150 years ago, on March 18, 1871, the Paris Commune was declared. France, under the benighted 'nephew', Napoleon III, had initiated a foolish 'war of choice' with Prussia in 1870, and had paid the price with the catastrophic defeat at Sedan, which led to the surrender and capture of the Emperor. The Prussians accepted the surrender of Paris on January 28, 1871 and Adolphe Thiers, leader of the new French government, signed an armistice with the Prussians that disarmed the French Army.
But Paris was protected not by army regulars but by the National Guard. On March 18, two French Army generals were killed by the Paris Guard, in a dispute at Montmartre over the control of cannon mounted on the butte, and the city administration, the Commune, refused any longer to accept the authority of the Thiers government. The city's population, during the Prussian siege, had been winnowed of many of its bourgeois or noble elements, which had deserted the city, while it had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees coming from Prussian-occupied regions of France. The city's proletarian population was already highly politicized, seeking a much stronger level of control of the city's economy. Among the political watchwords of the time was 'la république démocratique et sociale!', but the city's leftist political movements spanned a wide range of positions, from the 'radical republicans' under Clemenceau, to the followers of Blanqui. The latter, though a small group (maybe one thousand activists) were armed and disciplined and formed the core of the Commune's leadership.
The Prussians created the opportunity for the Thiers government to assemble an army to retake Paris from the forces of the radicals and the workers. The Army, under MacMahon, entered Paris on May 21, and ferocious street-fighting followed - la semaine sanglante. The Tuileries Palace was burned, and then the Hotel de Ville. Communards captured were summarily executed in the streets of the city. The final fighting took place in and around the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise, in the northeast of the city. Two hundred National Guardsmen held the graveyard, but they could not resist the Army as it used cannon to blow open the gates. Hand-to-hand fighting amidst the graves ensued. In the early evening, the Army had either killed or captured the Guardsmen. 147 were taken to the wall of the graveyard and executed in short order and without compunction; their bodies were flung into a mass grave at the foot of the wall.
Estimates of casualties vary, but up to 20,000 Parisians died in the 'Bloody Week' and the events stand as a reminder of the ashen ruthlessness of the forces of French reaction - enabled by their Prussian foe to choke the brief flaring-out of a truly radical and bold new political experiment. Even today, the Mur des Fédérés is a place both melancholy and stark. Visiting in mid-winter a couple of years ago, I could feel the silence chill and palpable, as the great city surged just outside.
The Commune is much written about. Marx penned his marvellous Civil War in France (see below), Zola - so brave in many other respects - denigrated it in La Débacle, and the great English historian of France, Alistair Horne, produced his Fall of Paris. Commemoration of the Commune was for a long time a fixture in the calendars of the European Left - in Dublin, James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party used to organise ceremonies of remembrance, and Connolly wrote about the Commune in The Workers' Republic (see Donal Fallon's brilliant article about the Commune and the Easter Rising below). To this day, the Mur is a shrine of the French Left, depleted and divided as it now is.
Nowadays, the flame of the Commune and what it might have achieved is carried by writers such as Eric Hazan, or, in a different inflection, the brilliant English Marxist geographer, David Harvey, whose voluminous writings about 'the capital of the nineteenth century' (Benjamin) constitute a fabulous resource for urban rebels everywhere.
Reading, and remembering:
Kristin Ross: The contemporary relevance of the Paris Commune
Eric Hazan: 'Paris: the Commune overjoyed'
From Jacobin:
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