One week before, on August 18, an order had been given for insurrection by the Paris Liberation Committee, which coordinated resistance activity there. It was chaired by André Tollet, an artisan in the sans-culotte tradition of 1789 and a trade unionist who had escaped from the camp where he had been interned as a communist. Its military arm was the French Forces of the Interior, or FFIs as they were known, commanded by Henri Rol-Tanguy, a communist metalworker and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, but it was desperately short of weapons and initially had only 600 people in arms. The muscle of the insurrection was a general strike that swept up the railways, utilities, cinemas, restaurants, the Galeries Lafayette and even the Paris police.