Paris Commune

The Paris Commune emerged from catastrophe. France had just lost the Franco-Prussian War, signing the Treaty of Frankfurt on May 10, 1871—though by then the Commune was already dead. The sequence began in September 1870 when Prussian forces surrounded Paris, triggering a four-month siege. The city starved. When an armistice came in January 1871, Parisians felt betrayed: the war seemed winnable, or at least not definitively lost. The French government, now led by Adolphe Thiers, relocated to Versailles and began disarming the National Guard, the citizen militia that had defended the city. On March 18, 1871, government troops tried to seize cannons the Guard had positioned on Montmartre. Parisians blocked them. Shots were fired. Two generals, Claude Lecomte and Thomas Clement, were executed by the crowd. The city erupted.

By March 26, Parisians had elected a new governing body, the Commune, with representatives from each arrondissement. It was not a unified vision—radicals, socialists, anarchists, and republicans all competed for influence. The Commune abolished the police, attempted to seize Church property, set rents at pre-siege levels, and instituted various labor protections. The most dramatic move came on May 16, 1871, when the Vendôme Column—a symbol of imperial power erected by Napoleon—was toppled. Louise Michel, a schoolteacher and fierce Commune supporter, participated in that symbolic demolition. The government in Versailles watched with fury. Thiers saw the Commune not as misguided idealism but as existential threat to property and order.

The final assault began May 21, 1871. Government forces, now numbering around 130,000, breached Paris's walls and methodically retook the city block by block over seven days. Parisians built barricades in narrow streets. The fighting was vicious. Photographs from the period, among the first war images systematically documented, show the wreckage. The Communards set fires as they retreated—the Tuileries Palace burned, along with other landmarks. By May 28, the Commune was finished. The death toll remains contested: official estimates put it at around 20,000, though some historians argue for higher numbers. Executions of suspected Communards continued for weeks afterward. Nearly 40,000 were arrested; many were deported to New Caledonia.

Louise Michel survived the initial purges but was captured and deported to New Caledonia in 1873. Karl Marx, watching from London, published The Civil War in France in 1871, treating the Commune as a revolutionary experiment worthy of serious study rather than dismissal. He was largely alone in that assessment. French and European elites treated the Commune as a cautionary tale about mob rule. In Paris itself, the event was suppressed from public memory for decades—monuments were rebuilt without acknowledgment of what had occurred. Yet the Commune persisted in leftist imagination as proof that workers could, briefly, govern themselves. Whether it was a failed workers' revolution or a confused popular uprising remains debated. What's certain: for 72 days in 1871, Paris belonged to Parisians, not to capital or throne.