Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/106

 meeting, club, or tendency, just on the morrow of a war of invasion which ravaged her territory,—France was invited to pass from unity, the work of so many ages, to the federation of mediæval times! Strange indeed are the surprises in the lives of nations, and above all, in the movements of great cities!

The working engineer Assi, one of the chiefs of this great revolt—a man without instruction or judgment, but of an energetic character, has avowed that he never read but one book—the "Revolutions of Italy," a work by Edgar Quinet, which he was incapable of understanding by reason of his inadequate information, but by which his imagination was much affected. Italy, which in three hundred years up to the time of Charles V, presents the spectacle of seven thousand revolutions, must most assuredly have offered to Citizen Assi the complete model of an entire system. The elected Commune had to draw up its charter. The watchmaker Tirard, the dyer Loiseau-Pinson, sat side by side as members of the Central Committee, and disposed of Paris, the capital of a great nation, as Congress would have disposed of a nuisance in the District of Columbia.

In a word, the new Commune was constituent, and acknowledged no other authority than its own—a spectacle unique in the world. Neither in the United States nor Switzerland, where communal liberties are so great, has anything of the kind ever existed. Such was the situation—a return to the middle ages—a retrogression of eight centuries—federation substituted for unity—universal suffrage become a dead letter—the Prussian invasion considered as one of those accidents from which Paris had to disengage its responsibility, as the Assembly at Versailles only existed on condition of being an annex to the Commune.

It has been well said of the newly elected Commune