So far they were quite within their rights, and Clemenceau at first sympathised wholly with the Federals. The Parisians had undergone terrible privations during the siege, they were exasperated by the denunciations that poured in upon them from the provinces, they saw no hope for their recently won liberties unless they themselves were in a position to defend them, they had grave doubts whether they had not been betrayed within and without during the siege itself. It is no wonder that, under such circumstances, they should resent, by force of arms, any attempt to deprive them of the means of effective resistance to reactionary repression. There was also nothing in the establishment of the Commune itself which was other than a perfectly legitimate effort to organise the city afresh, after the old system had proved utterly incompetent. But the attempt to disarm the population of Montmartre roused passions which it was impossible to quell. Clemenceau, as Mayor of the district, did all that one man could do to save the two generals, Lecomte and Clément Thomas, from being killed. With his sound judgment he saw at once that, whether their execution was justifiable or not, it would be regarded as murder by many Republicans whom the cooler heads in Paris desired to conciliate. As was proved afterwards, he exerted all his power to check even the semblance of injustice. But his final intervention to prevent the tragedy of the Château Rouge came too late, and Lecomte and Thomas, who had not hesitated to risk the massacre of innocent citizens on behalf of a policy of repression, were regarded as the first victims of an infuriated mob. The outcome of Clemenceau's own endeavours to save these misguided militarists was that he himself became "suspect" to the heads of the Central Committee of the Commune sitting at the Hôtel de Ville, which had taken control of all Paris. He was the duly elected and extremely popular Radical-Socialist--to use a later designation--Mayor of perhaps the most advanced arrondissement in the capital, he had been sent to Bordeaux by a great majority of his constituents to sit on the extreme left, and, in that capacity, had stoutly defended the rights of Paris; he was strongly in favour of most of the claims made by the leaders of the Commune. But all this went for nothing. The new Committee wanted their own man at Montmartre, and Clemenceau was not that man.