Central Committee of the National Guard (1871)

After the armistice of 28 January 1871 and the election on 8 February of a National Assembly with a royalist majority, delegates of the Paris National Guard battalions began meeting to defend the Republic. On 15 February at the Tivoli-Vauxhall they elected a provisional commission to draw up the statutes of a permanent organisation, and on 24 February some 2,000 delegates from about 200 battalions resolved not to let the government disarm the Guard. On the eve of the Prussian entry the committee moved the cannon bought by public subscription during the siege to working-class quarters such as Montmartre and Belleville. On 15 March, at the Vauxhall, 1,325 delegates of 215 battalions adopted the statutes and set up the Central Committee, naming Garibaldi commander-in-chief, a title he declined. The battalions of the bourgeois arrondissements sent no delegates.

The committee mixed workers with small employers, small shopkeepers and members of the liberal professions, and the International and the trade-union chambers had about twenty representatives on it. When the army failed to seize the cannon on 18 March and Thiers withdrew the government and the troops to Versailles, the committee occupied the Hôtel de Ville that night. Holding that its competence was limited to representing and defending the National Guard, it at once called municipal elections, putting Jourde and Varlin in charge of finances and Duval and Rigault of the prefecture of police. It lifted the state of siege, freed political prisoners, deferred rent payments and banned evictions. Fearing civil war, it rejected the Blanquists' demand for a march on Versailles.

When the Commune council elected on 26 March was proclaimed on 28 March the committee handed over power, but it meant to keep command of the National Guard. It named Cluseret to head the war department, published its own newspaper and pressed Rossel to share command, clashing repeatedly with members of the Commune. The National Guard reported both to the committee and to the Commune's Executive Commission, and it was never clear which was in charge of the war.

In The Civil War in France Marx called the Central Committee the provisional government of the revolution from 18 March until the Commune took over, but named its failure to march at once on a then helpless Versailles a decisive mistake. In his 1891 introduction Engels wrote that the Blanquists, the majority among the members of the Commune, had also predominated in the Central Committee.