The whole country thrilled with political life.

For the time, the provinces held the directing power, which had been necessarily removed from the capital; and--most powerful motive of all--they looked on the Parisian experiment as gross treason to _la patrie_, while she lay at the feet of the Germans.

Thus, the very motives which for a space lent such prestige and power to the Communistic Jacobins of 1793 told against their imitators in 1871.
The inmost details of their attempt will perhaps never be fully known; for too many of the actors died under the ruins of the building they had so heedlessly reared.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the Commune was far from being the causeless outburst that it has often been represented.

In part it resulted from the determination of the capital to free herself from the control of the "rurals" who dominated the National Assembly; and in that respect it foreshadowed, however crudely, what will probably be the political future of all great States, wherein the urban population promises altogether to outweigh and control that of the country.