The Paris Commune
In 1871 on March18 Paris awoke to the thunderous shouts of 'vive la
Commune' jubilant crowds thronged the streets proclaiming 'the end of the old world'
and heralding the dawn of a great 'carnival of the oppressed'. The people Marx
would later describe as 'those Parisians storming heaven' and the Commune they
created 'that glorious harbinger of a new society' shook the status quo preserved by
the European powers to its very foundations. But what was the Commune? Why did
the people of Paris revolt against the French Government? And how those this
historic uprising bear any resonance for the radical left and the anti-capitalist
movement of today?
The Paris Commune erupted from a sea of discontent aggravated in Paris by
the severe economic dislocation caused by the siege of Paris by Bismarck and
Prussian troops during the Imperialist Prussian-Franco war for Alsace and Lorraine in
Northern France. Selfish demands by the French assembly for a complete cessation to
temporary economic measures adopted by the Parisian working class during the crisis,
such as a suspension of loan repayments and the utter contempt shown by the
assembly's head Adolphe Thiers towards the grievances of the Parisian working class
contributed to increased tensions in the city. The city was angered further by the
prospect of enforcement to pay Bismarck war indemnity, a punishment many felt
should be 'paid by the authors of war' the German and French Industrialists that
fuelled the drive to war. Thiers was a man in the grip of intense paranoia, a rabid fear
of the danger posed by a united and revolutionary working class to the capitalist class
system had plagued him since he witnessed the Parisian chapter in the European wave
of revolt in 1848. He had played a brutal part in the suppression of that rising and
initiated the construction of a number of military garrisons on the walls of the city
overlooking the workers residential districts with a view to rapid suppression of any
further revolt.
In the wake of the Prussian conflict and a growing radicalism in Paris Thiers
relocated the seat of Government to Versailles. This was in effect the proverbial
straw that crushed the camel's back. Since the French revolution the seat of
Government had always been Paris, this move of Thiers signalled to the people of
Paris and France as a whole, a regressive step, the removal of government from the
people, a robbery, placing it in the hands of that old bastion of the tyrannical Ancien
Regime the palace of Versailles and all the connotations that evoked. In an act of
peaceful defiance the Parisian National Guard, a civil militia established by the people
of Paris to defend the city against Prussia, and also in this time of economic crisis a
massive provider of revenue for the unemployed workers of Paris, proclaimed a
Republican Federation and a City Commune was elected on March 15
Across France cities such as Marseille and Lyons answered the Parisian
workers call to arms and attempted to establish similar Communal Governmental
Structures. The anger within the Parisian working class constrained itself until in a
moment of supreme arrogance Thiers ordered the seizure of 400 cannons at
Montemarte. Cannons bought by the people of Paris to provide defence during the
previous years war. Angry but peaceful crowds confronted the soldiers in the Place
Pigalle. A General Lecomte ordered his men to fire. They refused. Following further
orders and exchanges of insults the troops response was to shoot the General himself.
Thiers immediately withdrew all governmental officials from the city. The
communards established power by March 26.
Their's 'pacification' of the city began in earnest on April 2. Communards
manned hastily erected barricades against the onslaught of Prussian troops and a freed
Bonapartist army released by A Bismarck anxious to quash working class uprising.
Thiers viewed the Communards as 'dangerous barbarians', part of a growing
international labour movement subverting Government and Capitalism, a movement
seeking to eradicate the class system. In Lyons and Marseille the Communes quickly
succumbed after just a day of bloody street fighting. The crushing of Paris was to be a
stark warning to revolutionaries and a bloody exorcism of the city's radical
underground of political dissent. It was an orgy of violence, which in the end led only
to the death of 900 of Thier's men.
On May 21 troops broke into the city. The seven days that followed
will always be etched into the city's memory as 'the bloody week'. On May 21 the
last barricade was captured and the Commune was crushed. After the Initial street
fighting the government launched into a process of summary mass executions. One
notorious General Gallifet executed people randomly, taking his victims according to
hair colour, non-possession of a watch or simply because he didn't like the look on
their face. At La Roquette prison 1,900 were executed. The largest massacre took
place in the famous Pere Lachaise graveyard.
This 'revenge of the respectable people' horrified many across Europe. On
May 28 The English Times condemned the 'inhumane laws of revenge wallowed in
by Adolphe Thiers'. Of the 25,000 communards murdered, the majority were killed
after resistance stopped. The French Government had killed more of its own citizens
than had died at the hands of Robespierre's Reign of Terror. The victims were burned
on mass pyres along the Seine or buried in mass graves. In the Official Trials
following the revolt 270 were sentenced to death and a further 10,000 imprisoned or
sentenced to exile in the colonies.
In his address to the General Council of the First International, just two days
after the final conflict in Paris Marx described the Commune as 'the reabsorb ion of
state power by society as its own living forces instead of as a force subduing and
controlling it'. The Communards sought to destroy the bureaucracy and officialdom
that removed state and economic control from the people. All posts in the Commune
were filled on the basis of 'universal suffrage of all concerned subject to the right of
recall at any time'. All officials were to be paid 'the working mans wage', that is the
average industrial wage, destroying the political careerism that plagued French
politics.
The Commune was internationalist and it declared that 'the flag of the
Commune is the flag of the World republic'. On April 2nd any connection between
church and state was abolished. It removed 'all that belongs to the sphere of a
persons conscience' from schools, that is removing religious domination of the
educational system. The Guillotine was publicly burnt on April 8th as a symbol of
state suppression and tyranny amid public rejoicing. On April 12th the Commune
decreed that the victory column on the Plad Vendome, which was cast from guns
captured by Napoleon after the war of 1801 should be demolished as a symbol of
nationalist and Imperialist aggression. On April 16th extensive plans were undertaken
and prepared for dormant factories to be reopened and operated by their former
workers in co-operative societies.
What is unusual about the Commune is that its defeat was total. It gained no
immediate reforms and the city was subjected to an excessive clampdown for years
after. But the Commune achieved another victory, the victory of history. It was a
revolt that created a legacy that lasts to this day. In its short time span it gained
International support, 30,000 people demonstrated in Hyde Park, London against
Thiers suppression of the Commune. The Communards created two immortal
symbols of the class struggle, the red flag and the internationalist anthem 'Le
Internationale'. The Commune has become generally accepted as the first revolution
of the industrial age, the first few pot shots in the international class war. To the
establishment, the bourgeoisie and governments of Europe it was a sign of the ideas
of the First Internationals growing ability to promote and instigate revolution.
Throughout the 1870s, the German Chancellor Bismarck would do everything in its
power to clampdown on the growth of socialism in Germany. A clampdown which
grows out of his fear of revolution in the spirit of the Commune spreading to
Germany and shattering the Imperialist giant Bismarck had forged through 'rule by
the sword at home and abroad'. In the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917,
Trotsky and Lenin would anxiously wait for 72 days, the life span of the Paris
Commune, to pass before assuring themselves that the possibility of workers power in
Russia was coming into reality. Lenin later remarked in a speech how 'the young
soviet republic stood on the shoulders of the Paris Commune'. The Parisian students
and workers manning the barricades of May'68 could be heard discussing the
relevance of the Commune late into the night.
But what is the relevance of the Commune to us in our present struggle against
the forces of Capitalism and globalised exploitation? At every mass protest organised
against the summits of the global elite we have witnessed a massive backlash from the
forces of the state. In Dublin at a recent anti-privatisation demo many Irish activists
encountered the violence of the state machine for the first time, later expressing their
shock. In this movement we should begin to understand more than ever the nature of
the state. Its function is to protect capitalism. The function of the police and military
is to protect the state, hence Capitalism, we should not delude ourselves with any
belief in the falsification that they are there to protect us and maintain the peace. To
paraphrase Lenin's apt description of the structure, behind the velvet glove of
parliamentary democracy there are armed bodies of men whose sole function is to
maintain the economic and political status quo. Or as an anarchist comrade puts it 'if
elections could chance anything, they'd be illegal'. In many revolutionary scenarios
we have seen how the armed forces of the state take up the cause of the people, switch
sides and play an instrumental role in the revolution. This may not be the case in any
future scenario. On my way to Genoa, someone put forward the proposition that the
Italian States dependence on the Carabineeri may be advantageous to the anti-
capitalist side, as it is a force primarily made up of young conscripts fulfilling their
compulsory National Service, maybe many in the force would take our side. This was
proved wrong; such a conscript killed Carlo Guilianni. In Argentina, a country in the
midst of a massive economic crisis and social turmoil, there has been as yet no sign
that the police or military will join the demonstrators, in fact the reverse seems to be
the case as 30 lie dead, murdered by the police and the petit bourgeoisie. From the
Paris Commune we can draw the conclusion that once a movement grows to pose a
serious threat to the prevailing economic and political system the state will attempt to
crush it with all the violence of Theirs and his so called 'respectable people'.
The argument put forward by the comrade in Socialist Youth on
these pages recently regards the Black Bloc ignores the fact that the massive
demonstrations outside the summits of the world's elite tend to be direct action in
nature and not revolutionary situations. So the actions of the Black Bloc, while not a
strategy for revolutionary change do focus on the shutting down of these summits and
the disruption of these meetings in the short term. Its an issue that is taking up to
much of the anti capitalist movements intellectual debate and distracting us from
forming a long term challenge to the system. The media highlights violence to
dismiss us, in the same way that school history books ignore the violence of the state
during the Commune, instead focussing on the violence of the Communards. Divide
and conquer.
So, how does the Commune provide us with a strategy for change? The
Commune provided what are to my knowledge the first working examples of working
class self-organisation, councils or soviets. Committees and councils of workers or
students organising in their factories or other environments allows people to seize
economic and political control from the capitalist ruling elite, bringing the idea of
revolution to reality. It is a strategy far beyond smashing up McDonalds, or travelling
half way across Europe to protest. We must bring the revolutionary spirit of the mass
anti capitalist protest into our factories, offices, schools and universities. Mass
international demonstrations build the confidence of the movement but will not
change the world. We have to wrest away their control over our lives at source,
wherever it is that wealth they steal originates. The slogan of this movement used to
be to 'think global, act local'. We seem to be forgetting this.
The Paris commune seems to have failed because it was isolated within France
upon the failure of the Marseille and Lyons Commune. It seems that isolation is
something that strangles revolution, from the commune to Russia to Cuba. Isolation
is also something that kills struggle. We need to form links between all our everyday
struggles in order to make any serious fight back against the system. It was a unity of
struggle that ignited the Commune, from frustrations over the connection between
Church and State, the effect of war on the People of Paris, the wider disgust with
Imperialism.... In unity there is strength. It is the beauty of the anti capitalist protest
that there is such a wide range of causes, as revolutionaries we need to forge links
between all these diverse causes, only then can we challenge Capitalism with any
hope of victory.
The political structures of the Paris Commune seem to be something that both
anarchists and socialists agree on. Yet, we spent most of our time bickering and
slagging each other off. Most of our differences seem to arise from history, we
should learn from the mistakes of history. But ultimately it is to the future that we
both look. We share a common vision of a classless society based on structures
similar to those adopted by the short lived Paris Commune and should work towards
this society together.
Solidarity and Revolution.