of Nogent on the twentieth. The Spanish were held up for some time while attempting to secure the Bois de Boulogne, attempting to clear their flank so as to enter the city; that objective took two weeks to root out, as the communards there proved surprisingly resilient. Nevertheless, by the twenty-eighth of June the communards had lost all control of the forts and were now plunged into disorganized fighting in the city itself. Individually, each arrondissement fought remarkably, refusing to surrender and cutting down many Loyalist and Spanish troops in the process, but due to the wider streets it was impossible to make individual neighborhoods into fortresses a la 1789 and 1848. Even so, the communards did amazingly well, and it was only after a week or so that the Loyalist troops hit upon the idea of blowing apart the houses with artillery fire to loop around and outflank a given barricade position. And so, over the course of three weeks of heavy fighting, the communards were cleaned out, house by house and street by street, fighting on long after the death of Blanqui. The hill of Montmartre was the last position to fall, on the nineteenth of July, and on the very next day the Emperor himself issued a proclamation declaring the destruction of the commune and the safety of the city.
It was then that the reprisals came. Witnesses were found, photographs were obtained, and newspapers were scoured for mention of any who had raised arms against the Emperor. A series of kangaroo court trials were widely publicized, and everyone, male and even some females, was sentenced to death if found guilty. Which happened a good ninety percent of the time. The global backlash was tremendous; initially a Red Terror had swept the globe but now revulsion arose at what the tyrant Napoleon was doing to maintain his hold on power. But nothing concrete was done; the communards were shot and dumped in mass graves. A scant few escaped to Germany, Britain, and the United States, but they were few in number indeed. The new white terror lasted for months and ended up in the deaths of nearly a hundred thousand people and the exile of a good ten thousand to the French colonies. Napoleon III retook his throne at the partially vandalized Tuileries, establishing himself there as opposed to Versailles so as to keep a closer watch on the city. In any event, it was explicitly clear that the Liberal Empire was, if not on life support, dead.
The effect on communist thought was immense. During the two months of the Commune itself Marx had written glowingly about it as had Engels, referring to the transitory ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and indicating that the Commune was the perfect archetype thereof. Such feelings took a sharp turn when the Commune was destroyed though. Already since the 1872 Hague congress, the First International had been breaking up somewhat along anarchist lines vs. Marxist lines, but after the Commune went the way of the dodo so too did united communist thought. Marx and Engels pointed to the Commune as an excellent prototype of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, that intermediate stage before communism, but that it had had the failure of not entrusting itself to a true dictator, i.e. Blanqui, who could control the revolutionary impulse and give it true direction. The fallout over the bank robbing issue, they thought, helped divide the communards at the worst possible time, which the Loyalists and Spanish were able to exploit. Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchists, however, took a different line. The Commune had not even been necessary, and its mere existence had led to its fall; true success would have been gained by not even bothering with the quasidemocratic, partly authoritarian government that the Commune instituted but rather by immediately proceeding to decentralized workers’ councils, preferably by arrondissement, and so resisting attack. Bakunin and his followers pointed to how much longer it took to clean out Paris one neighborhood at a time to how rapidly the forts and the unified army had collapsed. Then Marx countered by saying that the unified army at least had had a chance, whereas the arrondissements had never been able to do more than mount a stalwart, failed defense…and the argument raged on. The First International was completely broken up by the end of 1876, the Marxists and Bakuninists going their separate ways, and the overall strength of the communist movement took a big hit. Those elements of society that tend towards the revolutionary had been practically destroyed, and it would take some decades before they were strong enough to rise again. Bakunin’s death in 1877 helped speed up reconciliation a bit, but some of his supporters like knyaz Pyotr Kropotkin carried on his message as the Jura federation.
But socialist thought was not the only developing area of philosophy. A philologist named Friedrich Nietzsche had, despite renouncing his Prussian citizenship, served in the Great European War as a medical orderly in the Rhineland and seen the elephant at Alfeld; his reaction to the horror of war was not one of military glorification but instead of revulsion. He had earlier spent time with Richard Wagner (whose Bayreuth opera house had remained largely free of the ruin of war) and had even wrote a book examining Wagner’s and other works in a philological and philosophical context,
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. But now, after the war, his thoughts turned more rapidly towards his antistatist beginnings. It was he who, in 1879, published
Human, All Too Human, which in a series of a few hundred aphorisms (since he was somewhat unwilling to construct his own philosophical doctrine) ridiculed the nationalistic ethos that drove the European states to war and is taken as the foundation of the pan-European movement. Nietzsche gained a large following, especially in the Scandinavian countries, for his work. At the height of this popularity, though, he suffered a romantic reverse and fled his post as professor of classical philology at Basel for southern France, where he shut himself up and began work on a magnum opus, which he had not yet finished by 1884. But hints could be found in his other writings, released periodically; the rise of the Paris Commune had led him to write, “Where are the Vandals of the twentieth century? Evidently they will appear and establish themselves only after violent Socialist revolutions.” He railed against the sheeple, saying that “regimentation has grown very strong in this democratic Europe; people who learn easily submit easily…those who can command will find those who will obey.” With great enthusiasm across Europe and with some trepidation many eagerly awaited his next work.
In the aftermath of the turmoil of the Great European War and the crushing of the Paris Commune, by and large Europe began to return to normal. The British subsidies and the French reparations (which in turn were aided by British subsidies of their own, lessening the economic impact on France) helped restore the Belgian and German economies in particular. Much of the damage done to the Rhineland was fixed, and Belgium’s industrial strength began to go back up. For much of this time the countries of Europe were fixed on integrating their new gains; Hungary in particular had quite the interesting time trying to get Bohemia and Slavania to work together with the magnates in Budapest. But a few things prevented Europe from recovering quickly. The first and foremost of these was a new form of influenza, spread during the war; during 1876 and 1877 it swept over Europe and caused millions more deaths than the Great European War itself had. One of the victims of the flu was Emperor Wilhelm I, who left his throne to his son Friedrich (crowned ‘Kaiser Friedrich III’, strangely enough, because that was his title as Prussian King but as Emperor he was the first of the Friedrichs); other prominent Europeans carried off were the Empress Eugenie of France and Benjamin Disraeli. In any event, this equine influenza carried off millions, seriously impeding European growth, but in the end significant developments were made in the field of epidemiology and medical science in general. Reconstruction following the war was given another jolt with a series of bank crises in 1880, which spread even to the United States (affecting the election there, as we will later see). The period before 1884 was full of economic ‘bumps’, but at least there had been no major panic yet. As of that year, the European economy as a whole was extremely fragile, leading to several important decisions by some of the Great Powers…to which we will turn in a moment.
But instead, let us look at the United States, which as we left it in 1865 (outside of a brief interlude in 1874) was, if only briefly, the strongest nation on the planet. The postwar partial demobilization reduced that significantly, of course, but the Americans still had great industrial and manpower potential. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Republican coalition of free workers and northern capitalists held strong and reelected Abraham Lincoln on a platform of Southern reconciliation and reconstruction and a quashing of the insurgency. Also, winning the war itself kind of helped. Lincoln’s second term saw some successes against the Ku Klux Klan partisans, especially on the Eastern Seaboard. Their operations were largely confined to the Great Smoky Mountains, the Tennessee River valley, and the Deep South by 1868, when Lincoln refused to run for a third term. It may have been impossible for him anyway. His more lenient plan was shoved aside by the Radical Republicans in Congress as the Ku Klux Klan insurgency ramped up; by 1866 they were able to force the President to go along with many of the old provisos of the Wade-Davis Bill, which he had earlier pocket-vetoed. The Ironclad Oath, which forced the taker to affirm that he had never served the Confederacy in its government or military, was especially seen as necessary due to the large numbers of former Confederate Army personnel serving in the Ku Klux Klan. Members of that particular vile organization (or heroic group of freedom fighters, take your pick) were of course given the death penalty with scant exception. Of more importance – and success – were the programs surrounding black literacy and black suffrage, which the Ku Klux Klan frequently attempted to interrupt with mixed results. In order to give the emancipated blacks more voting power, many former Confederates had been disenfranchised, and many others refused to vote on either a matter of principle, illiteracy, or because they felt violence was a better answer.
So since Lincoln refused to run in 1868, the Republican nomination was essentially up for grabs. His vice president, Andrew Johnson, had been chosen because, as a Democrat, he would be able to hopefully help smooth the introduction of Reconstruction in the southern states. This obviously failed, and along with a general line taken against the Radical Republicans that by now controlled the party Johnson was a dead letter who wouldn’t have been able to run on that ticket anyway. Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s original vice president, similarly declined the honor; just as well, because he too had lost a good deal of prestige after not being nominated as the vice president in 1864. Some support went to George Meade, victor of Gettysburg and capturer of Richmond, but Meade declined the offer, claiming ill health and a lack of interest in politics; so too did Ulysses Grant, commander in the West at that time. (Grant was, after all, spending much of his time commanding the anti-insurgency forces in the Deep South.) So the Republicans finally decided to nominate William Seward for president and boost his ticket with vice president Gouverneur Warren, a wartime general and hero at Gettysburg. Opposing Seward was Horatio Seymour of New York, a favorite son candidate who did surprisingly well at the polls but who was in the end defeated by the Republican candidate by well over half a million votes. The Army’s work to secure black suffrage in the South undoubtedly helped the Republican cause. Seward, whose presidency was greatly affected by the Radical Republicans that were in power in Congress, spent much of his time attempting to keep anti-Confederate measures from being passed, but at the same time to strengthen the cause of Reconstruction; one of his pet projects was the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1869, which cost the United States a grand total of two cents an acre but at the time was roundly mocked by the public. After Congress lost its Radical Republican majority in 1870’s elections, many of the older, harsher anti-Confederate laws were repealed. But at the very least, new federal programs were set up to aid the blacks and continue ‘rehabilitating’ the southern states. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which was organized to help blacks find jobs, get homes, and build schools, was expanded. Due to initial failures in the Freedmen’s Bureau’s implementation, a federal Bureau of Internal Security was founded under the aegis of the Department of Justice to better fight the paramilitary groups both in court and in the field, assisting the overloaded US Marshals Service (which was eventually shifted west to deal with the influx of settlers and the similar influx of lawlessness in those territories). The successes of the BIS led to a marked decrease in Southern resistance in the areas of the Deep South.
But still, Seward was seen as too conciliatory for the Presidency; while the insurgency continued in the South, many of the Republicans believed that the complete and utter destruction of the former Confederates was necessary, by the harshest means if possible. A president with a military background was required for the 1872 elections, one that would take a more active approach to the problem of the Ku Klux Klan; given the unwillingness of the General of the Army Ulysses Grant to serve, Republican Party chiefs had to scour the ranks of the military to find a suitable candidate. They thought they did in William Tecumseh Sherman, who had fought under Grant in the West and proved an admirable logistic strategician as commander of the Army troops in Mississippi and Alabama. Back in 1868 he had refused to run, reiterating it to a reporter from the New York
Tribune: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.” By 1872, though, with the Ku Klux Klan expanding its operations in the West (although declining under the blows of his troops and the BIS in the South), Sherman was ready to recant his statement; though he was strongly opposed to the plan, he feared that he would have to, there being no other choice. With James G. Blaine of Maine as his running mate, Sherman – having, in essence, been rubber-stamped by the party convention – went on to crushingly defeat Samuel Tilden’s Democratic ticket in the general election. Tilden’s campaign as a reform candidate from New York had given Sherman the support of many of the Northeastern bosses, a key aid. And Sherman applied to the Presidency the same spirit that he had to the Ku Klux Klan. While he personally did not favor most Radical Republican policies, Sherman felt that he had to destroy every basis for Klan power, and thus with the assistance of Elihu Washburne, a Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, pushed through a measure that would arm the Southern blacks and divide the plantations of former slave owners between them. Finally approved in 1874, the measure seriously split the Republican Party. The northern capitalists and party bosses it had relied on were aghast at the Radicals and at Sherman, and it showed in the 1874 midterm election, in which the Republicans lost several strongholds in the Northern states (though the allegiance of free workers aided their cause tremendously). Sherman didn’t really care, though; the Klan was virtually annihilated in the Southern states by the end of his term and was in partial remission in the West. As for the West itself, that problem was lessened by a somewhat similar plan; where Sherman had attacked the enemy’s support base in the South, he created one in the West, by improving relations with the Native Americans and generally acting to split them from the Klansmen by giving concessions, including larger and better reservations and working with the Supreme Court to improve their legal status. With their support base destroyed, the Klansmen began to wither, suffering tremendous blows at the hands of the Army and the BIS, until eventually Nathan Bedford Forrest, the ‘Grand Wizard’ of the group, was caught and killed at Bozeman in 1875 with two thousand other cavalry. The back of the insurgency was broken, and although after 1875 sporadic attacks continued by splinter groups, by and large resistance to the federal government ceased. It is for this reason that many count 1875 as the final year of the American Civil War, not 1864 as others do.
Sherman was most definitely not going to run for the Presidency again, and he made this abundantly clear. This was the final straw for the Republican Party and Lincoln’s old coalition. Already it had been seriously riven by the Radical Republicans’ policies in the Deep South, and granting the Native Americans larger and better reservations had angered the northern capitalists who had served as a major antagonist of the slave-owning South. Now that slavery and the Confederacy had been finally, decisively defeated, and now that the businessmen of the North were getting more and more interested in trade both transcontinental and intercontinental, the coalition lost all meaning. Already the free white workers were beginning to clash with their managers over labor issues of pay and work hours. The split was already visible by the 1874 election, but in 1876 it became formal. Many Republican party bosses in the North as well as many of the merchants and industrialists simply walked out of the convention and held their own. Calling for a platform that entailed stronger central government (so that it could subsidize business and crush the Native Americans, of course), these men formed the Neo-Federalist Party, which merged with large segments of the already-ruined Democratic Party – especially the classical-liberal Bourbon Democrats – and nominated Horace Greeley, a media magnate and head of the
New York Tribune. The Radical Republicans dominated their convention, as to be expected. Roscoe Conkling, a New York City boss who stayed loyal to the Republicans, had one of his cronies, Chester A. Arthur, Port Collector for New York City, nominated for the Presidency. A few splinters of the Democratic Party held their own convention but were largely ignored and got next to no votes in the general election of 1876, while a few more coalesced in the Greenback Party, which commanded significant labor support due to its opposition to the return of the United States currency to specie-based methods.
It's very helpful.
(be happy to lend a hand... I just happen to have a few academic works on Industrialisation sitting on my table).
