in concert for the work of reorganization. If the Assembly, he said, desired a permanent Republic, this was a matter which would entirely depend upon the Assembly itself. The Republic was in its hands. "For my own part," he said, "I vow before history that I will never deceive you; that I will never prejudge a question apart from you; that I will never act in any way so as to disown or betray your sovereignty."

In compliance with this decree, the Assembly met at Versailles on Monday, the 20th, eight days after the last body of Germans had marched out of the place. By that time very serious events had occurred in Paris.

On the previous Wednesday it had been decided at a Cabinet Council at Versailles, to appoint General Valentin Prefect of Police. A Council of Ministers and Generals was also held in Paris, to consider how to deal with those insurgent battalions which still refused to deliver up their cannon. The same evening a detachment of artillery, accompanied by a strong body of the Garde Républicaine, appeared on the Place des Vosges, with horses and harness prepared to carry off the cannon parked in that spot. The National Guard, however, formally refused to surrender them. Upon this, instead of enforcing the Government order, the commander of the troops quietly retired with his men. Early on the following morning detachments of National Guards came down from Belleville and dragged the cannon to the Buttes Chaumont. This was an overt act of defiance which could not be overlooked.

On Saturday morning (the 18th) a Government proclamation was placarded on the walls of Paris, to the effect that no attention having been paid by the insurgents to the counsels and injunctions of the ruling powers, notwithstanding the forbearance with which they had been treated, it was determined that action should be taken in the interest of Paris and of France.

Action had already begun. At four o'clock that morning strong detachments of cavalry and infantry, commanded by Generals Vinoy and Le Comte, had surrounded the Buttes Montmartre, and disarmed the sentinels who guarded the contested pieces. Had the cannon been carried off at that moment all might have been well. But here came a fatal want of forethought or of execution on the part of Government. The artillery destined to transport the cannon from the stronghold of the revolutionists, were two hours later on the spot than they ought to have been. During those two hours the Red Republicans had time to call together their forces from all parts of Montmartre; and when the tardily-arrived artillery began the work of harnessing, they found themselves obliged to give way. At the Place Pigalle a captain of chasseurs ordered his men to fire upon the National Guards. Scarcely, however, had he given the word of command, when the insurgents fired, and the officer was shot dead. The gendarmes present drew their swords, and prepared to charge; but the chasseurs suddenly disbanding, and the National Guards advancing at the same time, their movement was checked.

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As they marched onwards the Reds met with no resistance; the infantry refused to fight, and raised the butt-ends of their rifles in the air; and the Gendarmes saw themselves compelled to withdraw. When they reached the Buttes a similar scene took place. In vain General Le Comte ordered his men to resist them. Up went the butt-ends of the muskets, and "Vive la République" was shouted from the ranks of "order." The general himself was surrounded, disarmed, and carried off to the Château Rouge, where he was placed in custody. General Vinoy, and those troops which had not joined the Reds, retreated into the interior of Paris. In the insurgent quarters the afternoon was spent in barricading all the streets leading down into Paris, and fortifying with cannon the Buttes Montmartre and Chaumont.

Among the onlookers at these proceedings happened to be General Clément Thomas, formerly Commander-in-Chief of the National Guards. He was recognized and seized; and his fate, and that of the unfortunate General Le Comte, who was dragged from his short imprisonment at the Château Rouge, were speedily decided. Under the orders of an Insurrectionary Committee, they were taken to a house in the Rue des Rosiers; and there the mob, without waiting for further trial or delay, insisted on their immediate execution. They were dragged into the garden of the house-first old General Thomas, then Le Comte,-and, with their backs to the wall, shot down by a body of National Guards.

In other quarters of Paris also the Red Republican agitation was carried on that afternoon. Barricades were thrown up in the Place de la Bastille and the Faubourg St. Antoine, and a party of the insurgents occupied the Caserne du Prince Eugéne. The command of the National Guard was entrusted to Charles Lullier, an ex-naval officer, a young man of restless, frantic temperament. At about five o'clock the battalions of Montmartre descended from their heights, with drums and trumpets at their head, ostensibly to march upon the Hôtel de Ville, instead of which, however, they marched across the Seine to Montrouge. Simultaneously with this descent into the city, the news of the assassination of Generals Le Comte and Thomas became current, and excited general horror and indignation. Nevertheless, the population remained inactive: two proclamations of the Government, appealing to the National Guards, produced no effect; and the insurgents were allowed to do as they pleased. Among numerous other points secured by them was the Orleans Railway-Station, where during the evening General Chanzy, who was coming by that line from Tours, was arrested, and escorted through the city to the Château Rouge at Montmartre. On Sunday he was transferred to the Prison de la Santé.

At nine o'clock, another body of some 1500 men descended from Montmartre by the Rue Blanche, and marched immediately upon the Place Vendôme, which they found occupied by the gendarmes and National Guards. These retired upon their approach, and the Etat-Major of the National Guards was immediately taken posses

sion of by the insurgents, as well as the Ministry of Justice. About an hour afterwards they installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville, where during the night the Central Committee held a meeting. Early in the morning barricades were thrown up at all the streets leading on to the Place.

And now all the members of Government quitted Paris, some on Saturday evening, some on Sunday morning, taking with them the remaining Government forces. Before Sunday, the 19th of March, the whole of the city had been left to itself, and battalions of National Guards stood posted in different quarters. The Central Committee issued the following proclamation from the Hôtel de Ville :

"Citizens, The French people, until the attempt was made to impose upon it by force an impossible calm, has awaited without fear and without provocation the senseless and infamous men who wished evil to the Republic. This time our brothers of the army would not raise their hands against the arch of our liberties. Thanks to all, and that you and France have proclaimed the Republic, with all its consequences, to be the only Government which can close for ever the era of invasions and civil wars. The state of siege is raised. The people of Paris are convoked in their comitia for the communal elections. The security of all citizens is assured by the co-operation of the National Guard.

"The Central Committee of the National Guard:-Assi, Billioray, Ferrat, Cabric, Moreau, Dupont, Varlin, Boursier, Mortif, Zouher, Valette, Jourde, Rosseau, Sullier, Blanchet, Grallard, Baron Geresme, Halse, Pougeret.

"Hôtel de Ville, March 19."

A few hours after it was announced that the elections were to take place on the following Wednesday, the 22nd, and that the Central Committee was prepared to resign its power into the hands of the Commune, which should then be chosen as the true representative of the wishes and sentiments of the Parisians.

That same afternoon, the offices of the Journal Officiel, hitherto the organ of M. Thiers and the Assembly, were seized; and under the accustomed title, there appeared on Monday morning, besides the various Proclamations issued by the Central Committee, an address purporting to justify the acts of the new Paris Government, and condemning those of the opposite party; a proclamation to the departments, calling on them to imitate Paris; a declaration from the Committee, stating that Generals Le Comte and Thomas had been shot without their knowledge; and various notes raising the state of siege in the capital, suppressing Councils of War, according a full amnesty for all political crimes, and assuring liberty to the press. The staff and archives of the newspaper, however, had been removed to Versailles, and the two official journals thenceforth fulminated antagonistic articles and decrees. The offices of the Figaro and Gaulois were also invaded by National Guards on

Sunday; and the editors and writers having fled, seals were placed on the doors.

Such was the revolution of the 18th of March, or of the 27e Ventose, An. 79, as the insurgents, in honour of former traditions, pleased themselves with calling it. It was a subject of remark and astonishment at the time, that of the names appended to the decrees of the revolutionary party, none were familiar to the public ear as connected with the previous movements of Red Republicanism. Blanqui, Flourens-both indeed lately condemned to death, par contumace, but known to be living in safe defiance of Government-Rochefort, Félix Pyat, editor of the Vengeur-such were the men who might have been supposed ready to take the foremost place in any aggression of the ultra-democratic party. But who were these the men who now issued their mandates from the Hôtel de Ville, the men whom the battalions of Montmartre and Belleville implicitly obeyed?

The name of Assi was literally the only one that had hitherto caught the notice of the public ear. He was the leader in that strike at the Creuzot iron-works which had occurred in the spring of 1870. A Bremen man by birth it is said, a hard-headed, resolute artisan.

The power that had now risen to the real direction of affairs in Paris was one which had originated in social, not in political ideas; but it so happened that, owing to its effective organization and the clear-sightedness with which its leaders kept their aims in view, it had succeeded in appropriating and utilizing all other elements of revolutionary restlessness around it. Those elements during the later days of Imperialism in France were many. Though agreed in a general wish to upset the existing Government, the so-called Socialists and Red Republicans, as represented by Blanqui, by Félix Pyat, by Louis Blanc, by Delescluze, or by Rochefort, had various ideas of the Utopia that was to follow. More or less they marched in the track of the old Democratic notions of 1793, and aimed at establishing a system of political equality. But of late years a society had spread its ramifications throughout Europe, of which the principle was not primarily political, but social, revolution. The International Working Men's Association" had been in organized existence since the year 1862. It was originally formed with the design to prevent needless competition among workmen, to regulate the conditions of strikes, to establish common interests among the working classes in different countries and states, and generally to amend their condition by all practicable and legal means. It was at a meeting in London, in 1864, that a new character that of political action-became first imparted to it. The Conference at Lausanne, in 1866, bore this character still more strongly. In 1868 the French branch of the society underwent a prosecution by Government. Then it was that, for the first time, the names were mentioned of Assi, Duval, Varlin, and eight other members of the subsequent " Commune" of Paris. The wealth and influence of the society continuing to increase, its aims became

more distinctly revolutionary, and some of its advanced members before long announced that it aimed at the abolition of religion, the substitution of science for faith, of human justice for Divine justice, and the suppression of marriage; also at the direct legislation of the people by the people, the abolition of inheritance, and the constitution of land as collective property.

Now these views, not, as we have said, originally coming into the programme of the International, had been propagated for several years by the Socialist fanatics in France by the party whose mixed and incongruous elements sprung out of the many varieties of popular dissatisfaction with which the country had abounded since 1848. The intervention of the "International," and the organization and coherence which it gave both to practical Socialism and to theoretic or philosophical Communalism, was what made the Red Republican action of 1871 so formidable. The Empire, while it lasted, kept down these combined elements with a strong hand, but they sprung into activity the moment the Empire fell. The very day after the proclamation of the Republic, on the 4th of September, "committees of vigilance were established by the Reds in the faubourgs, clubs were instituted, meetings were held, sections of the International were founded in all the quarters of Paris, incendiary speeches and threats were uttered in all directions. Their abortive attempts to overthrow the Government on the 31st of October and the 22nd of January, resulting in the imprisonment or outlawry of some of their leaders, had no deterring effect on the projects entertained by these formidable conspirators.

When the capitulation of Paris brought to an end the contest with the foreign foe, many causes combined to favour their designs. The capitulation itself, however inevitable, was a grand discredit to the actual rulers. Though the International Society was, by its original idea, independent of patriotic prejudices, yet the antiPrussian cry was popular, and served their hour. The policy of Napoleon III. in seeking the support of his Empire from the rural population had helped to widen the separation of feeling and interests between the country and the town classes. The reactionary character of the Assembly at Bordeaux, its resolution not to sit at Paris, and the undisguised antipathy with which the members of the "Rural" party treated the Paris deputies who came to take their seats among them, tended to exasperate every hostile predisposition, and to impel the Parisians to claim without further delay the rights of self-government. Throughout the late siege cries had been heard from time to time for the "Commune," but only a vague notion of municipal organization had been connected with the word. It now became evident that a new but definite theory of government had been thought out, and was about to be applied by the leaders of the insurrectionary movement. The subject of communal rights had for some time occupied the minds of political writers in France. In the early part of the century it was brought