South of the Pompidou Centre, rue Renard runs down a large place dominated by the huge, gleaming Hôtel de Ville , the seat of the city's local government. Those opposed to the establishments of kings and emperors created their alternative municipal governments in this building in 1789, 1848 and 1870. The poet Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic here during the working-class revolt of 1848, and Gambetta the Third in 1870. But, with the defeat of the Commune in 1871, the conservatives, in control once again, concluded that the Parisian municipal authority had to go, if order, property, morality and the suppression of the working class were to be maintained. For the next hundred years, Paris was ruled directly by the national government.