The history of the Paris Commune is a short one. It was proclaimed on 18 March 1871, and was crushed two months later during La semaine sanglante (Bloody Week), from 22–29 May. It aroused loathing and enthusiasm, it had its own song – ‘Le temps des cérises’ (Cherry Season) – and has been the subject of an enormous amount of literature.43 The first person to write its history had himself been part of it, and had avoided by a hair’s breadth the fate that met at least 20,000 men and women during the horrible massacre in May. His name was Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray and his 1876 book was called Histoire de la Commune de Paris de 1871 (History of the Paris Commune of 1871). Like many other survivors, Lissagaray fled to London where he came into contact with Marx, who helped him with his book. Even more important was the encounter with Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter. Prosper-Olivier and Eleanor became a couple, despite Jenny’s and Karl’s opposition. But their passion withered after a few years, and Eleanor broke off the engagement.
Lissagaray’s book on the Commune, on the other hand, has the freshness that eyewitness depictions can provide. It is also built on interviews with others who survived the bloodbath, additionally providing a decent overview over the chaotic course of events.44
Only two works from the later literature will be pointed out. The first is a splendid volume for which Jean Bruhat had primary responsibility, but also the help of a number of colleagues. Bruhat was both a historian, educated at the École normale supérieure, and an active communist who broke with the French Communist Party as a result of the May 1968 unrest in Paris. La Commune de 1871 (The Paris Commune), the second edition of which was published in 1970, is marked by the spirit of the times but is also an ambitious work, with documentation equally as rich as the illustrations. In the eyes of Bruhat and his assistants, the Paris Commune was one revolution in a series of revolutions pointing towards Russia and 1917. Lenin’s comments in State and Revolution – that the Paris Commune was the first attempt of the proletariat to crush the bourgeois state – are respectfully reproduced.45
The second work that should be mentioned is André Zeller’s 1969 book Les hommes de la Commune (The Men of the Commune). Zeller was one of France’s highest military men in 1961, when together with three other generals he staged a coup against President Charles de Gaulle with the intent of keeping Algeria French. The coup was defeated, and Zeller and his colleagues were sentenced to prison. Zeller was freed in 1966, and then devoted himself to completing an extremely knowledgeable 450-page book on the Commune.
It could be expected that his understanding would be the direct opposite of Bruhat’s, and that he would thus see the Commune as a lower-class uprising directed against the legitimate holders of power. But it is not! It is a lively, empathetic description of people trying to create their own spontaneous order in a chaotic and desperate situation. The title is odd: women played a more conspicuous role in the Paris Commune than in any previous uprising. Many of the furious press condemnations of the shortlived regime dealt with women. Zeller in fact also mentions a few women, above all the young Russian follower of Marx Elisabeth Dmitrieff, who at the age of nineteen turned up at the Marx family home and won everyone’s confidence. She was additionally one of the founders of the Russian section of the International, and during the Commune she played a central role in the Union des femmes that organized women from various parts of Paris for the purpose of strengthening the Commune and giving women a central place in it.
Old General Zeller had one main criticism of the Commune: it lacked leaders. There was neither a Lenin nor a Trotsky, he argued. It is easy to agree with him that the Commune was odd in the respect that it is difficult to even discern a group of leaders. So many names parade by in the records; in Bruhat’s major work, the number of pictures of faces is almost stunning.
Zeller, at least, had a favourite: Louis Rossel. He was a gifted young officer who refused to accept the French capitulation. This was primarily why he joined the leading group of the Commune, known as the Communards. At the age of twenty-two, he served as their military leader for eleven days. But problems soon arose – most likely through infiltrations from the enemy’s side – and chaos broke out. Rossel refused to shoot any alleged traitors, resigned his commission, and was declared to be arrested but hid in an apartment in central Paris. Ultimately, it was the enemy who captured him after the defeat of the Commune and executed him after a sham trial.
Bruhat is not as enthusiastic. Rossel was a good organizer but armed with military prejudices, he said. He wanted to introduce a system so strict that it could not fit a revolutionary situation. The rumours that he had ambitions to create a dictatorship may possibly have been true.
Bruhat follows in Marx’s footsteps when he evaluates the Commune and its many actors. It is typical that his conclusions on what went wrong reproduce statements by Marx (and also Lenin).46 Marx himself knew that his influence on developments was highly limited. A good many of the leading representatives of the Commune had joined the International, but as we know there were several shades of opinion within the International. Proudhon still had followers in the French section, and the same applied to Blanqui. The anarchists were gaining ground. Marx had a few faithful followers: Elisabeth Dmitrieff was one of them, the shoemaker Auguste Serraillier another. But they were in no way crucial to the course of events.
It is easy for posterity to view the Commune either as the result of an underhanded plot staged by various conspiratorial elements within the International, or as a proper revolution in the same suite as its predecessors in 1789, 1830, and 1848. But it was neither of those things. If anything, it was the result of a series of coincidences.
The background was a devastating war. In that respect, the Commune had similarities with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. France had suffered a total defeat. Paris had been abandoned to the enemy. A provisional French government had been constituted, but it had no real authority in the capital. Dissatisfaction was fermenting in the National Guard (La garde nationale), which included all men old enough for military service. The provisional government had agreed to disarm the Guard, but the Guard wanted nothing to do with the agreement. The violence escalated when seventy-three-year-old Adolphe Thiers took over government power. He tried to calm the citizens of Paris in vain. Two generals, Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte, were both shot by their own troops. These were not planned actions, as Thiers and others maintained, but unplanned outbreaks of fury. Thiers immediately gave the order to evacuate Paris, and fled the city himself. Zeller scornfully comments that Thiers always did this when the ground began burning under his feet. Cutting and running had also been his weapon in 1830 and 1848, as well as in 1851 when Louis Bonaparte seized power.47
All this happened on 18 March, the first day of the Commune. The people in power had left Paris; it was now a question of establishing the people’s own power. The only model on hand was the one from 1792. Many of those taking the initiative regarded themselves as Jacobins; the followers of Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, or Marx had no alternate model. Marx had warned against every attempt to repeat the past, but had said nothing about how to avoid it.
Suddenly, there was a power vacuum in Paris. The first person who could speak and act with any authority would thus seize the initiative. It became a collective affair: a Comité central – Central Committee – took on the task of guiding the free city towards the future. The first proclamations were already coming out on 18 March: ‘Citizens, the people of Paris have cast off the yoke they wanted to put on us’, it said.48 But the Central Committee’s position of power was not undisputed; opponents also announced themselves. In order to create legitimacy, general elections were quickly arranged after four days, on 22 March. But even this decision received criticism. Weapons were more important than opinions, the critics argued.
Through the election – in which participation was weaker than expected – each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris recei
ved four representatives, thus a total of eighty in all. On 28 March, the Commune was proclaimed.
So far, this was a rather undramatic history – a respite in the middle of the noise of the battle. But, outside Paris, the rumours were flying, each one worse than the last. Forgeries circulated and gained credence. Even Marx came in for his share. Newspapers that were hostile to developments in Paris published a forged letter in which Marx criticized the Parisian members of the International for devoting themselves to politics too much. Marx and Engels wrote a clarification to The Times.49
The Commune divided responsibility among its leading members; all areas were to be covered. But external threats soon became impossible to ignore, and on 10 April Marx judged the situation to be hopeless. It was the Communards’ own fault, he said; they had shown entirely too much ‘civility’ (honnêteté). They did not want to appear like usurpers, but devoted their time to electing committees. Their chances lay in starting a civil war, but instead they had given free rein to ‘that mischievous avorton Thiers’.50
It is not easy to know how Marx imagined a civil war when the strongest army in Europe – the German – stood outside the city. But his attitude towards the Parisian drama contains many other nuances. This is clear from a letter he wrote only six days later to Ludwig Kugelmann. ‘What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!’, he exclaimed enthusiastically. In fact, he went further: ‘History has no like example of a like greatness.’ Nevertheless, compunctions meant that the crucial moment had been lost. Entirely too rashly, the Central Committee had turned over power to the Commune.
Marx noted with satisfaction that his prediction from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte had come true: the next attempt at a French Revolution should not amount to taking over the bureaucratic-military machinery, but smashing it.51
Kugelmann received a new letter from Marx on 17 April. New ideas were crying out to be expressed. World history would be easy if it played out under purely favourable circumstances and if chance did not play a role, Marx wrote. The characters of those in the leadership of the movement also belonged to chance.52
In two drafts, Marx addressed precisely two such leading persons (the completed letters have been lost). One was Leo Frankel (or Fränkel), a Hungarian who joined the International and made his name in the Commune through his efforts to establish a Committee for Public Security (Comité de salut public), and the other was Louis-Eugène Varlin, who was also a member of the International but was chiefly a Proudhonist. Marx encouraged them to see to it that papers that compromised Thiers and other enemies of the Commune were preserved in a safe place. He also criticized the Commune for devoting entirely ‘too much time over trifles and personal squabbles’.53
There are no letters in Marx’s hand from the time of the ‘bloody week’. On 12 June, when London was flooded with refugees from the massacres in May, Marx formulated a few summary assessments in the letter to Edward Spencer Beesly that has already been discussed. He noted that the nonsense (Unsinn) of the Paris press about his own writings and his relationship to the Commune testified to the fact that the police were sitting on greatly insufficient material. But he exclaimed in the same breath: ‘If only the Commune had listened to my warnings!’ He had advised them to fortify the heights to the north towards the Prussian side, otherwise they would end up in a rat trap, and he had told them to send all papers that compromised the Thiers regime to London. They had done neither.54
The Paris Commune made Marx notorious across all Europe – in fact, over large parts of the world. Previously he had lived somewhat in the background, watched by a police spy or two; he had become briefly known as a journalist and acquired a certain, very limited reputation as a scholar, but now his name was being spread everywhere and roused horror or rapture. He was not unaffected by the fame. He wrote to Kugelmann with a satisfied smile that ‘throughout the period of the last Paris revolution’ he had incessantly been called ‘le grand chef de l’Internationale’ (the big boss of the International) in the hostile press.55
Kugelmann knew as well as Marx that it was not true. As we have seen, Marx’s influence over the Paris Commune was limited, and the very birth of the Commune was neither calculated nor pushed forward by anyone. It arose out of the chaos the war had created.
But, once the Commune was a fact, Marx – true to habit – tried to keep accounts of what was happening. He composed several drafts before publishing in June 1871 – when everything was over – The Civil War in France, a nearly forty-page ‘Address’ that constituted the official position of the International on the events in Paris and in France. It is above all a history of the background of the Commune, its character, and its bloody conclusion, more than the course of events.
The interesting thing is Marx’s analysis of the Commune as a political phenomenon. He starts with a small exposition on the development of the state. Its permanent attributes of a standing army, police, bureaucracy, and so on are a consequence of the absolute monarchy. But the state gradually developed to strengthen the power of the capitalists over labour; it serves, in the words of Thiers, to keep the ‘vile multitude’ in check. This took on an extreme form in the Second Empire, during which the rich got tremendously richer and the working class had to toil and starve.
It is in this light that the Commune should be viewed. It was, Marx said, ‘the direct antithesis to the Empire’. Here, he was reaching directly back to Hegel, who argued that the revolution of 1789 constituted the antithesis to absolutism. But Marx did not then follow in Hegel’s footsteps: for Hegel, the negation of absolute royal power must also meet its negation, in this case the rule of the first Napoleon. Marx, naturally, did not see the bloody repression of the Commune as such a step forward – quite the contrary.
But how did the Commune itself appear as an antithesis to what preceded it? The Commune had rid itself of the Army, replacing it with the National Guard which consisted of ‘the working men’. The Commune was to be a working assembly, not a parliamentary one, and it was to be simultaneously executive and legislative. Once the Commune had got rid of the police and the standing army, it was also eager to free itself from the power of the priests.
In a vision reminiscent of Charles Fourier, Marx saw all of France covered by nothing but communes down to the smallest village. Each and every one had its sovereignty, at the same time as they were joined together in decision-making assemblies both regionally and centrally in Paris. At the higher levels, it was thus a representative system.
Marx said optimistically that, just as private businesses have a splendid ability to put the right person in the right place (here he undoubtedly got his information from Engels), so would the communes and the network of communes find their ideal executor of all the tasks a society requires to function.
After this summary plan for a new type of society, Marx returned to a more theoretical level. Much earlier, he had preferred to use a classic pair of concepts – form and content (or form and substance) – to elucidate his views on society in general. Once again, this was put to use. These were, he said, entirely new historical creations that should not be confused with certain earlier forms of social life, with which they may have a certain external similarity. They were thus not any new variant of the medieval communes, nor do they constitute a new attempt at breaking down large political entities into small states. Nor did it involve a return to the communal division of the 1790s. On the contrary, they constitute a thoroughly expansive political form, whereas all previous forms had been repressive. This form aims at turning the means of production, land and capital, into simple tools for free and associated labour. This is, Marx emphasized, pure communism.
The working class expected no miracles from the Commune, and they had no pre-set utopias. They saw before them a long series of future battles, which would change both circumstances and people. International cooperation would always be important.
The Commune showed wisdom and moderation, M
arx wrote. Like the English oligarchs, the German Empire had created an important part of its wealth through robbing the Church of its riches at one point, and now they professed horror at the fact that the Commune had taken 8,000 francs from the Church.
But despite his admiration, he admitted that the past had strongly made itself felt during the months the Commune existed. His words are a faint echo of the classic ideas in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written nearly twenty years earlier, where he talked about the past weighing like a nightmare on those that came after. Now, he was more hopeful: time would shake these regressions off. With these words, he definitively distanced himself from the Jacobins who played an important role in the first Commune.
But he also emphasized the significance of women in the Commune as ‘heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity’.
At the end of the document, he defended the decision of the Commune to take hostages – including the Archbishop of Paris – when the threat from outside became urgent. Marx pointed out that the Communards offered again and again to exchange the prelate, and even additional priests, for one man – namely Blanqui, who was being held prisoner by their opponents. Thiers refused, since ‘he knew that with Blanqui he would give to the Commune a head, while the Archbishop would serve his purpose best in the shape of a corpse’.
The Commune ended with a civil war under the supervision of the foreign invaders. Thiers’s troops displayed a cruelty that can only be compared with the worst Roman generals. But Marx assured his readers that the defeat of the Commune did not mean the end; the battle would be taken up again and again ever more intensively.56
The address is an important document. It acquired great historical significance especially because it guided Lenin to such a great degree. It is not as obvious that it completely expresses Marx’s understanding. His earlier addresses in the name of the International had been products of compromise. This one has such features as well. Marx suppressed the criticism he gave free rein to in his correspondence. When he pointed out Blanqui as the possible leader of the Commune, he was scarcely expressing his own assessment of the foremost advocate of what he called the ‘tactic of the Putsch’. Rather, he was placating the influential Blanquists in the International with his words.
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