The preliminaries were signed on February 26, and accepted by the
National Assembly on March 1, but the actual treaty of Frankfort was not
signed and ratified until the ensuing month of May.
Paris presented a sorry spectacle during the weeks which followed the
armistice. There was no work for the thousands of artisans who had become
National Guards during the siege. Their allowance as such was prolonged in
order that they might at least have some means of subsistence. But the
unrest was general. By the side of the universal hatred of the Germans,
which was displayed on all sides, even finding vent in the notices set up
in the shop-windows to the effect that no Germans need apply there, one
observed a very bitter feeling towards the new Government. Thiers had been
an Orleanist all his life, and among the Paris working-classes there was a
general feeling that the National Assembly would give France a king. This
feeling tended to bring about the subsequent bloody Insurrection of the
Commune; but, as I wrote in "Republican France," it was precisely the
Commune which gave the French Royalists a chance. It placed a weapon in
their hands and enabled them to say, "You see, by that insurrection, by
all those terrible excesses, what a Republic implies.
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