À La Carte

The commune that wanted to change the world

by Lynne Wigmore

There is a wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris known as “Le Mur des Fédérés”. It was there that the last fighters of the Paris Commune were shot in May 1871 by Versailles troops. Every year, thousands of both French and international tourists visit this exalted memorial of the labour movement to honour their memories.

The Commune de Paris was established on 18 March 1871 and governed Paris for two months, until 28 May, with policies that tended toward a progressive, anti-religious system of social democracy. Feminist, socialist, and anarchist currents played important roles in the Commune, although they had very little time to achieve their respective goals. Much of what led to the formation of the Paris Commune can be traced back to a series of revolutions between 1789 and 1848, during which time a sentiment of revolution had taken hold within Paris. France lost the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, which led to the siege of Paris and the resulting peace treaty in January 1871. Many left-wing Parisians were dissatisfied with this outcome and felt that the war should have continued. As part of the armistice agreement, Prussian troops were barred from Paris and the National Guard (a volunteer army of mostly industrial workers) were retained to keep order in the capital. When a right-wing majority was returned during the February National elections, the Parisian revolutionaries felt unrepresented, fearing a return to a Monarchy. 400, now-obsolete, bronze cannons that had been paid for by the Paris public via a subscription remained in the city after the war. The new Central Committee of the National Guard, now dominated by radicals, decided to put the cannons in parks in working-class neighbourhoods to keep them away from the regular army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. Adolphe Thiers – chief executive of the Third Republic and orchestrator of the armistice – was equally determined to bring the cannons under national-government control. The National Guard refused to stand-down, supported by many Parisian citizens, and the resulting hostilities led to the death of two government generals and a military retreat from Paris. The national government was relocated to Versailles and the Paris Commune was born. Many of the bourgeois citizens of Paris elected to leave Paris at this time, aligning themselves with the government. March 26th saw the election to the Commune Council of 60 members – one for every 20,000 residents. Women were not allowed a vote and only 48% of eligible voters chose to do so. Those not voting were predominently better off and more right wing. There were many differences between the council members representing the city arrondissments; the more revolutionary council members wanted to introduce radical new ideas.

The new Commune held its first meeting on 28 March in a euphoric mood. The members adopted a dozen proposals: the abolition of the death penalty; the abolition of military conscription, although all healthy male citizens were to be members of the National Guard; a proposal to send delegates to other cities to help launch communes there; and a resolution declaring that membership in the Paris Commune was incompatible with being a member of the National Assembly. A resolution was also passed, after a long debate, that Council discussions were to be secret, since the Commune was effectively at war with the government in Versailles and should not make its intentions known to the enemy. The Commune met on fewer than sixty days in total, so only a few decrees were actually implemented, but these included the separation of Church and state, labour laws to reduce working hours and the abolition of child labour. They focused upon social initiatives such as soup kitchens, free schools for children, pensions for unmarried companions and children of national guardsmen killed in active service, together with workers’ rights such as the right of employees to run an enterprise if deserted by an owner. Women played an important role in both the initiation and the governance of the Commune, though women could not vote in the Commune elections and there were no elected women members of the Commune itself. Their participation included building barricades and caring for wounded fighters. Some founded free schools and bakeries and others called for the end of any discrepancy between the position of wife and concubine and legitimate and illegitimate children.

From its inception, there was very strong anti-clerical mood. The Archbishop of Paris and a number of priests were executed during Bloody Week, in retaliation for the execution of Commune soldiers by the regular army. The destruction of the Vendôme Column honouring the victories of Napoleon I, topped by a statue of the Emperor, was one of the most prominent civic events during the Commune. As tension rose, there an awareness that Thiers was waiting at Versailles and an army was regrouping outside the city; people became suspicious of anybody who might be against the Commune. Commune leaders were convinced that French army soldiers would refuse to fire on national guardsmen, although several skirmishes between the two sides had resulted in guardsmen found with weapons being executed. The commune issued a decree announcing that every execution of a partisan of the Commune of Paris would be met with the execution of triple the number of hostages. Discovering an undefended path through the fortifications on 21st May, the government army pushed through into the centre of the city. The retreating Communards destroyed buildings to create barricades and set fires in many areas including the burning of the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville. Over the next week, the army pressed forward into the Commune’s strongholds in Montmartre and elsewhere

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in the north of Paris and broke their resistance bitby-bit, largely through sheer weight of numbers. There were massacres on both sides – it was a very bloody week indeed. The final battle scene was the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where savage fighting took place around the tombs until nightfall on 27th May when the last 150 guardsmen, many of them wounded, finally surrendered. The captured guardsmen were taken to the wall of the cemetery, known today as the Communards’ Wall, and shot. Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. 95 were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; over 5,000 were deported ands more than 3,000 imprisoned locally. A review in 1871 allowed many to have their sentences reduced or even receive pardons. The official report mentioned only Army casualties which amounted, from April through May, to 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing. The report assessed information on Communard casualties only as “very incomplete”. Later reports agree that at least 10,000 to 20,000 men, women and children died in the fighting. Soon after the Paris Commune took power in Paris, revolutionary and socialist groups in several other French cities tried to establish their own communes. The Paris Commune sent delegates to the large cities to encourage them. The longest-lasting commune outside Paris was that of Marseille, from 23 March to 4 April, which was suppressed with the loss of thirty soldiers and one hundred and fifty insurgents. None of the other Communes lasted more than a few days, and most ended with little or no bloodshed. On 24th July 1873, The National Assembly decreed the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park, specifying that it was needed to “expiate the crimes of the Commune”. A plaque and a church, Notre-Dame-des-Otages (Our Lady of the Hostages) on Rue Haxo, mark the place where fifty hostages, including priests, gendarmes and four civilians, were shot by a firing squad. A plaque also marks the wall in Père Lachaise Cemetery . Commemorations are held at the cemetery every year in May. Another plaque, behind the Hôtel de Ville, marks the site of a mass grave of Communards shot by the army. Their remains were later reburied in city cemeteries. Two squares are named after the Paris Commune; one is the Place de la Commune-de-Paris, the other is the Công xã Paris Square of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Thiers was elected the first President of the French Third Republic in 1871. He was replaced in 1873 by MacMahon, leader of the regular army that crushed the Commune. Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of Montmartre at the beginning of the Commune, became the leader of the Radical Party in the French Chamber of Deputies and served as Prime Minister of France during the pivotal years of World War I. Some leaders of the Commune died on the barricades but most survived and lived long lives, with some resuming political careers in France. Louise Michel, the famous “Red Virgin” of Montmartre, was sentenced to transportation to the penal colony of New Caledonia where she served as a schoolteacher. Receiving an amnesty in 1880, she returned to Paris where she resumed her work as an anarchist. Arrested several times, she was freed following the intervention of Georges Clemenceau. She died in 1905. The Communards wanted to run Paris as they saw fit with no regard to the rest of France - Paris did not have an overall mayor until 1977, partly out of fear of what the capital would do if it had too much power and went its own way as it had tried to under the Commune.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionaries saw the commune as an example of the power of the working class; Lenin argued that its fatal weakness was that it simply wasn’t ruthless enough. It remains a landmark for the left and for the revolutionary strain in French politics. The Commune’s violence also remains a warning as to where radicalism can lead.

Earlier this year, a memorial Araucaria tree (native to New Caledonia) was planted in Montmartre by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, as part of the 150th anniversary commemorations, which included a series of exhibitions, lectures and concerts, plays and poetry readings. 150 years on, there is still much that we can learn from the Paris Commune. Although they ultimately fell, they had the strength of conviction to fight for their beliefs and stand up for the rights of their people, even if it came at a cost. Perhaps they were too rigid in their belief systems, perhaps they needed to be open to compromise, but their memories live on to inspire us today.