Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution

by R.R. Palmer

The Paris Commune comprised forty-eight sections, or what we should call wards. These sections were the very springs of revolution. Here met the true “sans-culottes,” the men who did not wear the knee-breeches of the upper classes. Direct popular government was the rule. Each section had an assembly in which its citizens (males over twenty-one) were supposed to deliberate and vote. Some three thousand citizens lived in each section on the average, but only a fraction ever attended the meetings. When the mayor of Paris was elected he received only 14,137 votes in a city of over six hundred thousand—somewhat less than an average of three hundred in each section assembly. Some members of the city council had been elected by as few as twenty votes. Hébert, assistant procurator of the Commune and the man whose name came to stand for the proletarian movement, held office by virtue of fifty-six votes in his section. Chaumette, the procurator and Hébert’s follower, received fifty-three.