150 years ago 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 independent, 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.
It is said to be one of the first examples of working people taking power.
This radical experiment in socialist self government lasted 72 days
before being violently being crushed in a brutal massacre that
established France's Third republic.
This rebellion would shake the
foundations of European society to the core, the people rising up
against a despised and detested government and its its capitalist
rulers proclaiming the city an independent municipality, belonging to
itself . 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 of the
proletariat seizing political power. Taking charge of their own
destiny.
The Paris Commune came into being in the context of the Franco-Prussian
war which led to the collapse of the Second French Empire under the rule
of Napoleon III, which was replaced by the Third Republic in late 1870.
The Prussian army had surrounded Paris and held the city under a siege
for around 4 month in the cold winter of 1870/71. It is reported that
the people in Paris first ate the animals in the zoo and later rats in
order to survive. Eventually, the French army surrendered and accepted
the conditions for the peace treaty imposed by Bismarck.
The city of Paris was mostly defended by the National Guard instead
of the regular army. A large fraction of the National Guard were
proletarians, some of which were said to be undisciplined 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. However, those early attempts were repressed and foiled. An
important detail of the peace deal between the French army and the
Prussians was the fact that the National Guard were allowed to keep
their weapons in order to “maintain law and order” in Paris.
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 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 and every year, thousands, and
sometimes, as in 1971, tens of thousands, of French people, but also
people from all over the world, visit this exalted place of memory of
the labour movement. They come alone or in demonstrations, with red
flags or flowers, and 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.
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.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 legacy 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.
“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.
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.
