The government grew increasingly unpopular with Parisians as efforts to break the siege failed, citizens starved, and the bombardment of the city intensified.

Revolutionary sentiment grew over the winter, particularly among the National Guard, which vastly outnumbered the professional soldiers of the French Army in the besieged city.

France surrendered on 28 January 1871, and a new National Assembly, dominated by monarchists and led by the conservative Adolphe Thiers, was elected on 8 February.

[5] Fighting women, who were mostly working class, were indeed welcomed by the ordinary soldiers of the National Guard, who were as well; Léo attributed the opposition to their presence to the "bourgeois and authoritarian mindset" of the officers and surgeons.

[12] A major centre of revolutionary action in the 12th arrondissement was Club Éloi, where elected Commune officials, town hall functionaries, National Guard officers, and many women all took part in debates.

[14] On 10 May 1871, the day after he took up his post as colonel of the 12th Legion of the National Guard (that is, the Fédérés of the 12th arrondissement), Jules Montels announced the "first company of volunteer citizen women".

It is likely that the group had already arisen from the local Union des femmes and the Committee of Republican Women, and that this announcement "was simply a recognition of official patronage.

[...] You have been given a great example: the citizens, heroic women, filled with the righteousness of our cause, demanded arms from the Committee of Public Safety to defend, like all of us, the Commune and the Republic."

The volunteers were organized militarily, with women officers at their head, and many witness accounts, preserved in the dossiers of the courts martial, attest to many parades in front of the Place de la Bastille next to the town hall of the 12th arrondissement.

They called on other women to join them;[20] several of their speeches were remarked upon by Paul Fontoulieu [fr], author of Les Églises de Paris sous la Commune, who was an anti-communard but generally reliable witness.

[17] Except for a few known only as names — Ménard, Ciron, Lambin[17] — Julie Magot, Louise Neckbecker, Marie Rogissart, and Adélaïde Valentin are the only historically attested members of the legion.