On this day March 18th, 1871, artisans and communists, labourers and anarchists took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune, rising up against a despised and detested government and proclaimed the city an independent municipality belonging to itself. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous National Guardsmen, seized the city and set about reorganising society in their own interests based on workers' councils.
This heroic radical experiment in socialist self government may have lasted only 72 days before being violently being crushed in a brutal massacre that established France's Third republic. but the rebellion would shake the foundations of European society to the core,building a commune where they would directly and collectively manage their society through new institutions and voluntary associations of their own creation. It would mark the first major experience in history of men and women. picking up arms in a proletarian revolution to create a socialist society, and taking charge of their own destiny. Celebrated as an episode in which the have-nots wrested power, albeit briefly, from the haves, the Commune is remembered as a golden “What if?”
Paris was, at the time, the second largest city in the world after
London, and had a population of over 1.8 million by 1870. It was the political
centre of the world, and there had been revolutions or overthrows of
governments in France in 1830 and 1848, and many insurrectionary incidents in
the years that followed. Leading up to 1870, Napoleon III was in power and his
government amounted to a police state, which kept down workers. But France was
also the largest section of the First International, or the International
Workingmen’s Association, of which Marx and Engels were early influential
members.
The Paris Commune came into being in the context of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoleon went to war because his repression at home had not
succeeded in stopping strikes or the growth of the International. He needed a foreign distraction to pull the
country behind him, and chose a war with Prussia over the issue of who would
ascend to the vacant Spanish throne. The
main reason he lost this war was because he and the rest of the ruling class
were terrified of recruiting and arming a mass army, of giving guns to the
workers. As Adolphe Thiers (who would later become the President) said, “it is
not safe to place a gun on the shoulders of every socialist.
The war against Prussia began in July 1870 and within two months,
Napoleon and some several thousand French troops were captured. Immediately
afterwards, crowds of Parisians invaded the Legislative Assembly and the City
Hall and declared a new, republican government on September 4, 1870. Everyone, except royalists and the defenders
of the old empire, was thrilled that the Napoleonic dictatorship was gone. The
Parisian deputies to the Legislative Assembly formed a provisional government.
Many hoped that an armistice with Prussia would be reached immediately. When
this did not happen, Parisians turned to the task of preparing the city to
resist. In September 1870, the Prussian siege of Paris began. At the end of
January 1871, the Government of National Defence accepted Bismarck’s armistice
terms and surrendered the city to the Prussians.
The French held elections for a National Assembly, which in turn
selected the elderly and extremely conservative statesman Adolphe Thiers to
lead the government. Appalled at the government’s capitulation to Bismarck’s
terms and angered that the Prussian troops who had starved and bombarded Paris
were to be allowed to humiliate the city with a triumphal march, the Parisians
grew daily more suspicious of the government’s motives. Working class
neighbourhoods barricaded themselves. Cannons that had been left in the zone to
be occupied by the Prussians were dragged by hand to the hills of Paris for
safekeeping.
The French Government of Thiers decided that unpaid back rents had
to be paid up, which was impossible because there was no money due to mass
unemployment. The government also said
that all debts incurred during the war had to be paid, and then the government
stopped paying the National Guard. It suppressed radical newspapers. It sentenced the working class leaders
Auguste Blanqui and Gustave Flourens to death in absentia. And it moved the
capital of the country from Paris to Versailles, the historic centre of French
royalty.
The Versailles government wanted to disarm the National Guard. The
government’s army went to Montmarte, a working class neighbourhood, to remove
the cannons. The National Guard became aware of this attempt and one of the
Communards who led the resistance was Louise Michel. Michel described the
situation in Montmartre: “It was an
ocean of humanity, but there was not death, because the women threw themselves
on the cannon, and the soldiers refused to turn on the crowd.” Later that day,
two senior French military officials were killed by their own soldiers.
As Val Morel of the Central Committee of the National Guard, said
“This fighter had dreams for fifty years and now he was living his dream, and
seeing businessmen humbled, begging for an audience. At last.”
By March, there was a situation of dual power, with the National
Guard in Paris, and the ruling class government moved outside Paris, to
Versailles.Even though the National
Guard at one time had been bourgeois, it had become working class in makeup.
The wealthy had left Paris during the winter, leaving the workers armed in the
National Guard.The Commune emerged on March 18, 1871, out of material conditions
that drove the masses into action. First, the siege of Paris cut off the city
from the rest of world (except by air balloon), and there was total economic
collapse. Secondly, the winter added to a food and heat crisis. The government
did not ration food so the wealthy did just fine—eating the animals in the zoo,
horses, cats, dogs and rats—while the masses starved. Thirdly, while the
government talked about defending the
country, it preferred surrendering to Prussia than giving power to its workers.
It had set up the National Guard, essentially a citizens militia, and lots of
unemployed workers joined up. Now there was a mass, organized, and armed
working class.
The ruling class was now more terrified of its own working class
citizens than it was of the Prussians. And for good reasons. The National Guard
was democratized: officers were elected, there were instant recall provisions,
and there was no extraordinary pay for senior officers. This became the basis
for the workers’ democracy the Commune tried to develop. So there was working
class unity, democratic control, and centralization to take on the ruling
class. This was something brand new, a mass and democratic movement from below
to create a new society.
A large fraction of the National Guard were
proletarians, and rejected
to wear the official uniform. While there was a general discontent with
the unconditional surrender of the French army and nationalist calls to
continue the war or revenge Prussia for the defeat were widespread, the
First International had gained significant influence especially within
the working class of Paris, as well. This combined the general
frustration within the population due to the lost war and the
devastating siege with a general urge for profound social change due to
arising class consciousness. Accordingly, already within the last month
of the war, some attempts of uprising were undertaken with popular
demands like the civil control of the military and elections of a
commune.
The central government, not unaware of the revolutionary potential of
an armed Paris, secretly sent troops into the city in the night of
March 17th/18th in order to bring the cannons of
the National Guard under the control of the central army. However, the
attempt was soon revealed and the people of Paris quickly rushed to
defend their cannons. Only a few shots were fired before the soldiers
defected to the crowd that had surrounded them. On March 18th,
authorities of the central government started to flee from the city,
followed by a general retreat of the French Army which left the National
Guard in control of the city. The republican tricolor was replaced with
the red flag. The Paris Commune was born.
The National Guard Central Committee, arrondissement mayors, and
Parisian deputies instituted self-rule for Paris, announced city-wide elections
and tried to negotiate with the government in Versailles to reach a peaceful
solution to the crisis. On March 28th the Paris Commune officially
came into existence. The newly elected municipal council was inaugurated at the
city hall, or Hotel de Ville, and began to undo the decrees of the National
Assembly.
The Paris Commune was the high point in the surge of the workers movement also expressed in the First International founded in 1867. Ideologically charged, with lots of division, the backlash following the defeat of the Commune, also broke up the International in 1872, which would see it splitting into two factions; Marxist and Anarchist. The leading figures on the two sides were Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin.
Both Marx and Bakunin supported and hailed the Commune - unlike some English trade unionists in the International, who recoiled in horror. Bakunin and his followers would use the word 'commune' a lot saying that the state could be immediately abolished by transforming society into a federation of free communes. The Paris Commune reflected anarchist ideas of community control, workers associations and confederations, and surprisingly at the time Karl Marx strongly embraced the Commune, writing at the time he said " Working men's Paris, with its commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. It's martyr's are enshrined in the great heart of the working class."
Since then the Paris Commune has been thus variously described as either Anarchist or Socialist depending on the ideology of the commentator. It still fills me with much cause for celebration and inspiration. Along with the establishment of a state of, by, and for the working class, the Commune’s claim to greatness is the remarkable range of measures it passed. Rent payments were deferred, as were debt obligations for a period of three years, with no accrual of interest; goods held in the government pawnshop were released to their owners; the separation of church and state was declared, with the government no longer funding church operations and all religious emblems removed from classrooms; the standing army was abolished, replaced by the National Guard, with its officers elected by its members; the guillotine was publicly burned; all elected members of the Commune’s council were made revocable, with their wages limited to those of a worker; factories closed down by their owners during the siege and Commune were to be turned into cooperative enterprises under worker control; and night work for bakers was banned. The Vendome Column, the symbol of Napoleonic military glory, was torn down, its demolition organized by Gustave Courbet.
From March 18 to 28 May the two million residents of Paris ran their city as an autonomous commune, establishing 43 worker co-operatives, and advocated for a federation of revolutionary communes across France, establishing an 8 hour day,and began to regulate workers wages and contracts, abolishing fines for workers, giving them compensation, this was truly a government who put the interest of workers first . It also aimed to make education free, opening up culture for the people, formerly the sole property of the wealthy, opening reading rooms in hospitals to make life pleasant for those sick. Paris was filled with life, ideas and enthusiasm , though their city was under siege, attempts made to starve and break the will of the people surrounded by a hostile army.
The Commune also opened the way for the emancipation of women, allowing them a greater role in politics than they had previously enjoyed. The name of Louise Michel, who headed a vigilance committee and organized an ambulance service, is the best known of the female Communards, but there were others of note. The most important organization was the Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and the Care of the Wounded, co-founded by the Russian emigré Elisabeth Dmitrieff, who also fought at the barricades in the final days of the Commune and later fled to Switzerland. Women weren’t granted the vote or the right to sit on the Commune, but they played a key role at the barricades and were involved in the fight from its first day. The Communards famously set fire to many of Paris’ most famous and important buildings, the arson attributed to roving bands of revolutionary women known as Les Petroleuses.
Peter Kropotkin later enthused "Under the name of the Paris Commune, a new idea was born, to become a starting point for future revolutions.' But many others thoughts that the Paris Commune did not go far enough .
Anyway the French government was not going to tolerate this radicalism in its capital, and finally the French army marched from Versailles, but retaking the city would prove to be difficult, the communards would hold out for several weeks. The revolutionaries had built 600 barricades around the city which had to be cleared one by one. The French army finally entered Paris on May 21 and crushed the movement by May 28. Paris burned and was drowned in blood , the estimate of Parisian civilians killed usually tally's to be around 20,000, many died on the barricades. The leaders of the Commune might have had faults but for all their mistakes , they chose to fight to the end alongside the other workers. At the Père Lachaise Cemetery the French army lined up and executed 147 Commune members.
In reckoning with the French state’s actions concerning the Commune, it is important to also highlight that even after the mass executions had ended, a further 9,000 Communards were sentenced to either imprisonment or exile. In the forts along the French Atlantic Coast, but above all in the penal colony on New Caledonia—known as the “dry guillotine”—Communard resistance fighters died in great numbers, before an amnesty declared in 1880 permitted survivors to return to their homeland.
The amnesty, however, was no rehabilitation; the sentences received by the Communards retained their legal validity, and to this day French authorities have staunchly refused efforts to have them revoked. This means that the Communards retain the status of political criminals. The intent here is clear: to delegitimize the Paris Commune. In this sense, the depiction of the aforementioned events published in an 1881 issue of the German magazine Der Sozialdemokrat to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Commune’s defeat remains as apt as ever. A sea of blood separating two worlds; on the one side, those who struggled for a different and better world, and on the other, those who sought to preserve the old order
There is a wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, known as “Le Mur des Fédérés” It was there that the last fighters of the Paris Commune were shot To the left, the wall became the symbol of the people’s struggle for their liberty and ideals and a reminder of the ferocity of the government's reprisals. In keeping with their anti-bourgeois principles the former Communards rejected the grandiosity of monuments land wished only for a simple plaque to mark the wall where the mass executions had taken place. However, fearful of encouraging future insurrection, the authorities attempted to sell off the plots associated with the common grave and banned any mention of the events on individual or collective monuments within the cemetery. Many leaders of the French Communist Party, especially those involved in the French resistance, are also buried nearby.
Jules Jouy, a chansonnier from Montmartre wrote:
"Tombe sans croix et sans chapelle, sans lys d'or, sans vitraux d'azur, quand le peuple en parle, il l'appelle le Mur.”
The memory of the Commune remained engraved in the people's memory, especially within the workers’ movement which regenerated itself in a few years time. However following the Commune, worker’s protests were not authorized in the streets of Paris until roughly 1910. For anarchists and socialists commemorative ceremonies at the Wall of the Communards assumed the same role that the funerals of opposition figures had during the Restoration. The first march to the Wall took place on 23 May 1880, two months after the partial amnesty for former exiled and deported communards, which came into effect in March 1879, and just before the general amnesty of July 1880. It would be coordinated principally by the (Guesdist) Workers’ Party via its associated relays such as the Socialist Committee for Aid to the Pardoned and Unpardoned (Comité socialiste d’aide aux amnistiés et non-amnistiés) and the Federated Syndical Workers’ Union of Workers of the Seine and the Socialist Press (Union fédérative ouvrière et l’Union syndicale des travailleurs de la Seine et la presse socialiste) which included the publications L’Égalité and Le Prolétaire.: 25,000 people, a symbolic "immortal" red rose in their buttonholes, stood up against police forces. From that time on, this "ascent to the Wall", punctuated French labour force political history. Every year since 1880, the organizations of the French left have held a demonstration in this symbolic place during the last week of May.
The “Wall” has, little by little, become established as the open-air domus ecclesia of a secular and revolutionary left. This secular space has become a new space of sacralization around which those who still believe in and hope for the coming of a more just and egalitarian society and for the completion of the work left unfinished by the revolts of March 1871, come to rest, to reassemble, and to recharge.
Unlike the masculine crowds of street protests that often ended in insurrection, these are respectful family affairs that included women and children. Their orderly nature was later invoked to convince the authorities to grant permits to political parties so that growing worker’s movements might march in the streets of the capital. The modern protest march, now an institution of Parisian life, can be said to have in part been born within the walls of Père Lachaise, where innovations of funerary practice and funerary architecture first allowed for personal and collective commemoration.
Ironically Strangely, Adolphe Theirs is also buried in the cemetery. He was the French President who presided over the execution. and the man most widely associated with the Communes brutal suppression. In May 1971, 100 years after the Commune and just three years after the 1968 protests that had rocked both the capital and the Fifth Republic, commemorators once again lined the streets. Some individuals tried to blow up the tomb of Adolphe Thiers. And in May 2019 thousands of gilet haunes poured out onto the streets and into Père Lachaise to commemorate the Commune and its stand against the French State. Many leaders of the French Communist Party, especially those involved in the French resistance, are also buried nearby.
“Ce que nous demandons à l’Avenir.
Ce que nous voulons de Lui.
C’est la Justice.
Victor Hugo (Inscription on the Communards’ Wall)
What we ask of the future
What we want from it
Is justice
Every year the tens of thousands, of French people, but also people from all over the world, who visit this exalted place of memory of the labour movement, either coming alone or in demonstrations, with red flags or flowers, they sometimes sing an old love song, which became the song of the Communards: “Le Temps des Cerises”. We do not pay homage to a man, a hero or a great thinker, but to a crowd of anonymous people who we refuse to forget.
The annual Memorial Meeting Near the Wall of the Communards in the Cemetary of Père Lachaise
Painting by Ilya Repin
After its demise, the Commune became all things to all people on the left; for some, the first socialist state, for others, anarchism in action. For Friedrich Engels, as he wrote in his postscript to Marx’s The Civil War in France, it was the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that he and Marx and the First International had long called for. It was, in reality, not just the first revolution of its kind, but in many ways the last, above all a product and prisoner of France’s particular conditions and history. The measures implemented by the Commune, a form of government that, like so much else about its foundations, harked back to the French Revolution, would be echoed through the decades, inspiring movements around the world and playing an essential role in the rise of the left. But if Engels is right and the Paris Commune was the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, many of those who later invoked their ideas ultimately betrayed them..Engels’s description was championed by Marx and later by Lenin who, in the months leading up to the Russian Revolution, called for the creation of “a state of the Paris commune type.”
As Walter Benjamin said in his theses “On the Concept of History” (1940), the struggle for emancipation is waged not only in the name of the future but also in the name of the defeated generations; the memory of enslaved ancestors and their struggles is one of the great sources of moral and political inspiration for revolutionary thought and action. The Paris Commune is therefore part of what Benjamin calls “the tradition of the oppressed”, that is to say, of those privileged (“messianic”) moments in history when the lower classes have succeeded, for a while, in breaking the continuity of history, the continuity of oppression; short - too short - periods of freedom, emancipation and justice which will, each time, serve as benchmarks and examples for new battles.
Since then both Communists, left wing societies, socialists, anarchists and others have seen the Commune as a model for a prefiguration of a liberated society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grass roots up
Inarguably, the Commune triumphed as an ideal for the Left, creating a
set of radical possibilities. It endures not only as a historical event,
but also as a sketch open to multiple interpretations. Its historical
content provides a map suggesting various routes to egalitarianism,
while ‘the idea of the Commune’ presents an open vessel, sufficiently
ample to hold differing and shifting equitable ideals.
Just as Lenin saw the October revolution in the tradition of the Paris Commune as he proved by euphorically counting every day up to the historical 73 day mark of resistance of the Commune, this remarkable legacy has acted as an exemplary model for all victorious revolutions that followed and has been continued in the resistance of Sur in Bakur (North-Kurdistan) as well as with the revolution in Syria and Rojava (West-Kurdistan). It is a story of possibility not failure, evidence that points to the seeds of building an alternative society, that unites a spring of peoples, resisting together., and committed to continue building up the practical alternative we want to live.
Many aspects of this first attempt at social emancipation of the oppressed retain an astonishing relevance and should be reflected on by the new generations. Without the memory of the past and its struggles there will be no fight for the utopia of the future.The people of Paris began the fight for a new world, I guess it's up to us to finish the task.The sun that rose over Paris on the 18th of March 1871 is eternal. The dream stays alive.
Today the anniversary is being observed amidst a powerful upsurge of class struggle in France, Paris again in flames due to people protesting against their capitalist oppressors, and globally a wave of protests and strikes, that imparts to this historic day intense contemporary relevance .How appropriate that all this is going on during the anniversary of the start of the Paris Uprising.
The
spirit of the Commune is wonderfully captured in the song “The International”
written by Communard Eugene Pottier. Ir has been a standard of the socialist movement since the late nineteenth century, when the Second International adopted it as its official anthem.Sung in languages around the world even
today, the lyrics, continue to inspire:
Debout, les damnés de la terre / Arise, damned of the earth
Debout, les forçats de la faim / Arise, prisoners of hunger
La raison tonne en son cratère, / Reason thunders in its volcano
C’est l’éruption de la fin / This is the eruption of the end
Du passé faisons table rase, / Lets make a clean slate of the past
Foule esclave, debout, debout, / Enslaved masses, arise, arise
Le monde va changer de base / The world is is going to change its foundation
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout / We are nothing, we will be all
Chorus:
C’est la lutte finale / This is the final struggle
Groupons-nous, et demain, / Group together, and tomorrow
L’Internationale, / The Internationale
Sera le genre humain. / Will be the human race
Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes, / There are no supreme saviors
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun, / Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune
Producteurs sauvons-nous nous-mêmes / Producers, let us save ourselves
Décrétons le salut commun / Decree the common salvation
Pour que le voleur rende gorge, / So that the thief expires
Pour tirer l’esprit du cachot, / To free the spirit from its cell
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge, / Let us fan the forge ourselves
Battons le fer tant qu’il est chaud / Strike while the iron’s hot
Chorus
L’État comprime et la loi triche, / The State oppresses and the law cheats
L’impôt saigne le malheureux; / Tax bleeds the unfortunate
Nul devoir ne s’impose au riche, / No duty is imposed on the rich
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux. / The right of the poor is an empty phrase
C’est assez languir en tutelle, / Enough languishing in custody
L’égalité veut d’autres lois: / Equality wants other laws
«Pas de droits sans devoirs, dit-elle, / No rights without duties she says
Égaux, pas de devoirs sans droits!» / Equally, no duties without rights
Chorus
Hideux dans leur apothéose, / Hideous in their apotheosis
Les rois de la mine et du rail, / The kings of the mine and the rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose, / Have they ever done anything
Que dévaliser le travail? / Than steal work?
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande, / Inside the strong-boxes of the gangs
Ce qu’il a créé s’est fondu. / What work has created is melted
En décrétant qu’on le lui rende, / By ordering that they give it back
Le peuple ne veut que son dû. / The people only want their due
Chorus
Les Rois nous saoulaient de fumées, / The kings made us drunk with fumes
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans / Peace among us, war to the tyrants
Appliquons la grève aux armées, / Let the armies go on strike
Crosse en l’air et rompons les rangs / Stocks in the air, and break ranks
S’ils s’obstinent, ces cannibales, / If these cannibals insist
A faire de nous des héros, / On making heroes of us
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles / They will know soon enough that our bullets
Sont pour nos propres généraux. / Are for our own generals
Chorus
Ouvriers, Paysans, nous sommes / Workers, peasants, we are
Le grand parti des travailleurs; / The great party of laborers
La terre n’appartient qu’aux hommes, / The earth belongs only to men
L’oisif ira loger ailleurs. / The idle will go reside elsewhere
Combien de nos chairs se repaissent / How much of our flesh have they consumed
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours, / But if these ravens, these vultures
Un de ces matins disparaissent, / Disappear one of these days
Le soleil brillera toujours / The sun will shine forever
Chorus
La raison tonne en son cratère, / Reason thunders in its volcano
C’est l’éruption de la fin / This is the eruption of the end
Du passé faisons table rase, / Lets make a clean slate of the past
Foule esclave, debout, debout, / Enslaved masses, arise, arise
Le monde va changer de base / The world is is going to change its foundation
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout / We are nothing, we will be all
Chorus:
C’est la lutte finale / This is the final struggle
Groupons-nous, et demain, / Group together, and tomorrow
L’Internationale, / The Internationale
Sera le genre humain. / Will be the human race
Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes, / There are no supreme saviors
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun, / Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune
Producteurs sauvons-nous nous-mêmes / Producers, let us save ourselves
Décrétons le salut commun / Decree the common salvation
Pour que le voleur rende gorge, / So that the thief expires
Pour tirer l’esprit du cachot, / To free the spirit from its cell
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge, / Let us fan the forge ourselves
Battons le fer tant qu’il est chaud / Strike while the iron’s hot
Chorus
L’État comprime et la loi triche, / The State oppresses and the law cheats
L’impôt saigne le malheureux; / Tax bleeds the unfortunate
Nul devoir ne s’impose au riche, / No duty is imposed on the rich
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux. / The right of the poor is an empty phrase
C’est assez languir en tutelle, / Enough languishing in custody
L’égalité veut d’autres lois: / Equality wants other laws
«Pas de droits sans devoirs, dit-elle, / No rights without duties she says
Égaux, pas de devoirs sans droits!» / Equally, no duties without rights
Chorus
Hideux dans leur apothéose, / Hideous in their apotheosis
Les rois de la mine et du rail, / The kings of the mine and the rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose, / Have they ever done anything
Que dévaliser le travail? / Than steal work?
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande, / Inside the strong-boxes of the gangs
Ce qu’il a créé s’est fondu. / What work has created is melted
En décrétant qu’on le lui rende, / By ordering that they give it back
Le peuple ne veut que son dû. / The people only want their due
Chorus
Les Rois nous saoulaient de fumées, / The kings made us drunk with fumes
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans / Peace among us, war to the tyrants
Appliquons la grève aux armées, / Let the armies go on strike
Crosse en l’air et rompons les rangs / Stocks in the air, and break ranks
S’ils s’obstinent, ces cannibales, / If these cannibals insist
A faire de nous des héros, / On making heroes of us
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles / They will know soon enough that our bullets
Sont pour nos propres généraux. / Are for our own generals
Chorus
Ouvriers, Paysans, nous sommes / Workers, peasants, we are
Le grand parti des travailleurs; / The great party of laborers
La terre n’appartient qu’aux hommes, / The earth belongs only to men
L’oisif ira loger ailleurs. / The idle will go reside elsewhere
Combien de nos chairs se repaissent / How much of our flesh have they consumed
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours, / But if these ravens, these vultures
Un de ces matins disparaissent, / Disappear one of these days
Le soleil brillera toujours / The sun will shine forever
Chorus
“If socialism wasn’t born of the Commune, it is from the Commune
that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer
wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed,
but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and
every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an
end to the capitalist regime.” —Edouard Vaillant, a member of the Paris Commune.
" History has no like example of a like greatness... to these Parisians storming heaven" - Karl Marx.
Long live the memory of the Paris Commune / Vive la Commune!
Further reading :-
History of the Paris Commune - Lissagary
Voltarine de Cleyre on the Paris Commune
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre-the-paris-commune?v=1575118490
The Paris Commune: Revolution and counter revolution in Paris 1870 -1871
https://libcom.org/history/paris-commune-revolution-counterrevolution-paris-1870-1871
Communards at the barricades.
Painting by Diego Riviera
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