The Narbonne Commune and Sharpening Divisions in Republican Ranks

Villagers in the Aude greeted the Third Republic with celebrations and dancing in the streets; in some parts of the Narbonnais they brought out red flags and displayed statues of the Marianne in public squares.^[54] But the proclamation of the Commune in Paris had still more dramatic repercussions. The Club de l'union in Narbonne changed its name to the Club de la révolution and declared Narbonne to be an independent commune under the leadership of Emile Digeon.^[55] On March 24, 1871, Digeon took the town hall and replaced the tricolor with the red flag, "symbol of the people's rights." Just a year earlier masons and glass workers had struck in Narbonne, and in the south the Ligue du Midi had supported a regional defense against the Prussians. Digeon was convinced that a local insurrection could succeed given that urban workers had already begun to defend their rights against employers.^[56] He also appealed to the rural workers, artisans, and vinegrowers who formed the base of the left republican movement in the countryside. Speaking at the Club de la révolution, Digeon linked the Paris Commune to the defense of the nation and the Republic, and to the struggle of the poor against the rich.^[57]

If we must . . . take up arms, let it be for the work of democratic propaganda, for the way of the oppressed against the oppressors, the exploited against the exploiters. . . . Let us unite around [the red flag] to prevent the resurrection of the scaffold, to prevent the cemeteries of Africa, already filled with republicans by Cavaignac and Bonaparte, from receiving newcomers from the reaction of 1871. . . .

Workers, laborers of Narbonne, go to the countryside, tell the peasants that their interests are the same as yours, that the Revolu-

tion . . . means the emancipation of those whom misery oppresses under the yoke of the rich. . . . Tell them that the Revolution means peace by the abolition of permanent armies, by the abolition of taxes for the small proprietor, and for the day laborer.^[58]

The Narbonne commune did not become a mass movement, however. The sudden prosperity of the vineyards hardly created a favorable climate for insurrection. Audois vinegrowers gathered full harvests and enormous profits even as the phylloxera ravaged the vineyards of the Gard and the Hérault. Vinedressers and other rural workers likewise enjoyed the highest wages they had ever seen. The relatively small group of three hundred men and women who occupied the town hall, supported by two hundred fifty soldiers, did not hold out for long. After less than a week, on March 30, President Thiers sent a regiment of Algerian sharpshooters to Narbonne to force the insurrectionists out of the town hall, and police arrested thirty-two activists, including Digeon.^[59]

Both nationally and locally the repression of the communes allowed some French citizens to accept the Republic as the guardian of order; for others the Communards became martyrs who died defending workers' and artisans' rights and the rights of local communities against arbitrary state authority. These differences corresponded to the divisions between radical republicans and moderates. Radicals continued to organize in the Aude, building on the political organizing techniques of their démoc soc predecessors: they held nighttime meetings in barns or fields in an attempt to attract peasants and rural workers, and occasionally they used village cafés as meeting halls.^[60] Radicals helped to found urban artisans' political associations such as the Cercle de l'union des travailleurs in Limoux, and the Fédération radicale tried to organize urban and rural artisans elsewhere in the department. Their organizing efforts bore some fruit as landowners, vinedressers, and urban workers sent radical republicans to the Chamber of Deputies in 1871 and 1873.^[61] Moderate republican officials linked the growth of radicalism (as left republicanism came to be known) to the passionate Latin temperament of local voters and to the prosperity of vineyard workers and bourgeois alike, deploring the fact that men of

property and standing eagerly took part "in this worker and agricultural radicalism."^[62] In truth, however, the success of radicalism in the Aude owed more to the crises of viticultural capitalism than to its fortunes.

The nearly total domination of vineyards made the local economy especially vulnerable. By the mid 1870s the phylloxera, a tiny aphid that kills vines by living off their roots, had already ravaged vineyards elsewhere in the south, but it had not yet touched the Aude. Vinegrowers, desperate for government assistance to prevent phylloxera from spreading, warmed to the interventionist position of southern radicalism. Although the radicals' national program, following the ideas of Louis Blanc and Georges Clemenceau, did not address the concerns of vineyard owners specifically, many of its features, recalling the social program of 1848, would have directly or indirectly benefited vignerons : the defense of individual rights, and especially the rights of small producers; the nationalization of railroads and the Canal du Midi; the lowering of taxes and transport rates for both industrial and agricultural goods; the creation of credit facilities; and the regulation of working hours and working conditions.^[63] In July 1878, just after phylloxera first appeared in the Audois villages of Ouveillan and Argelliers, the radical majority in the Chamber of Deputies passed legislation that gave significant financial support for treatment of vines attacked by the insect.^[64]

By the late 1870s, then, the growth of the viticultural bourgeoisie and the prosperity of vinedressers and urban artisans had helped to transform the politics of the Aude in three ways. First, densely populated, agglomerated rural villages in the Aude provided a welcome setting for démoc socs and republicans to organize and establish a base among rural workers, artisans, and small landowners, who shared an interest in the fate of the vines. The viticultural petty bourgeoisie's economic security during this golden age enabled it to escape the influence of the local notables who had shaped rural politics for generations. Second, the expansion of markets, the protourbanization of the countryside, the spread of education, and the unparalleled prosperity of the growing vineyard economy brought vinedressers and workers

into contact with urban political leaders and new organizing techniques and facilitated political alliances between rural dwellers and town folk. Third, new political ideologies and movements began to take root in protourban villages, with republicanism prospering where vineyards grew. Ultimately the defense of the vine drew cultivateurs and the viticultural petty bourgeoisie to radicalism. Once the vineyard economy crumbled under the impact of the phylloxera crisis, however, the underlying class divisions of peasant society came into sharper focus. This process in turn paved the way for the development of socialism in the Aude.