Paris Commune
This article is about the government of Paris in 1871.
For the Commune during the French Revolution, see
Paris Commune (French Revolution). For the Ukrainian
town once named “Settlement of Paris Commune”, see
Perevalsk.
The Paris Commune[7] was a radical socialist and revo-
lutionary government that ruled Paris from 18 March to
28 May 1871. Following the defeat of Emperor Napoleon
III in September 1870, the French Second Empire swiftly
collapsed. In its stead rose a Third Republic at war with
Prussia, who subjected Paris to a brutal four-month siege.
A hotbed of working-class radicalism, during this time
France’s capital was primarily defended not by the reg-
ular French Army, but by the often politicized and radi-
cal troops of National Guard. In February 1871 Adolphe
Thiers, the new chief executive of the French national
government, signed an armistice with Prussia that dis-
armed the Army but not the National Guard.
The killing of two French army generals by soldiers of the
Commune’s National Guard and the refusal of the Com-
mune 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”) begin-
ning on 21 May 1871.[8] Debates over the policies and
outcome of the Commune had significant influence on
the ideas of Karl Marx, who described it as an example
of the "dictatorship of the proletariat".[9]
1 Prelude
On 2 September 1870, after France’s unexpected defeat
at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, Em-
peror Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussian Chan-
cellor Otto von Bismarck. When the news reached
Paris the next day, shocked and angry crowds came out
into the streets. Empress Eugénie de Montijo, the Em-
peror’s regent, fled the city, and the Government of the
Second Empire swiftly collapsed. Republican and radical
deputies of the National Assembly went to the Hôtel de
Ville, 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 to-
ward Paris.
1
1.1 Demographics
In 1871 France was deeply divided between the large ru-
ral, Catholic and conservative population of the French
countryside and the more republican and radical cities of
Paris, Marseille, Lyon and a few others. In the first round
of the 1869 parliamentary elections held under the French
Empire, 4,438,000 had voted for the Bonapartist candi-
dates 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 Bonapartists.[10]
Of the two million people in Paris in 1869, according
to the official census, there were about 500,000 indus-
trial workers, or fifteen percent of all the industrial work-
ers in France, plus another 300,000-400,000 workers in
other enterprises. Only about 40,000 were employed in
factories and large enterprises; most were employed in
small industries in textiles, furniture and 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 po-
litical refugees, the largest number being from Italy and
Poland.[10]
During the war and the siege of Paris, various members
of the middle- and upper-classes departed the city; at the
same time there was an influx of refugees from parts of
France occupied by the Germans. The working class and
immigrants suffered the most from the lack of industrial
activity due to the war and the siege; they formed the
bedrock of the Commune’s popular support.[10]
1.2 Radicalization of the Paris workers
The Commune resulted in part from growing discon-
tent among the Paris workers.[11] This discontent can be
traced to the first worker uprisings, the Canut Revolts,
in Lyon and Paris in the 1830s[12] (a Canut was a Ly-
onnais silk worker, often working on Jacquard looms).
Many Parisians, especially workers and the lower-middle
classes, supported a democratic republic. A specific de-
mand 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” way of managing the economy, if not necessar-
ily socialist, summed up in the popular appeal for "la
république démocratique et sociale!" (“the democratic and
social republic!").
2 1 PRELUDE
Socialist movements, such as the First International, had
been growing in influence. Hundreds of societies affili-
ated to it across France. In early 1867, Parisian employers
of bronze-workers attempted to de-unionize their work-
ers. This was defeated by a strike organized by the Inter-
national. Later in 1867, an illegal public demonstration
in Paris was answered by the legal dissolution of its ex-
ecutive committee and the leadership being fined. Ten-
sions escalated: Internationalists elected a new committee
and put forth a more radical programme, the authorities
imprisoned their leaders, and a more revolutionary per-
spective 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.[13]
The killing of journalist 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. The war with Prussia, initiated by Napoleon III
in July, was initially met with patriotic fervour.[14]
1.3 Radicals and revolutionaries
Louis Auguste Blanqui, leader of the Commune’s far-left faction,
was imprisoned for the entire time of the Commune.
Paris is the traditional home of French radical move-
ments. Revolutionaries had gone into the streets to op-
pose their governments during the 1789 French Revolu-
tion, the popular uprisings of July 1830 and June 1848;
all were violently repressed by the government.
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 and future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau,
who was a member of the National Assembly and Mayor
of the 18th arrondissement. Clemenceau tried to negoti-
ate a compromise between the Commune and the govern-
ment, but neither side trusted him; he was considered ex-
tremely radical by the provincial deputies of rural France,
but too moderate by the leaders of the Commune. He be-
came the Prime Minister of France during the last years
of the First World War, and signed the peace treaty that
restored Alsace and Lorraine to France.
The most extreme revolutionaries in Paris were the fol-
lowers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, a charismatic profes-
sional revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life
in prison. He had about a thousand followers, many of
them armed and organized into cells of ten persons each.
Each cell operated independently and was unaware of the
members of the other groups, communicating only with
their leaders by code. Blanqui 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 disci-
plined soldiers and several of the senior leaders of the
Commune.
1.4 Defenders of Paris
By 20 September 1870, the German army had sur-
rounded Paris and was camped just 2,000 metres (6,600
ft) from the French front lines. The regular French Army
in Paris, under General Trochu’s command, had only
50,000 professional soldiers of the line; the majority of
the French first-line soldiers were prisoners of war, or
trapped in Metz, surrounded by Germans. The regulars
were thus supported by around 5,000 firemen, 3,000 gen-
darmes, and 15,000 sailors.[15] The regulars were also
supported by the Garde Mobile, new recruits with little
training or experience. 17,000 of them were Parisian, and
73,000 from the provinces. These included twenty battal-
ions of men from Brittany, who spoke little French.[15]
The largest armed force in Paris was the Garde Nationale,
or National Guard, numbering about 300,000 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 na-
tional 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, of-
ten refused to obey orders without discussing them, and
demanded the right to elect their own officers. The mem-
bers of the National Guard from working-class neighbor-
hoods became the main armed force of the Commune.[15]
1.6 Uprising of 31 October
1.5 Siege of Paris; first demonstrations
Eugène Varlin led several thousand National Guard soldiers to
march to the Hotel de Ville chanting 'Long Live the Commune!".
As the Germans surrounded the city, radical groups saw
that the Government of National Defense had few sol-
diers to defend itself, and launched the first demonstra-
tions against it. On 19 September, 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 centre of the city and demanded that a new govern-
ment, 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 5 October, 5,000 protesters marched from Belleville
to the Hotel de Ville, demanding immediate municipal
elections and rifles. On 8 October, several thousand sol-
diers from the National Guard, led by Eugène Varlin of
the First International, marched to the centre chanting
'Long Live the Commune!", but they also dispersed with-
out incident.
Later in October, General Louis Jules Trochu launched a
series of armed attacks to break the German siege, with
heavy losses and no success. The telegraph line connect-
ing Paris with the rest of France had been cut by the Ger-
mans on 27 September. On 6 October, Defense Minister
Léon Gambetta departed the city by balloon to try to or-
ganise national resistance against the Germans.[16]
3
Revolutionary units of the National Guard briefly seized the Hotel
de Ville on 31 October 1870, but the uprising failed.
1.6 Uprising of 31 October
On 28 October, the news arrived in Paris that the 160,000
soldiers of the French army at Metz, which had been sur-
rounded 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 31 October, the lead-
ers of the main revolutionary groups in Paris, including
Blanqui, Félix Pyat and Louis Charles Delescluze, called
new demonstrations at the Hotel de Ville against General
Trochu and the government. Fifteen thousand demon-
strators, some of them armed, gathered in front of the
Hôtel de Ville in pouring rain, calling for the resignation
of Trochu and the proclamation of a commune. Shots
were fired from the Hôtel de Ville, one narrowly missing
Trochu, and the demonstrators crowded into the building,
demanding the creation of a new government, and mak-
ing lists of its proposed members.[17]
Blanqui, the leader of the most radical faction, estab-
lished his own headquarters at the nearby Prefecture of
the Seine, issuing orders and decrees to his followers, in-
tent upon establishing his own government. While the
formation of the new government was taking place inside
the Hôtel de Ville, however, units of the National Guard
and Garde Mobile loyal to General Trochu arrived and re-
captured the building without violence. By three o'clock,
4 1 PRELUDE

the demonstrators had been given safe passage and left, had been defeated on four fronts and Paris was facing
and the brief uprising was over.[17] a famine. General Tronchu received reports from the
On 3 November, city authorities organized a plebiscite prefect of Paris that agitation against the government
of Parisian voters, asking if they had confidence in the and military leaders was increasing in the political clubs
Government of National Defense. “Yes” votes totalled and in the National Guard of Belleville, La Chapelle,
557,996, while 62,638 voted “no”. Two days later, mu- Montmartre, and Gros-Caillou.
nicipal councils in each of the twenty arrondissements of At midday on 22 January, three or four hundred National
Paris voted to elect mayors; five councils elected radical Guards and members of radical groups – mostly Blan-
opposition candidates, including Delescluze and a young quists – gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville. A battalion
Montmartrean doctor, Georges Clemenceau.[18] of Gardes Mobiles from Brittany was inside the building
to defend it in case of an assault. The demonstrators pre-
sented their demands that the military be placed under
1.7 Negotiations with the Germans; con- civil control, and that there be an immediate election of a
tinued war commune. The atmosphere was tense, and in the middle
of the afternoon, gunfire broke out between the two sides;
In September and October Adolphe Thiers, the leader of each side blamed the other for firing first. Six demonstra-
the National Assembly conservatives, had toured Europe, tors were killed, and the army cleared the square. The
consulting with the foreign ministers of Britain, Russia, government quickly banned two publications, Le Reveil
and Austria, and found that none of them were willing of Delescluze and Le Combat of Pyat, and arrested 83
to support France against the Germans. He reported to revolutionaries.
the Government that there was no alternative to negotiat- At the same time as the demonstration in Paris, the lead-
ing an armistice. He travelled to German-occupied Tours ers of the Government of National Defense in Bordeaux,
and met with Bismarck on 1 November. The Chancellor had concluded that the war could not continue. On 26
demanded the cession of all of Alsace, parts of Lorraine, January, they signed a ceasefire and armistice, with spe-
and enormous reparations. The Government of National cial conditions for Paris. The city would not be occu-
Defense decided to continue the war and raise a new army pied by the Germans. Regular soldiers would give up
to fight the Germans. The newly organized French armies their arms, but would not be taken into captivity. Paris
won a single victory at Coulmiers on 10 November, but would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. At Jules
an attempt by General Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot on 29 Favre's request, Bismarck agreed not to disarm the Na-
November at Villiers to break out of Paris was defeated tional Guard, so that order could be maintained in the
with a loss of 4,000 soldiers, compared with 1,700 Ger- city.
man casualties.
Everyday life for Parisians became increasingly difficult
during the siege. In December temperatures dropped 1.9 Adolphe Thiers; parliamentary elec-
to −15 °C (5 °F), and the Seine froze for three weeks. tions of 1871
Parisians suffered shortages of food, firewood, coal and
medicine. The city was almost completely dark at night. See also: French legislative election, February 1871
The only communication with the outside world was by The national government in Bordeaux called for national
balloon, carrier pigeon, or letters packed in iron balls elections at the end of January, held just ten days later on
floated down the Seine. Rumors and conspiracy theo- 8 February. Most electors in France were rural, Catholic
ries abounded. Because supplies of ordinary food ran out, and conservative, and this was reflected in the results;
starving denizens ate most of the city zoo’s animals, and of the 645 deputies assembled in Bordeaux on Febru-
then having eaten those, Parisians resorted to feeding on ary, about 400 favoured a constitutional monarchy under
rats. either Henri, Count of Chambord (grandson of Charles
By early January 1871, Bismarck and the Germans them- X) or Prince Philippe, Count of Paris (grandson of Louis
[20]
selves were tired of the prolonged siege. They installed Philippe).
seventy-two 120- and 150-mm artillery pieces in the forts Of the 200 republicans in the new parliament, 80 were
around Paris and on 5 January began to bombard the city former Orleanists (Henri’s supporters) and moderately
day and night. Between 300 and 600 shells hit the centre conservative. They were led by Adolphe Thiers, who
of the city everyday.[19] was elected in 26 departments, the most of any candi-
date. There were an equal number of more radical repub-
licans, including Jules Favre and Jules Ferry, who wanted
1.8 Uprising and armistice a republic without a monarch, and who felt that signing
the peace treaty was unavoidable. Finally, on the ex-
Main article: Armistice of Versailles treme left, there were the radical republicans and social-
ists, a group that included Louis Blanc, Léon Gambetta
Between 11 and 19 January 1871, the French armies and Georges Clemenceau. This group was dominant in
2.2 Failed seizure attempt and government retreat
Adolphe Thiers, the chief executive of the French Government
during the Commune
Paris, where they won 37 of the 42 seats.[21]
On 17 February the new Parliament elected the 74-year-
old Thiers as chief executive of the French Third Repub-
lic. He was considered to be the candidate most likely to
bring peace and to restore order. For long an opponent
of the Prussian war, Thiers persuaded Parliament that
peace was necessary. He travelled to Versailles, where
Bismarck and the German King were waiting, and on 24
February the armistice was signed.
2 Establishment
2.1 Dispute over cannons of Paris
At the end of the war 400 obsolete muzzle-loading bronze
cannons, partly paid for by the Paris public via a subscrip-
tion, remained in the city. The new Central Committee of
the National Guard, now dominated by radicals, decided
to put the cannons in parks in the working-class neighbor-
hoods of Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Montmartre,
to keep them away from the regular army and to defend
the city against any attack by the national government.
Thiers was equally determined to bring the cannons un-
der national-government control.
Clemenceau, a friend of several revolutionaries, tried to
negotiate a compromise; some cannons would remain in
Paris and the rest go to the army. However Thiers and
5
A contemporary sketch of women and children helping take two
National Guard cannons to Montmartre
the National Assembly did not accept his proposals. The
chief executive wanted to restore order and national au-
thority in Paris as quickly as possible, and the cannons
became a symbol of that authority. The Assembly also
refused to prolong the moratorium on debt collections im-
posed during the war; and suspended two radical newspa-
pers, Le Cri du Peuple of Jules Valles and Le Mot d'Ordre
of Henri Rochefort, which further inflamed Parisian rad-
ical opinion. 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 enraged of the National
Guard and the radical political clubs.[22]
On 17 March 1871, there was a meeting of Thiers and his
cabinet, who were joined by Paris mayor Jules Ferry, Na-
tional Guard commander General D'Aurelle de Paladines
and General Joseph Vinoy, commander of the regular
army units in Paris. Thiers announced a plan to send the
army the next day to take charge of the cannons. The plan
was initially opposed by War Minister Adolphe Le Flô,
D'Aurelle de Paladines, and Vinoy, who argued that the
move was premature, because the army had too few sol-
diers, was undisciplined and demoralized, and that many
units had become politicized and were unreliable. Vi-
noy urged that they wait until Germany had released the
French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full
strength. Thiers insisted that the planned operation must
go ahead as quickly as possible, to have the element of
surprise. If the seizure of the cannon was not successful,
the government would withdraw from the 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.[23]
6 2
The killing of Generals Clément-Thomas (above) and Lecomte
by national guardsmen on 18 March sparked the armed conflict
between the French Army and the National Guard.
2.2 Failed seizure attempt and government
retreat
Early in the morning of 18 March, two brigades of sol-
diers climbed the butte of Montmartre, where the largest
collection of cannons, 170 in number, were located. A
small group of revolutionary national guardsmen were al-
ready there, and there was a brief confrontation between
the brigade led by General Claude Lecomte, and the Na-
tional Guard; one guardsman, named Turpin, was shot
dead. Word of the shooting spread quickly, and members
of the National Guard from all over the neighborhood,
including Clemenceau, hurried to the site to confront the
soldiers.
Elsewhere in Paris, the Army had succeeded in securing
the cannons at Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and other
strategic points; but a crowd gathered and continued to
grow, and the situation grew increasingly tense at Mont-
martre. The horses that were needed to move the can-
non away did not arrive, and the army units were immo-
bilized. As the soldiers were surrounded by the crowd,
they began to break ranks and join the crowd. General
Lecomte tried to withdraw, and then ordered his soldiers
to load their weapons and fix bayonets. He thrice ordered
them to fire, but the soldiers refused. Some of the offi-
cers were disarmed and taken to the city hall of Mont-
martre, under the protection of Clemenceau. General
Lecomte and the officers of his staff were seized by the
ESTABLISHMENT
guardsmen and his mutinous soldiers and taken to the lo-
cal 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 of-
ficers were taken to 6 Rue des Rosiers by members of
a group calling themselves The Committee of Vigilance
of the 18th arrondissement, who demanded that they be
tried and executed.[24]
At 5:00 in the afternoon, the National Guard had cap-
tured another important prisoner: General Jacques Leon
Clément-Thomas. An ardent republican and fierce dis-
ciplinarian, he 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 be-
cause of the severe discipline he imposed during the siege
of Paris.[25] 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 Lecomte’s regiment at Rue des Rosiers
seized Clément-Thomas, beat him with rifle butts, pushed
him into the garden, and shot him repeatedly. A few min-
utes later, they did the same to General Lecomte. Doc-
tor Guyon, who examined the bodies shortly afterwards,
found forty balls in the body of Clément-Thomas and nine
balls in the back of Lecomte.[26][27] By late morning, the
operation to recapture the cannons 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 organise a
withdrawal to Versailles, where he could gather enough
troops to take back Paris.
On the afternoon of 18 March, following the govern-
ment’s failed attempt to seize the cannons at Montmartre,
the Central Committee of the National Guard ordered the
three battalions to seize the Hôtel de Ville, where they be-
lieved the government was located. They were not aware
that Thiers, the government, and the military comman-
ders were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the
gates were open and there were few guards. They were
also unaware that Marshal Patrice MacMahon, the future
commander of the forces against the Commune, had just
arrived at his home in Paris, having just been 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 hid him in his office and
helped him board a 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.[28][29]
2.4 Council elections
On the advice of General Vinoy, Thiers ordered the evac-
uation 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.
2.3 National Guard takes power
Barricades during the Paris Commune, near the Place de la Con-
corde
In February, while the national government had been or-
ganising in Bordeaux, a new rival government had been
organized in Paris. The National Guard had not been dis-
armed as per the armistice, and had on paper 260 battal-
ions of 1,500 men each, a total of 400,000 men.[30] Be-
tween 15 and 24 February, some 500 delegates elected
by the National Guard began meeting in Paris. On 15
March, just before the confrontation between the Na-
tional Guard and the regular army over the cannons,
1,325 delegates of the federation of organizations cre-
ated by the National Guard elected a leader, Giuseppe
Garibaldi (who was in Italy and respectfully declined the
title), and created a Central Committee of 38 members,
which made its headquarters in a school on the Rue Bas-
froi, between Place de la Bastille and La Roquette. The
first vote of the new Central Committee was to refuse
to recognise the authority of General D'Aurelle de Pal-
adines, the official commander of the National Guard
appointed by Thiers, or of General Vinoy, the Military
Governor of Paris.[31]
Late on 18 March, when they learned that the regu-
lar army was leaving Paris, units of the National Guard
moved quickly to take control of the city. The first
to take action were the followers of Blanqui, who went
quickly to the Latin Quarter and took charge of the gun-
powder stored in the Pantheon, and to 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 the Place
Vendôme, as well as the Ministry of Justice. That night,
the National Guard occupied the offices vacated by the The elections of 26 March elected a Commune council
government; they quickly took over the Ministries of Fi- of 92 members, one for every twenty thousand residents.
7
nance, the Interior, and War. At eight in the morning
the next day, the Central Committee was meeting in the
Hôtel de Ville. By the end of the day, 20,000 national
guardsmen camped in triumph in the square in front of
the Hôtel de Ville, with several dozen cannons. A red
flag was hoisted over the building.[32]
The extreme-left members of the Central Committee,
led by the Blanquists, demanded an immediate march on
Versailles, to disperse the Thiers government and to im-
pose their authority on all of France; but the majority
first wanted to establish a more solid base of legal au-
thority in Paris. The Committee officially lifted the state
of siege, named commissions to administer the govern-
ment, and called elections for 23 March. They also sent
a delegation of mayors of the Paris arrondissements, led
by Clemenceau, to negotiate with Thiers in Versailles to
obtain a special independent status for Paris.
2.4 Council elections
The celebration of the election of the Commune, 28 March 1871
In Paris, hostility was growing between the elected re-
publican mayors, including Clemenceau, who believed
that they were legitimate leaders of Paris, and the Central
Committee of the National Guard.[33] On 22 March, the
day before the elections, the Central Committee declared
that it, not the mayors, was the legitimate government of
Paris.[34] It 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 guards-
men. “We are caught between two bands of crazy peo-
ple,” Clemenceau complained, “those sitting in Versailles
and those in Paris.”
8 3 ADMINISTRATION AND ACTIONS

Ahead of the elections, the Central Committee and the and no commander in chief. The Commune began by es-
leaders of the International gave out their lists of candi- tablishing nine commissions, similar to those of the Na-
dates; mostly belonging to the extreme left. The candi- tional Assembly, to manage the affairs of Paris. The com-
dates had only a few days to campaign. Thiers’ govern- missions in turn reported to an Executive Commission.
ment in Versailles urged Parisians to abstain from vot- One of the first measures passed declared that military
ing. When the voting was finished, 233,000 Parisians conscription was abolished, that no military force other
had voted, out of 485,000 registered voters, or forty- than the National Guard could be formed or introduced
eight percent. In upper-class neighborhoods many ab- into the capital, and that all healthy male citizens were
stained from voting: 77 percent of voters in the 7th and members of the National Guard. The new system had one
8th arrondissements; 68 percent in the 15th, 66 percent important weakness: the National Guard now had two
in the 16th, and 62 percent in the 6th and 9th. But in the different commanders. They reported to both the Cen-
working-class neighborhoods, turnout was high: 76 per- tral Committee of the National Guard and to the Execu-
cent in the 20th arrondissement, 65 percent in the 19th, tive Commission, and it was not clear which one was in
and 55 to 60 percent in the 10th, 11th, and 12th.[35] charge of the inevitable war with Thiers’ government.[38]
A few candidates, including Blanqui (who had been ar-
rested when outside Paris, and was in prison in Brittany),
won in several arrondissements. Other candidates who 3 Administration and actions
were elected, including about twenty moderate repub-
licans and five radicals, refused to take their seats. In
3.1 Program
the end, the Council had just 60 members. Nine of the
winners were Blanquists (some of whom were also from
the International); twenty-five, including Delescluze and
Pyat, classified themselves as “Independent Revolution-
aries"; about fifteen were from the International; the rest
were from a variety of radical groups. One of the best-
known candidates, George Clemenceau, received only
752 votes. The professions represented in the council
were 33 workers; five small businessmen; 19 clerks, ac-
countants and other office staff; twelve journalists; and
a selection of workers in the liberal arts. All were men;
women were not allowed to vote.[36] The winners were
announced on 27 March, and a large ceremony and pa-
rade by the National Guard was held the next day in front
of the Hôtel de Ville, decorated with red flags.

The Commune returns workmen’s tools pawned during the siege.

2.5 Organization and early work
The new Commune held its first meeting on 28 March
in a euphoric mood. The members adopted a dozen pro-
posals, including an honorary presidency for 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 declar-
ing that membership in the Paris Commune was incom-
patible with being a member of the National Assembly.
This was aimed particularly at Pierre Tirard, the repub-
lican mayor of the 2nd arrondissement, who had been
elected to both Commune and National Assembly. See-
ing the more radical political direction of the new Com-
mune, Tirard and some twenty republicans decided it was
wisest to resign from the Commune. A resolution was
also passed, after a long debate, that the deliberations of
the Council were to be secret, since the Commune was
effectively at war with the government in Versailles and
should not make its intentions known to the enemy.[37]
Following the model proposed by the more radical mem-
bers, the new government had no president, no mayor,
The Commune adopted the discarded French Republi-
can Calendar during its brief existence and used the so-
cialist red flag rather than the republican tricolor. De-
spite internal differences, the Council began to organise
the public services essential for a city of two million resi-
dents. It also reached a consensus on certain policies that
tended towards a progressive, secular, and highly demo-
cratic social democracy. Because the Commune met on
fewer than sixty days in all, only a few decrees were ac-
tually implemented. These included:
• separation of church and state;
• remission of rents owed for the entire period of the
siege (during which payment had been suspended);
• abolition of night work in bakeries;
• granting of pensions to the unmarried companions
and children of national guardsmen killed in active
service;
3.2 Feminist initiatives 9

• free return by pawnshops, of all workmen’s tools and

household items, valued up to 20 francs, pledged
during the siege;

• postponement of commercial debt obligations, and

the abolition of interest on the debts;

• right of employees to take over and run an enter-

prise if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune,
nonetheless, recognized the previous owner’s right
to compensation;

• prohibition of fines imposed by employers on their

workmen.[39]

The decrees separated the church from the state, appro-

priated all church property to public property, and ex-
cluded the practice of religion from schools. In theory,
the churches were allowed to continue their religious ac-
tivity 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 Blanqui, impris-
oned in Brittany since 17 March.[40]
The workload of the Commune leaders was usually enor-
mous. The Council members (who were not “representa-
tives” but delegates, subject in theory to immediate recall
by their electors) were expected to carry out many execu-
tive and military functions as well as their legislative ones.
Numerous organizations were set up during the siege in
the localities (quartiers) to meet social needs, such as can-
teens and first-aid stations. For example, in the 3rd ar-
rondissement, school materials were provided free, three
parochial schools were “laicised”, and an orphanage was
established. In the 20th arrondissement, schoolchildren
were provided with free clothing and food. At the same
time, these local assemblies pursued their own goals, usu-
ally under the direction of local workers. Despite the
moderate reformism of the Commune council, the com-
position of the Commune as a whole was much more rev-
olutionary. Revolutionary factions included Proudhonists
(an early form of moderate anarchism), members of the
international socialists, Blanquists, and more libertarian
republicans.
3.2 Feminist initiatives
Women played an important role in both the initiation and
the governance of the Commune, including active par-
ticipation in building barricades and caring for wounded
fighters.[41] Joséphine Marchias, a washer woman, picked
up a gun during the battles of May 22-23rd and said, “You
cowardly crew! Go and Fight! If I'm killed it will be
because I've done some killing first!" She was arrested
as an incendiary, but there is no documentation that she
was a pétroleuse (female incendiary). She worked as a vi-
vandiére with the Enfants Perdus. While carrying back
the laundry she was given by the guardsmen, she carried
Louise Michel, anarchist and famed “Red Virgin of Montmartre”,
became an important part of the legend of the Commune.
away the body of her lover, Jean Guy, who was a butcher’s
apprentice.[41][42] There was a reports in various newspa-
pers of pétroleuses but evidence remains weak. The Paris
Journal reported that soldiers arrested 13 women who al-
legedly threw petrol into houses. There were rumors that
pétroleuses were paid 10 francs per house. While clear
that Communards set some of the fires, the reports of
women participating in it was overly exaggerated at the
time.[43] Several women and children threw themselves
between Thiers’ army and the cannons they were attempt-
ing to confiscate from Montmartre. Despite orders from
their commanders, some soldiers refused to fire on their
own people.
Some women organized a feminist movement, following
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, created the Women’s Union for the
Defense of Paris and Care of the Wounded on 11 April
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 pur-
sued through a global struggle against capitalism, the as-
sociation demanded gender and wage equality, the right
of divorce for women, the right to secular education, and
professional education for girls. They also demanded sup-
pression of the distinction between married women and
10 3 ADMINISTRATION AND ACTIONS

concubines, and between legitimate and illegitimate chil- the Germans were demanding war reparations of five bil-
dren. They advocated the abolition of prostitution (ob- lion francs; the gold reserves would be needed to keep
taining the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or le- the franc stable and pay the indemnity. Jourde’s prudence
gal brothels). The Women’s Union also participated in was later condemned by Karl Marx and other Marxists,
several municipal commissions and organized coopera- who felt the Commune should have confiscated the bank’s
tive workshops.[44] Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie reserves and spent all the money immediately.[46]
Le Mel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite,
which served free food for indigents, and then fought dur-
ing the Bloody Week on the barricades.[45] 3.4 Press
Paule Minck opened a free school in the Church of
Saint Pierre de Montmartre and animated the Club Saint-
Sulpice on the Left Bank.[45] The Russian Anne Jaclard,
who declined to marry Dostoyevsky 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 co-
operative bakery in 1867, also fought during the Com-
mune and the Bloody Week.[45] 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.

3.3 Bank of France

The Commune named Francis Jourde as the head of the
Commission of Finance. A former clerk of a notary, ac-
countant in a bank and employee of the city’s bridges and
roads department, Jourde maintained the Commune’s ac-
counts with prudence. Paris’s tax receipts 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 daily salary of
the National Guard. Jourde first obtained a loan from
the Rothschild Bank, then paid the bills from the city ac-
count, which was soon exhausted.
The gold reserves of the Bank of France had been moved
out of Paris for safety in August 1870, but its vaults con-
tained 88 million francs in gold coins and 166 million
francs in banknotes. When the Thiers government left
Paris in March, they did not have the time or the reli-
able soldiers to take the money with them. The reserves
were guarded by 500 national guardsmen who were them-
selves Bank of France employees. Some Communards
wanted to appropriate the bank’s reserves to fund so-
cial projects, but Jourde resisted, explaining that without
the gold reserves the currency would collapse and all the
money of the Commune would be worthless. The Com-
mune appointed Charles Beslay as the Commissaire of
the Bank of France, and he arranged for the Bank to loan
the Commune 400,000 francs a day. This was approved
by Thiers, who felt that to negotiate a future peace treaty
Le Père Duchêne looks at the statue of Napoleon on top of the
Vendôme column, about to be torn down by the Communards.
From 21 March, the Central Committee of the National
Guard banned the major pro-Versailles newspapers, Le
Gaulois and Le Figaro. Their offices were invaded and
closed by crowds of the Commune’s supporters. After
18 April other newspapers sympathetic to Versailles were
also closed. The Versailles government, in turn, imposed
strict censorship and prohibited any publication in favour
of the Commune.
At the same time, the number of pro-Commune newspa-
pers and magazines published in Paris during the Com-
mune expanded exponentially. The most popular of the
pro-Commune newspapers was Le Cri du Peuple, pub-
lished by Jules Valles, which was published from 22
February until 23 May. Another highly popular publi-
cation was Le Père Duchêne, inspired by a similar paper
of the same name published from 1790 until 1794; after
its first issue on 6 March, it was briefly closed by General
Vinoy, but it reappeared until 23 May. It specialized in

humour, vulgarity and extreme abuse against the oppo-
nents of the Commune.[47]
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 ex-
cesses of the Commune. The most popular republican
paper was Le Rappel, which condemned both Thiers and
the killing of generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas by
the Communards. Its editor Auguste Vacquerie was close
to Victor Hugo, whose son wrote for the paper. The ed-
itors 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.”[48]
3.5 Catholic Church
From the beginning, the Commune had a tense relation-
ship with the Catholic Church. On 2 April, soon after
the Commune was established, it voted a decree accus-
ing 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 cease religious edu-
cation 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 evi-
dence of alleged sadism and criminal practices. More ex-
treme 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 retalia-
tion for the execution of Commune soldiers by the regular
army.[49]
3.6 Destruction of the Vendôme Column
The destruction of the Vendôme Column honouring the
victories of Napoleon I, topped by a statue of the Em-
peror, was one of the most prominent civic events during
the Commune. It was voted on 12 April by the executive
committee of the Commune, which declared that the col-
umn 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 had written to the
Government of National Defense on 4 September calling
for the demolition of the column. In October, he had
called for 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 16 April, after the de-
cision to tear down the column had already been made.
11
Destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.
The column was pulled down at the demand of painter Gustave
Courbet, who, after the collapse of the Commune, was sentenced
to six months in prison and later ordered to pay for putting the
column back up.
The ceremonial destruction took place on 16 May. In
the presence of two battalions of the National Guard and
the leaders of the Commune, a band played "La Mar-
seillaise" 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.[50]
On 12 May another civic event took place: the destruction
of Thiers’ home on Place Saint-Georges. Proposed by
Henri Rochefort, editor of the Le Mot d'Ordre, on 6 April,
it had not been voted upon 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, the money to be given
to widows and orphans of the fighting. The house was
emptied and destroyed on 12 May.[51]
4 War with the national govern-
ment
4.1 Failed Versailles offensive
In Versailles, Thiers had estimated that he needed
150,000 men to recapture Paris, and that he had only
about 20,000 reliable first-line soldiers, plus about 5,000
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 MacMahon, 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 two weeks after
12 4 WAR WITH THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

the Army’s Montmartre rout, it began skirmishing with Under the new decree, a number of prominent
the National Guard in the outskirts of Paris. religious leaders were promptly arrested, including the
Abbé Deguerry, the curé of the Madeleine church, and the
In Paris, members of the Military Commission and the
archbishop of Paris Georges Darboy, who was confined at
Executive Committee of the Commune, as well as the
the Mazas prison. The National Assembly in Versailles
Central Committee of the National Guard, met on 1
responded to the decree the next day; it passed a laaw
April. They decided to launch an offensive against the
allowing military tribunals to judge and punish suspects
Army in Versailles within five days. The attack was first
within 24 hours. Émile Zola wrote, “Thus we citizens
launched on the morning of 2 April by five battalions who
of Paris are placed between two terrible laws; the law of
crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly. The National
suspects brought back by the Commune and the law on
Guard troops were quickly repulsed by the Army, with a
rapid executions which will certainly be approved by the
loss of about twelve soldiers. One officer of the Versailles
Assembly. They are not fighting with cannon shots, they
army, a surgeon from the medical corps, was killed; the
are slaughtering each other with decrees.”[55]
National Guardsmen had mistaken his uniform for that
of a gendarme. Five national guardsmen were captured
by the regulars; two were Army deserters and two were 4.3 Radicalization
caught with their weapons in their hands. General Vi-
noy, the commander of the Paris Military District, had
ordered any prisoners who were deserters from the Army
to 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.[52]
Despite this first failure, Commune leaders were still con-
vinced that, as at Montmartre, Versailles army soldiers
would refuse to fire on national guardsmen. They pre-
pared a massive offensive of 27,000 national guardsmen
who would advance in three columns. They were
expected to converge at the end of 24 hours at the gates of
the Palace of Versailles. They advanced on the morning
of 3 April—w 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 them
to be occupied by national guardsmen. Actually Ver-
sailles soldiers had re-occupied the abandoned forts on
28 March. The National Guard soon came under heavy
artillery and rifle fire; they broke ranks and fled back
to Paris. Once again national guardsmen captured with The popular journalist Félix Pyat became one of the most
weapons were routinely shot by Versailles units.[53] influential members of the Commune and its Committee for
Public Safety. He went into exile during the Bloody week,
was later amnestied and elected to the National Assembly.

4.2 Decree on Hostages By April, as MacMahon’s forces steadily approached

Commune leaders responded to the execution of prisoners
by the Army by passing a new order on 5 April— the
Decree on Hostages. 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 by 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.
[54]
Paris, divisions arose 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,
su
upported by Le Vengeur of Pyat and Le Père Duchesne
of Vermersch, supported giving the military priority. The
publications La Commune, La Justice and Valles’ Le Cri
du Peuple feared that a more authoritarian government
would destroy the kind of social republic they wanted
to achieve. Soon, the Council of the Commune voted,
with strong opposition, for the creation of a Committee
of Public Safety, modelled on the eponymous Committee
that carried out the Reign of Terror (1793–94). Because
of the implications carried by its name, many members
of
4.5 Capture of Fort Issy 13

the Commune opposed the Committee of Public Safety’s of rifles in its arsenal, but only half of the cannons and
creation. two-thirds of the rifles were ever used. There were heavy
The Committee was given extensive powers to hunt down naval cannons mounted on the ramparts of Paris, but few
and imprison enemies of the Commune. Led by Raoul national guardsmen were trained to use them. Between
Rigault , it began to make several arrests , usually on the end of April and 20 May, the n[2]umber of trained
suspicion of treason, intelligence with the enemy, or insults artillerymen fell from 5,445 to 2,340.
to the Commune. Those arrested included General de The officers of the National Guard were elected by the
Martimprey—almost 80 years old, the governor of the In- soldiers, and their leadership qualities and military skills
valides, alleged to having caused the assassination of rev- varied widely. Gustave Clusaret, the commander of the
olutionaries in December 1851—as well as more recent National Guard until his dismissal on 1 May, had tried
commanders of the National Guard, including Cluseret. to impose more discipline in the army, disbanding many
High religious officials had been arrested: Archbishop unreliable units and making soldiers live in barracks
Darboy, the Vicar General Abbé Lagarde, and the Curé instead of at home. He recruited officers with military
of the Madeleine Abbé Deguerry. The policy of holding experience, particularly Polish officers who had fled to
hostages for possible reprisals was denounced by some France in 1863, after Russians crushed the January Up-
defenders of the Commune, including Victor Hugo, in rising; they played a prominent role in the last days of the
a poem entitled “N No Reprisals” puublished in Brussels on Commune.[58] One of these officers was General Jaroslav
21 April.[56] On 12 2 April, Rigault proposed to exchange Dombrowski, a former Imperial Russian Army officer,
Archbishop Darboy and several other priests fo or t he who was appointed commander of the Commune forces
imprisoned Blanqui. Thiers refused the proposal. On on the right bank of the Seine. On 5 May, he was
14 May, Rigault proposed to exchange 70 hostages for appointed commander of the Commune’s whole army.
the extreme-left leader, and Thiers again refused.[57] Dombrowski held this position until 23 May, when he was
killed while defending the city barricades.[59]

4.4 Composition of the National Guard 4.5 Capture of Fort Issy

A barricade constructed by the Commune in April 1871 on the
Rue de Rivoli near the Hotel de Ville. The figures are blurry due
to the camera’s lengthy exposure time, a common defect in early
photographs.
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 6 May; the actual
number was much lower, probably between 25,000 and
50,000 men. At the beginning of May, 20 percent of the
National Guard was reported absent without leave. The
National Guard had hundreds of cannons and thousands
One of the key strategic points around Paris was Fort
Issy, south of the city near the Porte de Versailles, which
blocked the route of the Army into Paris. The fort’s gar-
rison was commanded by Leon Megy, a former mechanic
and a militant Blanquist, who had been sentenced to 20
years hard labour for killing a policeman. After being
freed he had led the takeover of the prefecture of Mar-
seille 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 the command of
Fort Issy on 13 April.
The army commander, General Ernest de Cissey, 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 MacMahon, offering to spare
the lives of the fort’s defenders, and let them return to
Paris with their belongings and weapons, if they
surrendered 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. But 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 7–8 May , when the remaining national
guardsmen in the fort, unable to withstand further attacks,
decided to withdraw. The new commander of the Na-
14 5 “BLOODY WEEK”

tional Guard, Louis Rossel, issued a terse bulletin: “The

tricolor flag flies over the fort of Issy, abandoned yesterday
by the garrison.” The abandonment of the fort led the
Commune to dismiss Rossel, and replace him with De-
lescluze, a fervent Communard but a journalist with no
military experience.[60]
Bitter fighting followed, as MacMahon’s army worked
their way systematically forward to the walls of Paris. On
20 May, MacMahon’s artillery batteries at Montretout,
Mont-Valerian, Boulogne, Issy, and Vanves opened fire
on the western neighborhoods of the city—A Auteuil,
Passy, and the Trocadero—with shells falling close to
l'Étoile. 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 4,000 soldiers left at la Muette, 2,000 at Neuilly,
and 200 at Asnieres and Saint Ouen. “I lack artillerymen
and workers to hold off the catastrophe.”[61] On 19 May,
while the Commune executive committee was meeting to
judge the former military commander Clauseret for the
loss of the Issy fortress, it received word that the forces
of Marshal MacMahon were within the fortifications of
Paris.

5 “Bloody Week”
Dombrowski caricatured in Le Père Duchesne Illustré: “Un bon
5.1 21 May: Army enters Paris bougre!... Nom de Dieu!...” (“Good chap!... Good God!...”)

The final offensive on Paris by MacMahon’s army began

Jaroslav Dombrowski, a Polish exile and former officer, was one
of the few capable commanders of the National Guard. He was numbers. They had learned the tactics of street fighting
killed early in the Bloody Week.
early in the morning on Sunday, 21 May. On the front
line, soldiers learned from a sympathiser 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 MacMahon, who was
with Thiers at Fort Mont-Valérien. MacMahon immedi-
ately gave orders, and twwo 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 Auteuil and Passy.[62]
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 defense, 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
and simply tunnelled through the walls of houses to
outflank the Communards’ barricades.
5.3 23 May: Battle for Montmartre; burning of Tuileries Palace 15

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!".[63] 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 Guard was to
find someone to blame, and Dombrowski was the first
to be accused. Rumors circulated that he had accepted A street in Paris in May 1871, by Maximilien Luce
a million francs to give up the city. He was deeply
offended by the rumors. They stopped when Dombrowski Parc Monceau and Place Clichy, while General Douay
died two days later from wounds received on the
occupied the Place de l'Étoile and General Clichant
barricades. His last reported words were: “Do they still
occupied the Gare Saint-Lazaire. Little resistance was
say I was a traitor?"[64]
encountered in the west of Paris, but the army moved
forward slowly and cautiously, in no hurry.
5.2 22 May: Barricades, first street battles No one had expected the army to enter the city, so only
a few large barricades were already in place, on the
On the morning of 22 May, bells rang around the city, and Rue Saint-Florentin and Rue de l'Opéra, and the Rue de
Delescluze, as delegate for war of the Commune, issued Rivoli. Barricades had not been prepared in advance;
a proclamation, posted all over Paris: some nine hundred barricades were built hurriedly out
of paving stones and sacks of earth. Many other people
In the name of this glorious France, mother prepared shelters in the cellars. The first serious fighting
of all the popular revolutions, permanent home took place in the afternoon of the 22nd, an artillery
of the ideas of justice and solidarity which duel between regular army baatteries on the Quai d'Orsay,
should be and will be the laws of the world, and the Madeleine, and National Guard batteries on the
march at the enemy, and may your revolution- terrace of the Tuileries Palace. On the same day, the first
ary energy show him that someone can sell executions of National Guard soldiers by the regular army
Paris, but no one can give it up, or conquer inside Paris took place; some sixteen prisoners captured
it! The Commune counts on you, count on the on the Rue du Bac were given a summary hearing, and
Commune![65] then shot.[68]

The Committee of Public Safety issued its own decree:

5.3 23 May: Battle for Montmartre;
TO ARMS! That Paris be bristling with burning of Tuileries Palace
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 Committee of Public Safety
will do theirs![66]

Despite the appeals, only fifteen to twenty thousand per-

sons, including many women and children,, responded.
The forces of the Commune were outnumbered five-to-
one by the army of Marshal MacMahon.[67]
On the morning of 22 May, the regular army occupied
a large area from the Porte Dauphine; to the Champs-
de-Mars and the École Militaire, where general Cissey
established his headquarters; to the Porte de Vanves. In Communards defending a barricade on the Rue du Rivoli
a short time the 5th corps of the army advanced toward
On 23 May the next objective of the army was the butte
16 5 “BLOODY WEEK”

On the same day, having had little success fighting the

army, units of national guardsmen began to take revenge
by burning public buildings symbolising the government.
The guardsmen led by Paul Brunel, one of the original
leaders of the Commune, took cans of oil and set
fire to buildings near the Rue Royale and the Rue du
Faubourg Saint-Honoré. 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 Guard with thirty cannon placed in the
A barricade on Place Blanche during Bloody Week, whose de- garden. They had been engaged in a day-long artillery
fenders included Louise Michel and a unit of 30 women 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.[69] 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.”[70]
The Richelieu library of the Louvre, connected to the Tu-
ileries, 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.[71] Defenders of the Commune later
claimed that many of the fires were caused by artillery
Ruins of the Tuileries Palace, burned on 23 May by a National from the French army.[72]
Guard unit led by Jules Bergeret. He wrote, “I wish the same will
happen to all the monuments of Paris..” 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
of Montmartre , where the uprising had begun. The M erimee, the author of Carmen''.[73]
National Guard had built and manned a circle of
barricades and makeshift forts around the base of the 5.4 24 May: Burning of Hotel de Ville;
butte. The garrison of one barricade, at Chaussee executions
Clignancourt, was defended in part by a battalion of
about thirty women, including Louise Michelle, the At two in the morning on 24 May, Brunel and his men
celebrated “Red Virgin of Montmartre” , who had went to the Hotel de Ville , which was still the
already participated in many battles outside the city. headquarters of the Commune and of its chief executive,
She was seized by regular soldiers and thrown into Delescluze. Wounded men were being tended in the
the trench in front of the barricade and left for dead. halls, and some of the National Guard officers and
She escaped and soon after-wards surrendered to the Commune members were changing from their uniforms
army, to prevent the arrest of her mother. The into civilian clothes and shaving their beards, preparing
battalions of the National Guard were no match for the to escape from the city. Delescluze ordered everyone to
army; by midday on the 23rd the regular soldiers were at leave the building, and Brunel’s men set it on fire.[74]
the top of Montmartre, and the tricolor flag was raised
over the Solferino tower. The soldiers captured 42 The battles resumed at daylight on 24 May, under a sky
guardsmen and several women, took them to the same black with smoke from the burning palaces and min-
house on Rue Rosier where generals Clement-Thomas istries. There was no co-ordination or central direction
and Lecomte had been executed, and shot them. On the on the Commune side; each neighborhood fought on its
Rue Royale, soldiers seized the formidable barricade own. The National Guard disintegrated , with many
around the Madeleine church; 300 prisoners captured soldiers changing into civilian clothes and fleeing the
with their weapons were shot there, the largest of the city, leaving between 10,000 and 15,000 Communards
mass executions of prisoners.[64] to de-
5.5 25 May: Death of Delescluze 17

tor, who wrote “and especially the archbishop” on the bot-

tom 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.[76]

5.5 25 May: Death of Delescluze

The ruins of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, the headquarters of the

Commune, burned by the National Guard on 24 May and later
rebuilt

fend the barricades. Delescluze moved his headquarters

from the Hotel de Ville too the city hall of the 11th ar-
rondissement. More public buildings were set afire,
including the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police,
the theatres of Chatelet and Porte-Saint-Martin, and the
Church of Saint-Eustache.
As the army continued its slow advance, the summary
executions of hundreds of suspected Communards by the
army continued. Informal military courts were estab-
lished at the École Polytechnique, Chatelet, the Luxem-
bourg 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 Delescluze, the last military leader of the Commune, was shot
sentences immediately carried out.[75] dead after he stood atop a barricade, unarmed.
Amid the news of the growing number of massacres
carried out by the army in different parts of the city, By the end of 24 May, the regular army had cleared
some Communards carried out their own executions as most of the Latin Quarter barricades, and held three-
a desperate and futile attempt at retaliation. Raoul fifths of Paris. MacMahon had his headquarters at the
Rigaut, the chairman of the Committee of Public Quai d'Orsay. The insurgents held only the 11th, 12th,
Safety, without getting the authorization of the 19th and 20th arrondissements, and parts of the 3rd, 5th,
Commune, executed one group of four prisoners, and 13th. Delescluze and the remaining leaders of the
before he himself was captured and shot by an army Commune, about 20 in all, were at the city hall of the 13th
patrol. On 24 May, a delegation of national guardsmen arrondissement on Place Voltaire. A bitter battle took
and Gustave Genton, a member of the Committee of place between about 1,500 national guardsmen from the
Public Safety , came to the new headquarters of the 13th arrondissement and the Mouffetard district,
Commune at the city hall of the 11th ar-rondissment commanded by Walery Wroblowski, a Polish exile who
and demanded the immediate execution of the had participated in the uprising against the Russians,
hostages held at the prison of La Roquette . The new against three brigades commanded by General de Cissey.
[77]
prosecutor of the Commune, Théophile Ferré, hesitated
and then wrote a note: “Order to the Citizen Director of During the course of the 25th the insurgents lost the city
La Roquette to execute six hostages.” Genton asked for hall of the 13th arrondissement and moved to a barricade
volunteers to serve as a firing squad, and went to the La on Place Jeanne-d'Arc, where 700 were taken prisoner.
Roquette prison, where many of the hostages were being Wroblowski and some of his men escaped to the city hall
held. Genton was given a list of hostages and selected of the 11th arrondissement, where he met Delescluze, the
six names, including the Archbishop of Paris and three chief executive of the Commune. Several of the other
priests.. The governor of the prison, M. François, refused Commune leaders, including Brunel, were wounded, and
to give up the Archbishop without a specific order from Pyat had disappeared. Delescluze offered Wroblowski
the Commune. Genton sent a deputy back to the the command of the Commune forces, which he
Prosecu declined,
18 6 COMMUNARD PRISONERS AND CASUALITIES

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
du Château-d'Eau, climbed to the top and showed himself
to the soldiers, and was promptly shot dead.[78]

5.6 26 May: Capture of Place de la

Bastille; more executions
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 ar-
rondissment, from the Carreau du Temple to the Arts-et-
Metiers, and the National Guard still had artillery at their
strong points at the Buttes-Chaumont and Père-Lachaise, Eugène Varlin, one of the leaders of the Commune, was captured
from which they continued to bombard the regular army and shot by soldiers at Montmartre on 28 May, the last day of
forces along the Canal Saint-Martin.[79] the uprising.

As the executions of hundreds of prisoners by the army

continued, a contingent of several dozen national On 28 May, the regular army captured the last remaining
guardsmen led by Antoine Clavier, a commissaire and positions of the Commune , which offered little
Emile Gois, a colonel of the National Guard, arrived resistance. In the morning the regular army captured La
at La Roquette prison and demanded, at gunpoint, the Roquette prison and freed the remaining 170 hostages.
remaining hostages there: ten priests, thirty-five The army took 1,500 prisoners at the National Guard
policemen and gendarmes, and two civilians. They position on Rue Haxo, and 2,000 more at Derroja, near
took them first to the city hall of the 20th Père-Lachaise. A handful of barricades at Rue Rampon-
arrondissement; the Commune leader of that district neau and Rue de Tourville held out into the middle of the
refused to allow his city hall to be used as a place of afternoon, when all resistance ceased.[82]
execution. Clavier and Gois took them instead to Rue
Haxo. The procession of hostages was joined by a
large and furious crowd of national guardsmen and
civilians who insulted, spat upon, and struck the
6 Communard prisoners and casu-
hostages. Arriving at an open yard, they were lined up alities
against a wall and shot in groups of ten. National
guardsmen in the crowd opened fire along with the firing
6.1 Prisoners and exiles
squad. The hostages were shot from all directions, then
beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets.[80] A
total of 63 people were executed by the Commune
during the bloody week.[6]

5.7 27–28 May: Final battles; massacre at

Père-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 Père-Lachaise,
defended by about 200 men. At 6:00 in the evening,
Executed National Guards
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 Hundreds of prisoners who had been captured with
nightfall, when the last 150 guardsmen, many of them weapons in their hands or gunpowder on their hands had
wounded, were surrounded; and surrendered. The captured been shot immediately. Others were taken to the main
guardsmen were taken to the wall of the cemetery, known barracks of the army in Paris and after summary trials,
today as the Communards’ Wall, and shot.[81] were executed there. They were buried in mass graves
6.2 Casualties
in parks and squares. Not all prisoners were shot
immediately; the French Army officially recorded the
capture of 43,522 prisoners during and immediately
after Bloody Week. Of these, 1,054 were women, and
615 were under the age of 16. They were marched in
groups of 150 or 200, 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. More than half of the prisoners,
22,727 to be exact, were released before trial for
extenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds.
Since Paris had been officially under a state of siege
during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by
military tribunals. Trials were held for 15,895
prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-
five were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; 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.[83]
The Commune’s prosecutor Théophile Ferré, who handed over
six hostages for execution, was executed in November 1871.
A separate and more formal trial was held beginning
7 August for the Commune leaders who survived and
had been captured, including Théophile Ferré, who had
signed the death warrant for the hostages, and the painter
Gustave Courbet, who had proposed the destruction of
the column in Place Vendôme. They were tried by a panel
of seven senior army officers. Ferré was sentenced to
death, and Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison,
and later ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding the column.
19
He went into exile in Switzerland and died before making
a single payment. Five women were also put on trial for
participation in the Commune, including the “Red
Virgin” Louise Michel. She demanded the death
penalty, but was instead deported to New Caledonia.
In October 1871 a commission of the National Assembly
reviewed the sentences; 310 of those convicted were
pardoned, 286 had their sentences reduced, and 1,295
commuted. Of the 270 condemned to death—175 in
their absence—25 were shot, including Ferré and Gustave
Genton, who had selected the hostages for execution.[84]
Thousands of Communards, including leaders such as
Felix Pyat, succeeded in slipping out of Paris before
the end of the battle, and went into exile; some 3,500
going to England, 2,000–3,000 to Belgium, and 1,000
to Switzerland.[85] A partial amnesty was granted on 3
March 1879, allowing 400 of the 600 deportees sent to
New Caledonia to return, and 2,000 of the 2,400
prisoners sentenced in their absence. A general amnesty
was granted on 11 July 1880, allowing the remaining 543
condemned prisoners, and 262 sentenced in their absence,
to return to France.[86]
6.2 Casualties
When the battle was over, Parisians buried the bodies of the Com-
munards in temporary mass graves. They were quickly moved to
the public cemeteries, where between 6,000 to 7,000 Commu-
nards were buried.
Participants and historians have long debated the number
of Communards killed during Bloody Week. The offi-
cial army report by General Félix Antoine Appert
mentioned only Army casualties, which amounted, from
April through May, to 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and
183 missing. The report assessed information about
Com-munard casualties only as “very incomplete”.[3]
The issue of casualties during the Bloody Week arose at
a National Assembly hearing on 28 August 1871, when
Marshal MacMahon testified. Deputy M. Vacherot told
him, “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.” MacMahon responded, “I don't
know
20 7 CRITIQUE

what that estimate is based upon; it seems exaggerated to the dead. Based on their records, he reported that
me. All I can say is that the insurgents lost a lot more between 20 and 30 May, 5,339 corpses of Communards
people than we did.” Vacherot continued, “Perhaps this had been taken from the streets or Paris morgue to the
number applies to all of the siege, and to the fighting at city cemeteries for burial. Between 24 May and 6
Forts d'Issy and Vanves.” MacMahon replied, “the num- Septem-ber, the office of inspection of cemeteries
ber is exaggerated.” Vacherot persisted, “It was General reported that an additional 1,328 corpses were
Appert who gave me that information. Perhaps he meant exhumed from temporary graves at 48 sites, including
both dead and wounded.” MacMahon replied, “Ah, well, 754 corpses inside the old quarries near Parc des
that’s different.”[87] Buttes-Chaumont, for a total of 6,667 .[93] Modern
Marxist critics attacked du Camp and his book ;
In 1876 Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fought on
Collette Wilson called it “a key text in the construction
the barricades during Bloody Week, and had gone into
and promulgation of the reactionary memory of the
exile in London, wrote a highly popular and sympathetic
Commune” and Paul Lidsky called it “the bible of the
history of the Commune. At the end, he wrote: “No one
anti-Communard literature.”[94] However, In 2012
knows the exact number of victims of the Bloody Week.
Robert Tombs, made a new study of the cemetery records
The chief of the military justice department claimed
and estimated that the number killed was between 6,000
seventeen thousand shot.” Lissagaray was referring to
and 7,000, confirming du Camp’s research.[4] Jacques
General Appert, who had reportedly told a National
Rougerie, who had earlier accepted the 20,000 figure,
Assembly deputy that there had been 17,000 Commune
wrote in 2014, “the number ten thousand victims seems
casualties . “The municipal council of Paris,”
today the most plausible; it remains an enormous number
Lissagaray continued, “paid for the burial of seventeen
for the time.”[5]
thousand bodies; but a large number of persons were
killed or cremated outside of Paris.” “It is no
exaggeration,” Lissagaray concluded, “to say twenty 7 Critique
thousand, a number admitted by the officers.”[6] In a
new 1896 edition Lissagaray emphasized, "Twenty 7.1 Contemporary artists and writers
thousand men , women and children killed after the
fighting in Paris and in the provinces.”[88] Several
historians have accepted the 20,000 figure, among
them Pierre Milza,[89] Alfred Cobban[90] and Benedict
Ander-son.[91] Vladimir Lenin seized upon Lissagaray’s
estimate as emblematic of ruling-class brutality: “20,000
killed in the streets...Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at
nothing.”[92]

View of the Rue de Rivoli after Bloody Week

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
Communards killed in 1871 criticized its executions of suspected enemies. On the
other side, the young Anatole France described the
Between 1878 and 1880, a French historian and member Commune as “A committee of assassins, a band of
of the Académie française, Maxime Du Camp, wrote Les hooligans [fripouil-lards], a government of crime and
Convulsions de Paris. Du Camp had witnessed the last madness.”[95] The diarist Edmond de Goncourt, wrote,
days of the Commune, went inside the Tuileries Palace three days after La Semaine Sanglante, "...the bleeding
shortly after the fires were put out, witnessed the has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by
executions of Communards by soldiers, and the bodies killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the
in the streets. He studied the question of the number of next revolution... The old society has twenty years of
dead, and studied the records of the office of inspection peace before it...”[96]
of the Paris cemeteries, which was in charge of burying On 23 April George Sand, an ardent republican who had
taken part in the 1848 revolution, wrote “T
The horrible
7.2 Anarchists
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 muni-
tions and the food supplies.”[95] Soon after the Commune
began, Gustave Flaubert wrote 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...” Near the end of the Commune, Flaubert wrote her
again, “As for the Commune, which is about to die out,
it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages.” On 10
June, when the Commune was finished, Flaubert wrote
to Sand:[97]
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
insanity. 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.
Victor Hugo was critical of the Commune but sympa-
thetic 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 9 April, he wrote, “In short,
this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is
ferocious. From both sides, folly.”[95] He wrote poems
that criticized both the government and the Commune’s
policy of taking hostages for reprisals, and condemned
the destruction of the Vendôme Column.[98] On 25 May,
during the Bloody Week, he wrote: “A monstrous act;
they’ve set fire to Paris. They’ve been searching for fire-
men as far away as Brussels.” 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.”[95] He became the most vocal advocate of an
amnesty for exiled Communards, finally granted in the
1880s.[99]
Émile Zola, as a journalist for Le Sémaphore de Marseille,
reported on the fall of the Commune, and was one of the
first reporters to enter the city during Bloody Week. On
25 May 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 gun-
shot of a soldier.”[100] But on 1 June, when the fighting
was over, his tone had changed, “The court martials are
still meeting and the summary executions continue, less
numerous, it’s 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
21
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 execu-
tion 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.[101]
7.2 Anarchists
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, onnly 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.”[102] In 18
872, the conflict
climaxed with a final split between the two groups at the
Hague Congress, where Bakunin and James Guil-laume
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.
[103]
Anarchists participated actively in the establishment of
the Paris Commune. They included “Louise Michel, the
Reclus brothers, and Eugène Varlin (the latter murdered
in the repression afterwards). As for the reforms initiated
by the Commune, such as 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, th he 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.”[104] 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.”[102]
M i k h a i l B a k u n i n wa s a s t r o n g su p p o r t e r o f t h e
Commune , which was brutally suppressed by the
French government. He
22 7 CRITIQUE

saw the Commune as above all a “rebellion against the It was a transitional form, moving towards the
State,” and commended the Communards for rejecting abolition of the state as such. He used the famous
not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.[105] term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the
In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune was, he said, the first “dictatorship of the
Commune and the First International against the Italian proletariat”, a state run by workers and in the interests of
nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many workers. But Marx and Engels were not entirely
Italian republicans to the International and the cause of uncritical of the Commune. The split between the
revolutionary socialism. Marxists and anarchists at the 1872 Hague Congress
Louise Michel was an important anarchist participant in of the First International (IWA) may in part be traced
the Paris Commune. Initially she worked as an to Marx’s stance that the Commune might have saved
ambulance woman , treating those injured on the itself had it dealt more harshly with reactionaries,
barricades. During the Siege of Paris she untiringly i n s t it u t e d c o n s c r i p t io n , a n d c e n t r a l i z e d d e c i s io n -
preached resistance to the Prussians. On the establish- making in the hands of a revolutionary direction, etc.
ment of the Commune, she jo o i n e d t h e N a t io n a l The other point of disagreement was the anti-
Guard. She offered to shoot Thiers, and suggested authoritarian socialists’ opposition to the Communist
the destruction of Paris by way of vengeance for its conception of conquest of power and of a temporary
surrender. In December 1871, she was brought before transitional state (the anarchists were in favour of
the 6th council of war and charged with offences, general strike and immediate dismantlement of the
including trying to overthrow the government, encour- state through the constitution of decentralized workers’
aging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using councils, as those seen in the Commune).
weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she Lenin , like Marx, considered the Commune a living
vowed to never renounce the Commune, and dared the example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But he
judges to sentence her to death .[106] Reportedly, criticized the Communards for not having done enough to
Michel told the court, “Since it seems that every heart secure their position, highlighting two errors in particular.
that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a The first was that the Communards “stopped half way ...
little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist]
live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.”[107] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for
Following the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchist example, were not taken over”. Secondly, he thought
movement, as was the whole of the workers’ movement, their “excessive magnanimity” had prevented them from
was decapitated and deeply affected for years. “destroying” the class enemy. For Lenin, the Commu-
nards “underestimated the significance of direct military
operations in civil war; and instead of launching a resolute
7.3 Marx, Engels, and Lenin offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its
victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles
Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists, and others government time to gather the dark[109] forces and prepare
have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration for the blood-soaked week of May.”
of, a “liberated” society, with a political system based on
participatory democracy from the grass roots up. Marx 7.4 Other commentary
and Engels, Bakunin, and later Lenin and Mao tried to
draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards The American Ambassador in Paris during the
the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering Commune, Elihu Washburne, writing in his personal
away of the state") from the limited experience of the diary which is quoted at length in noted historian David
Commune. Mc-Cullough's book, The Greater Journey (Simon &
Marx, in The Civil War in France (1871), written during Schuster 2011), described the Communards as “brigands”,
the Commune, praised the Commune’s achievements, “assassins”, and “scoundrels"; “I have no time now to
and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary express my detestation.... [T]hey threaten to destroy
government of the future, “the form at last discovered” for Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will
the emancipation of the proletariat. Marx wrote that, surrender.”
“Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted
forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new that during the Commune, “the women behaved like
society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguish-
the working class. Its exterminators’ history has already ing themselves by the fury with which they fought”.[110]
nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers However, it has been argued in recent research that these
of their priest will not avail to redeem them.”[108] famous female arsonists of the Commune, or pétroleuses,
[111][112]
Engels echoed his partner, maintaining that the absence may have been exaggerated or a myth. Lissagaray
of a standing army, the self-policing of the “quarters”, claimed that because of this myth, hundreds of working-
and other features meant that the Commune was no class women were murdered in Paris in late May, falsely
longer a “state” in the old, repressive sense of the term. accused of being pétroleuses. Lissagaray also claimed that
the artillery fire by the French army was responsible for
8.1 Other communes of 1871 23

A plaque honours the dead of the Commune in Père Lachaise

Cemetery.

officials of the Bolshevik government were given the title

Commissar, which was borrowed directly from the Com-
missaires 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.[114] Stalin wrote: “In 1917 we thought that
we would form a commune, an association of work-
ers, and that we would put an end to bureaucracy...That
is a goal that we are still far from reaching.”[114] The
Bolsheviks renamed their dreadnought battleship Sev-
National Guard commander Jules Bergeret escaped Paris during astopol to Parizhskaya Kommuna. In the later years of
the Bloody Week and went into exile in New York, where he died the Soviet Union, the spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part
in 1905. of a Communard banner.
The National Assembly decreed a law on July 24, 1873,
for the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on
probably half of the fires that consumed the city during
Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park and
the Bloody Week.[113] However, photographs of the ruins
where General Clément-Thomas and General Lecomte
of the Tuileries Palace, the Hotel de Ville, and other
were killed, specifying that it was to be erected to
o “expiate
prominent government buildings that burned show that
the crimes of the Commune”.[115] A plaque and a church,
the exteriors were untouched by cannon fire, while the
Notre Dame des Otages (Our Lady of the Hostages) on
interiors were completely gutted by fire; and prominent
rue Haxo mark the place where fifty hostages, including
Communards such as Jules Bergeret, who escaped to live
priests, gendarmes and four civilians, were shot by a firing
in New York, proudly claimed credit for the most famous
squad.[116]
acts of arson.[73]
A plaque also marks the wall in Père Lachaise Ceme-
tery where 147 Communards were executed, commonly
known as "The Communards’ Wall".[117] Memorial com-
8 Influence and legacy memorations are held at the cemetery every year in May
to remember the Commune. Another plaque behind the
The Paris Commune inspired other uprisings named or Hotel de Ville marks the site of a mass grave of Commu-
called Communes: in Moscow (December 1905); Bu- nards shot by the army. Their remains were later reburied
dapest (March–July 1919); Canton (December 1927), in city cemeteries.
and, most famously, Petrograd (1 1917). The Commune
was regarded with admiration and awe by later Communist
and leftist leaders. Vladimir Lenin wrote: “We are 8.1 Other communes of 1871
only dwarves perched on the shoulders of those giants.”
He celebrated by dancing in the snow in Moscow on the Soon after the Paris Commune took power in Paris,
day that his Bolshevik government was more than two revolutionary and socialist groups in several other
months old, surpassing the Commune. The ministers and French cities tried to establish their own communes.
The Paris
24
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
and 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 revolution-
aries. 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 neighborhoods
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 24 March, 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.[118]
• Saint-Étienne. On 24 March, inspired by the news
from Paris, a crowd of republican and revolutionary
workers and national guardsmen invaded the city
hall of Saint-Étienne, 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 out-
side 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 29 March. However, on the 26th, the
more moderate republican members of the National
Guard disassociated themselves from the
8 INFLUENCE AND LEGACY
Commune. An army unit entered the 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.[119]
• 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 and 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
p r efe ct u r e , each claiming to be the legal
government of the city. On 4 April , G eneral
E s p iv e n t , w i t h s i x t o s e v e n t h o u s a n d
regular soldiers supported by sailors and
National Guard units loyal to the Republic,
e n t e r e d M a r s ei l l e , w h e r e t h e C o m m u n e wa s
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 30 soldiers were killed,
and about 150 of the insurgents were killed. As in
Paris, insurgents captured with weapons in hand
were executed, and about 900 others were
imprisoned. Gaston Cremieux was arrested,
condemned to death in June 1871, and executed
five months later.[120]
• 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
M a r c h , b u t h a n d e d b a c k t o t h e a r my w i t h o u t
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,
8.3 In fiction
before being themselves disarmed by the army.[121]
8.2 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 Père
Lachaise Cemetery, where the last battle of the
Commune had been fought. 8.3
• Patrice Mac-Mahon, the leader of the regular army
that crushed the Commune, became the provisional 8.3.1 Poetry
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 he died in 1893,
he was buried with the highest military honours at
the Invalides.
• Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of Montmartre at
the beginning of the Commune, became the leader
of the Radical Party in the French Chamber of
Deputies. He was Prime Minister of France during 8.3.2 Novels
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 others survived and lived long
afterwards.
• Felix Pyat, the radical journalist, slipped out of Paris
near the end of the Commune and reeappeared as a
refugee in London. He was sentenced to death in
absentia, but he and the other Communards were
granted an amnesty. 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 Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the last
battle of the Commune was fought.
• Louise Michel, the famous “Red Virgin”, was sen-
tenced 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, was imprisoned, and
then
25
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, Théophile Ferré, the man who had signed
the death warrant for the Archbishop of Paris and
other hostages.
In fiction
• Among the first to write about the Commune was
Victor Hugo, whose poem “Sur une barricade”,
written on 11 June 1871, and published in 1872 in a
collection of poems under the name L' Année terri-
ble, honours the bravery of a twelve-year-old Com-
munard being led to the execution squad.
• 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 hero-
ically pitted themselves”.[122] 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 Re-
public: A Romance of the Commune by Robert W.
Chambers.[122]
• Émile Zola’s 1892 novel La Débâcle is set against the
background of the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle
of Sedan and the Paris Commune.
• Guy Endore's 1933 horror novel The Werewolf of
Paris is set during the Paris Commune and contrasts
the savagery of the werewolf with the savagery of
La Semaine Sanglante
• French writer Jean Vautrin's 1998 novel Le Cri du
Peuple deals with the rise and fall of the Commune.
The Prix Goncourt winning novel 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 subse-
quent investigation in which the two main protag-
onists, Grondin and Tarpagnan, are involved. The
eponymous newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, is inspired
by the actual Communard newspaper edited by Jules
Vallès. The book itself is supposedly his account.
The painter Gustave Courbet also makes an appear-
ance.
26 10 REFERENCES

• In The Prague Cemetery, Italian author Umberto Eco • Gustave Paul Cluseret
sets chapter 17 against the background of the Paris
Commune. • Gustave Flourens

• Leó Frankel
8.3.3 Theatre • André Gill
• At least three plays have been set in the Commune: • Paschal Grousset
Nederlaget by Nordahl Grieg, Die Tage der Com-
mune by Bertolt Brecht, and Le Printemps 71 by • Paul Lafargue
Arthur Adamov.
• Édouard Manet
• Berlin performance group Showcase Beat le Mot • Medieval commune
created Paris 1871 Bonjour Commune (first per-
formed at Hebbel am Ufer in 2010), the final part • Felix Nadar
of a tetralogy dealing with failed revolutions.
• Eugène Edine Pottier
• New York theatre group The Civilians performed
Paris Commune in 2004 and 2008. • Élisée Reclus

• Arthur Rimbaud
8.3.4 Film • Louis Rossel
• There have been numerous films set in the Com- • Jules Vallès
mune. Particularly notable is La Commune, which
runs for 5¾ hours and was directed by Peter • Paul Verlaine
Watkins. It was made in Montmartre in 2000, and
• Strandzha Commune
as with most of Watkins’ other films it uses ordinary
people instead of actors to create a documentary ef- • Republic of Tarnobrzeg
fect.

• Soviet filmmakers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid

Trauberg wrote and directed, in 1929, the silent 10 References
film The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon) about the
Paris Commune. It was the recipient of Dmitri 10.1 Notes
Shostakovich's first film score.
[1] “Les aspects militaires de la Commune par le colonel Rol-
Tanguy”. Association des Amies et Amis de la Commune
8.3.5 Other de Paris 1871.

• The Italian composer, Luigi Nono, also wrote an
opera Al gran sole carico d'amore (In the Bright Sun-
shine, Heavy with Love) that is based on the Paris
Commune.
• Comics artist Jacques Tardi translated the Vautrin’s
novel (listed above) into a comic, which is also called
Le Cri du Peuple.
• 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.
[2] Milza, 2009a, p. 319
[3] Rapport d'ensemble de M. le Général Appert sur les opéra-
tions 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)
[4] Tombs, Robert, “How Bloody was la Semaine sanglante
of 1871? A Revision”. The Historical Journal, September
2012, vol. 55, issue 03, pp. 619-704
[5] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871,” p. 118
[6] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (1876), Histoire de la Com-
mune de 1871, La Decouverte/Poche (2000). p. 383
[7] French: La Commune de Paris, IPA: [la kɔmyn də paʁi]

[8] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de 1871”

9 See also
[9] Rougerie, Jacques, Paris libre- 1871. pp. 264-270
• Castilian War of the Communities [10] Milza, 2009a, p. 65

• Commune (socialism) [11] Haupt/Hausen 1979, pg. 74–75

10.1 Notes 27

[12] Edwards 1971, pg. 1 [43] “Nonfiction Book Review: Massacre: The Life and
Death of the Paris Commune by John Merriman. Ba-
[13] March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune sic, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-0-465-02017-1”. Publisher-
of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York, sWeekly.com. pp. 156–157. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
Macmillan & co. pp. 3–6.
[44] Women and the Commune, in L'Humanité, 19 March
[14] March, Thomas (1896). The history of the Paris Commune 2005 Archived 2 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine.
of 1871. London, S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd.; New York,
Macmillan & co. pp. 7–9. [45] François Bodinaux, Dominique Plasman, Michèle Ri-
bourdouille. "On les disait 'pétroleuses’..." Archived 26
[15] Milza, 2009b, pp. 143–145 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine.
[16] Milza, 2009b, pp. 143–165 [46] Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. McLellan), pp. 592–94
[17] Milza, 2009b, pp. 206–213 [47] Milza, 2009a, p. 250
[18] Milza, 2009b, pp. 212–213 [48] Milza, 2009a, p. 253
[19] Milza, 2009b, pp. 257–259 [49] Milza, 2009a, pp. 350–354
[20] Milza, 2009b, pp. 420–421 [50] Milza, 2009a, pp. 294–296
[21] Milza, 2009b, p. 421
[51] Milza, 2009a, pp. 296–298
[22] Milza, 2009a, pp. 8–9
[52] Milza, 2009a, pp. 138–139
[23] Milza, 2009a, pp. 9–11
[53] Milza, 2009a, pp. 141–152
[24] Milza, 2009a, pp. 16–18
[54] Milza, 2009a, p. 153
[25] Milza, 2009a, pp. 18–19
[55] Zola, Emile, La Cloche, 8 April 1871
[26] Milza, 2009a, p. 19
[56] Milza, 2009a, pp. 346–347
[27] Gluckstein, Donny (15 January 2014). Paris Commune:
[57] Milza, 2009a, pp. 345–350
A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 231.
[58] Milza, 2009a, p. 317
[28] Milza, 2009a, p. 76
[59] Zdrada, Jerzy (1973). Jarosław Dąbrowski 1836–1871.
[29] Gluckstein, Donny (15 January 2014). Paris Commune:
Wydawnictwo Literackie.
A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket Books. p. 4.
[60] Milza, 2009a, pp. 327–330
[30] Milza, 2009a, p. 35
[61] Milza, 2009a, p. 337
[31] Milza, 2009a, p. 45
[62] Milza, 2009a, pp. 379–380
[32] Milza, 2009a, p. 77
[63] Milza, 2009a, p. 381
[33] Milza, 2009a, p. 97

[34] Milza, 2009a, p. 103 [64] Milza, 2009a, p. 394

[35] Rougerie, Jacques, La Commune de Paris, pp. 58-60 [65] Proclamation de Delescluze. delegue a la Guerre, au peu-
ple de Paris, Journal officiel, 22 May 1871
[36] Milza, 2009a, pp. 109–113
[66] Milza, 2009a, p. 386
[37] Milza, 2009a, pp. 118–119
[67] Da Costa, Gaston, La Commune vecue, 3 vol. Paris,
[38] Milza, 2009a, p. 129 Librairies-impremeries reunies, 1903–1905, III, p. 81.
Serman, William, La Commune de Paris, p. 348
[39] Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory by
Timothy McCarthy [68] Milza, Pierre, “La Commune”, p. 391

[40] Milza, 2009a
[41] Merriman, John (2014). Massacre: The Life and Death
of the Paris Commune of 1871. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press. p. 81. ISBN 9780465020171.
[69] “Paris”. Encyclopædia Britannica 17 (14th ed.). 1956. p.
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[70] Joanna Richardson, Paris under Siege Folio Society Lon-
don 1982

[42] Perny, Paul (1818–1907) (1871-01-01). Deux mois de [71] Rene Heron de Villefosse, Histoire de Paris, Bernard
prison sous la Commune ; suivi de détails authentiques sur Grasset (1959). The father of the author of this book was
l'assassinat de Mgr l'archevêque de Paris (3e éd.) / par an assistant curator at the Louvre, and helped put out the
Paul Perny,... fires
28 10 REFERENCES

[72] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier (2012) [1876]. History of the [99] Milza, 2009a, pp. 457–460
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[100] 4th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune, 25 May 1871
[73] Milza, 2009a, pp. 396–397
[101] 11th letter of Emile Zola on the Commune, 1 June 1871
[74] Milza, 2009a, pp. 397–398
[102] Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of
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[103] Graham, Robert 'Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose
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[78] Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier, Histoire de la Commune de
[104] “The Paris Commune” by Anarcho
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[105] The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, Mikhail
[79] Milza, 2009a, p. 410
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[80] Milza, 2009a, pp. 411–412
[106] Louise Michel, a French anarchist women who fought in
[81] Milza, 2009a, pp. 413–414 the Paris commune

[82] Milza, 2009a, p. 414 [107] Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries: The Inspiring
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[116] Gregor Dallas, An Exercise in Terror: the Paris Commune
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[95] Pivot, Sylvain, “La Commune, les Communards, les
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[97] Correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and George
Sand. online-literature.com. [122] Albert Boime, Olin Levi Warner’s Defense of the Paris
Commune, Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 29,
[98] Hugo, Victor, L'Année Terrible No. 3/4 (1989), (pp. 4, 13)
 29

10.2 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 (2009a). L'année terrible: La Com-
mune (mars–juin 1871). Paris: Perrin. ISBN 978-
2-262-03073-5.

• Milza, Pierre (2009b). L'année terrible: La guerre

franco-prussienne (septembre 1870 – mars 1871).
Paris: Perrin. ISBN 978-2-262-02498-7.
• du Camp, Maxime (1881). Les Convulsions de
Paris. Paris: Hachette.

• 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 Dream-
ers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Police by Alex
Butterworth (Pantheon Books, 2010)

• (German) Haupt, Gerhard; Hausen, Karin: Die

Pariser Kommune: Erfolg und Scheitern einer Rev-
olution. Frankfurt 1979. Campus Verlag. ISBN 3-
593-32607-8.

• Edwards, Stewart (1971). The Paris Commune

1871. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. ISBN 0-413-
28110-8.

11 External links
• Paris Commune Archive at Marxists Internet
Archive
• Paris Commune Archive at Anarchist Archive

• Karl Marx and the Paris Commune by C.L.R. James

• The Paris Commune and Marx' Theory of Revolu-

tion 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
30 12 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

12 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

12.1 Text
• Paris Commune Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune?oldid=713147812 Contributors: The Anome, Tarquin, Sjc,
Andre Engels, Olivier, Leandrod, Ken Arromdee, Kwertii, Lquilter, Cyde, 172, IZAK, Yann, ArnoLagrange, G-Man, Den fjät-
trade ankan~enwiki, Victor Gijsbers, Charles Matthews, Wik, Fuzzywolfenburger, Tpbradbury, Nicboyde, Warofdreams, Rbellin,
David.Monniaux, Owen, Dimadick, Robbot, Chealer, Murray Langton, ChrisO~enwiki, Jmabel, Fifelfoo, Naddy, Kesuari, Papadopc,
Dhodges, Gobeirne, Xyzzyva, Sethoeph, Everyking, Snowdog, Curps, Semorrison, Beta m, Per Honor et Gloria, Mboverload, Pgan002,
Ruy Lopez, J. 'mach' wust, Formeruser-81, Quadell, Beland, Vina, Tothebarricades.tk, PFHLai, Soman, J d noonan, DMG413, Lac-
rimosus, Esperant, Mike Rosoft, Haiduc, DanielCD, Ultratomio, Tere, Pak21, Rama, Peppy~enwiki, Stbalbach, Bender235, Kelvinc,
Kross, Art LaPella, Aaronbrick, 96T, Che y Marijuana, Chapium, Martey, Infocidal, Shenme, Man vyi, La goutte de pluie, Pearle, Mi-
ranche, Kessler, DavidHoag, Ksnow, Brock, Cburnett, Redvers, Stardestroyer, Ultramarine, Fdewaele, Before My Ken, Ardfern, Lapsed
Pacifist, Will.i.am, Fourscore, Astanhope, Chris Buckey, GregorB, Palica, Graham87, Qwertyus, Tlroche, Jorunn, Rjwilmsi, Tim!, Carl
Logan, Amire80, MZMcBride, Habap, Funnyhat, Bash, FlaBot, Ground Zero, Jrtayloriv, Valentinian, Chobot, Jersey Devil, Jaraalbe,
Bgwhite, YurikBot, Tommyt, RussBot, Petiatil, Hede2000, Gaius Cornelius, Theelf29, NawlinWiki, Mkbnett, Rjensen, Tony1, Superi-
ority, Wknight94, Franz-kafka, Ms2ger, Bob247, Norvo, Poppy, CQ, Toitoine, Npeters22, TheTypoPatrol, Carabinieri, LeonardoRob0t,
SuperJumbo, Garion96, Mhardcastle, Luk, Vanka5, SmackBot, PiCo, Errarel, 1dragon, InverseHypercube, Alex1011, Unyoyega, Chair-
man S., Boggins, Frymaster, JJay, Edgar181, Alsandro, Srnec, Trystan, Hmains, Arash red, NatC, Chris the speller, Dahn, Persian Poet
Gal, JoeBlogsDord, Schlemazl, Colonies Chris, Mladifilozof, Dr. Dan, Mitsuhirato, Metallurgist, Atropos, Theduffster51, Caesartg, Mr
Minchin, Pwjb, Zdravko mk, Akriasas, DMacks, Kukini, Cast, SashatoBot, Lambiam, Lapaz, Tazmaniacs, Kayser sauze, Gonioul, Op-
timale, Santa Sangre, Mkoyle, Joseph Solis in Australia, Shoeofdeath, Theoldanarchist, Blowup, CmdrObot, Dancheng, Vision Thing,
Picaroon, MrFizyx, Lazulilasher, Ken Gallager, Myasuda, Themightyquill, Cydebot, Nmajdan, DumbBOT, Lunarian, Maziotis, Thijs!bot,
Dogaroon, Cefaro, Marek69, Bandiera~enwiki, AntiVandalBot, Mousebelt, Tpth, Glacierfairy, Zigzig20s, LegitimateAndEvenCompelling,
Fireice, Xhienne, MER-C, Skomorokh, Benjamin22b, Sean1K2GA9, Noimnotokay, Xact, WolfmanSF, VoABot II, Rjhughes2, Nyt-
tend, The Anomebot2, KConWiki, Cerddaf, Simonxag, Gomm, Markus451, Grantsky, Balazs.varadi, White Guard, Lost tourist, R'n'B,
CommonsDelinker, AlexiusHoratius, Patar knight, The Anonymous One, Andibrunt, Dinkytown, Strobilanthes, Rrostrom, DomBot, Fi-
achra10003, Ncadene~enwiki, Www3cubed, Reedy Bot, Slow Riot, Incornsyucopia, Maproom, Steve3742, Bot-Schafter, M-le-mot-dit,
DadaNeem, Jamesontai, Pphaneuf, DorganBot, Treisijs, Brogine, Squids and Chips, Hugo999, VolkovBot, Tourbillon, JoelleJ, Taraborn,
GHoeberX, Hoopscity, TXiKiBoT, Andysoh, SteveStrummer, Aymatth2, Olly150, Helen-Eva, Demigod Ron, PeterHuntington, Neil-R-
Rogers, Alex.rosenheim, Universaladdress, AlleborgoBot, SieBot, YonaBot, Work permit, WereSpielChequers, BotMultichill, Lucasbfrbot,
Exxess, BenoniBot~enwiki, Brylie, SiefkinDR, Adam Cuerden, Anchor Link Bot, Ahuitzotl, Finetooth, Radomu, Hibsch, Gr8opinionater,
SummerWithMorons, Wedineinheck, Syhon, TheOldJacobite, Piledhigheranddeeper, The.Digital.Bedouin, Conehed, Coinmanj, Word-
wright, Monsieur W, SchreiberBike, Me1973, Indopug, Bilsonius, Afrikaner, Good Olfactory, Felix Folio Secundus, Addbot, Ctb807,
Fi11222, OmgItsTheSmartGuy, Vega2, Simeon24601, Paris 16, LinkFA-Bot, West.andrew.g, Woland1234, WikiDreamer Bot, Luckas-
bot, Earnestdan, Yobot, Legobot II, Gongshow, Eduen, Againme, AnomieBOT, Abstruce, François Pichette, Xqbot, Padense, Capri-
corn42, DSisyphBot, Coretheapple, Tomas62, CGlanovsky, Omnipaedista, Carrite, DITWIN GRIM, Erik9, Governor Jerjerrod, Green
Cardamom, FrescoBot, CaptainFugu, Tobby72, Dhtwiki, Winterst, WQUlrich, Pinethicket, Mnh123, P.4.P. No. 1, Delft 253, Zachary
Klaas, Maude Frickert, Mjs1991, Oaklandguy, Vrenator, Manlywharf, Pkor, MaxEspinho, TjBot, GretaGarbo, Paluki, Pinkbeast, Emaus-
Bot, John of Reading, Dewritech, GoingBatty, Zictor23, ‫همنشین بهار‬, Brothernight, BillH76, Tono Fonseca, Korimako, Hubertgrove,
Loginloginlogin, Dohn joe, Erianna, DCWikibot, Donner60, Brigade Piron, Whoop whoop pull up, Helpsome, ClueBot NG, Astatine211,
Appledoze, Bazuz, Everest700, Daedalus51, Helpful Pixie Bot, Gob Lofa, Lowercase sigmabot, Dayofmayofday, BG19bot, Shawn.carrie,
Yerevantsi, WikiUser16, Aeroplanepics0112, DARIO SEVERI, JSWHU, Rococo1700, Kaelyd, Liamsoprych, Cyberbot II, Wikiuser17,
Esszet, Dexbot, Charles Essie, Mogism, The Vintage Feminist, Acoma Magic, Frosty, Nonhannoilconcettodiprivacy, Blaue Max, Cs-
Dix, Jb1944, Nixin06, Gxe113, Eaddae, Hyphantes, Oliszydlowski, Cabestan, SpiritedMichelle, Vlfr496, Factual accuracy, NastyMan99,
Nemagaiq, Jss199, Sealmondi, Cchiaraa, Je.est.un.autre, Noom514, Kapweb, Nøkkenbuer, KasparBot, Misanthropicalchemy, Lamassus,
Senator Stretch, DaizyDavenport, Etrogorchard and Anonymous: 341

12.2 Images
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Braquehais
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(1819 - 1889)
12.2 Images 31

• File:Combats_dans_la_rue_Rivoli.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Combats_dans_la_rue_Rivoli.

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32 12 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

• File:PereDuchesneIllustre3_1.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/PereDuchesneIllustre3_1.png Li-

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B6tel_de_Ville_after_the_Commune.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Metropolitan Museum of Art, online database: entry
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tributors: ? Original artist: ?

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