Seventy-two days that haunted Marx and French politics
The Paris Commune seized the French capital on 18 March 1871 and held parts of the city until 28 May. For two months Communards chased progressive, often anti-clerical experiments mixing socialist, anarchist, and republican schools of thought.
The spark was military humiliation. On 2 September 1870 France lost at Sedan and Napoleon III was taken prisoner; when the news reached Paris next day, Empress Eugénie fled, the Second Empire fell apart, and deputies declared a republic determined to keep fighting as Prussian columns advanced. During the siege that followed, many wealthier residents left while refugees poured in, and the National Guard defending the city grew steadily more radical. After the army's final defeat and the rise of Adolphe Thiers as chief executive, guardsmen took over the capital on 18 March 1871.
The country was split. In the 1869 elections Bonapartist candidates won about 4.4 million votes nationally against roughly 3.35 million for their opponents, yet in Paris republicans crushed them by 234,000 to 77,000. Of the city's two million inhabitants, about half a million were industrial workers, mostly in small textile, furniture and building workshops rather than factories, alongside 115,000 servants, 45,000 concierges and some 100,000 immigrants and exiles, many Italian and Polish. Workers and newcomers hit hardest by the idle economy became the Commune's base.
In power, the Communards separated church from state, closed Catholic churches and schools, cancelled rents, banned child labour and let employees take over businesses their owners had abandoned. Feminists, communists, reformist social democrats and Proudhonist anarchists all pulled in different directions.
The end was savage. The army attacked during the bloody week from 21 May, killing in combat or executing an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Communards, with one unverified 1876 figure reaching 20,000; the Commune itself shot Archbishop Georges Darboy and about a hundred hostages. Of 43,522 prisoners, including 1,054 women, most were freed quickly; about 13,500 were convicted and 1,169 deported, largely to New Caledonia. Everyone was pardoned in 1880. Marx and Engels hailed Paris as the first dictatorship of the proletariat, giving the episode a long afterlife in socialist thought.
Source: Paris Commune
