Paris Commune
Based on Wikipedia: Paris Commune
For seventy-two days in the spring of 1871, Paris belonged to its workers. Not to the empire that had just collapsed, not to the republic scrambling to replace it, but to the armed men and women who had defended the city through a brutal siege—and who now refused to give up their guns.
What followed was one of history's most remarkable experiments in radical democracy. And one of its bloodiest endings.
A City Under Siege
To understand how ordinary Parisians ended up running their own revolutionary government, you need to understand what the winter of 1870 did to them.
France had just lost a war to Prussia in spectacular fashion. Emperor Napoleon the Third—nephew of the original Napoleon—had been captured at the Battle of Sedan in September. When news reached Paris, crowds flooded the streets. The Empress fled. The Second Empire crumbled in hours. Republican politicians hastily declared a new French Republic, the country's third attempt at republican government, and vowed to keep fighting the Prussians.
It was a noble sentiment. It was also futile.
By late September, the Prussian army had surrounded Paris completely. The Germans camped just over a mile from French lines. Inside the city, the regular French Army could muster only about fifty thousand professional soldiers. Most of France's first-line troops were either prisoners of war or trapped in the fortress city of Metz, which would surrender its hundred and sixty thousand soldiers in late October.
The real military force in Paris was the National Guard—roughly three hundred thousand men organized by neighborhood. They had almost no training. Many refused to wear uniforms or follow orders without debate. They demanded the right to elect their own officers. In working-class neighborhoods like Belleville, Ménilmontant, and La Villette, these citizen-soldiers had become thoroughly radicalized.
The siege was devastating. December brought temperatures of negative fifteen degrees Celsius—about five degrees Fahrenheit. The Seine froze solid for three weeks. Food ran short, then firewood, then coal, then medicine. The city went dark at night. The only communication with the outside world was by hot air balloon and carrier pigeon.
Parisians ate rats. They ate horses. They ate the animals in the zoo. The wealthy fled if they could. The workers and immigrants who stayed—about five hundred thousand industrial workers, plus another three to four hundred thousand in other trades—suffered most. They would remember.
Two Frances
France in 1871 was really two countries.
The countryside was vast, Catholic, and conservative. In the 1869 elections, over four million votes had gone to supporters of Napoleon the Third's empire. Rural France wanted order, property, and the church.
The cities—Paris especially, but also Lyon and Marseille—were republican and radical. Paris had given two hundred and thirty-four thousand votes to republican candidates, against only seventy-seven thousand for the imperialists. The capital was home to political refugees from across Europe, particularly Italy and Poland. It had a long memory of revolution.
Parisians had overthrown governments before. The July Revolution of 1830. The revolution of 1848. Failed uprisings in 1832 and again in June 1848. The city was, as the saying went, the traditional home of French radical movements. Workers and the lower middle class had been demanding the same thing for decades: a democratic republic where Paris could govern itself through its own elected council. Smaller French towns had this right. Paris, whose "unruly populace" frightened the national government, did not.
Socialist movements were growing. The First International—an organization founded in 1864 to unite workers across national borders—had hundreds of affiliated societies across France. In 1867, when Parisian employers tried to break the bronze-workers' union, the International organized a strike and won. When authorities responded by dissolving their executive committee and fining the leadership, the Internationalists elected a new committee with a more radical program. The authorities imprisoned them too. Each crackdown pushed the movement further left.
The Powder Keg Ignites
The siege ended in January 1871, but the humiliation did not.
The armistice terms were crushing. France would cede all of Alsace and parts of Lorraine. It would pay enormous reparations. German troops would parade through Paris—a deliberate humiliation that infuriated the city's defenders.
In February, the newly elected National Assembly chose Adolphe Thiers as chief executive of the new republic. Thiers was a conservative, a monarchist at heart, deeply suspicious of Paris and its radicals. The Assembly met not in Paris but in Bordeaux, and later Versailles. The symbolism was clear: this was a government that did not trust its own capital.
Then Thiers made a catastrophic miscalculation.
The National Guard still had their weapons—including over two hundred cannons that had been purchased through public subscription during the siege. These guns, the workers felt, belonged to them. They had paid for them. On March 18, Thiers sent regular army troops to seize the cannons from Montmartre and other working-class neighborhoods.
It was three in the morning, and the troops were supposed to move fast. But they had forgotten to bring horses to haul away the guns. By the time the horses arrived, crowds had gathered. Women confronted the soldiers. The troops hesitated. Then they refused to fire on their fellow citizens. They began to fraternize with the National Guard.
Two French Army generals—Claude Lecomte and Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas—were seized by the crowd and shot. Thiers, horrified, ordered a complete evacuation. The regular army, the police, and the entire government administration withdrew to Versailles. Paris was left in the hands of its workers.
The Commune Takes Power
What happened next was unprecedented.
On March 26, Parisians elected a Commune Council of ninety-two members. (Seventeen were moderates who resigned almost immediately.) The council was a diverse coalition: old Jacobins who looked back to the French Revolution of 1789, followers of the anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, disciples of the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, members of the First International, feminists, and assorted radicals of every stripe.
They had almost nothing in common except opposition to the Versailles government and a general commitment to social revolution. The specific nature of that revolution was hotly debated. The Commune was not, despite later claims, a unified Marxist experiment. Marx himself was observing from London and would write extensively about what was happening, but his ideas were only one current among many.
What the Commune actually accomplished in its brief existence was remarkable.
They declared the separation of church and state—radical for Catholic France. They closed Catholic churches and schools in Paris. They cancelled rent payments that had accumulated during the siege. They abolished child labor. They established that employees could take over businesses abandoned by fleeing owners. They replaced the standing army with the armed people themselves. They made all public offices elective and recallable, with salaries capped at workmen's wages.
Women played crucial roles, though they could not vote or serve on the council. The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris, led by figures like Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Nathalie Lemel, organized cooperative workshops and demanded equal pay. Louise Michel, a schoolteacher who would become one of the Commune's most famous figures, organized ambulance services and fought on the barricades with rifle in hand.
The Commune was democratic to a fault. Decisions were debated endlessly. Factions quarreled. The Blanquists, who believed in disciplined revolutionary cells and decisive action, clashed with the Proudhonists, who favored decentralization and workers' self-management. Everyone had an opinion. Nothing happened quickly.
Versailles Strikes Back
While Paris debated, Thiers prepared for war.
The Germans, still occupying parts of France, released French prisoners of war so they could be used against the Commune. Thiers assembled a force of over one hundred thousand troops at Versailles. Many were former prisoners, bitter and demoralized. Their officers told them the Communards were criminals, looters, the dregs of society.
The Commune's military position was hopeless. They controlled Paris and little else. Attempts to march on Versailles in early April failed disastrously. The Communards had enthusiasm but almost no military experience. Their elected officers were often chosen for political reliability rather than competence. They squandered time and resources on symbolic gestures—pulling down the Vendôme Column, that monument to Napoleonic militarism—while Versailles troops tightened the noose.
On May 21, the Versailles army found an undefended section of wall and poured into Paris. What followed was the Semaine Sanglante—the Bloody Week.
The Bloody Week
The fighting lasted seven days. It was not a battle so much as a massacre.
The Communards fought street by street, building by building. Barricades went up across the city—over five hundred of them. But the Versailles troops had artillery. They could simply blast through. They shot prisoners on the spot. Summary executions became routine.
The Communards, in their desperation, set fires. The Tuileries Palace burned. So did the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of Paris's government for centuries. The Louvre narrowly escaped. Whether these fires were tactical—meant to slow the advancing army—or acts of nihilistic rage, historians still debate.
In retaliation for the killing of hostages, the Commune executed the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, along with about a hundred other prisoners, mostly police and priests. This gave the Versailles forces all the justification they needed, not that they required it.
The killing was indiscriminate. Workers with calloused hands were assumed to have fired rifles. Anyone found with gunpowder residue was shot. Men, women, sometimes children. The last fighting was in Père Lachaise Cemetery, among the tombstones. One hundred and forty-seven Communards were lined up against a wall there and executed. That wall still stands, a pilgrimage site for the left.
How many died? The Versailles government claimed around six thousand. Later investigations suggested ten to fifteen thousand killed in battle or executed. One estimate from 1876 put the toll at twenty thousand. The exact number will never be known. Bodies were burned, buried in mass graves, thrown into the Seine.
Over forty-three thousand prisoners were taken, including more than a thousand women. About half were released immediately—they hadn't actually fought. The rest faced military tribunals. Ninety-five were sentenced to death (though only twenty-three were actually executed). Over a thousand were deported to New Caledonia, a French colony in the South Pacific, about as far from Paris as it was possible to go.
What It Meant
Karl Marx, watching from London, immediately understood the Commune's significance. Here was the first time workers had actually held state power, however briefly. In his book "The Civil War in France," written in the Commune's immediate aftermath, he analyzed both its achievements and its failures. Friedrich Engels later called it the first example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"—a phrase that would echo through the next century.
What Marx meant by that phrase was not what later dictators would claim. He pointed to the Commune's radical democracy: elected officials who could be recalled at any time, paid workers' wages, directly accountable to the people. "Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like?" Engels later wrote. "Look at the Paris Commune."
But the Commune also demonstrated the challenges of revolution. It was disorganized. It wasted time. It failed to seize the Bank of France, which continued to fund the Versailles government throughout the fighting. It was too democratic, some argued—too many meetings, too little action. The Blanquists said this proved the need for disciplined revolutionary leadership. The anarchists said it proved the folly of trying to seize state power at all.
For the French Third Republic, the Commune was a wound that never fully healed. The working-class neighborhoods of Paris would remember the Bloody Week for generations. The mass graves, the deportations, the wall at Père Lachaise—these became sacred sites of leftist memory. The red flag that the Communards had flown became the international symbol of socialist revolution.
In 1880, the Republic finally granted amnesty to all surviving Communards. They returned from exile and deportation, some to resume political careers. Louise Michel came back to a hero's welcome, still wearing black, still advocating revolution until her death in 1905.
The Paris Commune lasted just seventy-two days. It accomplished less than its admirers claim and more than its detractors admit. It demonstrated that ordinary people, given weapons and circumstances, would attempt to remake society along more egalitarian lines. It demonstrated, equally, how violently the established order would resist.
Both lessons remained relevant long after the last fires were extinguished and the last bodies buried.
The Revolutionary Underground
The most extreme revolutionaries in Paris operated very differently from the democratic socialists of the First International. Louis Auguste Blanqui, a man who had spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it, led perhaps the most formidable underground organization in the city.
Blanqui had about a thousand followers, organized into cells of ten. Each cell operated independently, unaware of who belonged to other groups. Members communicated with leadership only through coded messages. This was professional conspiracy—Blanqui had literally written the manual, a text called "Instructions for an Armed Uprising" that circulated among his followers.
There was a terrible irony in Blanqui's story. The Commune desperately needed his leadership and organizational skills. But Thiers had arrested him the day before the uprising, on March 17. The Commune offered to exchange all their hostages—including the Archbishop of Paris—for this one old revolutionary. Thiers refused. He understood that Blanqui alive and free was worth more to the Commune than any number of priests.
Blanqui spent the Commune's entire existence in prison, learning of its rise and fall secondhand. He would not be released until 1879, eight years later. He died in 1881, having spent thirty-seven of his seventy-six years behind bars. His followers, leaderless during the crucial weeks, provided some of the Commune's most disciplined soldiers—but without their chief strategist, they could not impose the kind of coordinated military action that might have saved it.
The Women of the Commune
Though women could neither vote nor hold office in the Commune, they were everywhere in its brief life.
The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and for Aid to the Wounded was founded on April 11, just weeks into the Commune's existence. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a twenty-year-old Russian émigré and associate of Marx, was its driving force. The union organized women's labor, set up cooperative workshops, demanded equal pay for equal work, and called for the abolition of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children.
Nathalie Lemel, a bookbinder and revolutionary who had been organizing workers for years, worked alongside Dmitrieff. These were not bourgeois reformers asking politely for modest improvements. They were revolutionaries who saw women's liberation as inseparable from workers' liberation.
Louise Michel became the Commune's most famous woman. A schoolteacher from Montmartre, she had been educating working-class children and agitating for revolution for years. During the Commune, she organized ambulance services, served on vigilance committees, and when the Versailles troops broke through, she fought on the barricades with a Remington rifle.
After the defeat, she was arrested and deported to New Caledonia. She refused any special treatment, living among ordinary prisoners and befriending the indigenous Kanak people. When she returned to France after the amnesty, she continued organizing and agitating until her death. She rejected all attempts to moderate her views. "If you're not a rebel at twenty, you've got no heart," she reportedly said. "If you're not a rebel at sixty, you've got no brain."
A World of Exiles
Those who escaped the repression scattered across Europe. England took the largest share—London was already home to Marx and other continental radicals. Belgium and Switzerland absorbed many others. Some made it as far as the United States.
For nearly a decade, these exiles lived in political limbo. They organized, argued, and waited. The various socialist factions continued their debates about what had gone wrong and what should be done differently next time. The First International, already weakened by disputes between Marxists and anarchists, effectively collapsed in the aftermath of the Commune's defeat.
When amnesty finally came in 1880, many exiles were middle-aged or elderly. Some returned to France and resumed political careers. Others had built new lives abroad and chose to stay. The generation of 1871 had shaped European socialism, but the next generation would have to carry the movement forward.
The Third Republic that had crushed the Commune eventually became, paradoxically, one of Europe's most stable democracies. It lasted until 1940—nearly seventy years. It granted workers the right to organize, established free secular education, and separated church and state. Many reforms the Commune had demanded became law through gradualist means.
Whether this vindicated the reformists who said revolution was unnecessary, or the revolutionaries who said their sacrifice had forced these concessions—that argument continued well into the next century. It continues still.
The Shadow of the Commune
Every major revolutionary movement of the twentieth century looked back to Paris in 1871.
Lenin studied the Commune obsessively. His book "State and Revolution," written on the eve of the Russian Revolution, drew heavily on Marx's analysis of what had happened in Paris. The Bolsheviks were determined not to repeat the Commune's mistakes: they would seize the banks immediately, they would not be too democratic, they would crush counter-revolution without hesitation. Whether this made them better revolutionaries or worse ones depends on who is telling the story.
The red flag of the Commune became the flag of socialist movements worldwide. The Internationale, the anthem of the socialist movement, was written by a Communard, Eugène Pottier, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat. "Arise, ye workers from your slumbers," it begins. "Arise, ye prisoners of want."
For the right, the Commune represented the nightmare they always warned about: the mob unleashed, property destroyed, civilization itself in flames. The violence of the repression—so disproportionate to anything the Commune had actually done—reflected genuine fear. Better to kill twenty thousand than to let the workers hold power.
For the left, the Commune was proof that another world was possible, that ordinary people could govern themselves, that the hierarchies that seemed so permanent were in fact fragile. It was also proof of what the ruling class would do to prevent that world from being born.
Both lessons endure.