The attempt to remove National Guard cannon from the Butte on 18 March 1871, which the troops refused to carry out (1871)
The trigger; Generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas were seized and shot by the crowd.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Paris Commune
18 March – 28 May 1871
Revolutionary municipal government in France, and a founding myth of the socialist left
A revolutionary government that ruled the French capital for seventy-two days in the spring of 1871, in the aftermath of defeat by Prussia and a four-month siege. It began when troops sent by Adolphe Thiers's government to remove National Guard cannon from Montmartre on 18 March fraternised with the crowd instead, and Thiers withdrew to Versailles. The Commune, elected on 26 March, decreed the separation of church and state, remission of rents, and workers' control of abandoned workshops, and toppled the Vendôme Column as a monument to militarism. Government troops re-entered the city on 21 May and crushed it in the Semaine sanglante, the bloody week; estimates of those killed vary widely and remain disputed.
How to spot them
- ▸Cannon on the Butte Montmartre, and soldiers who will not fire on the crowd, 18 March 1871
- ▸A government that has retreated to Versailles while the capital governs itself
- ▸A column in a square pulled down as a monument to militarism, with a painter later blamed
- ▸A bloody week in late May that ends among the tombs of a cemetery in the east
- ▸A white basilica raised afterwards on the hill, as an act of expiation
What happened
The toppling on 16 May of a bronze column in the Place Vendôme, cast from captured cannon (1871)
The Vendôme Column; the painter Gustave Courbet was later held liable for the cost of re-erecting it.
The seventy-two-day government whose red flag flew over the Hôtel de Ville (1871)
Elected on 26 March 1871; it decreed the separation of church and state and remitted rents.
The final week of street fighting from 21 to 28 May, ending at the wall of a cemetery in the east (1871)
La Semaine sanglante; the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise became a socialist shrine.
Marx's pamphlet of 1871 for the International, written as the fighting ended (1871)
The Civil War in France, which made the episode a model for later revolutionaries.
A schoolteacher and anarchist, called the Red Virgin, deported to New Caledonia (1871)
Louise Michel, who demanded death at her trial and was transported instead.
The white basilica begun in 1875 on the hill above the city, as an act of national expiation (1875–1914)
Sacré-Cœur, built on Montmartre where the rising had begun.
Quick-fire facts
- •It followed France's defeat at Sedan in September 1870, the proclamation of the Third Republic and a siege that lasted from September 1870 to January 1871
- •Adolphe Thiers, chief executive of the French government, directed the suppression from Versailles
- •The Commune adopted the revolutionary calendar and flew the red flag
- •Archbishop Georges Darboy of Paris was among the hostages shot in the final days
- •The Tuileries Palace was burned and never rebuilt; the Hôtel de Ville was gutted and reconstructed
- •Estimates of Communard dead in the Semaine sanglante have ranged from around 6,000 to 20,000 and remain contested
- •Some 40,000 people were arrested and more than 4,000 deported to New Caledonia; an amnesty followed in 1880
- •Marx called it the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat; Lenin was buried wrapped in a Communard flag, by tradition
- •The song L'Internationale was written by the Communard Eugène Pottier in June 1871
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Sources
- Alistair Horne — The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71
- John Merriman — Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871