Paris Commune

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Le Père Duchesne face to the statue of Napoleon I on top of the Vendome column: "Eh ben ! bougre de canaille, on va donc te foutre en bas comme ta crapule de neveu !… (Here! savage rascal, we will put you down just as your crook of a nephew!…"

The term "Paris Commune" (French: La Commune de Paris) originally referred to the government of Paris during the French Revolution. However, the term more commonly refers to the socialist government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 (more formally from March 26) to May 28, 1871.

In a formal sense the Paris Commune of 1871 was simply the local authority (council of a town or district — French "commune") which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871. But the conditions in which it was formed, its controversial decrees and tortured end make it one of the more important political episodes of the time.

Background

Destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune

The Commune was the result of an uprising of republicans, democrats and patriots within Paris after the Franco-Prussian War ended with French defeat. The war with Prussia, started by Napoleon III ("Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte") in July 1870, turned out disastrously for the French and by September Paris itself was under siege. The gap between rich and poor in the capital had widened in recent years and now food shortages, military failures, and finally a German bombardment were adding to an already widespread discontent. Parisians, especially workers and the lower-middle classes, had long been supporters of a democratic republic. A specific demand was that Paris should be self-governing, with its own elected council, something enjoyed by smaller French towns, but denied to Paris by a government wary of the capital's unruly populace. An associated but more vague wish was for a fairer, if not necessarily socialist, way of managing the economy, summed up in the popular cry for "la république démocratique et sociale!"

In January, 1871, when the siege had lasted for four months, the moderate republican Government of National Defence sought an armistice with the newly-proclaimed German Reich. The Germans included a triumphal entry into Paris in the peace terms. Despite the hardships of the siege many Parisians were bitterly resentful and were particularly angry that the Prussians should be allowed a brief ceremonial occupation of their city.

A contemporary sketch of women and children helping take two National Guard cannon to Montmartre

By that time hundreds of thousands of Parisians were armed members of a citizens' militia known as the "National Guard", which had been greatly expanded to help defend the city. Guard units elected their own officers, who in working-class districts included radical and socialist leaders.

Steps were being taken to form a "Central Committee" of the Guard, including patriotic republicans and socialists, both to defend Paris against a possible German attack, and also to defend the republic against a possible royalist restoration, following the election of a monarchist majority in February 1871 to the new National Assembly.

The population of Paris was defiant in the face of defeat, and were prepared to fight if the entry of the German army into the city led to an armed clash. Before the Prussians entered Paris, National Guards, helped by ordinary working people, managed to take large numbers of cannon (which they regarded as their own property, as they had been partly paid for by public subscription) away from the Prussians' path and store them in "safe" districts. One of the chief "cannon parks" was on the heights of Montmartre.

Adolphe Thiers, head of the new provisional government, realised that in the present unstable situation the Central Committee formed an alternative centre of political and military power. In addition, he was concerned that the workers would arm themselves with the National Guard weapons and provoke the Prussians.

The rise and nature of the commune

The Prussians entered Paris briefly and left again without incident. But Paris continued to be in a state of high political excitement.

As the Central Committee of the National Guard was adopting an increasingly radical stance and steadily gaining in authority, the government could not indefinitely allow it to have four hundred cannon at its disposal. And so, as a first step, on March 18 Thiers ordered regular troops to seize the cannon stored on the Butte Montmartre and in other locations across the city. Instead of following instructions, however, the soldiers, whose morale was in any case not high, fraternised with National Guards and local residents. The general at Montmartre, Claude Martin Lecomte, who was later said to have ordered them to fire on the crowd of National Guards and civilians, was dragged from his horse and later shot, together with General Thomas, a veteran republican now hated as former commander of the National Guard, who was arrested nearby.

Generals Lecomte and Thomas being shot in Montmartre after their troops join the rebellion: a photographic reconstruction, not an actual photograph

Other army units joined in the rebellion which spread so rapidly that the head of the government Thiers ordered an immediate evacuation of Paris by as many of the regular forces as would obey; by the police; and by administrators and specialists of every kind. He himself fled, ahead of them, to Versailles. Thiers claimed he had thought about this strategy ("retreat from Paris to crush the people afterward") for a long time, while meditating the example of the 1848 Revolution, but it is just as likely that he panicked. There is no evidence that the government had expected or planned for the crises that had now begun. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now the only effective government in Paris: it arranged elections for a Commune, to be held on March 26.

The 92 members of the Commune (or, more correctly, of the "Communal Council") included a high proportion of skilled workers, several professionals (such as doctors and journalists). Many of them were political activists, ranging from reformist republicans, through various types of socialists, to the Jacobins who tended to look back nostalgically to the Revolution of 1789.

Louis Auguste Blanqui

One man, the veteran leader of the 'Blanquist' group of revolutionary socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, was elected President of the Council, but this was in his absence, for he had been arrested on March 17 and was held in a secret prison throughout the life of the Commune. The Paris Commune was proclaimed on March 28, although local districts often retained the organizations from the siege.

Social measures

The commune adopted the previously discarded French Republican Calendar during its brief existence and used the socialist red flag rather than the republican tricolore — in 1848, during the Second Republic, the red flag had already been opposed by radicals and socialists against the moderate Republicans, similar to the moderate and liberal Girondists during the 1789 Revolution.

Despite internal differences, the Council made a good start in maintaining the public services essential for a city of two million; it was also able to reach a consensus on certain policies whose content tended towards a progressive, secular and highly democratic social democracy rather than a social revolution. Lack of time (the Commune was able to meet on fewer than 60 days in all) meant that only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included:

• the separation of church and state
• the right of vote for women
• the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege (during which payment had been suspended)
• the abolition of night work in the hundreds of Paris bakeries
• the granting of pensions to the unmarried companions of National Guards killed on active service, as well as to the children if any
• the free return, by the city pawnshops, of all workmen's tools and household items up to 20 francs in value, pledged during the siege as they were concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war
• the postponement of commercial debt obligations, and abolition of interest on the debts
• and, the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner, who was to receive compensation.

The Commune returns workmen's tools pawned during the siege

The decree of separated the church from the state, made all church property public property, and excluded religion from schools — these propositions would become law only in 1905. The churches were only allowed to continue their religious activity if they kept their doors open to public political meetings during the evenings. Along with the streets and the cafés, this made the churches one of the main participatory political centres of the Commune — a reappropriation which the Situationist movement would not forget in its architectural propositions. Other projected legislation dealt with educational reforms which would make further education and technical training freely available to all.

Some women organized a feminist movement, following on from earlier attempts in 1848 and 1789. Thus, Nathanie Le Mel, a socialist bookbinder, and Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and associate of Karl Marx, created the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés ("Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and Care to the Injured") on April 11, 1871. Considering that their struggle against patriarchy could only be followed in the frame of a global struggle against capitalism, the association demanded gender-equality, wages' equality, right of divorce for women, right to laïque instruction (non-clerical) and for professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubins, between legitimate and natural children, the abolition of prostitution — they obtained the closing of the maisons de tolérance (legal official brothels). The Women Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organized cooperative workshops . Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre" who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolize the active participation of a small number of women in the insurrectionary events. A female battalion from the National Guard defended the Place Blanche during the repression. However, they didn't acquire or even ask for the right to vote, and there were no female members of the Council.

The work-load of the leaders of the Commune was enormous. The Council members (who were not "representatives" but delegates, subject in theory to immediate recall by their electors) were expected to carry out many executive and military functions as well as their legislative ones. The numerous ad hoc organisations set up during the siege in the localities ("quartiers") to meet social needs (canteens, first aid stations) continued to thrive and cooperated with the Commune.

At the same time, these local assemblies pursued their own goals, usually under the direction of local workers. Despite the formal reformism of the Commune council, the composition of the Commune as a whole was much more revolutionist. Revolutionary trends present included Proudhonist - an early form of moderate anarchist, members of the International socialists, Blanquists, and more libertarian republicans. The Paris Commune has been celebrated by anarchist and Marxist socialists continuously until the present day, partly due to the variety of tendencies, the high degree of workers' control and the remarkable cooperation among different revolutionists.

In the III^e arrondissement, for instance, school materials were provided free, three schools were laicised and an orphanage was established. In the XX^e arrondissement, school children were provided with free clothing and food. There were many similar examples. But a vital ingredient in the Commune's relative success at this stage was the initiative shown by ordinary workers in the public domain, who managed to take on the responsibilities of the administrators and specialists removed by Thiers.

Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, emphasised (indeed, rather exaggerated) the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for an ultra-democratic revolutionary government of the future, 'the form at last discovered' for the emancipation of the proletariat. Friedrich Engels, Marx's closest associate, echoed this idea, later maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quartiers", and other features meant that the Commune was no longer a "state" in the old, repressive sense of the term: it was a transitional form, moving towards the abolition of the state as such - he used the famous (or notorious) term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the Commune was, he said, the first 'dictatorship of the proletariat', meaning it was a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. Its future development, however, was to remain a theoretical question. After only a week it came under attack by elements of the new army (which eventually included former prisoners of war released by the Prussians) being created at a furious pace in Versailles.

The assault

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Adolphe Thiers charging on the Communards, in Le Père Duchênes illustré magazine

The Commune forces, the National Guard, first began skirmishing with the regular Versailles Army on April 2. Neither side really sought a major civil war, but neither was ever willing to negotiate. The marquis de Galliffet, the fusilleur de la Commune who latter took part as Minister of War in Waldeck-Rousseau's government at the turn of the century (alongside independent socialist Millerand), was one of the general leading the repression headed by Thiers.

The nearby suburb of Courbevoie was occupied by the government forces on 2 April, and a delayed attempt by the Commune's own forces to march on Versailles on 3 April failed ignominiously. Defence and survival became overriding considerations, and a determined effort was made by the Commune leadership to turn the National Guard into an effective defence force.

Strong support came also from the large foreign community of political refugees and exiles in Paris: one of them, the Polish ex-officer and nationalist Jarosław Dąbrowski, was to be the Commune's best general. The Council was fully committed to internationalism, and it was in the name of brotherhood that the Vendôme Column, celebrating the victories of Napoleon I, and considered by the Commune to be a monument to Bonapartism and chauvinism, was pulled down.

Abroad, there were rallies and messages of goodwill sent by trade union and socialist organisations, including some in Germany. But any hopes of getting serious help from other French cities were soon dashed. Thiers and his ministers in Versailles managed to prevent almost all information from leaking out of Paris; and in provincial and rural France there had always been a skeptical attitude towards the activities of the metropolis. Movements at Narbonne, Limoges, and Marseille were rapidly crushed.

As the situation deteriorated further, a section of the Council won a vote (opposed by bookbinder Eugène Varlin, a correspondent of Karl Marx, and by other moderates) for the creation of a "Committee of Public Safety", modelled on the Jacobin organ with the same title, formed in 1792. Its powers were extensive and ruthless in theory, but in practice it was ineffective.

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Map of the April-May assault on the Paris Commune

Throughout April and May, government forces, constantly increasing in number, carried out a siege of the city's powerful defences, and pushed the National Guards back. On May 21 a gate in the western part of the fortified city wall of Paris was forced and Versaillese troops began the reconquest of the city, first occupying the prosperous western districts where they were made welcome by those residents who had not left Paris after the armistice. It seems an engineer (who had spied reguarly for the government) found the gate unoccupied and signaled the Versaillais.

The strong local loyalties which had been a positive feature of the Commune now became something of a disadvantage: instead of an overall planned defence, each "quartier" fought desperately for survival and was overcome in its turn. The webs of narrow streets which made entire districts nearly impregnable in earlier Parisian revolutions had been largely replaced by wide boulevards during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. The Versaillese enjoyed a centralised command and had superior numbers. They had learned the tactics of street fighting, and simply tunnelled through the walls of houses to outflank the Communards' barricades. Ironically, only where Haussmann had made wide spaces and streets were they held up by the defenders' gunfire.

During the assault, the government troops were culpable of the slaughter of National Guards and civilians: prisoners taken in possession of weapons, or who were suspected of having fought, were shot out of hand and multiple executions were commonplace. In a futile gesture of defiance on May 24 – May 26, more than 50 hostages, most of whom were priests or policemen, who had been captured by the Commune, were murdered. In some cases, certain leaders of the Commune, mainly Blanquists, gave the orders, in other cases they were killed by a mob in spite of the efforts of Commune leaders to prevent the killing.[1] Amongst the victims was the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy.

The toughest resistance came in the more working-class districts of the east, where fighting continued during the later stages of the week of vicious street fighting (La Semaine sanglante, the bloody week). By May 27 only a few pockets of resistance remained, notably the poorer eastern districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant. Fighting ended during the late afternoon or early evening of 28 May. According to legend, the last barricade was in the rue Ramponeau in Belleville.

Marshall MacMahon issued a proclamation: "To the inhabitants of Paris. The French army has come to save you. Paris is freed! At 4 o'clock our soldiers took the last insurgent position. Today the fight is over. Order, work and security will be reborn."

Commune prisoners being marched to Versailles: from a contemporary illustrated magazine

Reprisals now began in earnest. Having supported the Commune in any way was a political crime, of which thousands could be, and were, accused. Some of the Communards were shot against what is now known as the Communards' Wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery while thousands of others were tried by summary courts martial of doubtful legality, and thousands shot. Notorious sites of slaughter were the Luxembourg Gardens and the Lobau Barracks, behind the Hôtel de Ville. Nearly 40,000 others were marched to Versailles for trials. For many days endless columns of men, women and children made a painful way under military escort to temporary prison quarters in Versailles. Later 12,500 were tried, and about 10,000 were found guilty: 23 men were executed; many were condemned to prison; 4,000 were deported for for life to New Caledonia - French islands in the Pacific. The number of killed during La Semaine Sanglante can never be established for certain, and estimates vary from about 10,000 to 50,000. According to Benedict Anderson, "7,500 were jailed or deported" and "roughly 20,000 executed" . Thousands more - including most of the Commune leaders - succeeded in escaping to Belgium, Britain (a safe haven for 3-4,000 refugees), Italy, Spain and the United States. The final exiles and transportees were amnestied in 1880. Some became prominent in later politics, as Paris councillors, deputies or senators.

In 1872, "stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the left." For the imprisoned there was a general amnesty in 1880. Paris remained under martial law for five years.

The commune in retrospect

A plaque honours the dead of the Commune in Père Lachaise cemetery.

The better-off citizens of Paris, and many of the earlier historians of the Commune, saw it as a classic example of mob rule, terrifying and often inexplicable. Most later historians, even those on the right, have recognised the value of some of the Commune's reforms and have deplored the savagery of its repression.

On the left, there have been many who criticise the Commune for showing too great moderation, especially given the grave situation it was in. Karl Marx found it aggravating that the Communards "lost precious moments" organising democratic elections rather than instantly finishing off Versailles once and for all. France's national bank, located in Paris and storing billions of francs, was left untouched and unguarded by the Communards. Timidly they asked to borrow money from the bank (which of course they got without any hesitation). The Communards chose not to seize the bank's assets because they were afraid that the world would condemn them if they did. Thus large amounts of money were moved from Paris to Versailles, money that financed the army that crushed the Commune.

Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists and others have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration of, a liberated society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grass roots up. Marx and Engels, Bakunin, and later Lenin and Trotsky tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune. A more pragmatic lesson was drawn by the diarist Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote, three days after La Semaine sanglante, "…the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution… The old society has twenty years of peace before it…"

The Paris Commune has been the subject of awe for many communist leaders. Mao would refer to it often. Lenin, along with Marx, judged the Commune a living example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, though Lenin criticised the Communards for having 'stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of justice'; he thought their 'excessive magnanimity' had prevented them from 'destroying' the class enemy by 'ruthless extermination' - a mistake he certainly did not repeat. At his funeral he had his body wrapped in the remains of a red flag preserved from the Commune. The Soviet spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a communard banner from the Paris Commune. Also, the Bolsheviks renamed the dreadnought battleship Sevastopol to Parizhskaya Kommuna in honour of the Commune.

Other Communes

Simultaneously with the Paris Commune, uprisings in Lyon, Grenoble and other cities established equally short-lived Communes.

See also

• Medieval commune
• Louise Michel

Fictional treatments

• As well as innumerable novels (mainly in French) set in the Commune, at least three plays have been written and performed: Nederlaget, by the Norwegian Nordahl Grieg; Die Tage der Commune by Bertolt Brecht; and Le Printemps 71 by Arthur Adamov.
• There have been numerous films set in the Commune: particularly notable is La Commune Paris 1871, which runs for 5¾ hours and was directed by Peter Watkins. It was made in Montmartre in 2000, and as with most of Watkins' other films it uses ordinary people instead of actors in order to create a documentary effect.
• The Italian composer, Luigi Nono, also wrote an opera "Al gran sole carico d'amore" ("In the Bright Sunshine, Heavy with Love") that is based on the Paris Commune.
• The discovery of a body from the Paris Commune buried in the Opera, led Gaston Leroux to write the tale of The Phantom of the Opera.

References

• The two most important primary sources are:
  • The verbatim record of the sessions of the Commune (Procès-verbaux de la Commune. 2 vols., Paris, 1944-1945) — long out of print, though secondhand copies are to be found
  • The history of the Commune by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, an Communard journalist with socialist convictions who was present at or close to most of the events he describes, is very vivid and partisan (Histoire de la Commune de 1871. Most recent edition, 3 vols in 1, Paris, Maspero, 1969), which is available in English translation online).
• Another online classic is Marx's own contemporary analysis, The Civil War in France, written during and immediately after the events. For Lenin's views, see V.I. Lenin on the Paris Commune (Moscow, 1970)
• For anarchist analysis of the events, two important documents from the time are Mikhail Bakunin's The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State and Peter Kropotkin's The Commune of Paris
• Also online is Agor@'s book-length site about the Commune (in French)
• Returning to primary sources, there is an extremely hostile account in 4 volumes called Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris, 1878) by the journalist Maxime du Camp who takes a hard and rhetorical right-wing position. This is a fair guide to the contemporary views of the Versaillais. His book can be found in major libraries or through Galaxidion the main French online source for secondhand and antiquarian books.
• The leading modern historian of the Commune is Jacques Rougerie, whose books Procès des Communards and Paris ville libre are unfortunately unpublished in English.
• Two concise up-to-date histories in English, readily available , are:
  • Robert Tombs. The Paris Commune 1871 London, Longman, 1999
  • David A. Shafer. The Paris Commune London, Palgrave, 2005

Older works include:

• • Alistair Horne. The Fall of Paris. The Siege and the Commune 1870-71. London, Macmillan, 1965. (A much shorter but lavishly illustrated version was published in 1971 under the title, The Terrible Year). A very lively 'Anglo-Saxon' view.
  • Frank Jellinek. The Paris Commune of 1871. London, Gollancz, 1937. Also, N.Y., Grosset & Dunlap, 1965. Written from a socialist point of view.
• The Revolutionary Idea in France 1789-1871 by Godfrey Elton (London, Edwin Arnold, 1923), available in many university libraries, is one of the few books which places the Commune in a longer-term historical perspective. It is conservative in tone.
• Lenin, who deemed the Paris Commune an excellent example of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", also wrote about the Paris Commune in The Paris Commune (to be found in Lenin on the Paris Commune). It is less informative, however, than it is ideological.
• The fullest bibliography of the Commune is that of Robert le Quillec: La Commune de Paris. Bibliographie Critique 1871-1997. Paris, La Boutique de l'Histoire, 1997. 2660 books, pamphlets and other materials are listed.
• Barbara de Courson, Martyrs of the Paris Commune in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908).

External links

• Norman Barth writing on the Commune in Paris Kiosque
• Discussion of the Commune in "An Anarchist FAQ"
• Short history of the Paris Commune on libcom.org
• Paul Dorn, The Paris Commune and Marx' Theory of Revolution
• Association Les Amis de la Commune de Paris (1871) (in French)
• A short abstract and several famous songs from "La Commune" (in French language)
• Karl Marx's Contemporary account of the Commune 'The Civil War in France'
• Karl Marx and the Paris Commune by C.L.R. James