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Paris Commune

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 between 18th March and 28th May, 1871. But the conditions in which it was formed, its controversial decrees and tortured end constitute one of the more important political episodes of the time.

The war with Prussia, started by Napoleon III ("Louis 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 and the continuous Prussian bombardment were adding to an already widespread discontent. Working people were becoming more open to radical ideas. A specific demand was that Paris should be self-governing, with its own elected "Commune", something enjoyed by most French towns, but denied 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 Sociale!"

By the beginning of 1871 many tens 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. Battalions in the poorer districts elected their own officers and possessed many of the cannon which had been founded in Paris and paid for by public subscription. Steps were being taken to form a "Central Committee" of the Guard, and the President of the Third Republic, Louis Adolphe Thiers, realised that in the present unstable situation this body could come to form an alternative centre of political power.

In January, 1871, when the siege had lasted for four months, Thiers sought an armistice. 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.

In January, 1871, when the siege had lasted for four months, Thiers sought an armistice. 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. The events at this juncture are confused, but what is clear is that before the Prussians entered Paris National Guards, helped by ordinary working people, managed to take the cannon (which they regarded as their own property) away from the Prussians' path and store them in "safe" districts. One of the chief "cannon parks" was on the heights of Montmartre.

The Prussians entered Paris briefly and left again without incident. But Paris continued to be encircled while the issue of war indemnities dragged on. 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 18th March Thiers ordered regular troops to seize the cannon stored on the Buttes Montmartre. Instead of following instructions, however, the soldiers, whose morale was in any case not high, fraternised with National Guards and local residents. When their general, Claude Martin Lecomte, ordered them to fire on an unarmed crowd they dragged him from his horse. He was later shot. Other army units joined in the rebellion which spread so rapidly that President 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. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now the only effective government in Paris: it almost immediately abdicated its authority and arranged elections for a Commune, to be held on 26th March.

The 92 members of the Commune (or, more correctly, of the "Communal Council") included skilled workers, several “professionals” (such as doctors and journalists), and a large number of 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. The charismatic socialist, Louis Auguste Blanqui, was elected President of the Council, but this was in his absence, for he had been arrested on 17th March and was held in a secret prison throughout the life of the Commune. 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 social democracy rather than a social revolution. Lack of time (the Commune was able to meet on less than 60 days in all) meant that only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included: the remission of rents for the entire period of the siege (during which they had been raised considerably by many landlords); the abolition of night work in the hundreds of Paris bakeries; the abolition of the guillotine; 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 state pawnshops, of all workmen's tools of their trade, pledged during the siege; and, in an important departure from strictly "reformist" principles, the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner.

Projected legislation dealt, among other things, with the total separation of church from state and with educational reforms which would make further education and technical trading freely available to all.

The load of work was eased by several factors, although the Council members (who were not "representatives" but delegates, subject to immediate recall by their electors) were expected to carry out many executive functions as well as their legislative ones. But 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. In the 3rd arrondissement, for instance, school materials were provided free, three schools were laicised and an orphanage was established. In the 20th arrondissement school children were provided with free clothing and food. And so on. The vital ingredient, however, 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. Engels, Marx's closest associate, would later maintain 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. 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 included former prisoners of war released by the Prussians) being created at a furious pace in Versailles.

The outer suburb of Courbevoie was captured, and a delayed attempt by the Commune's own forces to march on Versailles failed ignominiously. Defence and survival became overriding considerations. The working-class women of Paris now played a steadily more important role. They served with the National Guard and even formed a battalion of their own which later fought heroically to defend the Place Blanche, a key to Montmartre. (It must be admitted that the democratic credentials of the Commune were not improved by the fact that women did not have the vote, or that there were no female members of the Council!)

Strong support came also from the large foreign community of political refugees and exiles in Paris: one of them, the Polish ex-officer and fighter for the independence of his country from Russia, Jaroslav Dombrowski, 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 monmument to 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 sceptical attitude towards the activities of the metropolis. Movements at Narbonne, Limoges and Marseilles 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. But the time when a strong central authority could have helped was now almost past. On 21st May a gate in the fortified wall of Paris was forced (or, more probably, betrayed) and Versaillese troops began the reconquest of the city, first occupying the prosperous western districts where they were made welcome by the residents who had not left Paris after the armistice, and then moving towards Montmartre and the poorer eastern districts of Belleville and Menilmontant.

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. The Versaillese enjoyed a centralised command and had modern artillery. By the 27th May only a few pockets of resistance remained. The advance of the Versaillese took a heavy toll in life: prisoners were shot out of hand and multiple executions were commonplace. In a futile gesture of defiance on 27th May, a mob seized and brutally murdered 50 hostages, several of them priests, who had been held by the Commune. These deaths were to be avenged many times over.

At four o'clock in the afternoon of the next day the last barricade, in the rue Ramponeau in Belleville, fell, and Marshall Mac-Mahon 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."

Reprisals now began in earnest. Having supported the Commune in any way was declared a crime, of which thousands could be, and were, accused. For many days endless columns of men, women and children made a painful way under military escort to temporary prison quarters in Versailles. Later they were tried; a few were executed; many were condemned to hard labour; many more were deported for long terms or for life to virtually uninhabited French islands in the Pacific. The number of killed during what became known as "La Semaine sanglante", the Week of Blood, can never be established for certain but the best estimates are 30,000 dead, many more wounded, and perhaps as many as 50,000 later executed or imprisoned. For the imprisoned there was a general amnesty in 1889.

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 yet at the same time 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. However, they have found it difficult to explain the unprecidented hatred which the Commune aroused in the middle and upper classes. On the left, there have been many who criticise the Commune for showing too great moderation (for example, for having failed to seize the gold reserves of the Bank of France, which went on sending large sums of money to Versailles while doing out small loans to 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 "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…"