In liaison with Mikhail Bakunin, they organized a big meeting bringing together several thousand participants on March 13, which gave great weight to the local section, then re-elected with Albert Richard at its head.

Without encountering resistance, it seized power under the leadership of a few leaders who had quickly arrived: Jacques-Louis Hénon, Désiré Barodet, Doctor Durand.

Without delay, they proclaimed the French Third Republic on the balcony, in a radical but not revolutionary spirit,[4] and put up a poster in town decreeing the downfall of the Empire.

Members of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) participated in the uprising, and the red flag was raised in place of the tricolor, without it being clearly defined whether this symbol announced a future revolution or simply proclaimed the downfall of the previous regime.

In order not to see his lines disperse, and the weapons get lost in the crowd, the general quickly made them return to the barracks, leaving the public safety committee in place.

Albert Richard, Louis Andrieux and Victor Jaclard, who were part of it, were delegates to the Parisian government to discuss with it the levy en masse against the Prussians.

[9] He was alarmed to see the Lyon section of the IWA collaborating with the Republicans, and instead pushed them to foment a revolutionary war, against the Prussians, and at the cost of the overthrow of the provisional government, which he denounced as defeatist.

[10] On September 17, 1870, during a public meeting, the militants of the IWA, including Bakunin, founded the Salvation Committee of France, on a program of mass levy and revolutionary war, in the spirit of 1792-1793.

Camille Camet [fr] was its secretary, and its main figures were Albert Richard, Gustave Paul Cluseret, Charles Beauvoir, Mikhail Bakunin, Eugène Saignes and Louis Palix.

The Salvation Committee of France, which included delegates from different parts of the city, was very active, publishing manifestos and increasing the number of public meetings.

In Lyon, on September 26, 1870, Salle de la Rotonde, at Les Brotteaux, during a big meeting with the workers in struggle of the national sites, the Salvation Committee of France called for the replacement of the provisional government by a decentralized and fighting federation of municipalities.

The disastrous situation in which the Country finds itself; the impotence of official powers and the indifference of the privileged classes have brought the French nation to the brink of the abyss.

At the call of teams of agitators sent to the construction sites, a demonstration of several thousand workers displaying the red flag invaded the Place des Terreaux at noon.

[12] Bakunin later attributed the failure of the movement to this "treason" by Cluseret: the workers gathered on the Place des Terreaux were in fact disarmed in the face of the troops and the national guard of the bourgeois neighborhoods.

The army arrived from Perrache, on the orders of prefect Marie-Edmond Valentin [fr], facing a crowd of 20,000 to 25,000 people shouting "Don't shoot!