Paris Commune

On March 18, 1871, French government troops tried to seize the cannon of the Paris National Guard on Montmartre, and the crowd and soldiers fraternized and killed two generals. The government of Adolphe Thiers withdrew to Versailles, and on March 26 Parisians elected a council, the Commune, with about 90 members: radical republicans, socialists and followers of Proudhon and Blanqui. For the next two months it governed the city.¹

The causes lay in the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Parisians had endured hunger and cold and felt betrayed when the national government, elected in a country eager for peace, agreed to an armistice, ended the moratorium on rents and debts, and appeared ready to restore the monarchy. The National Guard of workers and craftsmen had arms and refused to disarm. The Commune separated church and state, banned night work in bakeries, gave pensions to the widows of National Guards, handed abandoned workshops to cooperatives, and adopted the red flag. Women organized in clubs and the Union of Women, and the painter Gustave Courbet led an arts committee.¹

The Versailles army entered Paris on May 21, and the week of fighting up to May 28 is called the Bloody Week. Soldiers shot many captured Communards, thousands died in the fighting and executions, and the Commune's own forces killed about 100 hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. Tens of thousands were arrested and several thousand were deported, many to New Caledonia. Karl Marx wrote The Civil War in France, praising the Commune as a workers' government, and Lenin later studied it as a model and a lesson, although historians note that its leaders had no single plan.¹²³