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[introduction.]

p On March 18, 1871, when Paris had already been under siege for six months, as working wives and mothers hurried at dawn to take their places in the queues in front of the few bakeries where there was still bread to be had, shots rang out in Montmartre. They hurried to the scene only to see French soldiers carrying out their officers’ orders to take away from the Montmartre hill cannon paid for with funds collected by the Paris workers and guarded by armed workers—members of the National Guard, guns that had defended the city against the Prussian invaders.

p The women roused the soldiers of the National Guard to their feet and rallied the townspeople. The people of Paris were bitterly indignant. To try and disarm the National Guard when Paris was surrounded by the Prussians and deprive the city’s defenders of their cannon was an open act of national betrayal.

p Detachments of the National Guard and the people of Paris took up arms against the government troops. Some of the soldiers refused to shoot at their fellow countrymen and came over on to the people’s side, while the remainder were obliged to withdraw. The popular uprising soon spread, involving one district of the city after another. By mid-day it was quite clear that the people had won the day. Louis Adolphe Thiers, then head of the government, fled from the insurgent city in a carriage with curtains drawn across the windows and escorted by mounted police. A red flag was hoisted over the Hotel de Ville.

p The next day, a Sunday, tens of thousands of Parisians from the workers’ districts poured out onto the boulevards, squares and streets of the city. Laughter, songs and joyful cries filled the air on that warm, sunny spring day. The people had good reason to celebrate—for the first time they had become masters of their own destiny.

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p Meanwhile, the western and southern districts of the city that were nearest to Versailles presented a very different picture. They were seething with people, horses and carriages. Great piles of luggage were being roped up and loaded onto carriages bulging with cases, bundles and bags, as the wealthy, the aristocracy, the mounted officers and their unwilling men, all got in each other’s way in this panic exodus from the capital.

Soldiers of the National Guard, and the wives and children of the poor laughed heartily to see these fine gentlemen, who but the day before had been as composed and arrogant as ever, hurrying to pack together all their fine clothes before fleeing the city. The workers and their families cheered, glad to see the last of them. Without them Paris was a brighter, healthier place—a new chapter of the city’s history had begun and it was the people who were to bring it to fruition. For the first time in history the working class had taken power into its own hands.

The Historical Circumstances Leading Up
to the Paris Commune

p This victory of the proletariat of Paris in 1871 was not a fortuitous event. Earlier political developments and the workers’ experience in the class struggle ever since the Revolution of 1789 had paved the way for this victory.

p The industrial proletariat had come into being together with the introduction of machinery in industry and had grown in step with the development of capitalist production. It was their wellnigh intolerable living conditions which led the workers to engage in the class struggle. They received a mere pittance for working as much as 14-16 hours a day, which meant that they and their families were condemned to a life of hunger and constant deprivation. The struggle which the workers had been waging ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century was one they could not help but join—they were unable to reconcile themselves with the monstrous existence which their capitalist masters obliged them to lead. However, the workers at that stage had as yet little experience of the class struggle, they were not clear as to which were the best methods to use to transform the unjust social system which brought them so much suffering. This lack of awareness led them to make many mistakes and suffer frequent defeats.

p However, this experience of setbacks and defeats brought in its wake heightened maturity and class consciousness. A great advance had been made from the first spontaneous expressions of class hatred at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when workers vented their blind fury by destroying machines, to the 490 inauguration of the first international workers’ organisation—the First International—in 1864. The revolts of the Lyons weavers in 1831 and 1834, the first mass political movement of the workers —Chartism, the first international proletarian party—the Communist League, the June uprising of 1848, the proletariat’s participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of 1848-1849, the strike movement of the 1850s and ’60s, the support given by the workers to progressive democratic movements of the period—all represented important stages in the development of the proletariat’s class consciousness. All this had helped prepare the international workers’ movement to carry out its most important task—the seizure of political power.

p As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the great leaders of the working class, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, after setting forth the laws of social development, came to the conclusion in their works that between capitalism and socialism there must be a transitional stage—a dictatorship of the proletariat. This theoretical discovery was of tremendous importance, but neither Marx, Engels or anyone else at the time was clearly aware of what concrete forms this dictatorship would take in practice.

p Nor were the French workers, who were destined to set up such a dictatorship for the first time in history. In 1871 the French workers did not take up arms, clearly bent on the establishment of working-class power: the vast majority of them were not as yet acquainted with the writings of Karl Marx, and their struggle was largely spontaneous. After Napoleon Ill’s army had capitulated at Sedan, the Second Empire fell. The revolution of September 4, 1870 was carried out by the working people, but its achievements were turned by the bourgeois political leaders to their own ends. The bourgeoisie seized power and while the Germans continued to advance on the French capital the bourgeois government christened itself the "Government of National Defence".

p The situation was extremely grave. Even after the Third Republic had been proclaimed Prussia continued her aggressive war of plunder. Prussian troops occupied the north and northeastern parts of France, besieged Paris and captured Versailles. On January 18th, the King of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany there in the Hall of Mirrors.

p The French people, determined to put up a fight against the German conquerors, was at first prepared to accept the bourgeois politicians, who headed the "Government of National Defence" such as General Trochu and the lawyer Jules Favre. However, it soon emerged that the new regime led by the "Government of National Defence" was in practice not organising resistance but paving the way for appeasement and negotiations with invaders, since the French bourgeoisie hated and feared the workers more 491 than the Germans. Behind the backs of the heroic defenders of Paris, the French government pursued a treacherous course of capitulation, and later engaged in secret negotiations with the Germans. The "Government of National Defence" was to show itself to be in reality a government of national betrayal. On January 28, 1871, in defiance of the people, the government concluded an armistice with the Germans in which they agreed to the surrender of Paris and other humiliating conditions.

p The working people of Paris had already withstood a sixmonth siege and were suffering from dire hunger and want. Pigeons, crows, cats and dogs had become regular fare, while people froze in their unheated, unlit houses. Yet despite this suffering and privation, the people was not prepared to surrender.

p Realising that the government was about to betray them to the Germans the people of Paris rose up against their rulers on October 31, 1870 and January 22, 1871, in attempts to overthrow the government. These uprisings were both crushed, but the reactionary bourgeois government in its turn found itself by this time no longer in a position to control the armed Parisians. So it then turned for support to German bayonets and on March 1st German troops entered Paris; however, the National Guard and its elected executive—the Central Committee—succeeded in forestalling this attack. It called upon the people of Paris to avoid all contact with the invaders and the streets were soon empty with all the city’s houses presenting to the world outside a fajade of closed doors and curtained windows. The German troops remained in the city for three days in this atmosphere of silent hatred and then withdrew.

After this criminal betrayal had proved fruitless, the reactionary bourgeoisie made plans for a surprise night attack to disarm Paris’ revolutionary forces and capture their cannon. Adolphe Thiers, an inveterate enemy of the working class who had been elected to head the government in February, made preparations to carry out this plan. On the night of March 17th government troops were sent out not against the Germans but against the people of Paris. What this action led to has already been related.

The Revolutionary Government
of the National Guard Central Committee

p The uprising of March 18th had not been prepared in advance and was to a large degree spontaneous. However, the leadership of the uprising, and later political power, were to be taken over by the Central Committee of the National Guard, which was to become the first revolutionary government of the working class.

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p The embittered bourgeois politicians protested loudly at the fact that power in Paris was now in the hands of unknown individuals. The names of the members of the National Guard Central Committee were indeed unfamiliar in aristocratic salonsand bourgeois drawing rooms; however, they were on the lips of all the inhabitants of the workers’ suburbs and the poor districts of the city.

p One of the outstanding members of the new government was the book-binder Louis Eugene Varlin (1839-1871), a self-educated man of enormous energy and selfless dedication to the workers’ cause, who became one of the organisers of the Paris section of the First International. On March 18th, Varlin took part in the people’s battle against the soldiers sent out against them by Thiers, and was to enjoy great authority in the revolutionary government. A foundry worker by the name of Duval (1841-1871) who had taken part in the uprisings of January 22nd and March 18th was first sent to organise the police prefecture, and a few days later was made a general and one of the commanders of the city’s armed forces. The 27-year-old medical student fimile Eudes, who had earlier been sentenced to death for his part in the revolutionary movement against the Second Empire, was also made a general by the Central Committee. Despite his youth, the 28-year-old milliner Charles Amour had already amassed considerable experience in revolutionary struggle and legal persecution, and the Central Committee sent him as their representative to Lyons and Marseilles after the victory of the uprising of March 18th. Another member of the Central Committee, Grenier—the owner of a small laundry—was appointed delegate (a post more or less equivalent to that of minister) to the Ministry of the Interior. 28-year-old Francois Jourde who had long been active in the Paris section of the International was appointed delegate to the Ministry of Finance. The cobbler Edouard Roulier, a veteran of the revolutionary movement who had taken part in the June uprising of 1848, was put in charge of the Ministry of Education.

p The Central Committee of the National Guard was as it were a living embodiment of the will of the people of Paris. Side by side with workers were craftsmen, painters and writers, and the Committee presented a representative cross-section of the capital’s varied working population, their wide range of skills and pursuits. The lack of political homogeneity was also a faithful reflection of the level of political maturity of the French proletariat of that period—the Committee included Blanquists, Proudhonists, neo-Jacobins and unaligned democrats.

p The great achievement of the National Guard Central Committee lay in the fact that once the course of events had made it the leader of the popular revolution, it proved capable of 493 preserving close direct links with the people and implementing its will.

p Events themselves led the Central Committee to pursue bold revolutionary policies.

p The momentous step with which the revolutionary government began its work was to disband the regular army, which up till then had provided the ruling classes with an instrument of oppression against the working people. In their armed struggle of March 18th, the people of Paris had defeated Thiers’ detachments and obliged them to flee. On March 18th and 19th, the police and gendarmerie followed the soldiers’ example and also 494 sought refuge in Versailles. On March 19th, the Central Committee first decreed that the state of siege had been lifted, military tribunals were disbanded and all the soldiers who had stayed behind in the capital were ordered to join the ranks of the National Guard. These were measures deliberately designed to do away with military despotism. After disbanding the regular army and the police, the working-class revolutionary government took steps to ensure that the only armed forces in Paris should be those of the National Guard, i.e., the armed people.

p Immediately after the victorious popular uprising the Central Committee of the National Guard was obliged to take action against sabotage on the part of counter-revolutionary government functionaries. After March 19th, the ministries and administrative offices were all completely deserted. Their staff did not turn up at work, in compliance with a directive from Thiers’ government now seated at Versailles. However, this mass sabotage did not weaken the workers’ resolve. That same day the Central Committee issued an official announcement, declaring that the new government of the republic had taken over control of all ministries and administrative bodies.

Members of the Central Committee—workers, students, journalists, and artisans—were sent to organise the work in the ministries and administrative offices. They naturally lacked experience in state administration, yet they were fired with revolutionary enthusiasm, and were ready to put heart and soul into this new work, and if necessary sacrifice their lives for the people’s cause, and these qualities were to more than make up for their lack of experience. Within a short period the revolutionary government supported by the boundless initiative and energy of the people succeeded in organising state institutions founded on new democratic principles and in ensuring their smooth functioning. These measures carried out by the Central Committee of the National Guard dealt a crushing blow at the bourgeois, militarycum-bureaucratic state machinery and laid the foundations of a state of a new type which protected the interests of the oppressed, not those of the oppressors.

The Paris Commune—the First Dictatorship
of the Proletariat

p The work of the Central Committee was continued and carried" a stage further by the Paris Commune. The very day after the successful uprising of March 18th, the Central Committee announced that elections to a Paris Commune would be held. These elections took place on March 26th, while on March 28th, before 495 a tremendous crowd in the building of the Hotel de Ville, the inauguration of the Commune was solemnly announced.

p The elections to the Commune were carried out according to the principle of universal male suffrage. The Versailles counterrevolutionary government issued an appeal to the people to boycott the elections and the percentage of votes cast in the bourgeois and aristocratic districts was very small. So much the better, since this meant that the Commune was elected mainly by working people. Among the members of the Commune were the most outstanding figures from the Central Committee of the National Guard, such as Varlin, Duval, Jourde, Eudes and Vaillant.

p Like the Central Committee of the National Guard, the Commune regarded itself not as a municipal organ of the city of Paris but as the central revolutionary government of the republic.

p The Commune therefore proceeded to adopt laws, carrying out the functions of supreme legislative organ. It also supervised the implementation of laws, assuming supreme executive powers. This combination of legislative and executive powers in the one body was one of the remarkable features of the Commune.

p The Commune completed the work started by the Central Committee aimed at doing away with the old bourgeois state machinery. The regular army and police had by this time been officially disbanded. The former bureaucratic apparatus, now engaged in sabotage activity, was replaced by new state functionaries from the ranks of the people. The Commune adopted decrees dismissing former members of the bureaucracy who had been receiving extremely high salaries and stipulated a new maximum limit for state functionaries’ salaries, aimed at levelling out the average functionary’s salary and that of a skilled worker. The Commune also decreed that civil servants should be elected by the people, earn their respect, and that they could be recalled by popular demand at any time.

p All these measures introduced by the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Commune served to lay the foundations of a new type of state, which had known no historical precedent.

p Meanwhile however, even the workers of Paris and their leaders were only dimly aware of what they were creating. The people and their representatives in the Commune were acting as they felt events dictated, implementing the creative initiative of the popular masses. The direction of this creative activity and its true content were first described by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the Paris Commune of 1871 was indeed an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the coming of which he had forecast in his works of 1848-1850.

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p Of course the dictatorship of the proletariat did not truly come into its own in the Paris Commune. The Commune represented a first attempt to establish such a dictatorship, and its leaders were groping their way as they went and made a number of serious errors. Nevertheless, it served to demonstrate that the proletariat must and could destroy the bourgeois state machinery and replace it with a superior form of state apparatus, thus paving the way for the transition to a superior form of democracy, proletarian democracy in the interests of the majority, in the interests of the people.

p The Paris Commune also achieved a great deal in the sphere of social legislation. Despite its short life of a mere 72 days the Commune demonstrated that it was a genuinely democratic government, concerned first and foremost with the welfare of the working people.

p The Central Committee introduced important new laws immediately after it came to power. On the very next day after the uprising, on March 19th, an amnesty was decreed for all political prisoners who had been sentenced or arrested by the government of the exploiting classes. A decree was issued banning the sale of articles on pawn and ordering the return to their owners of all articles valued at less than 15 francs. Eviction as a result of tenants’ failure to pay their rent was also forbidden. These laws, which were later ratified by the Commune, were all designed to protect the interests of the poor and the working people—likewise the decrees providing for regular salaries to be paid to the soldiers of the National Guard and the allocation of one million francs for distribution in the form of allowances for the poor.

p The Paris Commune placed the social legislation of the first revolutionary government on a firmer basis and carried it still further, adopting a number of important new laws. On April 16th, a decree was issued ordering the transfer of all enterprises, abandoned by their owners, into the hands of the workers and producers’ associations. This decree possessed a truly socialist character and if the Commune had lasted longer the socialist essence of its policy would no doubt have come still more clearly to the fore.

p The Commune also introduced a decree of fundamental importance organising the requisition of all flats deserted by their bourgeois occupants when they fled Paris and their allocation to the defenders of the city, first and foremost to those whose living quarters had been damaged during the fighting. A decree was adopted separating the Church and State. Important measures were introduced to further the education of the masses: the Louvre, the Tuileries and other palaces and museums 497 containing priceless art treasures were opened to the public, and all forms of art and the promotion of school education were given every form of encouragement.

p All these measures provided ample proof of the enormous amount a working-class government could accomplish for the welfare of the people. However, alongside these measures which immortalised the Commune’s achievement, a number of mistakes were committed which were to prove fatal for the outcome of the struggle against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

p The gravest of these mistakes were those made almost immediately after the glorious victory of March 18th. For a start, the Communards did nothing to prevent the troops which remained loyal to Thiers from leaving the city. Still worse, the people of Paris did not carry their victory to its logical conclusion: instead of advancing immediately on Versailles, dealing a crushing blow to Thiers’ demoralised troops and fighting on to secure the victory of the revolution throughout the country, the Central Committee of the National Guard adopted a passive stand, preferring to wait and see which way the tide would turn.

p This fatal delay enabled the government at Versailles to recover from its initial defeat, confine the revolution to Paris and prepare for a counter-offensive against the city.

p Immediately after March 18th, communes were set up in a number of other towns: Lyons, Marseilles, Saint-Etienne, Toulouse, Perpignan, and Creusot. This served to show that the popular uprising which broke out in Paris might well have spread to embrace the whole country. However, the failure of the Communards to grasp the vital need for an extension of the revolutionary struggle outside Paris enabled the bourgeoisie to put down the various isolated centres of revolutionary activity in different parts of the country. By the beginning of April all these localised uprisings in the provinces had been quelled and the bourgeois counter-revolutionary forces were able to concentrate all their efforts against Paris.

p By this time Paris was cut off from the rest of the country, which meant that the working class in the capital was unable to set up the all-important alliance with the peasantry. The fact that the leaders of the Commune were aware of the importance of this task is borne out by a number of appeals addressed by the revolutionary government to the peasants. Yet the Communards were in no position to effect such an alliance with the peasantry and make use of its support.

p The Communards also pursued a fatally indecisive and halfhearted policy with regard to the Bank of France, the vital nerve of the country’s economy. Instead of nationalising the Bank, and thus undermining the economic power of the bourgeoisie, the 498 Commune merely addressed meek requests to the manager for moderate sums, while Thiers’ counter-revolutionary government showed no hesitation in making use of vast sums from the same source.

p These mistakes were, of course, not mere coincidences. Crude blunders, mistakes and miscalculations resulted from the insufficient maturity of both the French and the international workers’ movement in 1871. At that period capitalism had not yet exhausted its potential, while the workers’ movement, although it had already attained a sufficiently high stage of development to become aware of the vital importance and implications of the struggle for political power and its ability to set up a new, better and more just social order, had not yet freed itself from a number of mistaken illusions of the past, had not yet reached a clear understanding of the laws of social development and class struggle. This was what lay behind the Commune’s defeat.

p After gradually consolidating its military advantage, the Versailles government opened its offensive against Paris in the second half of April. The Communards fought with great heroism, but isolated as they were, they were unable to resist the superior counter-revolutionary forces. Thiers’ government was to cover 499 itself in eternal shame by turning to Bismarck with a request for help in crushing the resistance of the French workers. The German militarists then occupying French territory were only too willing to come to Thiers’ support.

p On May 10, 1871, a humiliating peace was signed in Frankfurt. Germany wrested two industrially developed provinces from France—Alsace and Lorraine—and demanded a war indemnity of 5,000 million francs. Thiers’ government hastened to conclude this crippling peace with the Germans in order to have its hands free to deal with the resistance of the working people at home.

p On May 22nd, the troops of the Versailles government made their way into Paris and the "May week" of bloodshed began. The counter-revolutionary forces with their cannon and machineguns wrought cruel reprisals against the defenders of the Commune, who put up a heroic resistance on the barricades.

p By May 28th the battle was over. The bourgeoisie then subjected the defeated workers to reprisals of merciless cruelty. The bourgeois newspapers screamed revenge, and the massacre began. The heroic defenders of the Commune were sent before the firing squad without trial. The exact number of victims has never been established: estimates vary between seventeen and thirty-five thousand. Tens of thousands were arrested and sentenced to hard labour in the ill-famed tropics of New Caledonia.

p The Commune had been defeated and its defenders had died heroes’ deaths. Yet, although the bourgeois counter-revolution emerged victorious, nothing can detract from the historic achievement of the Paris workers.

The Paris Commune represented a major advance in the world revolutionary movement, demonstrating for all to see that the proletariat’s struggle for liberation called for the seizure of political power. Subsequent generations of revolutionaries who carried on the good work begun by the Communards of 1871 were to draw invaluable lessons from both the impressive achievements and the grave mistakes of the Paris Commune.

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