Paris was primed for the Commune by four circles of cause and effect. First, the French had already witnessed many periods of revolutionary activity before the commune. The French Revolution in 1789 was followed by uprisings in 1830 and 1848. Historian Alain Faure suggests that the Commune can be seen in chrysalis form during the 1860s (Schafer p.26). Indeed, the energy and fervor of the first uprising was undoubtedly channeled in the events of 1848 and 1870. Secondly, Napoleon III’s struggle through the last years of his empire created a transition into the Commune. The first hint of the Emperor’s downfall appeared in his faltering foreign policies. By the end of his 2nd decade in power: “Almost every one of his foreign adventures had ended in disaster and his Empire, faced by a powerful and aggressive Prussia, was without a single European ally” (Aronson p.42). A series of embarrassing defeats of France’s armies, led to the proclamation of a Republic in Paris on September 4th, 1870.
Adding insult to injury, changes occurred on the mainland in a most simultaneous manner. In 1867, the Credit Mobilier Bank collapsed which signaled economic disaster for the regime (Schafer p21). Although France’s economy had grown and industrialized since the declaration of the Second Empire in Bonaparte’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” of 1851, the growing prosperity had chiefly benefitted propertied classes and finance capitalists at the expense of the working population, which included proletarianized industrial workers as well as artisans (Edwards 1971).Unlike the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the events of 1871 were not preceded by a nationwide agricultural crisis. The combination of an economic recession and a misguided war with Prussia over the succession of a Holenzollern prince to the Spanish throne were sufficient to sweep away the empire without a shot being fired. Thirdly it is important to note that while public opinion and meetings were reprised during the majority of the Second Empire, the Liberalization of the late 1860’s opened the floodgates of public frustration. Napoleon III sought to gradually liberalize France by permitting cultural discussions but steering the working class away from political solutions (Schafer p.20). The presence of numerous meetings in 1869 hints at the imminent creation of the Commune. The proclamation of the Commune on March 26th initiated a two-month experiment in democratic socialism. The Commune established worker’s cooperative enterprises throughout the city, instituted universal free education, declared the separation of church and state, and passed resolutions on specific economic issues such as abolition of night work for bakers. But as Marx (1940), noted “The greatest social measure of the Commune was its own working existence, its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people” (p.65). And finally, the organization of people had direct ties to Haussman’s urbanization. Groups of Parisians who met freely during Liberalization became as the Communards. The Communards was a group inspired to revolt against the policies of Haussman. During the 1850s, the people living in the slums of central Paris were forced to migrate to the 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, on the outskirts of Paris. As Haussmannization pierced through their neighbourhoods, they moved northwards en masse. It was in these northern suburbs that the Communards would congregate during the late 1860s. These displaced Parisians found themselves in new living areas that lacked basic amenities like public water fountains and hospitals (Edwards p.8). Their frustrations and struggles continued throughout the 1860s and were exasperated by the large-scale starvation during the Siege of Paris 1870.
Although the Commune was not a class war in the sense of a proletarian revolt against capitalism, its suppression was every bit as brutal as if it has been motivated by the class hatred Marx attributed to the French bourgeoisie. From the first hostilities between the Paris National Guard and the Government on March 30th, the Versailles forces chose to execute rather than detain many of the insurgents they captured. The fighting increasingly absorbed the Commune’s attention, until the Versailles army re-entered Paris on May 21st. In a re-enactment of the June Days of 1848, the people of Paris tore up cobblestones, gratings and anything else that was available to build barricades and defend the city against the Government troops. Officers and soldiers of the French army continued to execute those they captured at each barricade, prompting the massacre by Parisians of dozens of hostages taken by the Commune. At the end of the Semaine Sanglante of May 21 to 28th when the city had finally been subdued, about 25,000 Parisians were dead, most of them shot after surrendering to the army. In contrast, of the 15,000 Communards actually tried for their role in the insurrection (about 40,000 were arrested, but most of these were dismissed after a preliminary interrogation), only 23 were executed by the military courts (Appert 1875). About one-fifth of those tried were acquitted; the rest were either deported to the French penal colonies in New Caledonia or imprisoned in France for periods ranging from one to 20 years. In the short term, the upheaval of 1871 imperiled the infant French republic by reinforcing Bourbon and Bonapartist calls for the maintenance of social order through a strong monarchy. But in 1879, after nearly a decade of right-wing reaction under the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, the monarchist general who had engineered the crushing of the Commune, Republicans finally gained a majority in both houses of the legislature. Less than a year later, a general amnesty was approved for all those still imprisoned for participating in the 1871 uprising. In the ensuing months, thousands of convicted insurgents returned to France – leaving behind hundreds who had died among their sentences.
Now what was the significance of the Paris Commune of 1871? Peter Kropotkin wrote in 1895: Why is the idea represented by the Commune of Paris so attractive to the workers of every land, of every nationality? The answer is easy. The revolution of 1871 was above all a popular one. It was made by the people themselves, it sprang spontaneously from the midst of the mass, and it was among the great masses of the people that it found defenders, its heroes, its martyrs. It is just because it was so thoroughly “low” that the middle class can never forgive it. And at the same time its moving spirit was the idea of a social revolution; vague certainly, perhaps unconscious, but still the effort to obtain at last, after the struggle of many centuries, true freedom, true equality for all men. It was the revolution of the lowest people marching forward to conquer their rights.
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This historical account is necessarily brief. Detailed histories in English may be found in Horne (1965) and Edwards (1971); Tombs (1981) focused on the military aspects of the uprising. The classical account in French is Lissagaray [1876] (1969); Serman (1986) provided a recent synthesis.
The Mur des Fédérés, Pѐre-Lachaise Cemetery where the last resisting communards were shot on May 28th 1871.
Emile Beaussire, a lycѐe professor who remained in Paris throughout the Commune, estimated afterward that the “artisans of disorder” had numbered no more than one hundred fifty thousand to two hundred thousand and that only about sixty thousand of these were “social revolutionaries.” “Les honnetes gens sous la Commune,” Revue des deux mondes, XCIV (July 1, 1871), 105-106.
Sub-divisions, Districts. Each arrondissement of the French capital has its own Mayor, subject, however, to the regulations and orders of the Municipal Council, which directs the general affairs of the whole city and , at the time here spoken of, was called the Commune.