before examining constitutional questions, would be to reorganize the forces of the nation in order to provide for the enormous war indemnity which had to be paid to Germany before the territory could be liberated from the presence of the invader. The tacit acceptance of this arrangement by all parties was known as the “pacte de Bordeaux.” Apart from the pressure of patriotic considerations, it pleased the republican minority to have the government of France officially proclaimed a Republic, while the monarchists thought that pending their choice Of a monarch it might popularize their cause not to have it associated with the imposition of the burden of war taxation. From this fortuitous and informal transaction, accepted by a monarchical Assembly, sprang the Third Republic, the most durable régime established in France since the ancient monarchy disappeared in 1792.
The Germans marched down the Champs Elysées on the 1st of March 1871, and occupied Paris for forty-eight hours. The National Assembly then decided to remove its sittings to Versailles; but two days before its arrival at the palace, where the king of Prussia had just been The Commune. proclaimed German emperor, an insurrection broke out in Paris. The revolutionary element, which had been foremost in proclaiming the Republic on the 4th of September, had shown signs of disaffection during the siege. On the conclusion of the peace the triumphal entry of the German troops, the threatened disbanding of the national guard by an Assembly known to be anti-republican, and the resumption of orderly civic existence after the agitated life of a suffering population isolated by siege, had excited the nerves of the Parisians, always prone to revolution. The Commune was proclaimed on the 18th of March, and Paris was declared to be a free town, which recognized no government but that chosen by the people within its walls, the communard theory being that the state should consist of a federation of self-governing communes subject to no central power. Administrative autonomy was not, however, the real aim of the insurgent leaders. The name of the Commune had always been a rallying sign for violent revolutionaries ever since the Terrorists had found their last support in the municipality of Paris in 1794. In 1871 among the communard chiefs were revolutionaries of every sect, who, disagreeing on governmental and economic principles, were united in their vague but perpetual hostility to the existing order of things. The regular troops of the garrison of Paris followed the National Assembly to Versailles, where they were joined by the soldiers of the armies of Sedan and Metz, liberated from captivity in Germany. With this force the government of the Republic commenced the second siege of Paris, in order to capture the city from the Commune, which had established the parody of a government there, having taken possession of the administrative departments and set a minister at the head of each office. The second siege lasted six weeks under the eyes of the victorious Germans encamped on the heights overlooking the capital. The presence of the enemy, far from restraining the humiliating spectacle of Frenchmen waging war on Frenchmen in the hour of national disaster, seemed to encourage the fury of the combatants. The communards, who had begun their reign by the murder of two generals, concluded it, when the Versailles troops were taking the city, with the massacre of a number of eminent citizens, including the archbishop of Paris, and with the destruction by fire of many of the finest historical buildings, including the palace of the Tuileries and the hôtel de ville. History has rarely known a more unpatriotic crime than that of the insurrection of the Commune; but the punishment inflicted on the insurgents by the Versailles troops was so ruthless that it seemed to be a counter-manifestation of French hatred for Frenchmen in civil disturbance rather than a judicial penalty applied to a heinous offence. The number of Parisians killed by French soldiers in the last week of May 1871 was probably 20,000, though the partisans of the Commune declared that 36,000 men and women were shot in the streets or after summary court-martial.
It is from this point that the history of the Third Republic commences. In spite of the doubly tragic ending of the war the vitality of the country seemed unimpaired. With ease and without murmur it supported the new burden of taxation called for by the war indemnity and by the reorganization Republicans and Monarchists after the war. of the shattered forces of France. Thiers was thus aided in his task of liberating the territory from the presence of the enemy. His proposal at Bordeaux to make the “essai loyal” of the Republic, as the form of government which caused the least division among Frenchmen, was discouraged by the excesses of the Commune which associated republicanism with revolutionary disorder. Nevertheless, the monarchists of the National Assembly received a note of warning that the country might dispense with their services unless they displayed governmental capacity, when in July 1871 the republican minority was largely increased at the bye-elections. The next month, within a year of Sedan, a provisional constitution was voted, the title of president of the French Republic being then conferred on Thiers. The monarchists consented to this against their will; but they had their own way when they conferred constituent powers on the Assembly in opposition to the republicans, who argued that it was a usurpation of the sovereignty of the people for a body elected for another purpose to assume the power of giving a constitution to the land without a special mandate from the nation. The debate gave Gambetta his first opportunity of appearing as a serious politician. The “fou furieux” of Tours, whom Thiers had denounced for his efforts to prolong the hopeless war, was about to become the chief support of the aged Orleanist statesman whose supreme achievement was to be the foundation of the Republic.
It was in 1872 that Thiers practically ranged himself with Gambetta and the republicans. The divisions in the monarchical party made an immediate restoration impossible. This situation induced some of the moderate deputies, whose tendencies were Orleanist, to support the 1872: Thiers and Gambetta. organization of a Republic which now no longer found its chief support in the revolutionary section of the nation, and it suited the ideas of Thiers, whose personal ambition was not less than his undoubted patriotism. Having become unexpectedly chief of the state at seventy-four he had no wish to descend again to the position of a minister of the Orleans dynasty which he had held at thirty-five. So, while the royalists refused to admit the claims of the comte de Paris, the old minister of Louis Philippe did his best to undermine the popularity of the Orleans tradition, which had been great among the Liberals under the Second Empire. He moved the Assembly to restore to the Orleans princes the value of their property confiscated under Louis Napoleon. This he did in the well-founded belief that the family would discredit itself in the eyes of the nation by accepting two millions sterling of public money at a moment when the country was burdened with the war indemnity. The incident was characteristic of his wary policy, as in the face of the anti-republican majority in the Assembly he could not openly break with the Right; and when it was suggested that he was too favourable to the maintenance of the Republic he offered his resignation, the refusal of which he took as indicating the indispensable nature of his services. Meanwhile Gambetta, by his popular eloquence, had won for himself in the autumn a triumphal progress, in the course of which he declared at Grenoble that political power had passed into the hands of “une couche sociale nouvelle,” and he appealed to the new social strata to put an end to the comedy of a Republic without republicans. When the Assembly resumed its sittings, order having been restored in the land disturbed by war and revolution, the financial system being reconstituted and the reorganization of the army planned, Thiers read to the house a presidential message which marked such a distinct movement towards the Left that Gambetta led the applause. “The Republic exists,” said the president, “it is the lawful government of the country, and to devise anything else is to devise the most terrible of revolutions.”
The year 1873 was full of events fateful for the history of France. It opened with the death of Napoleon III. at Chislehurst; but the disasters amid which the Second Empire had ended were too
