BABETTE: You must do something for the bakery workers at once.
GENEVIÈVE: But I’m the Delegate for Education.
PHILIPPE: Then look after us. It says in your newspapers workers must educate themselves. But how can they when they have to work nights? I never see daylight.
LANGEVIN: I believe the Commune issued a decree abolishing nightwork in bakeries.
PHILIPPE: But the master bakers refuse to abide by it. And we don’t have the right to strike, we’re a vital industry. But the baker can shut up shop when she likes. There’s a loaf by the way. He gives her a loaf of bread.
GENEVIÈVE: That’s bribery. She bites into it.
LANGEVIN: If she shuts up the shop we’ll confiscate it and run it ourselves.
PHILIPPE: Does it taste good? You can let yourselves be bribed by us, but not by the masters. I’ll say it at the guild meeting, or they’ll smash the windows in the bakeries tonight. But what’s to be done about Babette and Madame Cabet? Their boss Busson, the army tailor, has come back.
BABETTE: But for a pair of trousers he’s only paying one franc now. He says the National Guard orders from the firms with the lowest prices.
GENEVIÈVE: Why are you looking at me like that, Pierre?
LANGEVIN: I am studying how you deal with the people, Citizen Delegate.
GENEVIÈVE: They are being economical with the people’s resources.
BABETTE: But we are the people.
LANGEVIN as Geneviève glances at him uncertainly: Learn, teacher.
BABETTE: If the Commune pays less than the Empire, we don’t need it. Jean is on the ramparts getting himself killed, and why? So we won’t have to endure that exploitation, that’s why.
PHILIPPE: If you won’t pay a proper rate for his trousers you’re doing the dirty on his own mother. And his girlfriend. You should …
LANGEVIN: We should? What’s the matter with you?
PHILIPPE: OK, we should …
LANGEVIN: That’s better.
PHILIPPE: So what should we do?
LANGEVIN: Of course, you’re not in the union of tailors, are you? That’s where prices should be decided. Not in Monsieur Busson’s hat factory.
BABETTE: How should we know that?
GENEVIÈVE: I’m trying to organise schools in which the children will learn it.
BABETTE: Where will you get the money for it if you can’t even pay a decent price for uniforms?
GENEVIÈVE: The Bank of France is a few blocks away. The difficulties are here. In this place even the cupboards are locked.
PHILIPPE: At least we can break them open, I should say.
LANGEVIN: What, you’re a baker and yet you’re ready to do a locksmith’s work as well? Now I feel more cheerful about the Commune, boys and girls. Perhaps his next sideline will be government.
He has wound up a grandfather clock that had stopped and now gives the pendulum a tap so that it begins to swing again. All look at the clock and laugh.
LANGEVIN: Expect no more of the Commune than you do of yourselves.
8
The office of the Governor of the Bank of France. The Governor, the Marquis de Plœuc, is in conversation with a fat churchman, the Procurator of the Archbishop of Paris. Rain.
DE PLŒUC: Tell His Eminence that I thank him for conveying to me the wishes of Monsieur Thiers. The ten million francs will be transferred to Versailles in the usual way. But what will happen to the Bank of France in the course of the next few days, I cannot say. At any minute I expect a visit from the Delegate of the Commune, and with that my arrest. There are two billion, 180 million here, Monsignore. That is our lifeline. If it is cut these people have won, whatever else happens.
SERVANT: Monsieur Beslay, Delegate of the Commune.
DE PLŒUC white in the face: France’s hour of destiny, Monsignore.
FAT CHURCHMAN: But how do I get out?
DE PLŒUC: Don’t lose your nerve.
Enter Beslay.
DE PLŒUC: Monsignore Beauchamp, Procurator of His Eminence the Archbishop.
FAT CHURCHMAN: May I take my leave?
DE PLŒUC: I assume you need this gentleman’s permission.
BESLAY: Give the Captain this visiting card.
The two men bow and the fat churchman leaves.
BESLAY: Citizen, in the Ministry of Finance the safes are sealed. The paymasters of the National Guard battalions stand there unable to open them. But the men must be paid or the Bank will be plundered, whatever I say. These people have wives and children.
DE PLŒUC: Monsieur Beslay, in accordance with the statutes of your Central Committee the employees of the Bank of France formed a battalion. Let me assure you that for more than two weeks they haven’t received a penny of their pay either, and they have wives and children too. Now, Monsieur Beslay, you have come through the courtyards and you have seen them there armed, sixty-year-olds among them, and I can assure you that they will fight if the Bank, which is in their care, should be attacked.
BESLAY: Such a fight would last two minutes.
DE PLŒUC: Perhaps only one. But what a minute in the history of France!
BESLAY after a pause: The Commune has issued a decree requiring the special battalions to be dissolved and merged with the others.
DE PLŒUC: I knew you would say that, monsieur. He holds up a scroll. May I show you a decree out of the archives of the Bank and issued by an older revolutionary body, the Convention, signed by Danton, according to which the employees of large administrative institutions are to be stationed, as soldiers, in their own offices?
BESLAY: Monsieur le Marquis, I haven’t come here to shed blood but to secure the means by which the defence of Paris and the reopening of its places of work may be effected and financed by the legally elected Commune.
DE PLŒUC: Monsieur Beslay, please do not think that I for one moment question the rights of the Commune. The Bank of France does not engage in politics.
BESLAY: Ah, now we are making progress.
DE PLŒUC: And what I hope with all my heart is that you of the Commune will recognise the rights of the Bank of France which stands above all parties.
BESLAY: Monsieur le Marquis, you are dealing with men of honour not highwaymen.
DE PLŒUC: Monsieur, I knew that the moment you came in. Monsieur Beslay, help me to save the Bank, which is to say the resources of your country, the resources of France.
BESLAY: Monsieur le Marquis, see us in a true light. We work like coolies, eighteen hours a day. We sleep in our clothes, on chairs. For fifteen francs a day every one of us does three or four jobs that to get done before now would have cost the people thirty times as much. There has certainly never been a cheaper government. But now we need ten million.
DE PLŒUC pained: Monsieur Beslay!
BESLAY: Monsieur le Marquis, we haven’t collected the taxes on tobacco or on daily provisions but we must pay the soldiers and the workers, we can’t hold on any longer unless we do. DE PLŒUC maintains a meaningful silence. Unless by early tomorrow we have six million …
DE PLŒUC: Six million. I wouldn’t be within my rights to give you one. In your sessions you speak of corruption, you accuse Monsieur Thiers of circumventing procedures to come at money, and now here you are yourself, demanding money from me even though no competent financial body exists. Despairingly. Set me up a body responsible for finance, I shan’t ask how you do it, but show me a piece of paper I can accept as legitimation.
BESLAY: But that will take two weeks. You are perhaps forgetting that we have the power.
DE PLŒUC: But not that I am in the right.
BESLAY: What funds do you have here?
DE PLŒUC: And you know I have a professional obligation to safeguard the confidentiality of the Bank! Do you, of all people, wish to assault such achievements as the confidentiality of our financial, legal and medical affairs? Monsieur Beslay, may I remind you that you too are dealing with a man of honour? Whatever sides we may seem to be on? Let us work together. Let us cons
ider together how best we may satisfy the needs of our great and beloved city without criminally infringing the infinitely numerous but oh so necessary prescriptions of this venerable institution. I am wholly and utterly at your disposal.
BESLAY: Monsieur le Marquis, for peaceful negotiations I am at your disposal.
9
a
Hôtel de Ville. Session of the Commune. Beslay is withstanding vehement criticism. At the same time there is great fatigue.
CRIES: Treachery! – Worse: stupidity! – Shall our communards go hungry while we heed Monsieur the Governor of the Bank of France and his ‘necessary formalities’? – Enough negotiations, send in a battalion!
BESLAY: Citizens, if you are not satisfied with my work I shall be more than happy to step down. But remember that the resources of France are our resources too and they must be managed thriftily.
CRY: By you or by the Governor?
BESLAY: I flatter myself that I have won over that perhaps rather pedantic but nonetheless honourable man by touching him in his professional pride and by appealing to his expertise to find us a legal way out.
CRIES: We want no appeals to him, we demand his arrest. – Why is it necessary to find a legal way out for the people to get their own money?
BESLAY: Do you want bankruptcy? Violate the statutes of the Bank and forty million banknotes are worthless. Currency depends on trust.
CRIES: Whose trust? – The bankers’? Mocking laughter. – These are delicate questions. Read Proudhon before you answer them. – We have taken possession of the state and now we must husband it.
VARLIN: For whom? This case illustrates that it is not enough to take possession of the apparatus of the state. It was not made for our purposes. Therefore we must smash it. That must be done by violence.
CRIES: No arrests! Let us not begin the new era with terror! Leave that to the old. – All you are doing is interrupting our peaceful work.
LANGEVIN: On the contrary, we are in the process of organising it.
CRIES: Arrest the Governor of the Bank and then read the newspapers! – The bourgeois newspapers? I read them and can’t understand why they have not been proscribed.
BESLAY: Citizens, I move that the issue be discussed in camera.
LANGEVIN: I oppose that proposal. Let us make no claim to infallibility as former governments, without exception, have done. Let us make public all our speeches and our deeds. Let us make the people privy to our imperfections, for we have nothing to fear but ourselves. Accordingly, I shall proceed. I shan’t speak of the fact that for 200,000 francs the Delegate for War could buy a thousand cavalry horses from the Germans – they are selling everything – but come back to the question of the soldiers’ pay, and include another question in it.
CRY: Don’t forget here that 200,000 men and their families live on that pay. The rifle is their trowel or spanner, it has to feed them.
RANVIER: I demand that the military situation be discussed.
LANGEVIN: Instead of paying the army a proper rate and fetching the money to do so from where it is, namely in the Bank of France, on top of that we stint the piece-rates for the women in the artillery works. I move that we cancel all contracts with suppliers who are using competition to force wages down and that we deal only with workshops that are in the hands of workers’ associations.
CRY: One thing at a time!
VARLIN: I support Langevin’s motion. To Beslay: But I’m also in favour of the immediate occupation of the Bank. For the same reasons.
LANGEVIN: One thing on account of the other.
RANVIER: The military aspect must be discussed as well. Don’t you see? Three things, all three of them. Because you have no time. Smash the enemy within today or you will be no match for the enemy outside your forts tomorrow.
CRIES: Where shall we find the strength for all that? Our strength will not suffice.
RIGAULT: We negotiate over the needs of the people. Why do we not listen to their proposals? They wish to participate, everywhere and at once. Why not put our trust in their strength? A strength which to many here is still mysterious and, indeed, suspect. The citizens who stormed the Bastille, declared the Revolution in Paris, protected its first steps, bled on the Champ de Mars, took the Tuileries, annihilated the Gironde, swept away priests and cults, were pushed back by Robespierre, rose up in Prairial, vanished for twenty years, surfaced again under the thunder of the Allies’ cannon, sank again into darkness, rose again in the year 1830 and being at once confined, filled the first years of the rule of capital with their strugglings and burst the net of steel in 1848, took the bourgeois republic by the throat four months later and, flung down again, broke out rejuvenated in 1868 and rattled the Empire and toppled it and offered themselves again against a foreign invader and were again scorned and insulted till 18 March when they smashed the hand that sought to throttle them. What could we have against the personal intervention of the people? They demand the immediate taking over of the banks and factories into their control and they demand the fight on all fronts but first and foremost the march on Versailles. Uneasy murmurings.
CRIES: That means civil war! – Bloodshed! – We hear the word ‘violence’ too often in this place. Beware!
RIGAULT holding up newspapers. Then listen to what is being said on the streets of Paris. I quote La Sociale, one of the few newspapers that are for us: ‘Citizen Delegates, march on Versailles! You will have the 220 battalions of the National Guard behind you, all support you, what are you waiting for? You have been patient too long. March on Versailles! Put your trust in Paris as Paris puts her trust in you! March on Versailles!’ Citizens, let us increase this strength by availing ourselves of it.
Murmurings continue.
CRIES: You quote what you ordered! – They are irresponsible men! – Socialism marches without bayonets!
RIGAULT: But bayonets confront it, citizens. The red flag flies over Marseilles and Lyons, but Versailles is arming rural ignorance and prejudice against them. Let us carry the flame of revolt into the country, burst the iron girdle around Paris and strike terror into the big cities!
Continuing murmurings of unease.
CRIES: Military adventures! – Enough of this! – The Commune rejects civil war! – I move: the assembly resumes its peaceable work and will not be disturbed by the attempts of some all too impatient people to plunge Paris into an adventure. – Agreed, but I move that we suppress the hostile newspapers. I name the following: Le Petit Moniteur, Le Petit National, Le Bon Sens, La Petite Presse, La France, Le Temps. – Look around you and study the principles of this assembly!
Mocking laughter among those around Rigault and Varlin. Meanwhile the Chairman has received a message.
CHAIRMAN: Citizen Delegates, I have received a message which will indeed turn the work of this assembly in a new direction.
b
A lobby in the Hôtel de Ville. Delegates and military personnel are entering or leaving the hall. A newspaper seller is selling the Officiel.
NEWSPAPER SELLER: L’Officiel! The Versailles traitors have attacked! Papal zouaves and imperial police have entered Neuilly! Women and children among the wounded! Mobilisation of all citizens between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five! The treacherous Versailles government has attacked!
AN OLD BEGGAR approaching him: Have you any bread on you?
NEWSPAPER SELLER: Don’t you know begging’s forbidden? ‘Versailles begins the civil war!’
BEGGAR: Can I forbid my belly rumbling?
Two delegates leave the session.
ONE TO THE OTHER: This attack, undertaken with so few troops, is an act of the purest desperation. Elections in the country have gone badly for Monsieur Thiers.
BEGGAR catching up with them below: Messieurs, allow me to show you the balloon just leaving Paris. It is visible above the houses.
DELEGATE: Ah, the ‘Sociale’? Has it lifted off?
BEGGAR: With proclamations and declarations, ten thousand of them for the country. The lan
d will be given to the peasants. From the balloon! I’m from the country, I am. I know what’s what, I’ll show you the balloon.
The delegates look upwards through a window.
BEGGAR: Messieurs, the balloon!
DELEGATE: You’re a peasant, old friend?
BEGGAR: From the Auvergne, Saint-Antoine.
DELEGATE: And why are you here?
BEGGAR: Take a look at me, can I still pull a plough? That’s for the youngsters.
DELEGATE: So you’ve come to relatives in Paris, eh?
BEGGAR: They had no room.
DELEGATE: And what’s your opinion of the Commune?
BEGGAR: Messieurs, at your service. You want what’s best, even though you do want to share everything out. God be with you. The balloon, messieurs, a look at it, that will be ten centimes.
DELEGATE: But why are you against the distribution of the land?
BEGGAR: Well, messieurs, they take it away.
DELEGATE: But not from you. You’ll get some.
BEGGAR: Pardon me, messieurs, they take it away. Do I still have my own farm, for example? Ten centimes.
DELEGATE: But your children are on it, aren’t they?
BEGGAR: You see?
DELEGATE: But that’s because you don’t have enough land between you.
BEGGAR: Do you mind if I ask you for the ten centimes for showing you the balloon? It will vanish any minute.
DELEGATE: Do you have a lord of the manor in Saint-Antoine?
BEGGAR: Of course we do. Monsieur de Bergeret.
DELEGATE: And are you fond of him?
BEGGAR: Well, monsieur, he does look after his own.
DELEGATE shaking his head and paying the money: An enemy. Owning nothing, he defends ownership, even that of the thief who has robbed him! We shall need years to persuade him. Exit.
BEGGAR showing the coin to the newspaper seller: Ten centimes, a very good balloon! What fools people are! They could have seen it for themselves.
Collected Plays, Volume 4 (Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry & Prose) 8 Page 13