The Paris Commune A Brief History

CAROLYN J. E I CHNER

“This compelling account of the Paris Commune makes a complicated event understandable and vivid. Eichner’s rich portraits bring to life the freedom and empowerment the Communards experienced, juxtaposed with the bloody repression of its nal days.”

—Sarah Fishman, author of From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France

At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to re, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France’s revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day con ict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the nal insurgent burst of the French Revolution’s long wake, for others the rst “successful” socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socioeconomic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty- rst centuries, keeping alive the revolution’s now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event. The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.

CAROLYN J. EICHNER teaches in the Departments of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her books include Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune and Feminism’s Empire Introducing a new series: Reinventions of the Paris Commune (see Literature and Revolution:British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871 on page 22)

144 pp 2 b/w, 8 color images 5.5 x 8.5

978-1-9788-2768-4 paper $19.95T

978-1-9788-2769-1 cloth $65.00SU

March 2022

History

Table of Contents

1. Illumination

2. Fluorescence

3. Explosion Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography Index