Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/91

 Central Committee attracted crowds of readers in the streets:

", 26th March.

"At the moment we write the Central Committee will have de jure, if not de facto, ceded its place to the Commune. Having fulfilled the mission imposed upon it by necessity, it will reduce itself to the special functions for which it was called into existence; and which, violently disputed by the Executive, obliged it to struggle to conquer or to die with the city, whose armed representative it was.

"Expression of the municipal liberty legitimately, judicially, insurgent against governmental arbitrariness, the Committee had no other task than to prevent, at any price, that Paris should be deprived of the primordial right it had triumphantly conquered. The day after the vote it may be said to have done its duty.

"As to the elected Commune, its part will be very different, and perhaps its means also. Before everything it will have to define its mandate and determine its attributes. That constituent power which is accorded so wide, so indefinite, so confused to a French National Assembly, it will have to exercise for itself, that is to say, for the city of which it is the representative.

"Therefore, its first work will be the discussion and preparation of a Charter, of that act which our ancestors of the Middle Ages called their commune. That accomplished, it will have to consider the means of making recognized and guaranteed by the central power, whatever that may be, this statute of municipal autonomy. This portion of its task will be none the less arduous if the movement, localized in Paris and one or two large cities, permits the present National Assembly to prolong a mission which good sense and the force of things limited to the conclusion of peace, and which has already been some time accomplished.