These measures claim a brief notice.  The former of them naturally falls into two parts, dealing severally with the Commune and the Department.  These are the two all-important areas in French life.  In rural districts the Commune corresponds to the English parish; it is the oldest and best-defined of all local areas.  In urban districts it corresponds with the municipality or township.  The Revolutionists of 1790 and 1848 had sought to apply the principle of manhood suffrage to communal government; but their plans were swept away by the ensuing reactions, and the dawn of the Third Republic found the Communes, both rural and urban, under the control of the prefets and their subordinates.  We must note here that the office of prefet, instituted by Bonaparte in 1800, was designed to link the local government of the Departments closely to the central power:  this magistrate, appointed by the Executive at Paris, having almost unlimited control over local affairs throughout the several Departments.  Indeed, it was against the excessive centralisation of the prefectorial system that the Parisian Communists made their heedless and unmeasured protest.  The question having thus been thrust to the front, the Assembly brought forward (April 1871) a measure authorising the election of Communal Councils elected by every adult man who had resided for a year in the Commune.  A majority of the Assembly wished that the right of choosing mayors should rest with the Communal Councils, but Thiers, browbeating the deputies by his favourite device of threatening to resign, carried an amendment limiting this right to towns of less than 20,000 inhabitants.  In the larger towns, and in all capitals of Departments, the mayors were to be appointed by the central power.  Thus the Napoleonic tradition in favour of keeping local government under the oversight of officials nominated from Paris was to some extent perpetuated even in an avowedly democratic measure.

Paris was to have a Municipal Council composed of eighty members elected by manhood suffrage from each ward; but the mayors of the twenty arrondissements, into which Paris is divided, were, and still are, appointed by the State; and here again the control of the police and other extensive powers are vested in the Prefet of the Department of the Seine, not in the mayors of the arrondissements or the Municipal Council.  The Municipal or Communal Act of 1871, then, is a compromise—­on the whole a good working compromise—­between the extreme demands for local self-government and the Napoleonic tradition, now become an instinct with most Frenchmen in favour of central control over matters affecting public order[69].

[Footnote 69:  On the strength of this instinct see Mr. Bodley’s excellent work, France, vol. i. pp. 32-42. etc.  For the Act, see Hanotaux op. cit. pp. 236-238.]