Paris Commune: Difference between revisions

Paris Commune
	; A barricade on Rue Voltaire, after its capture by the regular army during the Bloody Week.
Date	18 March – 28 May 1871
Location	Paris, France
Result	Revolt suppressed
Belligerents
French government French Armed Forces;	Communards ; National Guards
Commanders and leaders
Adolphe Thiers	Louis Auguste Blanqui
Casualties and losses
877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing	20,000 killed

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The Paris Commune (French: La Commune de Paris, IPA: [la kɔmyn də paʁi]) was a revolutionary and socialist government that briefly ruled Paris from 18 March until 28 May 1871.^[3] The killing of two French army generals by soldiers of the Commune's National Guard and the refusal of the Commune to accept the authority of the French government led to its harsh suppression by the regular French Army in "La Semaine sanglante" ("The Bloody Week") beginning on 21 May 1871.^[4] Debates over the policies and outcome of the Commune had significant influence on the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.^[5]

Prelude to the Paris Commune

On 2 September 1870, after his unexpected defeat at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, Emperor Louis Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. When the news reached Paris on 3 September, shocked and angry crowds came out into the streets, the Empress Eugenie, the regent of the Emperor, fled the city, and the Government of the Second Empire swiftly collapsed. Republican and radical deputies of the French National Assembly went to the Hotel de Ville and proclaimed the new French Republic, and formed a Government of National Defense. Though the Emperor and the French Army had been defeated at Sedan, the war continued. The German army marched swiftly toward Paris.

The population of Paris on the eve of Commune

In 1871 France was deeply divided between the large rural, Catholic, and conservative population of the French countryside and the more republican and radical population of Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and the few other large cities. In the first tour of the parliamentary elections held under the French Empire on 24 May 1869, 4,438,000 had voted for the Bonapartiste candidates supporting Louis Napoleon III, while 3,350,000 had voted for the republican opposition. In Paris, however, the republican candidates dominated, winning 234,000 votes against 77,000 for the Bonapartistes.^[6]

Of the two million people in Paris in 1869, according to the official census, there were about 500,000 industrial workers, or fifteen percent of all the industrial workers in France, plus another three to four hundred thousand workers in other enterprises. Only about 40,000 were employed in factories and large enterprises; most were employed in small workshops and businesses making clothing and textiles, furniture, and in construction. There were also 115,000 servants and 45,000 concierges. In addition to the native French population, there were about one hundred thousand immigrant workers and political refugees, the largest number being from Italy and Poland.^[6]

During the war and the siege of Paris, a large part of the middle class and upper class Parisians departed the city, and at the same time there was an influx of refugees from parts of France occupied by the Germans. The working class and immigrants were the sections of the population that suffered the most from the lack of industrial activity caused by the war and the long siege of Paris, and they were the basis of the popular support for the Commune. ^[6]

The radicalization of the Paris workers

The Commune resulted in part from growing discontent among the Paris workers.^[7] This discontent can be traced to the first worker uprisings, the Canut Revolts, in Lyon and Paris in the 1830s^[8] (a Canut was a Lyonnais silk worker, often working on Jacquard looms).

Many Parisians, especially workers and the lower-middle classes, supported 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 national government wary of the capital's unruly populace. They also wanted a more "just", if not necessarily socialist, way of managing the economy, summed up in the popular appeal for "la république démocratique et sociale!" ("the democratic and social republic!").^{[citation needed]}

Socialist movements, such as the First International, had been growing in influence. Hundreds of societies affiliated to it across France. In early 1867, Parisian employers of bronze-workers attempted to de-unionize their workers. This was defeated by a strike organised by the International. Later in 1867, an illegal public demonstration in Paris was answered by the legal dissolution of its executive committee and fines to the leadership. Tensions escalated; Internationalists elected a new committee and put forth a more radical programme, the authorities imprisoned their leaders, and a more revolutionary perspective was taken to the International's 1868 Brussels Congress. The International had considerable influence even among unaffiliated French workers, particularly in Paris and the big towns.^[9]

The killing of Victor Noir incensed Parisians and the arrests of journalists critical of the Emperor did nothing to quiet the city. A coup was attempted in early 1870, but tensions eased significantly after the plebiscite in May of that year. The war with Prussia, initiated by Napoleon III in July 1870, was initially met with patriotic fervour.^[10]

Radicals and revolutionaries

Paris was traditionally the home of French radical movements and revolutionaries, who had gone into the streets to oppose their governments during the French Revolution, the popular uprisings of 1830 and June 1848.

Of the radical and revolutionary groups in Paris at the time of the Commune, the most conservative were the "radical republicans". This group included the young doctor Georges Clemenceau, who was a member of the National Assembly, Mayor of Montmartre, and a deputy in the National Assembly. Clemenceau was considered extremely radical by the provincial deputies of rural France, but too moderate by the leaders of the Commune. He became the Prime Minister of France during the last years of World War I, and signed the peace treaty that restored Alsace and Loraine to France.

The most extreme revolutionaries in Paris were the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, a charismatic professional revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life in prison. He had about one thousand followers, many of them armed, in cells of ten persons, which operated separately, were unaware of the members of the other groups, who communicated only with the leaders of their groups. The groups communicated with each other by code. Blaqui had written a manual on revolution, Instructions for an armed uprising, to give guidance to his followers. Though their numbers were small, the Blanquists provided many of the most disciplined soldiers and several of the major leaders of the Commune.

Louis Charles Delescluze was a journalist, revolutionary, and last military leader of the Commune. As the Commune collapsed during the Bloody Week, unarmed, he stood atop a barricade and was shot dead.
Felix Pyat was a popular playwright, journalist and radical leader, who became one of the most influential members of the Commune and a member of the Committee for Public Safety. He escaped Paris during the Bloody week, went into exile, was later amnestied and elected to the National Assembly.
Eugene Varlin was a prominent socialist and member of the First Internationale. As a member of the Commune executive committee, he opposed the creation of a Committee on Public Safety. He was captured and executed by the army during the Bloody Week.
Jules Bergeret was a radical socialist, National Guard commander and advocate of the march on Versailles. During the Bloody Week, he gave the orders for the burning of the Tuileries Palace and the Hotel de Ville. He escaped Paris during the Bloody Week and went into exile in London, then New York, where he died in 1905.
Théophile Ferré, the prosecutor of the Commune, who handed over the Archbishop of Paris and five other hostages for execution on May 24. He was captured, tried and executed on November 22, 1871.

The defenders of Paris

By September 20, 1870, the German army had surrounded Paris, and was camped just two thousand meters from the French front lines. The regular French Army in Paris was under the command of General Louis Jules Trochu, and had only 50,000 professional soldiers of the line; the majority of the French first-line soldiers were prisoners of the Germans, or were trapped in Metz, surrounded by the Germans. The regular army soldiers were supported by 5,000 armed firemen, some 3,000 gendarmes, and about 15,000 sailors.^[11]

The regular professional army was supported by the Garde Mobile, new recruits who had little training or experience. Seventeen thousand of the garde mobile were from Paris, and 73,000 from the provinces. These included twenty battalions of men from Brittany, who spoke little or no French.^[11]

The largest armed force in Paris was the Garde Nationale, or National Guard, numbering about three hundred thousand men. They also had very little training or experience. They were organized by neighborhoods; those from the upper and middle class arrondissements tended to support the national government, while those from the working-class neighborhoods were far more radical and politicized. Guardsmen from many units were known for their lack of discipline; some units refused to wear uniforms, they often refused to obey orders without discussing them, and they demanded the right to elect their own officers. The members of the National Guard from the working-class neighborhoods became the main armed force of the Commune.^[11]

The siege of Paris and the first demonstrations

As the Germans surrounded the city, the more radical groups saw that the Government of National Defense had few soldiers to defend itself, and launched the first demonstrations against it. On September 19, National Guard units from the main working-class neighborhoods, Belleville, Menilmontant, La Villette, Montrouge, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Faubourg du Temple, marched to the center of the city and demanded that a new government, a Commune, be elected. They were met by regular army units loyal to the Government of National Defense, and the demonstrators eventually dispersed peacefully. On October 5, five thousand protesters marched from Belleville to the Hotel de Ville, demanding immediate municipal elections and rifles. On October 8, several thousand soldiers from the National Guard, led by Eugene Varlin of the Internationale. marched to the center, chanting 'Long Live the Commune!" but they also dispersed without incident.

Later in October, General Trochu launched a series of armed attacks to try to break the German siege, with heavy losses and no success. The telegraph line connecting Paris with the rest of France had been cut by the Germans on September 27. On October 6, Leon Gambetta, the Minister of Defense of the Government of National Defense, departed the city by balloon to try to organize national resistance against the Germans.^[12]

The uprising of October 31

On October 28, the news arrived in Paris that the 160,000 soldiers of the French army at Metz, which had been surrounded by the Germans since August, had surrendered. The news arrived the same day of the failure of another attempt by the French army to break the siege of Paris at Bourget, with heavy losses. On October 31, the leaders of the main revolutionary groups in Paris, including Blanqui, Pyat and Delescluze, called new demonstrations at the Hotel de Ville against General Trochu and the government. Fifteen thousand demonstrators, some of them armed, gathered in front of the Hotel de Ville in a pouring rain, calling for the resignation of Trochu and the proclamation of a commune. Shots were fired from the Place, one narrowly missing Trochu, and the demonstrators crowded into the Hotel de VIlle, demanding the creation of a new government, and making lists of its proposed members. Louis Blanqui, the leader of the most radical faction, established his own headquarters at the nearby Prefecture of the Seine, issuing orders and decrees to his followers, intent upon establishing his own government. While the formation of the new government was taking place inside the Hotel de Ville, however, units of the National Guard and Garde Mobile loyal to General Trochu arrived and recaptured the building without violence. By three o'clock the demonstrators had been given safe passage and left, and the brief uprising was over.^[13]

On 3 November 1871, city authorities organized a plebiscite of Parisian voters, asking if they had confidence in the Government of National Defense. 557,996 voted yes, and 62,638 voted no. Two days later municipal councils in each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris voted to elect mayors; five councils elected radical opposition candidates, including Delescluze and a young doctor from Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau.^[14]

Negotiations with the Germans and continued war

In September and October, The leader of the conservative faction in the National Assembly, Adolphe Thiers, had toured Europe consulted with the foreign ministers of Britain, Russia and Austria, and found that none of them were willing to support France against the Germans. He reported to the Government of National Defense there was no alternative to negotiating an armistice. He traveled to Tours,occupied by the Germans, and on 1 November met with the Prussian Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. Bismarck demanded the cession of all of Alsace, parts of Lorraine, and an enormous sum for reparations. The Government of National Defense, decided to continue the war and raise a new army to fight the Germans.

The newly organized French armies won a single victory at Coulmiers on 10 November 1870, but an attempt by General Ducrot on 29 November 1870 to break out of Paris was defeated with a loss of 4,000 soldiers killed and wounded, compared with 1700 German casualties.

The life of the Parisians under siege became more and more difficult. In December the temperature dropped to ten and fifteen degrees below zero Celsius, and the Seine froze for a period of three weeks. They suffered shortages of food, firewood, coal and medicine. The city was almost completely dark at night. The only communication with the outside world was by balloon, carrier pigeon, or letters packed in iron balls floated down the Seine. Rumors and conspiracy theories were abundant.

By early January, Bismarck and the Germans were themselves tired of the prolonged siege. They installed seventy-two 120 and 150 millimeter artiillery pieces in the forts around the city and on January 5 began to bombard the city day and night. Between 300 and 600 shells hit the center of the city each day.^[15]

The uprising of 22 January

Between January 11 and 19, the French armies had been defeated on four fronts and Paris was facing a famine. General Tronchu received reports from the prefect of Paris that agitation against the government and military leaders was increasing in the political clubs and in the National Guard of Belleville, La Chapelle, Montmarte,and Gros-Caillou.

At midday on 22 January 1871, three or four hundred National Guards and members of radical groups, mostly Blanquists, gathered outside the Hotel de Ville. A battalion of Gardes Mobiles from Brittany were inside the building, to defend it in case of an assault. The demonstrators presented their demands that the military be placed under civil control, and that there be an immediate election of a commune. The atmosphere was tense, and in the middle of the afternoon, gunfire broke out between the two sides; each side blamed the other for firing first. Six demonstrators were killed, and the army cleared the square. The government quickly banned the publications of two of the revolutionary leaders; Le Reveil of Delescluze and Le Combat of Felix Pyat, and arrested eighty-three of the revolutionaries.

The signing of the armistice

At the same time as the demonstration in Paris, the leaders of the Government of National Defense, located in Bordeaux, had concluded that the war could not be carried on any longer. On 26 January, a cease-fire and armistice were signed, with special conditions for Paris. The city would not be occupied by the Germans; the regular soldiers would give up the arms, but would not be taken into captivity. Paris would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs; and, at the request of Favre and agreed by Bismarck, the National Guard would not be disarmed, so that order could be maintained in the city.

Adolphe Thiers and the parliamentary elections of 1871

The national government in Bordeaux called national elections at the end of January, 1871, and the elections were held just ten days later, on 8 February 1871. Most electors in France were rural, Catholic and conservative, and this was reflected in the results; Of the 645 deputies assembled in Bordeaux on February, about four hundred favored a constitutional monarchy, under either the grandson of the deposed King Charles X (The Legitimists) or under the grandson of the deposed Louis Philippe (the Orleanists).^[16]

The republicans in the new parliament numbered about two hundred, of whom about eighty were former Orleanists, and moderately conservative; they were led by Adolphe Thiers, who was elected in twenty-six departments, the most of any candidate. There were an equal number of more radical republicans, including Jules Favre and Jules Ferry, who wanted a republic without a monarch, and who felt that signing the peace treaty was unavoidable. Finally, on the extreme left, there were the radical republicans and socialists, a group that included Louis Blanc, Leon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau.

The republicans and socialists were the victors in Paris, where they won 37 of the 42 seats. Of the 547,000 registered voters in Paris, Louis Blanc had won the most votes (216,000); Victor Hugo won 214,000 votes; Garibaldi received 200,000, Rochefort 163,000, the socialists Delescluze 153,000, and Felix Pyat 141,000. The left and center-left candidates also won a majority in Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.^[17]

On 17 February the new Parliament elected Adolphe Thiers as chief executive of the French Republic, as the candidate most likely to bring peace and to restore order. Adolphe Thiers was seventy-four years old in 1871. He had begun his career as an historian, writing a multi-volume history of the French Revolution. He entered politics in his early 30s, taking part on the 1830 Revolution which overthrew King Charles X of France and replacing him with a constitutional monarch, King Louis-Philippe. Thiers served Louis-Philippe as minister of the Interior, minister of trade and public works, foreign minister, and president of the Council.

During the French Revolution of 1848, Louis-Philippe offered him the post of prime minister, but he refused, and instead became a leader of the Parliament of the French Second Republic. Thiers initially supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, but when Bonaparte seized power in 1851 and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III, Thiers was arrested and exiled from France. He returned two years later to become the leader of the main parliamentary opposition to the Emperor. He was the only prominent member of Parliament to oppose the declaration of war on Prussia in 1870. When the Emperor was captured, Thiers refused to join the Government of National Defense, then ran and won his seat new Parliament with the largest vote of any candidate, and persuaded the Parliament that peace was necessary. He traveled to Versailles, where Bismarck and the German King were waiting, and on February 24 the armistice was signed.

The cannons of Paris

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

At the end of the war, four hundred obsolete muzzle-loading bronze cannon, which had been partly paid for by public subscription of the population of Paris, remained in the city. The new Central Committee of the National Guard, dominated by members of the more radical parties, decided to put the cannon into parks in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Montmartre, to keep them away from Regular Army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. Adolph Thiers, as chief executive of the national government, was equally determined to bring the cannon under government control.

Georges Clemenceau, the doctor from Montmartre who had been elected a Deputy to the National Assembly on February 8, and who was a friend of many of the revolutionaries, including Jules Valles, August Blanqui and Louse Michel, tried to negotiate compromise, by which some of the cannon would have remained in Paris and the others given to the army, but Thiers and the national Assembly did not accept his proposals. Thiers wanted to restore order and state authority in Paris as quickly as possible, and the cannons became the symbol of that authority. The Assembly also refused to prolong the moratorium on debt collections, imposed during the war and suspended two radical newspapers, the Cri de Peuple of Valles and the Mot d'Ordre of Rochefort, which further inflamed radical opinion in Paris. Thiers also decided to move the National Assembly and government from Bordeaux to Versailles, rather than to Paris, to be farther away from the pressure of demonstrations, which further increased the anger of the National Guards and the radical political clubs.^[18]

On 17 March 1871, at a meeting of Thiers and his Council of Ministers, joined by Jules Ferry, the mayor of Paris, General Aurelle de Paladines, the new commander of the National Guard, and General Joseph Vinoy, commander of the regular army units in Paris, Thiers announced the plan to send the army to take charge of the cannons. The plan was initially opposed by the new Minister of War, General Adolphe Le Flo, Aurelie de Paladines and General Joseph Vinoy, who argued that the move was premature, because the army had too few soldiers, was undisciplined, demoralized, and many units had become politicized and were unreliable. Vinoy urged that they wait until Germany had released the French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full strength. Thiers insisted that operation must go ahead as quickly as possible to use the element of surprise. If the seizure of the cannon was not successful, the government would withdraw from center of Paris, build up its forces, and then attack with overwhelming force, as they had done during the uprising of June 1848. The Council accepted his decision, and Vinoy gave orders for the operation to begin the next day.^[19]

Early in the morning of 18 March, two brigades of soldiers climbed the butte of Montmartre, where the largest collection of 170 cannon was located. A small group of revolutionary National Guards was already there, and there was a brief confrontation between the brigade led by General Claude Lecomte, and the National Guards, in which one guardsman, named Turpin, was shot dead. Word of the shooting spread quickly, and members of the National Guard from all over the neighborhood, as well as Mayor Georges Clemenceau, hurried to the site to confront the soldiers.

Elsewhere in Paris, the Army had succeeded in securing the cannon at Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and other strategic points in the city, but the crowd continued to grow and the situation became more and more tense at Montmartre. The horses that were needed to move the cannon away did not arrive, and the army units were immobilized. The soldiers were surrounded by the crowd, and soldiers began to leave the ranks and join the crowd. General Lecomte tried to withdraw, and then ordered his soldiers to load their weapons and fix bayonets. He gave the order three times to fire, but the soldiers refused. Some of the officers were disarmed and taken to the city hall of Montmartre, under the protection of Clemenceau. General Lecomte and the officers of his staff were seized by the National guards and his mutinous soldiers and taken to the local headquarters of the National Guard at the ballroom of the Chateau-Rouge. The officers were pelted with rocks, struck, threatened, and insulted by the crowd. In the middle of the afternoon Lecomte and the other officers were taken to 6 rue des Rosiers by members of a group calling themselves The Committee of Vigiilance of the 18th arrondissement, who demanded that they be tried and executed.^[20]

At 5:00 in the afternoon, the National Guards had captured another important prisoner: General Jacques Leon Clement-Thomas. General Clement-Thomas was an ardent republican and fierce disciplinarian, who had helped suppress the armed uprising of June 1848 against the Second Republic. Because of his republican beliefs, he had been arrested by Napoleon III and exiled, and had only returned to France after the downfall of the Empire. He was particularly hated by the National Guardsmen of Montmartre and Belleville because of the severe discipline he imposed during the siege of Paris.^[21] Earlier that day, dressed in civilian clothes, he had been trying to find out what was going on, when he was recognized by a soldier and arrested, and brought to the building at rue des Rosiers.

At about 5:30 on 18 March, the angry crowd of National guardsmen and deserters from the Lecomte's regiment at rue des Rosiers seized Clement-Thomas, beat him with rifle butts, pushed him into the garden, and shot him repeatedly. A few minutes later, they did the same to General Lecomte. Doctor Guyon, who examined the bodies shortly afterwards, found forty balls in the body of Clement-Thomas and 9 balls in the back of General Lecomte.^[22]^[23]

By the later morning, the operation to recapture the guns had failed, and crowds and barricades were appearing in all the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. General Vinoy ordered the army to pull back to the Seine, and Thiers began to organize a withdrawal to Versailles, where he could gather enough troops to take back Paris.

The Government Retreats

On the afternoon of March 18, following the government's failed attempt to seize the cannons at Montmartre, the Central Committee of the National Guard ordered the three battalions of National Guard to seize the Hotel de Ville, where they believed the government was located. They were not aware that Thiers, the government and the military commanders were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the gates were open and there were few guards. They were also unaware that Marshal Patrice Mac-Mahon, the future commander of the forces against the Commune, had just arrived at his home in Paris, having just ben released from imprisonment in Germany. As soon as he heard the news of the uprising, he made his way to the train station, where national guardsmen were already stopping and checking the identity of departing passengers; a sympathetic station manager concealed him in his office and helped him board the train, and he escaped the city. While he was at the train station National Guardsmen sent by the Central Committee arrived at his house looking for him.^[24]^[25]

At the advice of General Vinoy, Thiers ordered the evacuation to Versailles of all the regular forces in Paris, some forty thousand soldiers, including the soldiers in the fortresses around the city, the regrouping of all the army units in Versailles, and the departure of all government ministries from the city.

The National Guard takes power

In February, while the national government had been organizing in Bordeaux, a new rival government had been organized in Paris. The National Guard had not been disarmed by the armistice, and had on paper 260 battalions of 1500 men each, a total of 400,000 men.^[26] Between 15 February and 24 February, some five hundred delegates elected by the National Guard began meeting in Paris. On March 15, just before the confrontation between the National Guard and the regular army over the cannons of Paris, 1,325 delegates of the federation of organizations created by the National Guard elected a leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi (who was in Italy and respectfully declined the title) and created a Central Committee of thirty-eight members, which made its headquarters in a school on the rue Basfroi, between Place de la Bastille and La Roquette. The first vote of the new Central Committee was to refuse to recognize the authority of General Aurelle de Paladines, the official commander of the National Guard appointed by Thiers, or of General Vinoy, the Military Governor of Paris.^[27]

Late on 18 March, when they learned that the regular army was leaving Paris, the units of the National Guard quickly to take control of the city. The first to take action were the followers of Louis Blanqui, who went quickly to the Latin Quarter and took charge of the gunpowder stored in the Pantheon, and the Orleans train station. Four battalions crossed the Seine and captured the prefecture of police, while other units occupied the former headquarters of the National Guard at place Vendome and the Ministry of Justice.

During the night of 18–19 March, the National Guard occupied the empty offices vacated by the government; they quickly took over the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of the interior, and the Ministry of War. At eight in the morning on the 19th, the Central Committee was meeting in the Hotel de Ville. By the end of the day 20,000 national guardsmen were camped in triumph in the square in front of the Hotel de Ville, with several dozen cannon, and a red flag was hoisted over the building.^[28]

The extreme left members of the Central Committee, led the Blanquists, demanded an immediate march on Versailles, to disperse the Thiers government and to impose their authority on all of France, but the majority of the Committee wanted first to establish a more solid base of legal authority in Paris. The committee officially lifted the state of siege, named commissions to administer the government, and called elections for 23 March. They also sent a delegation of mayors of the Paris arrondissements, led by Georges Clemenceau, to negotiate with the Thiers government in Versailles to obtain a special independent status for Paris.

The Commune Elections (March 26)

In Paris, hostility was growing between the elected republican mayors, including Clemenceau, who believed that they were legitimate leaders of Paris, and the more members of the Central Committee of the National Guard.^[29] On 22 March, the day before the elections, the Central Committee declared that they, not the mayors, were the legitimate government of Paris.^[30] They declared that Clemenceau was no longer the Mayor of Montmartre, and seized the city hall there, as well as the city halls of the 1st and 2nd arrondissements, which were occupied by more radical national guardsmen. "We are caught between two bands of crazy people," Clemenceau complained, "those sitting in Versailles and those in Paris."

The Commune elections held on 26 March elected a Commune council of 92 members, one member for each twenty thousand residents. In advance of the elections, the Central Committee of the National Guard and the leaders of the Internationale gave out their list of candidates, mostly from the extreme left. The candidates had only a few days to campaign.

The government of Thiers in Versailles urged the citizens of Paris to abstain from the elections. There was fine spring weather on Election Day. When the voting was finished, 233,000 Parisians had voted, out of 485,000 registered voters, or forty-eight percent. In the upper-class 7th and 8th arrondissements, 77 percent of voters had abstained; 68 percent in the 15th, 66 percent in the 16th, 62 percent in the 6th and 9th. But in the working-class neighborhoods, turnout was high: 76 percent in the 20th, 65 percent in the 19th, 55 to 60 percent in the 10th, 11th, and 12th.^[31]

A few candidates, including Blanqui (who had been arrested when outside Paris, and was in prison in Brittany), won in several arrondissements. Other candidates elected, including about twenty moderate republicans and five radicals, refused to take their seats. In the end, the Council had just 60 members. Nine of the winning candidates were Blanquists (some of whom were also candidates of the Internationale). Twenty-five, including Delescluze, and Pyat, classified themselves as "Independent revolutionaries," about fifteen were from the Internationale, and the rest were from a variety of radical groups. One of the best-known candidates, George Clemenceau, received only 752 votes. The professions represented by the Commune council members were 33 workers, five small businessmen, 19 clerks, accountants and other office staff, twelve journalists, and a selection of workers of the liberal arts. All were men; women were not allowed to vote.^[32]

The winners of the election were announced on 27 March, and a large ceremony and parade by the National Guard was held the next day in front of the Hotel de VIlle, decorated with red flags.

The Commune organizes and begins work

The new Commune held its first meeting on 28 March in a euphoric mood; the members adopted a dozen proposals; including an honorary presidency for Louis Blanqui, the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of military conscription, a proposal to send delegates to other cities to help launch communes there, and a resolution declaring that membership in the Paris Commune was incompatible with being a member of the National Assembly. This was aimed particularly at Pierre Tirard, the republican mayor of the 2nd arrondissement, who had been elected to both the Commune and National Assembly. Seeing the more radical political direction of the new Commune, Tirard and some twenty of the republican members decided it was wiser to resign from the Commune. A resolution was also passed, after a long debate, that the deliberations of the Council should be secret, since the Commune was now effectively at war with the government in Versailles and should not make its intentions known to the enemy.^[33]

Following the model proposed by the more radical members, the new government had no President, no mayor, and no commander in chief. The Commune began by establishing nine commissions, similar to those of the National Assembly, to run the business of Paris. The Commissions in turn reported to an Executive Commission. One of the first measures passed declared that military conscription was abolished, that no military force other than the National Guard could be formed or could be introduced into the capital, and all healthy male citizens were members of the National Guard. The new system had one important weakness; the National Guard now had two different commanders; it reported to both the Central Committee of the National Guard and to the Executive Commission, and it was not clear which one was in charge of the inevitable war with the government in Versailles.^[34]

The Program of the Commune

The Commune returns workmen's tools pawned during the siege

The commune adopted the previously discarded French Republican Calendar during its brief existence and used the socialist red flag rather than the republican tricolour. In 1848, during the Second Republic, radicals and socialists had also adopted the red flag to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans; this was similar to the symbolic distinctions adopted by the moderate, liberal, Girondist movement during the 1789 revolution.

Despite internal differences, the Council began to organize the public services essential for a city of two million residents. It also reached a consensus on certain policies that tended towards a progressive, secular, and highly-democratic social democracy. Because the Commune was only able to meet on fewer than sixty days in all, only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included:

the separation of church and state;
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 and children of National Guards killed on active service;
the free return, by the city pawnshops, of all workmen's tools and household items valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege; the Commune was concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war;
the postponement of commercial debt obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts;
the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune, nonetheless, recognized the previous owner's right to compensation;
the prohibition of fines imposed by employers on their workmen.^[35]

The decrees separated the church from the state, appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice of religion from schools. (After the fall of the Commune, separation of Church and State, or laïcité, would not enter French law again until 1880-81 during the Third Republic, with the signing of the Jules Ferry laws and the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.) In theory, he churches were allowed to continue their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public political meetings during the evenings. In practice, many churches were closed, and many priests were arrested and held as hostages, in the hope of trading them for Louis-Auguste Blanqui, a revolutionary who had been arrested outside of Paris on March 17 and was held in prison in Brittany.^[36]

Other legislation proposed to make technical training freely available to all. It was not implemented because of the lack of resources and time.

Feminist initiatives

Women played an important role in both the initiation and governance of the Commune. Several women and children threw themselves between Adolphe Thiers' army and the cannons they were attempting to confiscate from the National Guard on Montmartre. Despite orders from Thiers, soldiers refused to fire on their own people. This led the French army to retreat to Versailles and allowed the Paris Commune to form.

Some women organized a feminist movement, following on from earlier attempts in 1789 and 1848. Thus, Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section of the First International (IWA), 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 of the Wounded") on April 11, 1871. The feminist writer André Léo, a friend of Paule Minck, was also active in the Women's Union. Believing that their struggle against patriarchy could only be pursued through a global struggle against capitalism, the association demanded gender equality, wages' equality, the right of divorce for women, the right to secular education and professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubines, and between legitimate and illegitimate children. They advocated the abolition of prostitution (obtaining the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or legal official brothels). The Women's Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organized cooperative workshops.^[37] Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Le Mel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for indigents, and then fought during the Bloody Week on the barricades.^[38]

Paule Minck opened a free school in the Church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre and animated the Club Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank.^[38] The Russian Anne Jaclard, who declined to marry Dostoievsky and finally became the wife of Blanquist activist Victor Jaclard, founded the newspaper Paris Commune with André Léo. She was also a member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre, along with Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the First International. Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA activists, and founder of a cooperative bakery in 1867, also fought during the Commune and the Bloody Week.^[38]

Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre", who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolized 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.

Local organizations

The workload of the Commune leaders 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. Numerous organisations were set up during the siege in the localities ("quartiers") to meet social needs, such as (canteens and first aid stations. For example, in the third arrondissement, school materials were provided free, three parochial schools were "laicised", and an orphanage was established. In the twentieth arrondissement, schoolchildren were provided with free clothing and food. 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 revolutionary. Revolutionary factions included Proudhonists (an early form of moderate anarchism), members of the international socialists, Blanquists, and more libertarian republicans.

War between the Commune and the national government

In Versailles, Thiers had estimated that he would need 150,000 soldiers to recapture Paris, and he had only about twenty thousand reliable first-line soldiers, plus about five thousand gendarmes. He worked rapidly to assemble a new and reliable regular army. Most of the soldiers were prisoners of war who had just been released by the Germans, following the terms of the armistice. Others were sent from military units in all of the provinces. To command the new army Thiers chose Patrice Mac-Mahon, who had won fame fighting the Austrians in Italy under Napoleon III, and who had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Sedan. He was highly popular both within the army and in the country. By 30 March, less than weeks after the route of the army on Montmartre, the regular army began skirmishing with the National Guard in the outskirts of Paris.

In Paris, the members of the Military Commission of the Commune and the executive committee of the Commune, as well as the central committee of the National Guard, met on April 1 and decided to launch an offensive toward the army in Versailles within five days. The attack was first launched in the morning of April 2 by five battalions who crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly. The National Guard troops were quickly repulsed by the regular soldiers, with a loss of about twelve soldiers. One officer of the Versailles army, a surgeon from the medical corps, was killed; the National Guardsmen had mistaken his uniform for that of a gendarme.

Five of the National Guard soldiers were captured by the Versailles soldiers; two were deserters from the regular army and two were National Guardsmen who were caught with their weapons in their hands. General Vinoy, the commander of the Paris Military District, had ordered that any prisoners who were deserters from the regular army should be shot. The commander of the regular forces, Colonel Boulanger, went further and ordered that all four prisoners be summarily shot. The practice of shooting prisoners captured with weapons became common in the bitter fighting in the weeks ahead.^[39]

The March on Versailles

Despite this first failure, the Commune leaders were still convinced that, as at Montmartre, the soldiers of the Versailles army would refuse to fire on the soldiers of the National Guard. They prepared massive offensive of 27,000 national guardsmen who would advance in three columns. They were expected to converge at the end of twenty-four hours at the gates of the Palace of Versailles. They advanced on the morning of 3 April without cavalry to protect the flanks, without artillery, without stores of food and ammunition, and without ambulances, confident of rapid success. They passed by the line of forts outside the city, believing that the forts were occupied by National Guardsmen, not knowing that the Versailles soldiers had re-occupied the abandoned forts on March 28. They soon came under heavy artillery and rifle fire from the Versailles soldiers, broke ranks and fled back to Paris. Once again National guardsmen captured with weapons were routinely shot by the Versailles units.^[40] The Commune forces, the National Guard, first began skirmishing with the regular Army of Versailles on April 2. Neither side really sought a major civil war, nor was either side ever willing to negotiate.

Support for the Commune outside of Paris

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. In provincial and rural France there had always been a skeptical attitude towards the activities of the metropolis. Other Communes were briefly created in Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Le Creusot, Toulouse, Narbonne, Limoges, and Marseille, but were quickly suppressed by the army. (see the section on Other Communes of 1871 below).

The Decree on Hostages

The leaders of the Commune responded to the defeat, and the public anger it caused, by drafting and passing a new order on 5 April which became known as the Decree on Hostages. It was roughly similar to the law of suspects of 1793, at the beginning of the reign of terror of the French Revolution.^[41] Under the decree, any person accused of complicity with the Versailles government could be immediately arrested, imprisoned, and tried by a special jury of accusation. Those convicted by the jury would become "hostages of the people of Paris." Article 5 stated: "Every execution of a prisoner of war or of a partisan of the government of the Commune of Paris will be immediately followed by the execution of a triple number of hostages held in virtue of article four." Prisoners of war would be brought before a jury, which would decide if they would be released or held as hostages.^[42]

Under the new decree, a number of prominent religious leaders were promptly arrested, including the Abbé Deguerry, the curé of the Madeleine church, and the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. He was confined at the Mazas prison. The National Assembly in Versailles responded swiftly on April 6 with its own law, allowing military tribunals to judge and punish suspects within twenty-four hours, a law which was broadly and frequently applied during the suppression of the Commune. When the new law was introduced, the journalist and author Émile Zola wrote,"Thus we citizens of Paris are placed between two terrible laws; the law of suspects brought back by the Commune and the law on rapid executions which will certainly be approved by the Assembly. They are not fighting with cannon shots, they are slaughtering each other with decrees."^[43]

Life Inside Paris during the Commune

The Bank of France and the Commune

The new Commune named Francis Jourde as the head of the Commission of Finance. He had been the clerk of a notary, an accountant in a bank, and an employee of the city department of bridges and roads, and he maintained the accounts of the Commune with prudence. The tax receipts of the City of Paris amounted to 20 million francs, with another 6 million seized at the Hotel de Ville. The expenses of the Commune were 42 million, the largest part going to pay the dailry salary of the National Guard. Jourde first obtained a loan from the Rothschild Bank, then paid the bills from the city account, which was soon exhausted.

The gold reserves of the Bank of France had been moved out of Paris for safety in August 1870, but the vaults of the Bank of France contained 88 million francs in gold coins and 166 million francs in banknotes. When Thiers and the government left Paris in March, they did not have the time or the reliable soldiers to take the money with them. The reserves were guarded by a five hundred National Guardsmen, who were themselves employees of the Bank of France. Some of the members of the Commune wanted to take the Bank's reserves to fund social projects, but Jourde resisted, explaining that, without the gold reserves, the value of the currency would collapse and all the money of the Commune would be worthless. The Commune appointed Charles Beslay as the Commissaire of the Bank of France, and Beslay made an arrangement that the Bank would loan the Commune four hundred thousand francs a day. This arrangement was approved Thiers and the government in Versailles, because Thiers knew that in the future treaty of peace the Germans were demanding an indemnity of five billion francs for the cost of the war, and the Reserves were needed to keep the franc stable and pay the indemnity. The prudence of Jourde was later condemned by Karl Marx and other Marxists, who felt the Commune should have confiscated the reserves of the Bank of France and spent all the money immediately. ^[44]

The press during the Commune

From March 21, the Central Committee of the National Guard banned the publication of the major pro-Versaille newspapers, Lu Gaulois and Le Figaro; their offices were invaded and closed by crowds of supporters of the Commune, and after April 18 other newspapers sympathetic to Versailles were all closed.

The most popular of the pro-Commune newspapers was Le Cri du peuple, published by Jules Valles, which was published from 22 February until 23 May. Another highly popular publication was Pere Duchene, inspired by a similar paper of the same name published from 1790 until 1794; its first issue on March 6, it was briefly closed by General Vinoy, and then reappeared again until May 23, and specialized in humor, vulgarity and extreme abuse against the opponents of the Commune.^[45]

A republican press also flourished, including such papers as Le mot d'ordre of Henri Rochefort, which was both violently anti-Versailles and critical of the faults and excesses of the Commune. The most popular republican paper was Le Rappel, which condemned both Thiers and the killing of General Leconte and Thomas. The editor, Auguste Vacquerie, was close to Victor Hugo, whose son write for the paper. The editors wrote, "We are against the National Assembly, but we are not for the Commune. That which we defend, that which we love, that which we admire, is Paris." ^[46]

The Commune and the Catholic Church

From the beginning, the Commune had a tense relationship with the Catholic Church. On 2 April, soon after the Commune was established, it voted a decree accusing the Catholic Church of "complicity in the crimes of the monarchy." The decree declared the separation of church and state, confiscated the state funds allotted to the church, seized the property of religious congregations, and ordered that Catholic schools to cease religious education and become secular. Over the next seven weeks, some two hundred priests, nuns and monks were arrested, and twenty-six churches were closed to the public. At the urging of the more radical newspapers. National guard units searched the basements of churches, looking for evidence of alleged sadism and criminal practices. More extreme elements of the National Guard carried out mock religious processions and parodies of religious services. Early in May, some of the political clubs began to demand the immediate execution of Archbishop Darboy and the other priests in the prison. The Archbishop and a number of priests were executed during Bloody Week, in retallation for the execution of Commune soldiers by the regular army.^[47]

The destruction of the Place Vendome Column

The destruction of the column honoring the victories of Napoleon I, topped by a statue of the Emperor, was one of the most prominent civic events during the Commune. It was voted on April 12 by the executive committee of the Commune, which declared that the column was "a monument of barbarism" and a "symbol of brute force and false pride." The idea had originally come from the painter Gustave Courbet, who on written to the Government of National Defense on 4 September calling for the demolition of the column. In October, he had called for the a new column, made of melted down German cannons, "the column of peoples, the column of Germany and France, forever federated." Courbet was elected to the Council of the Commune on April 16, after the decision to tear down the column was already made. The ceremony took place on May 16, in the presence of two battalions of the National guard and the leaders of the Commune, a band played the Marseillaise and the Chant du Départ. The first effort to pull down the column failed, but at 5:30 in the afternoon the column broke from its base and shattered into three pieces. The pedestal was draped with red flags, and pieces of the statue were taken to be melted down and made into coins.^[48]

On 12 May another civic event took place; the destruction of the home of Adolphe Thiers on place Saint-Georges. The idea was proposed by Henri Rochefort, editor of the newspaper Le Mot d'ordre, on 6 April, but not voted by the Commune until 10 May. According to the decree of the Commune, the works of art were to be donated to the Louvre (which refused them) and the furniture was to be sold, and the money given to widows and orphans of the fighting. The house was emptied and destroyed on May 12.^[49]

The Suppression of the Commune

The Committee of Public Safety

As the military situation of the Commune deteriorated further in April, the Council of the Commune voted, with some opposition, for the creation of a Committee of Public Safety, modelled on the Committee that carried out the reign of terror during the French Revolution of 1789. The Committee was given extensive powers to hunt down and imprison enemies of the Commune.

The army of the Commune

Since every able-bodied man in Paris was obliged to be a member of the National Guard, the Commune on paper had an army of about 200,000 men on May 6, but the actual number was much lower, probably between twenty-five and fifty thousand men. At the beginning of May twenty percent of the National Guard was reported absent without leave.

The National Guard had hundreds of cannon and thousands of rifles in their arsenals, but only half of the cannon and two-thirds of the rifles were ever used; There were heavy naval cannon mounted on the ramparts of Paris, but there were few National Guardsmen trained to use them. Between the end of April and may 20, the number of trained artillerymen fell from 5,445 to 2,340.^[50]

The officers of the National Guard were elected by the soldiers, and their leadership qualities and military skills varied widely. Gustave Clusaret, the commander of the National Guard until his dismissal on May 1, had tried to impose more discipline on the army, disbanding many of the unreliable units and making soldiers live in barracks instead of at home. He recruited officers with military experience, particularly Polish officers who had fled to France in 1863 after the Russians crushed the January Uprising; they played a prominent role in the last days of the Commune.^[51] One of these officers was General Jaroslav Dombrowski, a former Imperial Russian Army officer, who was appointed commander of the Commune forces on the right bank of the Seine. On May 5, he was appointed commander of the Commune's whole army. Dombrowski held this position until May 23, when he was killed while defending the city barricades.^[52]

The capture of Fort Issy

One of the key strategic points around Paris was Fort Issy, south the Paris near the Porte de Versailles, which blocked the route of the Army into Paris. The garrison of which was commanded by Leon Megy, a former mechanic and a militant Blanquist, who had been sentenced to twenty years hard labor for killing a policeman, He had been freed and had led the takeover of the prefecture of Marseille by militant revolutionaries. When he came back to Paris, he was given the rank of Colonel by the Central Committee of the National Guard, and given the command of Fort Issy on April 13.

The Army commander, General Ernest de Cissey, army began a systematic siege and a heavy bombardment of the fort that lasted three days and three nights. At the same time Cissey sent a message to Colonel Megy, with the permission of Marshal Mac-Mahon, offering to spare the lives of the fort's defenders and let them return to Paris with their belongings and arms weapons if they would surrender the fort. Colonel Megy gave the order, and during the night of 29–30 April, most of the soldiers evacuated the fort and returned to Paris. When the news of the evacuation reached the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Commune. Before General Cissey and the Versailles army could occupy the fort, the National Guard rushed reinforcements there and re-occupied all the positions. General Cluseret, commander of the National Guard, was dismissed and put in prison. General Cissey resumed the intense bombardment of the fort. The defenders resisted until the night of April 7–8, when the remaining National Guards in the fort, unable to withstand further attacks, decided to withdraw. The new commander of the National Guard, Louis Rossel, issued a terse bulletin: The tricolor flag flies over the fort of Issay, abandoned yesterday by the garrison." The abandonment of the fort led the Commune to dismiss Rossel, and his replacement as commander by Rossel and his replacement by Delescluze, a fervent Communard but a journalist with no military experience.^[53]

Bitter fighting followed as Mac-Mahon's army worked their way systematically forward to the walls of the city. On 20 May, Mac-Mahon's artillery batteries at Montretout, Mont-Valerian, Boulogne, Issy and Vanves opened fire on the western neighborhoods of the city, Auteuil, Passy, and the Trocadero, falling close to l'Etoile. Dombrowski reported that the soldiers he had sent to defend the ramparts of the city between Point-du-Jour and porte d'Auteuil had retreated to the city-- he had only 4000 soldiers left at la Muette, 2000 at Neuilly, and 200 at Asnieres and Saint Ouen. "I lack artillerymen and workers to hold off the catastrophe." ^[54] On 19 May, while Commune executive committee was meeting to judge the former military commander Clauseret for the loss of the Issy fortress, they received word that the forces of Marshal MacMahon were within the fortifications Paris.

The radicalization of the Commune

By April, as the forces of Mac-Mahon steadily approached Paris, divisions had arisen within the Commune about whether to give absolute priority to military defense or to political and social freedoms and reforms. The majority, including the Blanquists and the more radical revolutionaries, supported by Le Vengeurde Pyat and Le Pere Duchene of Vermersch, supported the military priority. The publications La Commune, La Justice and Le Cri du peuple of Jules Valles feared that a more authoritarian government would destroy kind of social republic they wanted to achieve.

The Committee on Public Safety of Raoul Rigault began to make more arrests, usually for treason, intelligence with the enemy, or insults to the Commune. Those arrested included General de Martimprey, almost eighty years old, the governor of the Invalides, alleged to having caused the assassination of revolutionaries in December 1851, as well as more recent commanders of the National Guard, including Cluseret. High religious officials had been arrested; the Archbishop Darboy, the Vicar General, Abbe Lagarde, and the Curé of the Madeleine, Abbé Deguerry. The policy of holding hostages for possible reprisals was denounced by some defenders of the Commune, including Victor Hugo, in a poem entitled "No reprisals" published in Brussels on Paril 21.^[55]

The leader of the most extreme faction of the Commune, Louis Blanqui, had been arrested by the Versailles government on 17 March, and was being held in a prison in the Bay of Morlaix in Brittany. On April 12, Rigault proposed to exchange Archbishop Darboy and several other priests for Blanqui. Thiers refused the proposal. On 14 May, Rigault proposed to exchange seventy hostages for Blanqui, and Thiers again refused.^[56]

The "Bloody Week"

May 21 - The Army enters Paris

The final offensive on Paris by Mac-Mahon's army began early in the morning on Sunday, 21 May. On the front line, soldiers learned from a sympathizer inside the walls that the National Guard had withdrawn from one section of the city wall at Point-du-Jour, and the fortifications were undefended. An army engineer crossed the moat and inspected the empty fortifications, and immediately telegraphed the news to Marshal Mac-Mahon, who was with Thiers at the fort of Mont-Valerien. Mac-Mahon immediately gave orders, and two battalions passed through the fortifications without meeting anyone, and occupied the porte de Saint-Cloud and the porte de Versailles. By four o'clock in the morning, sixty thousand soldiers had passed into the city and occupied Autuil and Passy.^[57]

Once the fighting began inside Paris, the strong neighborhood loyalties that had been an advantage of the Commune became something of a disadvantage: instead of an overall planned defence, each "quartier" fought desperately for its survival, and each was overcome in turn. The webs of narrow streets that made entire districts nearly impregnable in earlier Parisian revolutions had in the center been replaced by wide boulevards during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. The Versailles forces enjoyed a centralized 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.

The trial of Gustave Cluseret, the former commander, was still going on at the Commune when they received the message from General Dombrowski that the army was inside the city. He asked for reinforcements and proposed an immediate counterattack. "Remain calm," he wrote, "and everything will be saved. We must not be defeated!".^[58] When they had received this news, the members of the Commune executive returned to their deliberations on the fate of Cluseret, which continued until eight o'clock that evening.

The first reaction of many of the National Guards was to find someone to blame, and Dombrowski was the first to be accused; rumors circulated that he had accepted a million francs to give up the city. He was deeply offended by the rumors. They stopped when Dombrowski died two days later from wounds received on the barricades. His last reported words were: "Do they still say I was a traitor?" ^[59]

May 22 - the barricades go up, and the first street battles

On the morning of 22 May, bells rang around the city, and Delescluze, as delegate for war of the Commune, issued a proclamation, posted all over Paris:

"In the name of this glorious France, mother of all the popular revolutions, permanent home of the ideas of justice and solidarity which should be and will be the laws of the world, march at the enemy, and may your revolutionary energy show him that someone can sell Paris, but no one can give it up, or conquer it! The Commune counts on you, count on the Commune!" ^[60]

The Committee of Public Safety issued its own decree:

TO ARMS! That Paris be bristling with barricades, and that, behind these improvised ramparts, it will hurl again its cry of war, its cry of pride, its cry of defiance, but its cry of victory; because Paris, with its barricades, is undefeatable ...That revolutionary Paris, that Paris of great days, does its duty; the Commune and the Commitee of Public Safety will do theirs! ^[61]

Despite the appeals, only fifteen to twenty thousand persons, including many women and children, responded. The forces of the Commune were outnumbered five times by army of Marshal Mac-Mahon.^[62]

On the morning of 22 May, the regular army occupied a large area from the porte Dauphine to the Champs-de-Mars and the Ecole Militaire, where general Cissey established his headquarters, to the porte de Vanves. In a short time the 5th corps of the army advanced toward Parc Monceau and Place Clichy, while General Douay occupied the place de l'Etoile and General Clichant occupied the Gare Saint-Lazaire. Little resistance was encountered in the west of Paris, and the army moved forward slowly and cautiously, in no hurry.

No one had expected the army to enter the city, so only a few large barricades were already in place, on the rue Saint-Florentine and rue de l'Opera, and the rue to Rivoli. barricades had not been prepared in advance; some nine hundred barricades were built hurridly out of paving stones and sacks of earth. were hurridly put in place. Many other people prepared shelters in the cellars. The first serious fighting took place in the afternoon of the 22nd, an artillery duel between regular army batteries on the Quai d'Orsay and the Madeleine and National Guard batteries on the terrace of the Tuileries Palace. On the same day, the first executions of National Guard soldiers by the regular army inside Paris took place; some sixteen prisoners captured on the Rue de bac were given a summary hearing, and then shot.^[63]

May 23 - the battle for Montmartre and the burning of the Tuileries Palace

File:Ruine Tuileries.jpg

Ruins of the Tuileries Palace, burned on 23 May by a National Guard unit led by Jules Bergeret. He wrote, "I wish the same will happen to all the monuments of Paris.."

On May 23 he next objective of the army the Butte of Montmarte, where the uprising had begun. The National Guard had built and manned a circle of barricades and makeshift forts around the base of the Butte. The garrison of one barricade, at Chaussee Clignancourt, was defended in part by a battalion of about thirty women, including Louise Michelle, the celebrated "Red Virgin of Montmartre", who had already participated in many battle outside the city. She was seized by regular soldiers and thrown into the trench in front of the barricade and left for dead. She escaped and soon afterwards surrendered to the army, in order to prevent the arrest of her mother. The battalions of the National Guard were no match for the army; by midday on the 23rd the regular soldiers were at the top of Montmartre, and the tricolor flag was raised over the Solferino tower. The soldiers captured forty two guardsmen and several women, took them to the same house on Rue Rosier where generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte had been executed, and shot them. On the Rue Royale, soldiers seized the formidable barricade around the Madeleine church; three hundred prisoners captured with their weapons were shot there, the largest of the mass executions of prisoners.^[64]

On the same day, having had little success fighting the army, units of National Guardsmen began to take revenge by burning public buildings symbolizing the government. The Guardsmen led by Paul Brunel, one of the original leaders of the Commune, took cans of oil and set fire to the buildings around the rue Royale and the Faubourg Saint-Honore. Following the example set by Brunel, Guardsmen set fire to dozens of other buildings on rue Saint-Florentin, rue de Rivoli, rue de Bac, rue de Lille, and other streets.

The Tuileries Palace, which had been the residence of most of the monarchs of France from Henry IV to Napoleon III, was defended by a garrison of some three hundred National Guards with thirty cannon placed in the garden. They had been engaged in a day-long artillery duel with the regular army. At about seven in the evening, the commander of the garrison, Jules Bergeret, gave the order to burn the palace. The walls, floors, drapes and woodwork were soaked with oil and turpentine, and barrels of gunpowder were placed at the foot of the grand staircase and in the courtyard, then the fires were set. The fire lasted 48 hours and gutted the palace, except for the southernmost part, the Pavillon de Flore.^[65] Bergeret sent a message to the Hotel de Ville: "The last vestiges of royalty have just disappeared. I wish that the same will happen to all the monuments of Paris." ^[66]

The Richelieu library of the Louvre, connected to the Tuileries, was also set on fire and entirely destroyed. The rest of the Louvre was saved by the efforts of the museum curators and fire brigades.^[67] Defenders of the Commune later claimed that many of the fires were caused by artillery from the French army.^[68]

Besides public buildings, the National Guard also burned the homes of several people associated with the regime of Napoleon III, such as the home of the playwright Prosper Merimee, the author of 'Carmen.^[69]

May 24 - the burning of the Hotel de Ville, and the execution of prisoners and hostages

At two in the morning on May 24, Brunel and his men went to the Hotel de Ville, which was still the headquarters of the Commune and of its chief executive, Delescluze. Wounded men were being tended in the halls, and some of the National Guard Officers and Commune members were changing from their uniforms into civilian clothes and shaving their beards, preparing to escape from the city. Delescluze ordered everyone to leave the building, and Brunel's men set it on fire.^[70]

The battles resumed at daylight of 24 May, under a sky black with smoke from the burning palaces and ministries. There was no coordination or central direction on the Commune side; each neighborhood fought on its own. The National Guard disintegrated, with many soldiers changing into civilian clothes and fleeing the city, leaving between ten and fifteen thousand Communards to defend the barricades. Delescluze moved his headquarters from the Hotel de Ville to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement. More public buildings were set afire, including the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, the theaters of Chatelet and Porte-Saint-Martin, and the Church of Saint-Eustache.

As the army continued its slow advance, the summary executions continued. Informal Military courts were established at the Ecole Polytechnique, Chatelet, the Luxembourg Palace, Parc Monceau, and other locations around Paris. The hands of captured prisoners were examined to see if they had fired weapons. The prisoners gave their identity, sentence was pronounced by a court of two or three gendarme officers, the prisoners were taken out and sentences immediately carried out.^[71]

The Commune carried out its own executions. Raoul Rigaut, the chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, without getting the authorization of the Commune, executed one group of four prisoners, before he himself was captured and shot by an army patrol. On 24 May a delegation of National guardsmen and Gustave Genton, a member of the Committee of Public Safety came to the new headquarters of the Commune at the city hall of the 11th arrondissment and demanded the immediate execution of the hostages held at the prison of La Roquette. The new prosecutor of the Commune, Theophile Ferre, hesitated and then wrote a note: "Order to the Citizen Director of la Roquette to execute six hostages." Genton asked for volunteers to serve as a firing squad, and went to the La Roquette prison, where many of the hostages were being held. Genton was given a list of hostages and selected six names, including the Archbishop of Paris three priests. The Director of the Prison, Francois, refused to give up the Archbishop without a specific order from the Commune. Genton sent a deputy back to the Prosecutor, who wrote "and especially the archbishop" on the bottom of his note. The archbishop and five other hostages were promptly taken out into the courtyard of the prison, lined up against the wall, and shot.^[72]

May 25 - the death of Delescluze

By the end of 24 May, the regular army had cleared most of the Latin Quarter of barricades, and held three-fifths of Paris. Mac-Mahon had his headquarters at the Quai d'Orsay. The insurgents held only the 11th, 12th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, and parts of the 3rd, 5th, and 13th. Delescluze and the remaining leaders of the Commune, about twenty in all, were at the city of the 13th arrondissement on Place Voltaire. A bitter battle took place between about fifteen hundred National Guards from the 13th and the Mouffetard district, commanded by Walery Wroblowski, a Polish exile who had participated in the uprising against the Russians, against three brigades commanded by General de Cissey.^[73]

During the course of the 25th the insurgents lost the city hall of the 13th and moved to a barricade on place Jeanne-d'Arc, where seven hundred were taken prisoner. Wroblowski himself and some of his men escaped to the city hall of the 11th arrondissement, where he met Delescluze, the chief executive of the Commune. Several of the other Commune leaders, including Brunel, were wounded, and Pyat had disappeared. Delescluze offered Wroblowski the command of the Commune forces, which he declined, saying that he preferred to fight as a private soldier. At about seven-thirty Delescluze put on his red sash of office, walked unarmed to the barricade on the place Chateau-d'eau, climbed to the top and showed himself to the soldiers, and was promptly shot dead.^[74]

May 26 - the capture of Place de la Bastille and the executions on Rue Haxo

On the afternoon of 26 May, after six hours of heavy fighting, the regular army captured the Place de la Bastille. The National Guard still held parts of the 3rd arrondissment, from square du Temple to the Arts-et-Metiers, and the National Guard still had artillery at their strong points at the Buttes-Chaumont and Pere-Lachaisse, from which they continued to bombard the regular army forces along the Canal Saint-Martin.^[75]

The executions of prisoners by the army continued, as did the execution of hostages by the Commune. A contingent of several dozen National Guardsmen led by Antoine Clavier, a commissaire and Emile Gois, a Colonel of the National Guard, arrived at La Roquette prison and demanded, at gunpoint, the remaining hostages there; ten priests, thirty-five policemen and gendarmes, and two civilians. They took them first to the city hall of the 20th arrondissement, the Commune leader of that district refused to allow his city hall to be used as a place of execution. Clavier and Gois took them instead to rue Haxo. The procession of hostages was joined by a large and furious crowd of national guards and civilians who insulted, spat upon and struck the hostages. Arriving at an open yard, they were lined up against a wall and shot in groups of ten. National guardsmen in the crowd opened fire along with the firing squad, and the hostages were shot from all directions, then beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets.^[76]

May 27-28- the last battles and the massacre of Pere-Lachaise Cemetery

On the morning of 27 May, the regular army soldiers of Generals Grenier, Ladmirault and Montaudon launched an attack on the National Guard artillery on the heights of the Buttes-Chaumont. The heights were captured at the end of the afternoon by the first regiment of the French Foreign Legion. The last remaining strongpoint of the National Guard was the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, defended by about two hundred men. At 6:00 in the evening the army used cannon to demolish the gates and the First Regiment of naval infantry stormed into the cemetery. Savage fighting followed around the tombs until nightfall, when the last one hundred and fifty Guardsmen, many of them wounded, were surrounded and surrendered. The captured guardsman were taken to the wall of the cemetery, known today as the Communards' Wall, and shot.^[77]

On 28 May, the regular army captured the last remaining positions of the Commune, which offered little resistance. In the morning the regular army captured la Roquette prison and freed the remaining 170 hostages. The army took fifteen hundred prisoners at the National Guard position on Rue Haxo, and two thousand more at Derroja, near Pere-Lachaise. A handful of barricades at rue Ramponneau and rue de Tourville held out into the middle of the afternoon, when all resistance ceased.^[78]

Prisoners, trials and exiles

Some prisoners who had been captured with weapons in their hands or gunpowder on their hands had been shot immediately. Others were taken to the main barracks of the army in Paris, after summary trials, were executed there. Many were buried in mass graves, then later exhumed and reburied in the city cemeteries. The British historian Robert Tombs examined the detailed records of the cemeteries and concluded that the number of National Guardsmen and civilians killed during the "Bloody Week" was between 6000-7500. Other historians, without citing specific sources, estimated numbers of twenty thousand or more. (See section below on the casualties of Bloody Week).

Not all prisoners were shot immediately; the French Army officially recorded the capture of 43,522 prisoners during and immediately after Bloody Week. One thousand fifty four were women, and 615 were under the age of sixteen. These prisoners were marched in groups of one hundred fifty or two hundred, escorted by cavalrymen, to Versailles or the Camp de Satory where they were held in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions until they could be tried. Twenty-two thousand seven hundred twenty-seven, more than half, were released before trial for attenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds.

Since Paris has been officially under a state of siege during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by military tribunals. 15,895 prisoners were put on trial, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labor, 1,169 to deportation, usually to New Caledonia; 3,147 to simple deportation, 1,257 to reclusion, 1,305 to prison for more than a year, and 2,054 to prison for less than a year.^[79]

A separate and more formal trial was held beginning August 7 for the leaders of the Commune who survived and had been captured, including Theophile Ferre, who had signed the death warrant for the hostages, and the painter Gustave Courbet, who had proposed the destruction of the column in Place de Vendome. They were tried by a panel of seven senior army officers. Ferre was sentenced to death, and Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison, and later was ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding he column. He went into exile in Switzerland and died before the first payment could be made. Five women were also put on trial for participation in the Commune, including the famous "Red Virgin", Louise Michel. She demanded the death penalty, but was instead sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia.

In October 1871 a commission of the National Assembly reviewed the sentences; 310 of those convicted were pardoned, 286 had a reduction of the sentence and 1,295 had their sentences commuted. Of the 270 condemned to death - 175 in their absence - twenty-five were shot, including Theophile Ferre and Gustave Genton, who had selected the hostages for execution.^[80]

Thousands of Communards, including some of the leaders, such as Felix Pyat, succeeded in slipping out of Paris before the end of the battle, and went into exile; some 3,500 went to England, 2,000 to 3,000 to Belgium, and about one thousand to Switzerland.^[81] A partial amnesty was granted on 3 March 1879, allowing 400 of the 600 deportees sent to New Caledonia to return, and 2000 of the 2400 prisoners sentenced in their absence. A general amnesty was granted on 11 July 1880, allowed the remaining 543 condemned prisoners and 262 sentenced in their absence, to return to France.^[82]

Aftermath

Adolphe Thiers continued as provisional President of the French Third Republic from 1871 to 1873. When he died in 1877 he was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where the last battle of the Commune had been fought.

Patrice Mac-Mahon, the leader of the regular army that crushed the Commune, became the provisional president of the Third Republic from 1873 to 1875, and then was elected the first President of the Third Republic from 1875 to 1879. When died in 1893, he was buried with the highest military honors at the Invalides.

Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of Montmartre at the beginning the Commune, became the leader of the Radical Party in the French Chamber of Deputies. He was Prime Minister of France during the crucial years of World War I, and signed the Versailles Treaty, restoring Alsace and Lorraine to France.

Some leaders of the Commune, including Delescluze, died on the barricades, but other survived and lived long afterwards.

Felix Pyat, the radical journalist, slipped out of Paris near the end of the Commune and reappeared as a refugee in London. He was sentenced to death in absentia, but he and the other Communards were granted an amnesty, and he returned to France, where he again became active in politics. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in March 1888, where he sat on the extreme left. He died in 1889.

Louis Auguste Blanqui had been elected the honorary President of the Commune, but he was in prison during its entire duration. He was sentenced to be transported to a penal colony in 1872, but because of his health his sentence was changed to imprisonment. He was elected a Deputy for Bordeaux in April, 1879, but he was disqualified. After he was released from prison, he continued his career as an agitator. He died after giving a speech in Paris in January, 1881. Like Adolphe Thiers, he is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the last battle of the Commune was fought.

Louise Michel, the famous "Red Virgin", was sentenced to transportation to a penal colony in New Caledonia, where she served as a schoolteacher. She was amnestied in 1880, and returned to Paris, where she resumed her career as an activist and anarchist. She was arrested in 1880 for leading a mob which pillaged a bakery, imprisoned and pardoned. She was arrested several more times, and once was freed by the intervention of Georges Clemenceau. She died in 1905, and was buried near her close friend and colleague during the Commune, Theophile Ferré, the man who had signed the death warrant for the Archbishop of Paris and other hostages.

On 16 June 1875, the first stone was laid for the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park, and near where General Clement-Thomas and General Lecomte were killed. Though it was not officially declared so, the church was widely viewed as an act of expiation for the tragedy of the Commune.

A plaque and a church, Notre Dame des Hotages, (Our Lady of the Hostages), on Rue Haxo, marks the place where fifty hostages, including priests, gendarmes and four civilians, were shot by a firing squad.^[83]

A plaque also marks the wall in Pere Lachaise Cemetery where 147 Communards were executed, commonly known as "The Communards' Wall".^[84] Memorial commemorations are held at the cemetery every year in May to remember the Commune. Another plaque behind the Hotel de Ville marks the site of a mass grave of Communards shot by the army. Their remains were later reburied in city cemeteries.

The casualties

Participants and historians have long debated the number of Communards killed during Bloody Week. The official army report by General Félix Antoine Appert mentioned only French army casualties, which amounted from April through May to 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing. The report assessed information about Communard casualties only as "very incomplete".^[1]

The issue of the number of casualties during Bloody Week arose at a hearing of the National Assembly on August 28, 1871, where the leader of the army during the suppression the Commune, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, testified. One of the members of the Assembly, M. Vacherot, told the Marshal, "A general has told me that the number killed in combat, on the barricades, or after the combat, was as many as 17,000 men." The Marshal responded: "I don't know what that estimate is based upon; it seems exaggerated to me. All I can say is that the insurgents lost a lot more people than we did." Vacherot continued, "Perhaps this number applies to all of the siege, and to the fighting at Forts d'Issy and Vanves." MacMahon replied, "the number is exaggerated." Vacherot persisted: "It was General Appert who gave me that information. Perhaps he meant both dead and wounded." To which MacMahon replied, "Ah, well, that's different."^[85]

In 1876 Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fought on the barricades during the Bloody Week, and had gone into exile in London, wrote a highly popular and sympathetic history of the Commune. At the end, he wrote: "No one knows the exact number of victims of the Bloody Week. The chief of the military justice department claimed seventeen thousand shot." Lissagaray did not cite any source, but presumably was referring to General Appert, who had reportedly told a member of the National Assembly that the number of Commune casualties during the uprising had been seventeen thousand. Appert's official report did not cite any numbers. "The muncipal council of Paris," Lissagaray continued, "paid for the burial of seventeen thousand bodies; but a large number of persons were killed or cremated outside of Paris." He did not cite any sources for the number of burials paid for by the municipal council or for the claim that many more had been killed and cremated outside of Paris. "It is no exaggeration," Lissagaray concluded, "to say twenty thousand, a number admitted by the officers."^[2] In a new edition of his book published in 1896, Lissagaray wrote: "Twenty thousand men, women and children killed after the fighting in Paris and in the provinces," but he gave no sources.^[86]

Vladimir Lenin seized upon the number "twenty thousand" given by Lissagaray and cited it as proof of the brutality of the ruling classes: he wrote, "20,000 killed in the streets...Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at nothing." ^[87] The historian Benedict Anderson cited the number of twenty thousand.^[88] The British historian Alfred Cobban also used this estimate in 1965, writing: "the death toll of the Communards was probably not less than twenty thousand."^[89] The number "probably at least twenty thousand" was also cited more recently by French historian Pierre Milza.^[90]

The bodies of those Communards killed on the barricades and by execution afterwards had been buried in mass graves around the city. Immediately after the end of the Commune, for reasons of public health, they were quickly exhumed and reburied in the city cemeteries. Between 1878 and 1880, a French historian and member of the Académie française, Maxime Du Camp, wrote Les Convulsions de Paris, a history of the Commune. He examined the registers of the Paris cemeteries and reported that the dead buried after Bloody Week numbered 6,562. When his report was published, Lissagaray denounced him as a "reptile". In 2012 a British historian, Robert Tombs, made a similar study of the cemetery records and estimated that the number killed was between 6,000 and 7,000.^[91] The French historian Jacques Rougerie, wrote in 2014: "the number ten thousand victims seems today the most plausible; it remains an enormous number for the time."^[92]

Artists, writers and the Paris Commune

French writers and artists had strong views about the Commune. Gustave Courbet was the most prominent artist to take part in the Commune, and was an enthusiastic participant and supporter, though he criticised the Commune’s executions of suspected enemies. (See above). On the other side, the young Anatole France described the Communards as “A committee of assassins, a band of hooligans (‘’fripouillards’’), a government of crime and madness.” ^[93] the diarist Edmond de Goncourt, 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..."^[94]

On April 23, George Sand, an ardent republican who had taken part in the 1848 revolution, wrote: “The horrible adventure continues. They ransom, they threaten, they arrest, they judge. They have taken over all the city halls, all the public establishments, they’re pillaging the munitions and the food supplies.” ^[93]

Soon after the Commune began, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: “Austria did not go into Revolution after Sadowa, nor Italy after Novara, nor Russia after Sebastopol! But our good Frenchmen hasten to pull down their house as soon as the chimney takes fire…” ^[95]

Near the end of the Commune, Flaubert wrote again to George Sand: “As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages.” ^[95]

On June 10, when the Commune was finished, Flaubert again wrote to George Sand:

“I come from Paris, and I do not know whom to speak to. I am suffocated. I am quite upset, or rather out of heart. The sight of the ruins is nothing compared to the great Parisian inanity. with very rare exceptions, everybody seemed to me only fit for the strait-jacket. One half of the population longs to hang the other half, which returns the compliment. That is clearly to be read in the eyes of the passers-by.” ^[95]

Victor Hugo was critical of the Commune but sympathetic to the Communards. At the beginning of April, he moved to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who had just died. On April 9, he wrote, “In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly.” ^[93] He wrote poems criticising both the government and the Commune’s policy of taking hostages for reprisals, and condemning the destruction of the Vendome Column.^[96] On May 25, during the The Bloody Week, he wrote: “A monstrous act; they’ve set fire to Paris. They’ve been searching for firemen as far away as Brussels.” ^[93] But after the repression, he offered to give sanctuary to members of the Commune, which, he said, “was barely elected, and of which I never approved.” ^[93] He became the most vocal advocate of an amnesty for the Communards who had been exiled, which was finally granted in the 1880s.^[97]

Emile Zola, as a journalist for ‘’Le Semaphore de Marseille’’, reported on the fall of the Commune, and was one of the first reporters to enter the city during Bloody Week. On May 25 he reported: “Never in civilised times has such a terrible crime ravaged a great city…The men of the Hotel de Ville could not be other than assassins and arsonists. They were beaten and fled like robbers from the regular army, and took vengeance upon the monuments and houses….The fires of Paris have pushed over the limit the exasperation of the army. …Those who burn and who massacre merit no other justice than the gunshot of a soldier.” ^[98]

But on June 1, when the fighting was over, his tone had changed: “The court martials are still meeting and the summary executions continue, less numerous, its true. The sound of firing squads, which one still hears in the mournful city, atrociously prolongs the nightmare….Paris is sick of executions. It seems to Paris that they’re shooting everyone. Paris is not complaining about the shooting of the members of the Commune, but of innocent people. It believes that, among the pile, there are innocent people, and that it’s time that each execution is preceded by at least an attempt at a serious inquiry….When the echoes of the last shots have ceased, it will take a great deal of gentleness to heal the million people suffering nightmares, those who have emerged, shivering from the fire and massacre.” ^[99]

The Legacy of the Paris Commune

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

The Paris Commune inspired other uprisings named or called Communes: in Moscow (December 1905); Budapest (March–July 1919); Canton (December 1927), and, most famously, Saint Petersburg (1917). The Commune was regarded with admiration and awe by later Communist and leftist leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao.

Lenin wrote: "We are only dwarves perched on the shoulders of those giants." He celebrated by dancing in the snow in Moscow on the day that the Bolshevik government was more than two months old, surpassing the Commune. The ministers and officials of the Bolshevik government were given the title "Commissar" borrowed directly from the "Commissaires" of the Commune. Lenin's tomb in Moscow was (and still is)) decorated with red banners from the Commune, brought to Moscow for his funeral by French communists.^[100]

Stalin wrote: "In 1917 we thought that we would form a commune, an association of workers, and that we would put an end to bureaucracy...That is a goal that we are still far from reaching. ^[100]

The Bolsheviks renamed the dreadnought battleship Sevastopol to Parizhskaya Kommuna. In the later years of the Soviet Union, The Soviet spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a communard banner from the Paris Commune.

Anarchism and the Commune

Anarchist historian George Woodcock reports that "The annual Congress of the International had not taken place in 1870 owing to the outbreak of the Paris Commune, and in 1871 the General Council called only a special conference in London. One delegate was able to attend from Spain and none from Italy, while a technical excuse – that they had split away from the Fédération Romande – was used to avoid inviting Bakunin's Swiss supporters. Thus only a tiny minority of anarchists was present, and the General Council's resolutions passed almost unanimously. Most of them were clearly directed against Bakunin and his followers."^[101] In 1872, the conflict climaxed with a final split between the two groups at the Hague Congress, where Bakunin and James Guillaume were expelled from the International and its headquarters were transferred to New York. In response, the federalist sections formed their own International at the St. Imier Congress, adopting a revolutionary anarchist program.^[102] Anarchists participated actively in the establishment of the Paris Commune. They included "Louise Michel, the Reclus brothers , and Eugene Varlin (the latter murdered in the repression afterwards). As for the reforms initiated by the Commune, suchas the re-opening of workplaces as co-operatives, anarchists can see their ideas of associated labour beginning to be realised...Moreover, the Commune's ideas on federation obviously reflected the influence of Proudhon on French radical ideas. Indeed, the Commune's vision of a communal France based on a federation of delegates bound by imperative mandates issued by their electors and subject to recall at any moment echoes Bakunin's and Proudhon's ideas (Proudhon, like Bakunin, had argued in favour of the "implementation of the binding mandate" in 1848...and for federation of communes). Thus both economically and politically the Paris Commune was heavily influenced by anarchist ideas.^[103]". George Woodcock manifests that "a notable contribution to the activities of the Commune and particularly to the organization of public services was made by members of various anarchist factions, including the mutualists Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the libertarian collectivists Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists Elie and Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel."^[101] Mikhail Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Commune, which was brutally suppressed by the French government. He saw the Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State," and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.^[104] In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune and the First International against the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many Italian republicans to the International and the cause of revolutionary socialism.

Louise Michel was an important anarchist participant in the Paris Commune. Initially she workerd as an ambulance woman, treating those injured on the barricades. During the Siege of Paris she untiringly preached resistance to the Prussians. On the establishment of the Commune, she joined the National Guard. She offered to shoot Thiers, and suggested the destruction of Paris by way of vengeance for its surrender. In December 1871, she was brought before the 6th council of war, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she vowed to never renounce the Commune, and dared the judges to sentence her to death.^[105] Reportedly, Michel told the court, "Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance."^[106] Following the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchist movement, as the whole of the workers' movement, was decapitated and deeply affected for years.

The Marxist critique of 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 Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, and later Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong 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.

Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, praised the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat.

Marx wrote that: "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators' history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.".^[107]

Friedrich Engels echoed this idea, later maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quarters", 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 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. But Marx and Engels were not entirely uncritical of the Commune. The split between the Marxists and anarchists at the 1872 Hague Congress of the First International (IWA) may in part be traced to Marx's stance that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more harshly with reactionaries, instituted conscription, and centralized decision making in the hands of a revolutionary direction, etc. The other point of disagreement was the anti-authoritarian socialists' oppositions to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state (the anarchists were in favor of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralized workers' councils as those seen in the commune).

Lenin, along with Marx, judged the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", though Lenin criticized the Communards for having "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over"; he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy.^[108]

But two mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about "expropriating the expropriators", it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a "just exchange", etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.

...Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it [the Russian proletariat] knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle—they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution—but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.

The Paris Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this dictatorship was weak and incomplete. The Communards lacked the fundamentals—a Marxist proletarian party, discipline, organisation, a clear understanding of the aims of their struggle, and an alliance with the peasantry. The Commune committed a number of serious errors. It did not venture to confiscate the tremendous assets of the French bank and showed hesitance in dealing with counter-revolutionary agents and accessories, saboteurs, spies and the slanderous campaign in the bourgeoise press. The Commune paid too little attention to military training.
— Marx Engels Lenin on Scientific Socialism^[109]

Other Criticism and Defense of the Commune

The American Ambassador in Paris during the Commune, Elihu Washburne, writing in his personal diary which is quoted at length in noted historian David McCullough's book, The Greater Journey (Simon & Schuster 2011), described the Communards as "brigands", "assassins", and "scoundrels"; "I have no time now to express my detestation.... [T]hey threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender."

Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted that during the Commune, "the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguishing themselves by the fury with which they fought"^[110] However, it has been argued in recent research that these famous female arsonists of the Commune, or pétroleuses, may have been exaggerated or a myth.^[111]^[112]). Lissargaray, a Communard who went into exile in London, claimed that because of this myth, hundreds of working-class women were murdered in Paris in late May falsely accused of being petroleuses. Lissagaray also claimed that the artillery fire by the French army was responsible for probably half of the fires that consumed the city during the bloody week.^[113] However, photographs of the ruins of the Tuileries Palace and the Hotel De Ville and other prominent government buildings that burned show that the exteriors were untouched by cannon fire, while the interiors were completed gutted by fire; and prominent Communards such as Jules Bergeret, who escaped to live in New York, proudly claimed credit for the most famous acts of arson.^[114]

The other communes of 1871

Soon after the Paris Commune took power in Paris, revolutionary and socialist groups in several other French cities tried to establish their own Communes. The Paris Commune sent delegates to the large cities to encourage them. The longest-lasting Commune outside Paris was that in Marseille, from 23 March to 4 April, which was suppressed with the loss of thirty soldiers and one hundred fifty insurgents. None of the other Communes lasted more than a few days, and most ended with little or no bloodshed..

Lyon. Lyon had a long history of worker's movements and uprisings. On 28 September 1870, even before the Paris Commune, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and socialist Paul Clusaret led an unsuccessful attempt to seize the city hall in Lyon, but were stopped, arrested and expelled from the city by National guardsmen who supported the Republic. On 22 March, when the news of the seizure of power by the Paris Commune reached Lyon,, socialist and revolutionary members of the National Guard, met, heard a speech by a representative of the Paris Commune. They marched to the city hall, occupied it, and established a commune of fifteen members, of whom eleven were militant revolutionaries. They arrested the mayor and the prefect of the city, hoisted a red flag over the city hall, and declared support for the Paris Commune. A delegate from the Paris Commune, Charles Amouroux, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of several thousand people in front of the city hall. However, the following day the National Guardsmen from other neighbourhoods gathered at the city hall, held a meeting, and put out their own bulletin, declaring that the takeover was a "regrettable misunderstanding," and declared their support for the government of the Republic. On March 24, the four major newspapers of Lyon also repudiated the Commune. On 25 March, the last members of the Commune resigned and left the City Hall peacefully. The Commune had lasted only two days.^[115]

Saint-Etienne. On March 24 inspired by the news from Paris, a crowd of republican and revolutionary workers and national guardsmen invaded the city hall of Saint-Etienne, and demanded a plebiscite for the establishment of a Commune. Revolutionary members of the National Guard and a unit of regular army soldiers supporting the Republic were both outside the city The prefect, an engineer named de L'Espée, was meeting with a delegation from the National Guard in his office when a shot was fired outside, killing a worker. The National Guardsmen stormed the city hall, capturing the prefect. In the resulting chaos, more shots were fired and the prefect was killed. The National Guard members quickly established an Executive Committee, sent soldiers to occupy the railroad station and telegraph office, and proclaimed a Commune, with elections to be held on the 29th of March. However, on the 26th, he more moderate republican members of the National Guard disassociated themselves from the Commune. An army unit entered stye city on the morning of 28 March, and went to the city hall. The few hundred revolutionary National Guardsmen still at the city hall dispersed quietly, without any shots being fired.^[116]

Marseille. Marseille, even before the Commune, had a strongly republican mayor and a tradition of revolutionary and radical movements. On 22 March, the socialist politician Gaston Cremieux spoke to a meeting of workers in Marseille and called upon them to take up arms and to support the Paris Commune. Parades of radicals and socialists went into the street, chanting "Long live Paris! Long live the Commune!" On 23 March, the Prefect of the city called a mass meeting of the National Guard, expecting they would support the government, but instead the National Guardsmen, as in Paris, stormed the city hall land took the mayor and prefect prisoner, and declared a Commune, led by a commission of six members, later increased to twelve, composed of both revolutionaries and moderate socialists. The military commander of Marseille, General Espivent de la Villeboisnet, withdrew his troops, along with many city government officials, outside Marseille to Aubagne, to see what would happen. The revolutionary commission soon split into two factions, one in the City Hall and the other in the Prefecture, each claiming to be the legal government of the city. On April 4, General Espivent, with six to seven thousand regular soldiers supported by sailors and National Guard units loyal to the Republic, entered Marseille, where the Commune was defended by about two thousand National guardsmen. The regular army forces laid siege to the Prefecture, defended by about four hundred national guardsmen. The building was bombarded by artillery and then stormed by the soldiers and sailors. About thirty soldiers were killed, and about 150 of the insurgents were killed. As in Paris, insurgents, captured with weapons in hand were executed, and about nine hundred others were imprisoned. Gaston Cremieux was arrested, condemned to death in June 1871, and executed five months later.^[117]

Other cities. There were attempts to establish Communes in other cities. A radical government briefly took charge in the industrial town of Le Creusot from 24 to 27 March, but left without violence when confronted by the army. The city hall, prefecture and arsenal of Toulouse were taken over by revolutionary national guardsmen on 24 March, but handed back to the army without fighting on 27 March. There was a similar short-lived takeover over the city hall in Narbonne (23–28 March). In Limoges, no Commune was declared, but on 3–5 April revolutionary National Guard soldiers blockaded the city hall, mortally wounded an army colonel, and briefly prevented a regular army unit from being sent to Paris to fight the Commune. before being themselves disarmed by the army.^[118]

Fictional treatments

Among the first to write about the Commune was Victor Hugo, whose poem "Sur une barricade", written on June 11, 1871 and published in 1872 in a collection of poems under the name "L' Année terrible," honors the bravery of a twelve-year-old communard being led to the execution squad.
As well as innumerable novels (mainly in French), at least three plays have been set in the Commune: Nederlaget by Nordahl Grieg, Die Tage der Commune by Bertolt Brecht, and Le Printemps 71 by Arthur Adamov.
Historian Albert Boime states that that several right-wing popular novelists of the 19th century depicted the Commune as a tyranny "against which Anglo-Americans and their aristocratic French allies heroically pitted themselves".^[119] Among the most well-known of these anti-Commune novels are Woman of the Commune (1895, AKA A Girl of the Commune) by G. A. Henty and in the same year, The Red Republic: A Romance of the Commune by Robert W. Chambers.^[119]
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 New Babylon (1929) was the recipient of Dmitri Shostakovich's first film score.
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 is part of Gaston Leroux's fictional tale Le Fantôme de l'Opéra.
The title character of Karen Blixen's Babette's Feast was a Communard and political refugee, forced to flee France after her husband and sons were killed.
Soviet filmmakers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg wrote and directed in 1929 the silent film The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon) about the Paris Commune.
Terry Pratchett's Night Watch features a storyline based on the Paris Commune, in which a huge part of a city is slowly put behind barricades, at which point a brief civil war ensues.
Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris is set during the Paris Commune and contrasts the savagery of the werewolf with the savagery of La Semaine Sanglante
The rise and fall of the Paris Commune was depicted in the novel Spangle by Gary Jennings.
Berlin performance group Showcase Beat le Mot created Paris 1871 Bonjour Commune (first performed at Hebbel am Ufer in 2010), the final part of a tetralogy dealing with failed revolutions.
French writer Jean Vautrin's Le Cri du Peuple deals with the rise and fall of the Commune. This 1999 Prix Goncourt winning novel `Le Cri du Peuple' is an account of the tumultuous events of 1871 told in free indirect style from the points of view of a policeman and a communard tied together by the murder of a child and love for an Italian woman called Miss.Pecci.The novel begins with the discovery of the corpse of a woman dumped in the Seine and the subsequent investigation in which the two main protagonists Grondin and Tarpagnan are involved. The eponymous `Le Cri du Peuple' is a communard newspaper edited by a man called Valles. The book itself is supposedly his account. The painter Gustave Courbet also makes an appearance.

Comics artist Jacques Tardi translated the novel into a comic, which is also called Le Cri du Peuple.

In Fire on the Mountain by the American author Terry Bisson, African Americans began a slave rebellion throughout the south after John Brown's successful raid on Harpers Ferry. In the novel, the Paris Commune was one of many successful socialist states.
In the long-running British TV series The Onedin Line (episode 27, screened 10 December 1972), shipowner James Onedin is lured into the Commune in pursuit of a commercial debt, and is trapped in heavy fire.
New York theater group The Civilians performed Paris Commune in 2004 and 2008.

References

Notes

^ ^a ^b Rapport d'ensemble de M. le Général Appert sur les opérations de la justice militaire relatives à l'insurrection de 1871, Assemblée nationale, annexe au procès verbal de la session du 20 juillet 1875 (Versailles, 1875)
^ ^a ^b Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (1876), Histore de la Commune de 1871, La Decouverte/Poche (2000). P. 383.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 405
^ Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871.".
^ Rougere, Jacques, Paris libre- 1871. p. 264-270.
^ ^a ^b ^c Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- mars-juin 1871, p. 65.
^ Haupt/Hausen 1979, pg. 74-75
^ Edwards 1971, pg. 1
^ March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York, Macmillan & co. pp. 3–6.
^ March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York, Macmillan & co. pp. 7–9.
^ ^a ^b ^c Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871 pp. 143-145
^ Milza, Pierre, L'année terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne -Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 143-165
^ Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 206-213
^ Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 212-213
^ Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 257-259
^ Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 420-421
^ Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. p. 421.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 8-9
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune. p. 9-11.
^ Milza, Pierre "La Commune", p. 16-18.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune." p. 18-19.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 19.
^ Gluckstein, Donny (January 15, 2014). Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 231.
^ Milza. Pierre, La Commune, p. 76
^ Gluckstein, Donny (January 15, 2014). Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 4.
^ Milza, La Commune, p. 35.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 45
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 77
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 97.
^ Milza, p. 103.
^ Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de Paris, p. 58-60
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 109-113.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 118-119.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 129
^ Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory by Timothy McCarthy
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune.
^ Women and the Commune^{[dead link]}, in L'Humanité, March 19, 2005 Template:Fr icon
^ ^a ^b ^c François Bodinaux, Dominique Plasman, Michèle Ribourdouille. "On les disait 'pétroleuses'...^{[dead link]}" Template:Fr icon
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 138-139
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 141-152
^ Milza, "La Commune", p. 152
^ Journal officiel of the Commune, 5 April 1871, cited in Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 153.
^ Zola, Emile, La Cloche, 8 April 1871.
^ Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. McLellan), pp. 592-94
^ Milza. p. 250,
^ Milza, p. 253
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 350-354
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 294-296
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 296-298
^ Milza. Pierre, La Commune, p. 319.
^ Milza,Pierre, "La Commune, p. 317
^ Zdrada, Jerzy (1973). Jarosław Dąbrowski 1836-1871. Wydawnictwo Literackie.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 327-330.
^ Zeller, Andre, Les Hommes de la Commune, p. 336. Cited by PIerre Milza, "La Commune, p. 337.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune, p. 346-347.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 345-350
^ Milza, La Commune, p. 379-380.
^ Milza, "La Commune, p. 381.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 394.
^ Proclamation de Delescluze. delegue a la Guerre, au peuple de Paris, Journal officiel, 22 May 1871.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 386
^ Da Costa, Gaston, La Commune vecue, 3 vol. Paris, Librairies-impremeries reunies, 1903-1905, III, p. 81. Serman, William, La Commune de Paris, p. 348.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 391
^ Milza, La Commune, p. 394.
^ "Paris". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (14th ed.). 1956. p. 293.
^ Joanna Richardson, Paris under Siege Folio Society London 1982
^ Rene Heron de Villefosse, Histoire de Paris, Bernard Grasset (1959). The father of the author of this book was an assistant curator at the Louvre, and helped put out the fires.
^ Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (2012 (1876)). History of the Paris Commune of 1871. London: Verso. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
^ Milza, La Commune, p. 396-397.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 397-398.
^ Milza. "La Commune", p. 401.
^ Milza. "La Commune", p. 403-404
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, pp. 404-407.
^ Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier, Histore de la Commune de 1871, p. 355-356.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune," p. 410.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, pp. 411-412.
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 413-414
^ Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 414.
^ The official report of General Appert, made to the National Assembly on 8 March 1875, cited by Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 431-432.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 436-437
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 440.
^ Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871, p. 120.
^ Gregor Dallas, An Exercise in Terror: the Paris Commune 1871, History Today, Volume 39, Issue 2, 1989.
^ Cobban, Alfred (1965), A History of Modern France, p. 215. Penguin Books
^ Deposition de M. le maréchal Mac-Mahon (28 August 1871) in Enquéte Parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars 1871 (Paris: Librarie Législative, 1872), p. 183.
^ Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (1876), Histore de la Commune de 1871, La Decouverte/Poche (2000). P. 466.
^ V.I. Lenin, On the Paris Commune, Moscow, Progress Publishers.
^ In Benedict Anderson (July–August 2004). "In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel". New Left Review.
^ A History of Modern France. Vol 2: 1799–1861, Penguin Books, 1965. p. 215.
^ Milza, Pierre, La Commune"
^ Tombs, Robert, How Bloody was la Semaine sanglante of 1871? A Revision. The Historical Journal, September 2012, vol. 55, issue 03, p. 619-704.
^ Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871," p. 118.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e PIvot, Sylvain, “La Commune, les Communards, les ecrivains ou la haine et la gloire.” December 2003. La revue des Anciens Eleves de l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration”.
^ Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Robert Baldick, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (Oxford, 1962), p. 194
^ ^a ^b ^c http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/%7CCorrespondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand
^ Hugo, Victor, ‘’L’Annee Terrible’’
^ Milza, Pierre, ‘’L’Annee terrible- La Commune’’, pp. 457-460
^ http://www.deslettres.fr, 4th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune (25 May 1871
^ http://www.deslettres.fr, 11th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune (1 June 1871)
^ ^a ^b Rougerie, Jacques, Paris libre - 1871, p. 264.
^ ^a ^b Cite error: The named reference Anarchism 1962 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Graham, Robert 'Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2005) ISBN 1-55164-251-4.
^ "The Paris Commune" by Anarcho
^ The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
^ Louise Michel, a French anarchist women who fought in the Paris commune
^ Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries: The Inspiring Story of the Women of the Paris Commune "[1]", Haymarket Books. Retrieved 23 June 2009.
^ Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, English Edition of 1871
^ V.I. Lenin, "Lessons of the Commune", Marxists Internet Archive. Originally published: Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. March 2, 23, 1908. Translated by Bernard Isaacs. Accessed August 7, 2006.
^ Marx Engels Lenin on Scientific Socialism. Moscow: Novosti Press Ajency Publishing House. 1974. p. 160.
^ Eye-witness accounts quoted in 'Paris under Siege' by Joanna Richardson (see bibliography)
^ Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris: 1871, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 272 pages ISBN 978-0-521-28784-5
^ Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris, Cornell Univ Press, 1996, 304 pages ISBN 978-0-8014-8318-9>
^ Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (2012 (1876)). History of the Paris Commune of 1871. London: Verso. pp. 277–278. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
^ Milza, Pierre, L'année terrible- La Commune. 396-397.
^ Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 158-160.
^ Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 160-162.
^ Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 165-170.
^ Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 173-176.
^ ^a ^b Albert Boime, Olin Levi Warner's Defense of the Paris Commune, Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3/4 (1989), (pp, 4, 13).

Bibliography

Rougerie, Jacques (2014). La Commune de 1871. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 978-2-13-062078-5.
Rougerie, Jacques (2004). Paris libre 1871. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ISBN 2-02-055465-8.
Milza, Pierre (2009). L'année terrible - La Commune (mars-juin 1871). Paris: Perrin. ISBN 978-2-262-03073-5.
Milza, PIerre (2009). L'année terrible - La guerre franco-prussienne (septembre 1870- mars 1871). Paris: Perrin. ISBN 978-2-262-02498-7.
The Red Republic, A Romance of The Commune, Robert W. Chambers 1895 (a Romantic adventure about the Paris Commune of 1871)
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Police by Alex Butterworth (Pantheon Books, 2010)
Template:De icon Haupt, Gerhard; Hausen, Karin: Die Pariser Kommune: Erfolg und Scheitern einer Revolution. Frankfurt 1979. Campus Verlag. ISBN 3-593-32607-8.
Edwards, Stewart (1971). The Paris Commune 1871. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. ISBN 0-413-28110-8.
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, a Communard journalist with socialist convictions who was present at or close to most of the events he describes. (Histoire de la Commune de 1871. Most recent edition, 3 vols in 1, Paris, Maspero, 1969), which is available in English translation online.
Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, "History of the Paris Commune of 1871", Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-4-4.
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).
A recent selection of primary accounts is Mitchell Abidor (ed.), Communards: The Story of the Paris Commune of 1871, As Told by Those Who Fought for It. Erythrós Press/Marxists Internet Archive, 2010.
A comprehensive collection of eye-witness accounts referenced to original sources are presented in "Paris under Siege" by Joanna Richardson [Folio Society, London, 1982]
Amodern 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
David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, Simon & Schuster, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4165-7176-6. The third part of the book describes the commune from the view of Americans in Paris, including the American Minister, Elihu B. Washburne.

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 197).
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.
Vladimir 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).
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

Paris Commune Archive at marxists.org
Paris Commune Archive at Anarchist Archive
Short history of the Paris Commune on libcom.org
Karl Marx's contemporary account of the Commune 'The Civil War in France'
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune by C.L.R. James
The Paris Commune and Marx' Theory of Revolution by Paul Dorn
Association Les Amis de la Commune de Paris (1871) (in French)
The Siege of The Paris Commune at the Northwestern University Library Mccormick Library of Special Collections
Paris Commune on Encyclopedia.com
Page describing the history and the workings of the Paris Commune's government
"The Paris Commune, Marxism and Anarchism" Article discussing the Paris Commune from an anarchist perspective (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 50)

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[Versailles1875-1] Rapport d'ensemble de M. le Général Appert sur les opérations de la justice militaire relatives à l'insurrection de 1871, Assemblée nationale, annexe au procès verbal de la session du 20 juillet 1875 (Versailles, 1875)

[Lissagaray1-2] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (1876), Histore de la Commune de 1871, La Decouverte/Poche (2000). P. 383.

[3] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 405

[4] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871.".

[5] Rougere, Jacques, Paris libre- 1871. p. 264-270.

[Milza,_Pierre_p._65-6] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- mars-juin 1871, p. 65.

[7] Haupt/Hausen 1979, pg. 74-75

[8] Edwards 1971, pg. 1

[9] March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York, Macmillan & co. pp. 3–6.

[10] March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York, Macmillan & co. pp. 7–9.

[Milza,_Pierre_pp._143-145-11] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871 pp. 143-145

[12] Milza, Pierre, L'année terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne -Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 143-165

[13] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 206-213

[14] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 212-213

[15] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 257-259

[16] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. P. 420-421

[17] Milza, Pierre, L'annee terrible- La guerre franco-prussienne - Septembre 1870- Mars 1871. p. 421.

[18] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 8-9

[19] Milza, Pierre, La Commune. p. 9-11.

[20] Milza, Pierre "La Commune", p. 16-18.

[21] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune." p. 18-19.

[22] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 19.

[23] Gluckstein, Donny (January 15, 2014). Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 231.

[24] Milza. Pierre, La Commune, p. 76

[25] Gluckstein, Donny (January 15, 2014). Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 4.

[26] Milza, La Commune, p. 35.

[27] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 45

[28] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 77

[29] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 97.

[30] Milza, p. 103.

[31] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de Paris, p. 58-60

[32] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 109-113.

[33] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 118-119.

[34] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 129

[35] Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory by Timothy McCarthy

[36] Milza, Pierre, La Commune.

[37] Women and the Commune^{[dead link]}, in L'Humanité, March 19, 2005 Template:Fr icon

[Bodinaux-38] François Bodinaux, Dominique Plasman, Michèle Ribourdouille. "On les disait 'pétroleuses'...^{[dead link]}" Template:Fr icon

[39] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 138-139

[40] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 141-152

[41] Milza, "La Commune", p. 152

[42] Journal officiel of the Commune, 5 April 1871, cited in Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 153.

[43] Zola, Emile, La Cloche, 8 April 1871.

[44] Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. McLellan), pp. 592-94

[45] Milza. p. 250,

[46] Milza, p. 253

[47] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 350-354

[48] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 294-296

[49] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 296-298

[50] Milza. Pierre, La Commune, p. 319.

[51] Milza,Pierre, "La Commune, p. 317

[52] Zdrada, Jerzy (1973). Jarosław Dąbrowski 1836-1871. Wydawnictwo Literackie.

[53] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 327-330.

[54] Zeller, Andre, Les Hommes de la Commune, p. 336. Cited by PIerre Milza, "La Commune, p. 337.

[55] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune, p. 346-347.

[56] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 345-350

[57] Milza, La Commune, p. 379-380.

[58] Milza, "La Commune, p. 381.

[59] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 394.

[60] Proclamation de Delescluze. delegue a la Guerre, au peuple de Paris, Journal officiel, 22 May 1871.

[61] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 386

[62] Da Costa, Gaston, La Commune vecue, 3 vol. Paris, Librairies-impremeries reunies, 1903-1905, III, p. 81. Serman, William, La Commune de Paris, p. 348.

[63] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 391

[64] Milza, La Commune, p. 394.

[65] "Paris". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (14th ed.). 1956. p. 293.

[66] Joanna Richardson, Paris under Siege Folio Society London 1982

[67] Rene Heron de Villefosse, Histoire de Paris, Bernard Grasset (1959). The father of the author of this book was an assistant curator at the Louvre, and helped put out the fires.

[68] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (2012 (1876)). History of the Paris Commune of 1871. London: Verso. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)

[69] Milza, La Commune, p. 396-397.

[70] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 397-398.

[71] Milza. "La Commune", p. 401.

[72] Milza. "La Commune", p. 403-404

[73] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, pp. 404-407.

[74] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier, Histore de la Commune de 1871, p. 355-356.

[75] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune," p. 410.

[76] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, pp. 411-412.

[77] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 413-414

[78] Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 414.

[79] The official report of General Appert, made to the National Assembly on 8 March 1875, cited by Milza, Pierre, "La Commune", p. 431-432.

[80] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 436-437

[81] Milza, Pierre, La Commune, p. 440.

[82] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871, p. 120.

[83] Gregor Dallas, An Exercise in Terror: the Paris Commune 1871, History Today, Volume 39, Issue 2, 1989.

[84] Cobban, Alfred (1965), A History of Modern France, p. 215. Penguin Books

[85] Deposition de M. le maréchal Mac-Mahon (28 August 1871) in Enquéte Parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars 1871 (Paris: Librarie Législative, 1872), p. 183.

[86] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (1876), Histore de la Commune de 1871, La Decouverte/Poche (2000). P. 466.

[87] V.I. Lenin, On the Paris Commune, Moscow, Progress Publishers.

[Anderson-88] In Benedict Anderson (July–August 2004). "In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel". New Left Review.

[89] A History of Modern France. Vol 2: 1799–1861, Penguin Books, 1965. p. 215.

[90] Milza, Pierre, La Commune"

[RTombs-91] Tombs, Robert, How Bloody was la Semaine sanglante of 1871? A Revision. The Historical Journal, September 2012, vol. 55, issue 03, p. 619-704.

[92] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871," p. 118.

[PIvot,_Sylvain_2003-93] PIvot, Sylvain, “La Commune, les Communards, les ecrivains ou la haine et la gloire.” December 2003. La revue des Anciens Eleves de l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration”.

[94] Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Robert Baldick, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (Oxford, 1962), p. 194

[online-literature.com-95] ttp://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/%7CCorrespondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand

[96] Hugo, Victor, ‘’L’Annee Terrible’’

[97] Milza, Pierre, ‘’L’Annee terrible- La Commune’’, pp. 457-460

[98] ttp://www.deslettres.fr, 4th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune (25 May 1871

[99] ttp://www.deslettres.fr, 11th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune (1 June 1871)

[Rougerie,_Jacques_p._264-100] Rougerie, Jacques, Paris libre - 1871, p. 264.

[Anarchism_1962-101] Cite error: The named reference Anarchism 1962 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Graham-05-102] Graham, Robert 'Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2005) ISBN 1-55164-251-4.

[103] "The Paris Commune" by Anarcho

[104] The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

[flag-105] Louise Michel, a French anarchist women who fought in the Paris commune

[106] Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries: The Inspiring Story of the Women of the Paris Commune "[1]", Haymarket Books. Retrieved 23 June 2009.

[107] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, English Edition of 1871

[108] V.I. Lenin, "Lessons of the Commune", Marxists Internet Archive. Originally published: Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. March 2, 23, 1908. Translated by Bernard Isaacs. Accessed August 7, 2006.

[109] Marx Engels Lenin on Scientific Socialism. Moscow: Novosti Press Ajency Publishing House. 1974. p. 160.

[110] Eye-witness accounts quoted in 'Paris under Siege' by Joanna Richardson (see bibliography)

[111] Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris: 1871, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 272 pages ISBN 978-0-521-28784-5

[112] Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris, Cornell Univ Press, 1996, 304 pages ISBN 978-0-8014-8318-9>

[113] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (2012 (1876)). History of the Paris Commune of 1871. London: Verso. pp. 277–278. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)

[114] Milza, Pierre, L'année terrible- La Commune. 396-397.

[115] Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 158-160.

[116] Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 160-162.

[117] Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 165-170.

[118] Milza, Pierre, "L'Année terrible- La Commune. Pp. 173-176.

[ab-119] Albert Boime, Olin Levi Warner's Defense of the Paris Commune, Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3/4 (1989), (pp, 4, 13).

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@@ Line 164: / Line 164: @@
 ==The Program of the Commune==
-[[Image:communepawnshop.jpg|thumb|right|200px|The Commune returns workmen's tools pawned during the siege]] In addition, employers were prohibited from imposing fines on their workmen.<ref>Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory by Timothy McCarthy</ref> commune adopted the previously discarded [[French Republican Calendar]] during its brief existence and used the [[socialism|socialist]] [[Red flag (politics)|red flag]] rather than the [[Flag of France|republican tricolour]]. In 1848, during the [[French Second Republic|Second Republic]], radicals and socialists had also adopted the red flag to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans; this was similar to the symbolic distinctions adopted by the moderate, liberal, [[Girondist]] movement during the [[French Revolution|1789 revolution]].
+[[Image:communepawnshop.jpg|thumb|right|200px|The Commune returns workmen's tools pawned during the siege]]
+The commune adopted the previously discarded [[French Republican Calendar]] during its brief existence and used the [[socialism|socialist]] [[Red flag (politics)|red flag]] rather than the [[Flag of France|republican tricolour]]. In 1848, during the [[French Second Republic|Second Republic]], radicals and socialists had also adopted the red flag to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans; this was similar to the symbolic distinctions adopted by the moderate, liberal, [[Girondist]] movement during the [[French Revolution|1789 revolution]].
 Despite internal differences, the Council began to organize the public services essential for a city of two million residents. It also reached a consensus on certain policies that tended towards a progressive, secular, and highly-democratic [[social democracy]]. Because the Commune was only able to meet on fewer than sixty days in all, only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included:
@@ Line 172: / Line 173: @@
 * the granting of [[pension]]s to the unmarried companions and children of National Guards killed on active service;
 * the free return, by the city [[pawnshop]]s, of all workmen's tools and household items valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege; the Commune was concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war;
-* the postponement of commercial [[debt]] obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts; and
+* the postponement of commercial [[debt]] obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts;
-* the [[workers' self-management|right of employees to take over and run an enterprise]] if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune, nonetheless, recognized the previous owner's right to compensation.
+* the [[workers' self-management|right of employees to take over and run an enterprise]] if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune, nonetheless, recognized the previous owner's right to compensation;
+* the prohibition of fines imposed by employers on their workmen.<ref>Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory by Timothy McCarthy</ref>
 The decrees separated the church from the state, appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice of religion from schools.  (After the fall of the Commune,  separation of Church and State, or ''[[laïcité]]'', would not enter French law again until 1880-81 during the [[French Third Republic|Third Republic]], with the signing of the [[Jules Ferry laws]] and the [[1905 French law on the separation of Church and State]].)  In theory, he churches were allowed to continue their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public political meetings during the evenings.  In practice, many churches were closed, and many priests were arrested and held as hostages, in the hope of trading them for [[Louis-Auguste Blanqui]], a revolutionary who had been arrested outside of Paris on March 17 and was held in prison in Brittany.<ref>Milza, Pierre, ''La Commune''.</ref>

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