Paris Commune

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French history | Spring Uprising; A detailed account of the wanton destruction of the Paris Commune. Economist, Nov 29, 2014
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... une-spring-uprising
(book review on John Merriman, Massacre; The life and death of the Paris Commune of 1871. Yale University Press, 2014)

Note:
(a) history of France (in chronological order):
(i) ancien regime (ended in 1789)
(ii) First Republic (1792–1804) (Deposed in 1792, Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793)
(iii) First Empire (1804–1814/1815)
(iv) The Bourbon restoration (1814–1830; Louis XVIII and Charles X, younger and even younger brothers of Louis XVI respectively)
(v) July Monarchy (1830-1848) (so named because an uprising of "three glorious days" (July 26-29, 1848) forced Charles X to abdicate in favor of his 10-year-old grandson (with help from an aristocrat who elected to be an emperor himself (Louis Philippe; overthrown in 1848 revolution and died in 1850)
(vi) Second Republic (1848–52) (Revolutions of 1848 began in France)
(vii) Second Empire (1852-1871) (started when president of Second Republic, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon I), proclaimed himself emperor (Napoleon III); ended when he was captured at Battle of Sedan (SEpt 1, 1870) in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71))

* Napoleon II
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_II
(1811-1832 (died of tuberculosis); son of Napoleon I; table: Emperor of the French (titular))
* The commune (or town) of Sedan is pronounced in ENGLISH (the French have their own pronunciation) the same as the automobile of the same spelling.
* The above is summarized in
France in the long nineteenth century
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_long_nineteenth_century
(viii) Third Republic (1871-1940)

choi

(b) “THE crushing of the Paris Commune is still hard to comprehend. Over two days in May 1871, 130,000 troops from the regular French army entered Paris to suppress an improvised city government calling itself La Commune. Historians still dispute the figures, but seven days later the army had killed perhaps 10,000 defenders, unarmed helpers and hapless bystanders. Prisoners were shot out of hand. Of 36,000 people arrested, around 10,000 were executed, imprisoned or deported.”
(i) Paris Commune
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
(Mar 18-May 26, 1871; The killing of two French army generals [Jacques Leon Clement-Thomas and Claude Lecomte, both on Mar 18, 1871] by soldiers of the Commune's National Guard and the refusal of the Commune to accept the authority of the French government led to its harsh suppression by the regular French Army in "La Semaine sanglante" ("The Bloody Week"); section 1.10 Adolphe Thiers, parliamentary elections of 1871; section 7 "Bloody Week": May 21-28, 1871)
(ii) French English dictionary
* semaine (noun feminine; Latin septimāna ^): "week"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/semaine
* sanglant (adjective masculine; feminine form: sanglante): "1: bloody; 2: bloody-red"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sanglant

^ Latin English dictionary
septimāna (noun feminine; derived from the adjective septimānus (“related to the seventh element of a series”), derived from septimus (“seventh”)):
"week"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/septimana
* quartier (noun masculine: plural: quartiers; from French noun masculine quart ¼ +‎ -ier): "quarter, district (part of town), neighbourhood"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quartier
* hôtel (noun masculine; from Old French hostel, from Latin [noun neuter] hospitāle [hospital, guesthouse]. Compare [French noun masculine] hôpital [hospital]):
"mansion, town house, hotel"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hôtel
(iii) out of hand: "without delay or deliberation; also :  in a summary or peremptory manner <rejected the plan out of hand>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hand

choi

(c)
(i) The English surname Merriman is "an elaborate form of another surname Merry [happy]."
(ii) The French surname Thiers is name of places "in Puy-de-Dôme, Thiers-sur-Thève in Oise, or Thiers-la-Grange in Nord."

(d) “The collapse of France’s armies in an ill-chosen war with Prussia a year earlier had finished off Napoleon III’s authoritarian Second Empire. Radical French cities vied with a conservative countryside for control of a fragile new republic. To seal victory, the Germans besieged the capital. As food supplies ran low in January 1871, the French sued for terms. War-weary voters chose a right-wing government under Adolphe Thiers, granting him a mandate in effect to accept a harsh German peace.”
(i) Review (b)(i):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
(section 1.10 Adolphe Thiers, parliamentary elections of 1871)
(ii) Franco-Prussian War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
(section 6.6 Armistice: On Jan 28, 1871 the Government of National Defense based in Paris negotiated an armistice with the Prussians))
(iii) Government of National Defense
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_National_Defense
(the first government of the Third Republic of France from Sept 4, 1870 to Feb 13, 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War)

Quote: "The government, headed by General Louis Jules Trochu, was under Prussian siege in Paris. Breakouts were attempted twice, but met with disaster and rising dissatisfaction of the public. In late January the government, having further enraged the population of Paris by crushing a revolutionary uprising, surrendered to the Prussians. Two weeks later, it was replaced by the new government of Adolphe Thiers [titles: head ('chef' in French) and then president, Feb 17, 1871- May 24, 1873], which soon passed a variety of financial laws in an attempt to pay reparations and thus oblige the Prussians to leave France, leading to the outbreak of revolutions in French cities, and the ultimate creation of the Paris Commune.

choi

(e) “The Commune sprang from the sense among Parisians that they had been betrayed. Radical candidates had swept its parliamentary seats [in French cities, including Paris]. Especially in the poorer quartiers to the east, revulsion at the peace, dreams of fighting on and anger at the lifting of a wartime moratorium on debts mingled with hopes for democratic rights and social reform.”
(i) French Third Republic
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Third_Republic

Quote: "Early governments of the Third Republic considered re-establishing the monarchy; however, confusion as to the nature of that monarchy, and who among the various deposed royal families would be awarded the throne, caused those talks to stall. Thus, the Third Republic, which was originally intended as a transitional government, instead became the permanent government of France.

(ii) In a likely old version of Franco-Prussian War in Wikipedia (which now is published online by New World Encyclopedia with the same format as Wikipedia), it is stated:

section "7.2 French reaction to the defeat[:] National elections returned an overwhelmingly conservative government, which, under President Adolphe Thiers, established itself in Versailles, fearing that the political climate of Paris was too dangerous to set up the capital in the city. The new government, formed mainly of conservative, middle-class rural politicians, passed a variety of laws which greatly angered the population of Paris, such as the controversial Law of Maturities, which decreed that all rents in Paris, which had been postponed since September 1870, and all public debts across France, which had been given a moratorium in November 1870, were to be paid in full, with interest, within 48 hours. Paris shouldered an unfairly high proportion of the indemnity payments made to the Prussians, and the population of the city quickly grew resentful of the Versailles government. With Paris under the protection of the revolutionary National Guard and few regular soldiers in the city, left-wing leaders established themselves in the Hôtel de Ville [‘town hall,’ in Paris, which burned down during suppression of Paris Commune; rebuilt and remains city hall] and established the Paris Commune which was savagely repressed by Versailles with the loss of about 20,000 lives.

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(f) “When, on March 18th, Thiers fumbled an attempt to regain control in Paris from a radicalised militia, units of the regular army sided with the militia [ie, National Guard]. In some panic, Thiers recalled the army and the government to Versailles. State authority having been withdrawn from the capital, Paris elected a self-governing Commune of around 90 members, though about 20 from wealthier arrondissements refused their seats. What radical Paris saw as autonomy, conservative Versailles [led by Thiers] regarded as revolution. What to Versailles was the restoration of political order, the Commune took for class war by the rich.”

Paris Commune
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
(section 2 Cannons of Paris; section 2.1 Government retreat)

(g) “In Mr Merriman’s retelling, the Paris Commune is a reminder that the worst villainies are possible once you have dehumanised your opponent.”