This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

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The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first time in history workers ran society in their own interests. For 72 days, from March 18 to May 28, the ordinary workers of Paris controlled the city—until it was drowned in blood by the French Army.

In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx and Engels said that to achieve socialism the working class must achieve “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Brilliant though they were, Marx and Engels didn’t say exactly how this would happen. Then, as now, Marxism was not about sitting in high towers and devising schemes for a better society. Marx and Engels learned from the struggle itself what form workers’ power would take, and he learned it from the Paris Commune.

The only correction Marx and Engels thought necessary to make to the Communist Manifesto was prompted by the Paris Commune of 1871.

“One thing especially,” wrote Engels, “was proven by the Commune, viz., that the ‘working class cannot lay hold of the ready-made state machine and wield it for its own purposes.’”

And in a letter to a comrade in 1871, during the Paris Commune, Marx wrote, “the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another”—in other words, to replace one repressive, bureaucratic state with another— “but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.”

The Commune showed that workers must destroy the old state machine and replace it with their own organs of direct democracy. That is the great historical significance of the Commune, and why socialists still talk about it today.

For many years after Marx wrote this about the Paris Commune, his ideas were buried and distorted. The socialist movement did not take to heart the lessons of the Commune. Quite the opposite…most socialists actually believed that workers could “lay hold of the ready-made state machine.”

The main purpose of Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet State and Revolution is to show that Marx and Engels were not for workers taking over the state, but smashing it. He had to argue against the main currents of the socialist movement in Germany and elsewhere that identified workers power with taking control of the existing state—usually by electoral means—and using it to implement, by degrees, socialism. In fact, when Lenin exhumed Marx’s ideas about the State and the Paris Commune, he was accused of being an anarchist. We’ll come back at the end in more detail about what Marx learned from the Commune, but first, the story of the Commune needs to be told.

What emerges from looking at the Commune are two things: the struggle of women, which is incredibly inspiring. The activities of revolutionaries like Louis Michel is unsurpassed by any other participant in the revolution. In a society rife with deep sexism—even among the radicals and revolutionaries—the Commune showed the indispensible role of women and the need to link the cause of women’s liberation with that of workers’ emancipation.

Secondly, what emerges is the reality of ordinary working class people coming together and taking a stab at running society themselves. That is the great lesson of the Commune—workers can run society, and the Commune showed for the first time that it was not only possible, but necessary if we are to avoid the inevitable barbarism of world capitalism.

Paris in 1871. It had only recently become transformed by Haussman, Napoleon III’s architect, from as city of small, winding streets into one of wide, spacious boulevards—the more easily for counterrevolutionary troops to get around the city. Not many years before, Paris, like most European cities, was one where the rich and the poor were divided not geographically (except for the super-super-rich), but vertically. The rich lived on the lower floors, the poor in the upper floors. By the late 1860s, this had changed. Workers were displaced from the city centers, forced for the first time to live in working class districts in the outlying areas of the city.

France had a long revolutionary tradition: 1789; 1830; 1848. The tradition of Jacobin, or radical democracy, was still the strongest tradition. But 1848 had marked the emergence of the working class as a new force on the scene. Though Large-scale industry had barely begun to develop, the working class began to engage in large numbers of strikes for the first time in the late 1860s. Troops were used in a strike of steelworkers in 1870 and against Miners in the same year. Workers were just beginning to develop a sense of class consciousness. Nevertheless, the prevalence of small-scale production meant that most workers’ consciousness was still more that of the artisan than that of the industrial worker. Politics of movement were dominated by two tendencies, Blanquism and Proudhonism. Blanqui supported the idea of a revolution on behalf of workers but carried out by a small group of co-conspirators. Proudhon, sometime described as the father of anarchism, was a federalist who supported small-scale production and equal exchange—he opposed strikes and violence, was a sworn enemy of all centralized states, and opposed women’s emancipation. It was his politics that dominated the movement, though there were some, like Louise Michel and Eugene Varlin, who were active in strikes, supported women’s emancipation, and played key roles in the Commune.

The story begins in 1871. France is ruled by a dictator, Napoleon III, elected president on the ruins of the workers uprising in Paris in 1848, he seizes power by force in 1851, declaring himself Emperor. In July of 1870, he launches a war against Prussia as a means to deflect growing popular discontent. But the plan backfires and has the opposite effect. The war begins with Prussia, under the leadership of Otto Von Bismarck, defending itself against the incursion of France. But Prussian successes turn it quickly into a war in which Bismarck, leading a confederation of German states, takes the offensive and marches into France. As the French army suffers defeat after defeat, discontent mounts. The French ruling class, more fearful of an uprising of the masses than of Prussian arms, waves the flag of patriotism, but behind it maneuvers to end the war as quickly as possible.

Then, in early September, the French army is defeated at Sedan. Napoleon III, along with 100,000 troops, is captured. The next day, there are massive street demonstrations in Paris demanding the proclamation of a democratic republic. Workers invade the legislature and force the liberal and bourgeois deputies to proclaim a republic.

Under this pressure, the deputies agree to form a Provisional Government of National Defense in order to, in the words of one deputy, “prevent a revolution from breaking out.” Trochu, the general in charge of Paris, had this to say: “The Provisional Government saved the situation, which otherwise would have been lost. It prevented the demagogues from taking over Paris.”

The new government acted only under the pressure of the masses and the fact that Napoleon had been captured and was out of the picture. They had one thought on their minds: conclude the war as quickly as possible and restore order. By now Bismarck’s armies were laying siege to Paris. The popular sentiment among the Parisian masses was to resist, and among workers there was the well-founded suspicion that the new government wasn’t interested in doing so.

So the provisional government was in a difficult position. It could vigorously counterattack only if it mobilized the Parisian masses. As regular soldiers were drawn to the front, the government began calling up what they considered the more reliable, “bourgeois” battalions of the Parisian National Guard to defend the fortifications surrounding the city. In a burst of patriotic enthusiasm for the defense of Paris, workers in Paris began clamoring that all Parisians be armed. The government was forced to form up over 130 new battalions of the National Guard, swelling its numbers to 300,000, many of them workers. The new government lived in mortal fear, however, that a fully mobilized National Guard, composed mainly of workers and artisans, might turn their guns against them and create  “the commune,” as all revolutionaries called any revolutionary government formed in Paris. It was feared that the demoralized remnants of the French army would not stand up to the Parisian masses. The government was forced to make a distinction between the handful of “good,” i.e. bourgeois battalions and the majority of “bad,” i.e. working-class, battalions in the National Guard. The problem was that the National Guard was the only armed force in Paris. The police—hated as representatives of Napoleon’s despotism—had fled or gone into hiding.

For the masses of Paris, the Government became known as the Government of National Defection. During the siege, Clubs and Committees known as “vigilance committees” sprang up all over Paris, where workers met to argue and discuss their problems. A central committee was formed from these committees that issued a proclamation to workers saying, “Make way for the People, make way for the Commune.”

The Paris masses waited through five months of siege, suffering immense privations while the bourgeoisie thrived on hoarded and black market goods. Finally, in January, the Government signed an armistice with Prussia and prepared for elections to a new National Assembly.

This new assembly was dominated by conservatives, reactionaries, even monarchists, and was deliberately located outside of Paris at Bordeaux, where more conservative, rural elements could dominate it. Paris was effectively abandoned to the National Guard. The leader of the assembly was a man called Adolph Theirs. An historian of the Commune calls Thiers “an astute, hard, unscrupulous, shriveled-up old man, sure of his own superiority over everyone else around him…As a minister under Louis-Philippe he had seen to the savage repression of the workers revolts in Paris and Lyon, of the ‘vile multitude’ as Thiers was later to call them.” He was the most hated politician in Paris. Marx described Theirs as a “monstrous gnome.” Marx continued: “Never in his long political career has he been guilty of a single—even the smallest—measure of any practical use. Theirs was consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred of the men who produce it.”

In response to the election of the conservative assembly (with a monarchists majority), the Parisian National Guard decided to  elect its own Central Committee composed of revocable delegates from each company. After the siege, about 140,000 people, mostly Bourgeois, fled Paris for their country homes. This further strengthened the popular character of the National Guard.

The Parisian masses feared, rightly, that the new assembly would overthrow the republic. The first statute of the new National Guard Central Committee, debated and voted on unanimously by every company, stated the following: “The National Guard protests through the intermediary of its Central Committee against all attempts at disarmament, and declares that it will resist these attempts by force if necessary.” The third point pledged the national guard to recognize only those leaders it appointed. A speech by George Arnold, secretary of the National Guard, gives a flavor of what the armed Parisian working class—because in effect that’s what the National Guard had become—was striving for:

But now that we have won back the right to control our lives we will not part with it. We will no longer put up with alienation, with monarchs, oppressors and exploiters of all kinds who have come to regard their fellow-men as property and who use them for the satisfaction of their criminal instincts.

At the same time, the vigilance committees combined to form what they called a “Revolutionary Socialist Party,” which demanded the following:

They (the vigilance committees)…demand and seek to achieve by every means the abolition of the privileges of the bourgeoisie, its elimination as a ruling caste and the advent of workers to political power. In a word, social equality: no more employers, no more proletariat, no more classes…Until this definitive revolution is accomplished the only government of Paris they recognize is the Revolutionary Commune formed by the delegates of Revolutionary Socialist Groups of the city. The only national government they recognize is the government of political and social renewal formed by the delegates of revolutionary communes of the country and of the principal workers’ centers.

The Bordeaux government also alienated the Parisian middle class by passing a law which gave the citizens four months to pay bills (plus interests) that had build up during the siege and economic crisis in Paris.

This posed serious problems for Theirs and his new government. Part of the agreement with the Prussians included not only the right of the Prussian army to march into Paris, but the demobilization of the French army. As I said, this meant that really the only armed power in Paris was the National Guard. The problem for Theirs and co., then, was how to disarm the National Guard. Theirs moved the government from Bordeaux to Versailles, so as to be closer to Paris if the army (once reconstituted) needed to put down an uprising there.

 On March 1 the Prussian army marched victoriously through Paris. In order to prevent the Prussians from taking the cannons of Paris, the Parisian National Guard rounded up all the cannons and moved them to the Butte Montmartre, a hill in a working class section of Paris.

 Then came the key moment on March 18. Theirs decided to take back the cannons. He sent troops to Montmartre to take down the cannons, but in their haste his generals had forgotten to bring the horses. The delay allowed the workers to act. The women who came out early in the morning to get their bread saw what was happening and started to spread the news.  Some women went to the churches and sounded the bells. Several hundred women stormed up the hill to save the cannons. As one eyewitness report relates:

The women and children were swarming up the hill-side in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the action of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movements clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude…

At that moment the National Guard arrived; they had great difficulty in breaking through the crowd who were obstinately clinging to the wheels.

The women, especially, were crying out in fury: ‘Unharness the horses! Away with you! We want the cannons! We shall have the cannons!’

Women with knives then moved in and cut the straps for the horses to pull the guns. The were then surrounded by the crowd and offered food—which wins them over. The cannons were retaken. But still the main force of Gendarmes, police, cavalry and a battalion of the 88th hadn’t broken. The General in Charge, Lecompte, isn’t yet aware of what has taken place, and is confident he can win. The eyewitness account continues:

The National Guard all raise their rifle-butts in the air and awaited the results of the confrontation…

At that moment General Lecompte appeared.

It must be pointed out that up to then no officer of the light infantry had given orders to fire.

The General must have realized the battalion was unreliable, so he came to take command of it himself.

The crowd of women and children massed at the entrance of the Rue Muller saw that the General was about to give orders to fire. They gave way to a spontaneous movement and, instead of fleeing, threw themselves in front of the infantrymen, shouting, ‘Don’t fire!’

The soldiers obeyed. The crowd halted.

‘Shoulder arms!’

Rifle-butts were pressed against shoulders, barrels were lowered. A shiver went through the crowd, but noone moved.

A brief but profound silence, then the shout: ‘Fire!’

An agonizing suspense. The Federals made ready to avenge the crowd should the troops fire. But the soldiers refuse to obey.

One rifle was raised, then ten, then a hundred, as though the shadow of death that had been hovering over the crowd had suddenly flown away and spared them.

The General sternly rebuked the infantrymen; he pointed a revolver at them and threatened to blow the brains out of anyone who refused to fire.

The Federals saw him and heard his words. He repeated the order to fire three times. He was even overheard to say the following words: ‘Fire at least once for the sake of honor!’

Nothing could move the soldiers or provoke them to action; they remained impassive.

The General was beside himself with rage. ‘Are you going to surrender to that scum?’, he cried contemptuously.

A soldier then replied in these very words: ‘That is exactly what we want to do.’ And he threw down his rifle.

At that point Lalande, the Federal captain who had come to parley, place his hand on the General’s shoulder and said: ‘It is you who must surrender.’

Four generals were seized and shot by the people. But all in all, it was a relatively bloodless affair. Realizing that the National Guard had saved the cannons, Theirs panicked and immediately signed an order for the evacuation of Paris. His government and what remained of the army fled for Versailles, leaving the city in the hands of the National Guard. He had actually planned for this as a possible contingency. He was at this time more farsighted than the Communards themselves, as we shall see. From the beginning he thought that it might be necessary to flee Paris—in order to rebuild the army and march back and retake it by force.

A company of National Guard headed by a member of the International, Varlin (one of the most left wing and capable future leaders of the Commune who had played a prominent role in an 1870 strike of steel workers at Le Cruesot), moved in and occupied the Hotel DeVille, the traditional seat of Parisian revolutions. Here, one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Commune made itself felt from the start—its lack of centralism. For it actually took some time for the Central Committee to find Guard battalions willing to venture outside their own neighborhoods. This parochialism flowed from the conditions of the working class—it had yet to experience the natural centralism that flows from being concentrated into larger workplaces.

Events had completely outstripped the Central Committee, which was composed almost entirely of workers with very little experience of leading others. There was a lack of clarity about what had happened. A few of the more resolute members of the Committee argued that it was necessary to act while the Guard had the initiative, the troops few and demoralized, and the government on the run.

More experienced members of the Committee, such as Émile Victor Duval—a member of the International who had played an active part in the strike movement for several years—argued that the National Guard should immediately march on Versailles, disperse the National Assembly, and rally all of France behind the workers of Paris. Louise Michel and Andre Leo—both revolutionaries and staunch advocates of women’s rights—also favored an immediate march on Versailles as the only means to secure power. For them, it was clear that the National Guard had embarked on a social revolution that could not stop halfway.

Unfortunately, the majority of the committee did not see things that way. They voted down marching on Versailles and in fact wanted nothing more than to divest themselves of their newfound power. They therefore immediately put out a call for elections for a Commune to run Paris. 20,000 disorganized troops were allowed to leave Paris for Versailles unhindered.

They were concerned with legality, and many conceived their actions in purely local terms, as a municipal revolt restricted to Paris. Proudhonism here acted as a damaging influence on the struggle. One member of the Central Committee put it this way, “We did not know what to do. We did not want to take possession of the Hôtel De Ville… We were very embarrassed by our authority.” And really no wonder; the committee had only been elected 3 days prior to the revolution.

This was the first and most tragic mistake, for it meant that Theirs and co. would have time to rebuild an army and march on Paris. In just over a month the French army would be laying siege to Paris.

The Commune was elected on March 28 by male suffrage—women did not vote. Since the majority of the Bourgeoisie had fled the city, the Commune was elected entirely by workers, artisans and small shopkeepers. About a third of the delegates were ordinary workers.

Workers were for the first time in history had taken power into their own hands.

A statement by the Central committee of the National Guard, issued on April 28, the day Versailles troops began to attack Paris, reveals clearly the nature of the Commune and how the workers of Paris viewed it:

Workers, make no mistake—this is all-out war, a war between parasites and workers, exploiters and producers. If you are tired of vegetating in ignorance and poverty; if you want your children to grow up to enjoy the fruits of their labor rather than be some sort of animal reared for the factory or battlefield, increasing some exploiter’s fortune by the sweat of  their brow or shedding their blood for a tyrant; if you no longer want your daughters, whom you cannot raise and care for as you wish, to be instruments of pleasure for the aristocracy of money; if you no longer want poverty and debauchery to drive men into the police force and women into prostitution; finally, if you want justice to reign, workers, use your intelligence, arise! Let your strong hands crush the loathsome forces of reaction!

Marx had initially argued that a revolution in Paris was premature, and would be folly to embark upon. He was no doubt right—all of France was not ripe for social revolution. But given the fact of workers’ power in Paris, Marx became immediately its most ardent supporter and defender. His writings on the Paris Commune are incredibly inspiring, and it was he who recognized that the Commune represented nothing less than the working-class in power—what he and Engels called “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Its own working existence, Marx said, was its greatest achievement. It proved against all the reactionaries and elitists that workers could take power and run society.

What did the Commune look like? The best way to describe it is to quote what Marx had to say about it in his address to the general council of the International, the Civil War in France:

The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time…

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

The Commune, said Marx, destroyed the standing army and the bureaucracy. “The first decree of the Commune,” said Marx, “was the suppression of the standing army, and its substitution by the armed people.”

The old state was done away with and replaced by a new, democratic form of working-class rule:

The Commune was formed of municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class…Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials and other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves…

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of their sham independence…Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible and revocable.

This was the great lesson that Marx learned from the Commune: workers cannot take over the existing state, but must create their own organs of power, under the direct control of workers themselves.

The Commune lasted just over two months. For most of that time it had to focus its attention on fighting off the Versailles troops. But the social measures that it implemented and set out to implement, indicate its direction; Abolition of night work for bakers, Abolition of fines on the job, separation of church and state, reduction of the working day, the elimination of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, free compulsory and secular education for both sexes, deferment of overdue rents, creation of day-nurseries near every workplace, equalization of teachers wages for men and women, and confiscation of abandoned workshops to be run under workers’ control.

In these measures are both the greatness and the weakness of the commune—for no attempt was made to expropriate the owners of the biggest factories and workshops, and the central bank was not seized. There was not a universal movement by workers to take hold of the means of production, as happened in Russia in 1917. The economic basis for such a movement hadn’t yet developed. Paris in 1871 was not a modern industrial city. Paris was a city of about 1.8 million people, but France was still predominantly a rural society. The 1872 census showed that 44 percent of workers were industrial workers. Fifteen factories employed more than 100 workers each, a further 100 factories employed between 20 and 50 workers. Small-scale production remained the norm. Throughout France, 60 percent of industrial workers still worked in workshops employing less than ten workers. This explains why the commune was organized geographically, rather than by workplace. In Russia in 1917, the Putilov steel works along employed over 10,000 workers. Workers naturally formed councils, or soviets, based on their power at the point of production, the workplace, whereas the commune was organized geographically. Nevertheless, the commune was a workers’ government, not only because it abolished the distinction between legislative and executive power, and because its delegates were payed a workers’ wage and instantly recallable, but because the bourgeoisie had fled the city and therefore did not participate in the elections. Much in the same way that the National Guard, though ostensibly an instrument of bourgeois order, was, by the fact that workers dominated it, a de-facto workers’ militia.

Yet because the Commune was elected geographically rather than by workplace, it was more difficult for workers to hold their delegates accountable. Moreover, because many leaders in the Commune not only lacked experience, but were not confident in their new-found power, often the Commune spent far too much time talking and not enough time acting. It tended to waste precious time in long debates and neglected its most impending task—the systematic preparation of the Paris masses to militarily resist the counter-revolutionary troops. This was also a political problem, for many of the leaders in the Commune were not resolute working-class fighters with a clear sense, like Michel, Varlin and Duval, of the way to fight and win, but of Proudhonists who applauded the isolation of Paris and refused to organize an adequate defense.

The workers of Paris, though, didn’t just elect their delegates and go home. They formed clubs and committees in which they constantly met to discuss politics, tactics and strategy. They met not just to talk, but to organize the defense of Paris against the counterrevolution, more often than not with women playing the most prominent role.

To give you a flavor of these meetings, which were usually held in churches against the wishes of the priests, here is one meeting of the Club Saint-Leu, held on May 6 in the local church, reported on by someone not altogether sympathetic to its proceedings:

The first meeting took place on 6 May. It was chaired by Citizen Boilot who put the following motion on the agenda:

“Ought we to shoot the rich or merely make them give back what they have stolen from the people?”…

One can easily imagine, given the audience of thieves and drunkards, what friendly discourse and conciliatory Citizeness Rochon, a woman of the streets, was of the opinion that one should have no regard for “the Croesuses of the world.” (Croesus was a rich king: a “Croesus” was slang for a rich person). Another woman speaker advocated that all rich people have their incomes levelled to the sum of 500 francs. Finally, after prolonged discussion, the meeting decided that they should limit themselves to making the rich cough up, leaving it open whether to shoot them later.

Though women were not given the vote in the Commune, they played perhaps the most heroic and inspiring role in the Commune. They did this in a society where women were not allowed to divorce, and were consistently viewed and treated as inferior beings, the servants of men. Proudhon, one of the most popular figures on the left, was an extreme sexist. His views reflected the individualism of the artisan and the shopkeeper, as well as their patriarchal attitudes toward women. Only two careers are open to women, he declared,“housewife or harlot.” “Every woman who dreams of emancipation has lost, ipso facto, the health of her soul, the lucidity of her intellect, the virginity of her heart.”

That didn’t stop women from taking their rightful place in the revolution. Everywhere they showed the most energy and the most fighting spirit. I’ve already mentioned that women often predominated in many of the club meetings, and were the most revolutionary and the most scornful of men not willing to take up arms and fight for the commune. Nathalie Duval, a long-standing revolutionary, offered this description of a speech at a women’s club meeting just days before the fall of the Commune: “Mrs. Lemel did not make a long speech. She urged the women to take up arms in defense of the Commune and to fight to the last drop of  their blood. ‘The decisive moment is coming,’ she cried, ‘when we must be prepared to die for our country. No more weakness, no more hesitation! To arms, all of you! Let every woman do her duty! We must stamp out the Versailles!’”

Louise Michel was one of the most heroic figure of the Commune. A schoolteacher and member of the International, Louise Michel was passionately dedicated to the workers’ struggle and to the emancipation of women. She was everywhere, exhorting, organizing, speaking, and was one of the main organizers of the Vigilance committees. She was one of many who ran through the streets of Paris sounding the alarm when Theirs tried to take back the Cannons on Montmartre. And, as we shall soon see, she played a heroic role on the barricades defending the revolution.

What is so incredible about the Commune is that it was a festival of the oppressed, even as the French army was  fighting its way back into Paris, bombarding the city in order to gain entry. Like all revolutions, the Commune brought forth the immense creativity and energy among ordinary people that are ordinarily crushed by oppression, poverty and exploitation. Free concerts were held in confiscated palaces, everywhere there were endless meetings; and dancing and singing.

Here is a description by one participant of Paris not long before the Commune fell:

Would you believe it? Paris is fighting and singing! Paris is about to be attacked by a ruthless and furious army and she laughs! Paris is hemmed in on all sides by trenches and fortifications, and yet there are corners within these formidable walls where people still laugh!

Paris does not only have soldiers, she has singers too. She has both cannon and violins; she makes both Orsini bombs and music. The clash of cymbals can be heard in the dreadful silence between rounds of firing, and merry dance mingles with the rattle of machine guns…

The atmosphere we breathe is laden with hatred. The sky above us is no longer blue, its azure is marred by the smoke of burning villages; even the sun’s rays come to us through the red glow of shell and machine-gun fire. Laughter alone, the eternal prerogative of man, survives, splendid and invincible, in a world of ruins.

But the workers of Paris did more than laugh—they fought, 60,000 of them, in a furious week-long defense of the city that became known as bloody week.

No matter the outcome, the Commune had shown how a revolution raises up workers estimation of themselves and brings out the best in humanity. Wrote one woman Communard, Andre Leo (another who knew that the commune was doomed for not spreading the revolution and marching on Versailles.):

The soldier of the present revolution is of the people. Just yesterday, he was in his little shop, his chest bent down to his knees, plying his awl or his needle, or hammering iron. How many people passed by without knowing, without believing, that a man was there? Today, this stonecutter, this shoemaker, this carpenter, this smith suddenly straightens up and, putting aside his tool and his apron, heads for the battlefield. He does the greatest thing that a human being can do: he dedicates himself to his faith, he fights for an idea whose victory he may not be there to see. This poor man gives the precious human good—his life—to humanity.

Women like Andre Leon and Louise Michel urged women to take up arms along side the men, but the male communards were reluctant to let the women fight. Nevertheless, women like Louise Michel and others whose names we shall never know, forced their way into the struggle, and played a crucial role in the battle as ambulance workers, canteen workers and soldiers. Women demanded decent guns to fight, and often displayed more bravery under fire. Louise Michel was such a good fighter that the Federals gave her a Remington—the best rifle in use at the time. She was equally adept as a nurse and as a soldier. She was also a great orator who kept up the morale of the fighters. At the end of the fighting, she offered herself up for arrest in exchange for her mother who had been arrested.

But most women are unknown to us. Edith Thomas, historian of women in the Commune, writes:

Even the most ardent antifeminists have rarely denied that women have courage. A Neiully, a canteen workers with a head wound had the wound dressed and then returned to combat. Another, chased by a gendarme, suddenly turned around and killed him point-blank. Her comrades and the crowed cheered when she came back within the walls of Paris. On the Chatillon Plain, a canteen worker was the last to retreat, with a group of National Guards, and turned around every minute to fire her gun again. In the 137th Battalion, a young canteen workers—almost a child—never stopped firing the cannon despite the shells, coming from Chatillon, which were falling all around her.

Such scenes were repeated over and over again all over Paris.         

French troops began entering the city on May 21. Unfortunately, the Commune leaders had spent too much time talking and not enough time preparing for the fight. Paris workers were left to defend the city, barricade by barricade, with no overall plan. Nevertheless, workers showed immense daring and heroism, some of which I’ve described. But ultimately, the Commune was crushed in an orgy of hateful violence.

Here again, Edith Thomas describes the last efforts of defense:

The barricade on the Place du chateau-D’Eau exerted a sort of fascination. An English medical student, who had set up an ambulance along side it, tells us: “Just at the moment when the National Guard began to retreat, a women’s battalion turned up; they came forward on the double and began to fire, crying ‘long live the Commune.’ They were armed with Snider carbines, and shot admirably. They fought like devils…” Fifty two were killed there. Among them, a girl in her twenties, dressed  like a member of the Fusilier Marin, “rosy and beautiful with her curly black hair,” fought all day long; Marie M., whose first name at least we know among all these dead, anonymous women who will never be counted. The English student goes on:

“A poor woman was fighting in a cart, sobbing bitterly. I offered her a glass wine and a piece of bread. She refused, saying ‘for the little time I have left to live, it isn’t worth the trouble.’ The woman was taken by four soldiers, who undressed her. An officer interrogated her: “You have killed two of my men.’ The woman began to laugh  ironically and replied harshly: ‘May god punish me for not having killed more. I had two sons at Issy; they were both killed. And two at Neuilly. My husband died at this barricade—and now do what you want with me.’ I did not hear any more; I crawled away, but not soon enough to avoid hearing the command ‘fire,’ which told me everything was over.”

 In the week that it took to subdue Paris, the Versailles troops slaughtered 25,000 workers—thousands were left in the street in piles. The ruling class, the rich and their military machine, wreaked a vengeance on almost having lost their wealth and their power that makes the violence committed by workers in revolt pale in comparison. Thousands were taken prisoner and marched in shackles to Versailles. All along the way, bourgeois men and women came out to spit and jeer at the “canaille” (scum). Society women came out and beat captured communards with their parasols. General Gallifet picked out 100 men to be shot on the spot because they had gray hair and were therefore participants in the 1848 revolution. A self-proclaimed bourgeois noted his thoughts when he saw the piles of corpses along the streets of Paris:

What sewers, what jails could have spewed forth these ferocious brutes? How an honest man delights to see these corpses riddled with bullets, befouled and rotting. The stink of their corpses is the odor of peace. We should find it a pleasure to wash our hands in their blood.

Louise Michel was put on trial for her part in the Commune. This was here speech to the court:

I do not want to defend myself; I do not want to be defended. I belong entirely to the Social Revolution, and I declare that I accept full responsibility for all my actions. I accept it entirely and unreservedly…I have been told that I am an accomplice to the Commune. Certainly, yes; for the Commune wanted, above all else, the Social Revolution, and the Social Revolution is the dearest of my desires. Even more, I am honored in being one of the supporters of the Commune.

Standing before a military tribunal, she taunted them to kill her:

Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has to right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. I you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance…If you are not cowards, kill me.

The court banished her to an island fortress.

We already discussed one of the most important lessons Marx learned; that workers cannot take over the state as it exists, but must destroy it and build anew. The commune began that process, but didn’t finish it. For that, the Workers of Paris would have had to march immediately on Versailles and overthrow the National Assembly, disarm the army and begun spreading the revolution to other cities.

The aftermath of the Commune produced a howl of reaction worldwide from the Bourgeois press. Everywhere, the International was blamed for the commune, and a wave of persecution—which only helped to enhance its prestige—swept through Europe and the United States. Everything was blamed on the International, including the Chicago fire of 1871—said by some to be started by a “terrorist” associated with the Commune.

The Commune was crushed, but it left a legacy that has far outlasted its brief existence, showing us all that workers and oppressed people are capable of taking power and running society in their own interests.

Finally, it showed us that the kind of state workers need is one that quickly suppresses the old order and makes itself obsolete. In his preface to Marx’s writings on the commune, Engels says that people are brought up to have an almost superstitious reverence for the state, but that the commune showed that workers must shatter the old state and replace it by a new, democratic state. He says that people are so used to the idea that society cannot run without the state. “In reality,” he concludes, “ the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another; and indeed, in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.”

Sources and further reading

Marx and Engels, On the Paris Commune (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976)

Engels, On the 20the Anniversary of the Paris Commune: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

Marx, Civil War in France: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm

Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune (London: Quadrangle, 1973)

Steward Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Documents of the Revolution) (Cornell University Press, 1973)

Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007)

Edith Thomas, Louise Michel (Black Rose Books, 2009)

Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (London: Verso, 2012); also: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/archive/lissagaray/index.htm

Documents of the Paris Commune: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/documents/index.htm

Lenin, The State and Revolution: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/