Paris Commune

For just over two months in the spring of 1871, from 18 March to 28 May, a revolutionary council backed by the Paris National Guard ran the French capital in defiance of the national government. Born out of the siege and defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune passed a burst of radical social measures before the regular army retook the city in a week of fighting and executions known as the Bloody Week. Its violent end and its programme made it a lasting symbol for the European left.

During the German siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, the city's defence rested largely on the National Guard, a citizen militia that swelled into hundreds of battalions recruited mainly from working-class districts. The armistice of January 1871 left the Guard armed. Elections in February produced a largely conservative National Assembly, which chose Adolphe Thiers as head of the government and met first at Bordeaux and then at Versailles rather than in Paris. The Assembly also ended the wartime pause on debt collection and suspended radical newspapers, deepening the city's resentment.

The flashpoint was some 400 old bronze cannon, paid for by public subscription, which the Guard had moved to working-class neighbourhoods such as Montmartre. Early on 18 March, Thiers sent troops to remove them. At Montmartre crowds surrounded the soldiers, who refused orders to fire and went over to the crowd. Two generals, Claude Lecomte and Jacques Clément-Thomas, were seized and shot that afternoon. Thiers then withdrew the army and government, some 40,000 soldiers in all, to Versailles. That night Guard units occupied the ministries and the Hôtel de Ville, where a red flag was raised.

Elections on 26 March, in which turnout was low in wealthy districts but high in working-class ones, produced a council dominated by the far left: followers of the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, members of the socialist International and independent radicals. The Commune revived the revolutionary calendar of the 1790s and flew the red flag instead of the tricolour. Among its decrees were the cancellation of rent owed for the siege months, a ban on night work in bakeries, the separation of church and state and a right for workers to take over businesses abandoned by their owners. It also closed Catholic churches and schools. On 16 May, in a public ceremony, it pulled down the Vendôme Column, a monument to the victories of Napoleon I.

An early Communard march on Versailles failed, and through April and May government troops pressed in on the city's southern forts. The Commune took hostages, among them the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. Divided command between the council and the Guard's Central Committee hampered its defence.

On 21 May, finding a stretch of the city wall unguarded, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon's army entered Paris from the south-west. Over the following days it fought its way east across barricaded streets. Communards set fire to public buildings, including the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville, and on 24 May executed the archbishop; in all, about a hundred hostages were killed. Government troops shot many prisoners after capture. The last resistance ended on 28 May; at Père Lachaise Cemetery, captured fighters were executed against a wall now known as the Communards' Wall.

The death toll remains disputed. Estimates commonly range from about 10,000 to 15,000 Communards killed, while one historian's study of cemetery records suggests 6,000 to 7,000. The army reported 877 of its own soldiers killed in April and May.

More than 43,000 people were taken prisoner. About 13,500 were later convicted, and many were deported, mostly to New Caledonia, while leaders fled abroad. An amnesty in 1880 allowed survivors to return. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the Commune as the first example of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", and it became a founding legend for later socialist, communist and anarchist movements.

Our 1878 map shows France in the years after the Commune, with its eastern border moved west after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the German Empire.