Paris Commune (1871): Revolution and the Bloody Week

The Paris Commune was a revolutionary government that ruled Paris for just over two months, from 18 March to 28 May 1871, after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It introduced radical measures on labour, religion and local democracy before the army of the national government retook the city in la Semaine sanglante, the Bloody Week. The Commune became one of the most argued-over episodes in modern European history, a symbol for socialists and a warning for conservatives.

Background: defeat, siege and a divided France

The Commune was born from military disaster. In the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III surrendered with his army at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September 1870. Two days later republicans in Paris proclaimed the Third Republic, but German armies soon surrounded the capital.

The siege of Paris lasted from September 1870 to January 1871. Parisians ate horses, dogs, rats and animals from the zoo, and in early January the Germans shelled the city. The defence relied heavily on the National Guard, a citizen militia that swelled to some 300,000 men, many of them workers who depended on its small daily pay. An armistice was signed on 28 January 1871.

Elections in February produced a National Assembly dominated by monarchists and rural conservatives who wanted peace. Paris, by contrast, had voted largely for republicans and radicals. The Assembly chose the veteran politician Adolphe Thiers as head of the executive, moved its seat to Versailles rather than Paris, ended the wartime moratorium on rents and commercial debts, and cut the pay of most National Guardsmen. Many Parisians feared that the monarchy would be restored and that the city’s sacrifices during the siege were being ignored.

The uprising of 18 March

In the early morning of 18 March 1871, Thiers sent troops to remove the cannon that the National Guard had parked on the heights of Montmartre and Belleville. The guns had largely been paid for by public subscription, and Parisians regarded them as their own. Crowds gathered, soldiers refused to fire and many fraternised with the National Guard.

During the day two generals, Claude Lecomte and Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas, were seized and shot by an angry crowd. Thiers decided not to fight for the city. He ordered the army and government officials to withdraw to Versailles, leaving the Central Committee of the National Guard in control of Paris.

The Central Committee organised municipal elections on 26 March. The new council, elected mainly by working-class and lower-middle-class districts, was proclaimed as the Commune of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville on 28 March. Short-lived communes were also declared in Lyon, Marseille, Saint-Étienne and other towns, but they were quickly put down.

Who ran the Commune

The Commune’s council of around 90 members was a mixture rather than a single party. It included old-style Jacobin republicans inspired by 1793, followers of the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui (who had been arrested the day before the uprising and spent the whole Commune in prison), followers of the anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and members of the International Workingmen’s Association, often called the First International.

Among the best-known figures were the bookbinder and trade unionist Eugène Varlin, the veteran journalist Louis Charles Delescluze and the painter Gustave Courbet. Women played an unusually visible role. The teacher Louise Michel fought with the National Guard and nursed the wounded, while Élisabeth Dmitrieff and Nathalie Le Mel organised the Women’s Union for the Defence of Paris and Care of the Wounded, which set up women’s workshops.

Divisions between a “majority” that wanted centralised revolutionary power and a “minority” that defended individual liberties grew sharper over time. On 1 May the majority created a Committee of Public Safety, a deliberate echo of the French Revolution, which the minority opposed.

Reforms in a besieged city

Despite war with Versailles, the Commune passed a striking range of measures in a few weeks:

• Church and state: a decree of 2 April separated church and state and ended public funding of religion; many church buildings were used for political clubs.
• Rents and debts: rents owed during the siege were cancelled, and pawned goods of small value could be reclaimed free of charge.
• Labour: night work in bakeries was abolished, fines on workers’ wages were banned, and a decree of 16 April allowed workshops abandoned by their owners to be taken over by workers’ cooperatives.
• Army and administration: conscription and the standing army were abolished in favour of the National Guard, and the salaries of officials were capped near a skilled worker’s wage.
• Education: steps were taken towards free, secular schooling, including for girls.

Many of these measures were only partly carried out before the end. Symbolic acts drew more attention abroad: on 16 May the Communards pulled down the Vendôme Column, a monument to Napoleon I’s victories, and they burned a guillotine in public.

The Bloody Week, 21-28 May 1871

Fighting with Versailles began in early April. A disorganised Communard march on Versailles on 3 April was routed, and captured leaders, including Gustave Flourens and Émile Duval, were killed. The government’s army, commanded by Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, was rebuilt with soldiers released from German prison camps, while German troops still held forts north and east of Paris and stayed neutral.

On 21 May government troops entered Paris through an undefended gate at Point-du-Jour in the south-west. Over the next week they advanced eastward through the city against hundreds of barricades. The Commune had no unified command; most National Guardsmen defended their own neighbourhoods.

The fighting was accompanied by fires and killings on both sides. The Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais d’Orsay and other public buildings were burned, many by Communards as they retreated. Communards shot hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, executed on 24 May, and dozens of priests and gendarmes later in the week. Delescluze walked onto a barricade and was killed on 25 May.

Government troops carried out mass summary executions, sometimes after quick hearings by improvised military courts. Prisoners were shot in parks, barracks and at the Lobau barracks near the Hôtel de Ville. On 27 May fighting reached Père Lachaise cemetery, and on 28 May some 147 captured Communards were shot against a wall there, now known as the Mur des Fédérés. Varlin was captured and shot the same day. The last resistance in Belleville ended on 28 May.

By the numbers

Aftermath and repression

Military courts sat for years. Most of those convicted were sentenced to prison or deportation; a smaller number were executed, among them Louis Rossel, the Commune’s former delegate for war, shot in November 1871. Several thousand Communards were transported to New Caledonia in the Pacific, Louise Michel among them, while others fled to Britain, Belgium and Switzerland. Courbet was imprisoned and later ordered to pay for rebuilding the Vendôme Column.

Paris remained under martial law until 1876. Politically, the defeat of the Commune helped make the Third Republic acceptable to conservative France, because it showed that a republic could restore order. The left in France was weakened for most of the 1870s. A partial amnesty came in 1879 and a full amnesty in July 1880, after which many exiles returned and resumed political life.

The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, voted by the National Assembly in 1873 and built on Montmartre, was conceived as an act of national penance after the defeat of 1870. Its location on the hill where the uprising began meant that many on the left came to see it as a monument against the Commune.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Commune was a communist state. The name comes from commune, the ordinary French word for a municipality, and the Commune’s members held many different views. Its measures were reforming rather than a planned abolition of private property.

Myth: Paris was burned by women incendiaries. Stories of pétroleuses, women supposedly throwing petrol into cellars, spread widely in 1871. Historians have found little evidence for them; fires were set by Communard units for military and symbolic reasons, and also resulted from shelling.

Fact: violence came from both sides, but not equally. Communards killed around a hundred hostages, a real atrocity. The scale of killing by government forces during the Bloody Week was, however, far greater.

Legacy

Karl Marx wrote The Civil War in France within days of the defeat, presenting the Commune as the first government of the working class. Later Lenin and the Bolsheviks studied its failure closely, and the Commune became a founding story for socialist and anarchist movements across the world. The song “L’Internationale” was written by the Communard Eugène Pottier in 1871.

For conservatives, the Commune became a warning of what revolution could bring. In France, the memory of the Bloody Week still divides opinion; the Mur des Fédérés remains a place of annual left-wing commemoration. Historians continue to debate the death toll, the role of the International and how far the Commune looked back to the Revolution of 1789-1794 or forward to the revolutions of the 20th century.

Timeline

• 1870, 2 September: Napoleon III surrenders at Sedan; the Third Republic is proclaimed in Paris two days later.
• 1870, 19 September: German armies complete the encirclement of Paris; the siege begins.
• 1871, 28 January: Armistice ends the siege.
• 1871, 18 March: Attempt to seize the National Guard’s cannon at Montmartre fails; the government withdraws to Versailles.
• 1871, 28 March: The Commune is proclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville.
• 1871, 3 April: Communard march on Versailles is defeated.
• 1871, 16 May: The Vendôme Column is pulled down.
• 1871, 21 May: Government troops enter Paris; the Bloody Week begins.
• 1871, 28 May: Last resistance ends; Communards are shot at the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise.
• 1880, 11 July: Full amnesty for Communards becomes law.

Why it matters

The Paris Commune showed how war, defeat and social tension could combine into revolution in a modern European capital. Its reforms anticipated later debates about secular schooling, workers’ rights and local self-government, while its violent end shaped French politics for a generation and gave the international socialist movement one of its most powerful symbols.