The Paris Commune

The fall of the Empire and the siege of Paris

Napoleon III’s Second Empire declared war on Prussia in July 1870, but on 2 September the emperor surrendered at Sedan with an army of about a hundred thousand. When crowds invaded the Legislative Body on 4 September, republican deputies proclaimed the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville and set up a Government of National Defence under General Trochu. 1 2 3

German armies surrounded Paris on 19–20 September and a four-month siege began. With most of the regular army captured or shut up in Metz, the city was defended by the armed citizens’ militia, the National Guard. Its pay of 1.5 francs a day kept unemployed workers’ families alive, and the battalions of working-class districts elected their own officers. By winter Parisians were eating horses, dogs and even the zoo’s elephants. 4) 5) 6

Suspicion that the government was seeking peace broke out in two risings. On 31 October, at the news of Metz’s surrender, battalions led by Blanqui and Flourens occupied the Hôtel de Ville before withdrawing; on 22 January 1871 the Garde Mobile fired on a demonstration in front of it. After the German Empire was proclaimed in the Palace of Versailles on 18 January, the government signed an armistice on 28 January and handed over the forts of Paris. 4) 7 6

The Bordeaux Assembly and 18 March

In the elections of 8 February 1871, held under the armistice, the countryside returned a large monarchist majority pledged to peace, while Paris elected republicans and radicals. The National Assembly meeting in Bordeaux made Adolphe Thiers chief executive. It ended the siege moratorium on bills and rents, cut the National Guard’s pay and decided to sit at Versailles rather than Paris. 8 9 6

The Paris National Guard had not been disarmed, and from mid-February battalion delegates formed a Central Committee and a Republican Federation of the National Guard. Cannon bought by public subscription were hauled to working-class districts such as Montmartre and Belleville before the Germans entered the city. For Thiers the guns became the symbol of state authority. 6 5)

At dawn on 18 March regular troops tried to remove the cannon on the Butte Montmartre, but the horses did not arrive in time; surrounded by women, residents and guardsmen, the soldiers refused orders to fire and fraternised with the crowd. Generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas were executed that afternoon. Thiers withdrew the government, the army and the administration to Versailles, and that night the Central Committee took the Hôtel de Ville. Louise Michel was among those who roused the hill that morning. 6 9 10

Electing and organising the Commune

The Central Committee did not keep power but handed it to an election. On 26 March 233,000 of 485,000 registered voters chose 92 members, one for every 20,000 residents. Abstention exceeded 70 per cent in the wealthy 7th and 8th arrondissements, while turnout reached 76 per cent in the working-class 20th. Some winners, among them moderate republicans, refused their seats, leaving about sixty members. The Commune was proclaimed in front of the Hôtel de Ville on 28 March. 6 11

Thirty-three members were workers. Blanquists, Jacobin “independent revolutionaries” such as Delescluze, and members of the International — Proudhonists alongside Varlin and Frankel — sat together. Blanqui himself, arrested on 17 March, was elected from prison. The Commune had no president, mayor or commander-in-chief; nine commissions reported to an Executive Commission, and members were answerable to and revocable by their constituents. It abolished conscription and made every able-bodied male citizen a member of the National Guard. 6 12

The Declaration to the French People of 19 April demanded the autonomy of every commune in France and a nation formed as a free federation of self-governing communes. This federalist programme, in which Paris sought not to rule France but to dissolve centralisation, showed the influence of Proudhonism. 13 6

Decrees on labour and daily life

In little over two months few decrees were actually carried out, but their direction was clear. The Commune remitted rents owed for the siege and had pawnshops return free of charge tools and household goods pledged for up to 20 francs. It banned night work in bakeries and fines deducted from wages by employers, and granted pensions to the unmarried companions and children of guardsmen killed in action. 6 14

A decree of 16 April had workshops abandoned by their owners surveyed and handed to workers’ cooperatives. The Commission of Labour and Exchange that carried it out was headed by Leó Frankel, a Hungarian jeweller and member of the International, while the bookbinder Eugène Varlin handled finance. Former owners kept a right to compensation, so this was not expropriation, but it was the first attempt to make workers’ self-management public policy. 6 15 16

On 2 April the Commune separated church and state, abolished the religious budget and declared church property national property; secular schooling without religious instruction was pursued. Marx singled out its capping of officials’ pay at workmen’s wages and its replacement of the standing army by the armed people as “the political form at last discovered”. 17 6 12

Women and artists

Women had neither votes nor seats, yet they were at the centre of the Commune from 18 March. On 11 April the Russian International member Elisabeth Dmitrieff and the bookbinder Nathalie Lemel founded the Women’s Union for the Defence of Paris and Care of the Wounded. The Union set up committees in each arrondissement, tried to organise cooperative workshops for women workers and called on working women to defend the Commune. 18 19 6

The teacher Louise Michel served on the Montmartre vigilance committee, fought with a Guard battalion and organised ambulance work. Women spoke in the clubs, opened free schools and held barricades in Bloody Week. The Versailles press portrayed them as pétroleuses setting buildings alight, a charge that was largely unproven. 10 6

The painter Gustave Courbet led the Federation of Artists, which demanded self-government for museums and artists, and was elected to the Commune for the 6th arrondissement. On 12 April the Commune condemned the Napoleonic column in the Place Vendôme as “a monument of barbarism”, and on 16 May it was pulled down before a crowd. Courbet was later held responsible and ordered to pay for its reconstruction. 20 21 6

War with Versailles and division within

Civil war began on 2 April when Versailles troops attacked Courbevoie. The next day 27,000 guardsmen marched on Versailles in three columns but broke under the guns of Fort Mont-Valérien, and their commanders Flourens and Duval were killed after capture. The Commune replied on 5 April with the Decree on Hostages, threatening three hostages for every prisoner executed by Versailles. Archbishop Darboy of Paris was seized under it, and the Commune offered to exchange him for Blanqui; Thiers refused. 6 22 23

As the military position worsened, on 1 May the Commune voted to create a Committee of Public Safety named after that of 1793. The Blanquist and Jacobin “majority” wanted power concentrated for the war, while the “minority” around the International — Varlin, Frankel, Courbet, Vallès — protested against a dictatorship. Command of the Guard passed from Cluseret to Rossel and on 11 May to the civilian Delescluze. 24) 6 25

Paris stood alone. Communes proclaimed in late March in Lyon, Marseille, Saint-Étienne, Toulouse and elsewhere were put down within days; Marseille fell to bombardment on 4 April. Having ceded Alsace and part of Lorraine and promised five billion francs in the Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May, the Versailles government refilled Marshal MacMahon’s army with prisoners released by Germany; Thiers reckoned he needed 150,000 men to retake Paris. 26 27 28) 6

Bloody Week

On Sunday 21 May 1871 the Versailles army entered Paris through the unguarded Porte de Saint-Cloud in the western ramparts. Central command collapsed and the Guard scattered to the barricades of its own districts. Montmartre fell on 23 May, and the Polish exile officer Jarosław Dąbrowski was mortally wounded nearby. Retreating Communards set fire to symbols of power — the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Ville, the Ministry of Finance. 29 30 6

Regular troops summarily shot prisoners for carrying weapons or having powder-blackened hands. In retaliation Communards killed six hostages including Archbishop Darboy at La Roquette prison on 24 May, and about fifty priests, gendarmes and others in the rue Haxo on 26 May. On 25 May Delescluze walked up onto the barricade at the Château-d’Eau and was shot. 29 23 25

The last resistance ended in Belleville and the Père Lachaise cemetery. On 28 May 147 fighters were shot against the cemetery’s eastern wall, the Communards’ Wall that later became a place of labour-movement remembrance. That day Varlin was captured, dragged to Montmartre, beaten and shot. Thiers told the prefects that “the ground is covered with their corpses” and hoped the sight would serve as a lesson. 31 16 32

The death toll is still disputed. The army’s official report counted 877 soldiers killed in April and May. Estimates for the Communards range from Lissagaray’s twenty thousand to Robert Tombs’s six to seven thousand from cemetery records (2012) and Michèle Audin’s rebuttal of more than ten to fifteen thousand (2021). On any count it was a massacre with few parallels in nineteenth-century Europe for one city in so short a time. 6 29 33

Trials, deportation and amnesty

The army took 43,522 prisoners, 1,054 of them women. More than half were soon released, but some 15,000 were tried by military courts and 25 of those sentenced to death were shot. Most of those sentenced to deportation were shipped to New Caledonia, where Louise Michel arrived in 1873, and thousands who escaped arrest went into exile in England, Belgium and Switzerland. 6 10

Thiers became president in August 1871; MacMahon, who succeeded him in 1873, led a “Moral Order” government hoping for a restoration. That year the National Assembly voted to build the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on the Butte Montmartre as expiation for defeat and the Commune. A partial amnesty in 1879 and a general amnesty on 11 July 1880 brought the deportees and exiles home. 9 34 35 6

Interpreting and remembering the Commune

On 12 April Marx wrote to Kugelmann that the Parisians were “storming heaven”, and on 30 May, just after the fall, he published The Civil War in France in the name of the International’s General Council. He saw the Commune as “essentially a working-class government” and concluded that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery. In his 1891 introduction Engels wrote: “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune.” 36 37 12 38

Interpretations soon diverged. Bakunin read the Commune as the negation of the state itself, a dispute that led to the split of the International in 1872. In the German Reichstag Bebel called the Commune a “preliminary skirmish” of the struggle to come. Lenin’s “Lessons of the Commune” of 1908 blamed its defeat on the failure to march on Versailles and to take over the Bank of France, and in The State and Revolution of 1917 he made the Commune the prototype of the Soviet state. 39 40 41 42

Eugène Pottier, a member of the Commune, wrote the words of “The Internationale” in hiding in June 1871; set to music by Pierre De Geyter in 1888, it became the anthem of the world labour movement. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fought on the barricades, published his History of the Paris Commune of 1871 in exile in 1876, countering the Versailles narrative with a participant’s testimony. 43 44 33 45