The Commune

From Philip Jenkins at Chronicles:

From September 1870 through January 1871, Paris suffered under a tight Prussian siege, which resulted in devastating hunger, deprivation, and disease. International media covered the situation breathlessly, with each day’s headlines assessing the city’s defenses and recording the new horrors. Seeing the obsessively detailed city maps that graced American front pages seemingly every day, Mark Twain offered his own absurd and satirical map of the “Fortifications of Paris,” which made about as much sense of the situation as any more sober endeavor. With Napoleon out of power, an emergency provisional government reconstituted itself as the embryonic Third Republic, with its capital at Tours, later Bordeaux, and ultimately Versailles.

That left Paris itself under the control of an increasingly radicalized socialist administration, with its military arm in the populist National Guard. Tensions grew under the new president, Adolphe Thiers, whom radicals denounced as a tool of the propertied classes: Karl Marx called him a “monstrous gnome.” In March 1871, the prospect of a government attack to reclaim Paris provoked a leftist coup.

The Commune held out for two months in increasingly desperate straits, with growing violence against the bourgeois and clergy, who found themselves hostages. Women militants were at the forefront of the movement, including the semi-mythical female arsonists, the Pétroleuses. When the city fell to Versailles government troops in May, the resulting purges and massacres claimed some twenty thousand lives, culminating in the atrocious Bloody Week. Tens of thousands of other Communards —as the Commune’s members were called—were imprisoned or transported.

In leftist memory, the Commune was the first modern example of a true revolutionary socialist administration, and as such, it represented a model for future action. In his very influential 1871 tract The Civil War in France, Marx declared that “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.” In an ominous phrase, Friedrich Engels lauded the Commune as an exemplar of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Future revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky analyzed the Commune’s successes, and its reasons for failure. In more than one sense, Vladimir Lenin was a child of the crisis of 1870, the year of his birth: when he died in 1924, his body was wrapped in a Communard flag. Each new movement found its pattern in the Commune experience. Modern activists are as likely to vaunt its feminist heroines, like the legendary Red Virgin, Louise Michel, as its more mainstream figures.

Communists and anarchists alike drew savage lessons from the crisis, which seemingly taught the absolute bloody ruthlessness of the possessing classes when they faced a real threat from below. The Commune became a justification for overwhelming leftist violence in retaliation, for individual acts like assassination, for the formation of armed groups and militias, and—when power was achieved—for a state-imposed Red Terror. Memories of the Commune shaped the conduct of the Bolshevik Revolution and its European imitators after 1918, including the Spanish Republicans of the 1930s. Mao Zedong learned his own lessons, and cited the Paris precedent when launching the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. (Read more.)

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