The historic 72-day Paris Commune began on March 18, 1871 when Paris arose to the thunder-burst of ‘Vive la Commune!’ It came up with a radical social agenda like separation between church and state, women’s suffrage, abolition of interest on debts and worker self-management. It happened as a sequel to the defeat of the French Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) which also culminated in decades of tension between the French monarchist government and organised labour syndicates. Karl Marx called it the first experience of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as envisioned by him. ‘The proletarians of Paris,’ wrote the Central Committee of Paris Commune in its manifesto of March 18, ‘amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.’ The awakening in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curse of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June Insurrection in Paris. Its violent suppression on May 28, 1871 by the French Army on ‘la semaine sanglante’ (bloody week; 21-28 May) notwithstanding, Marx realised, “whatever the outcome of the revolution, the Commune had opened a new chapter in the history of the workers’ movement”.
In the wake of defeat by the Prussian armies, the conservative provisional government, headed by Thiers had negotiated peace by allowing Prussian troops to occupy sections of Paris, among other concessions. But Parisians who called for socialist self-rule in their city were aware that Thiers’ supporters were monarchists, out to crush freedom. They became restless, demanding municipal autonomy, forcing Thiers and his government to flee to Versailles. The Parisian National Guard, mostly comprising former labourers, had been allowed to form a governing Central Committee in Paris to command its units. Women played a significant role to combat Thiers who attempted to extract canons that the National Guard had funded. Women spontaneously began throwing stones and badgering the troops, causing riots that forced Thiers and his men to retreat. This working class of Paris, which had been inculcated with the doctrines of Proudhon and Blanqui, counted among them many members of the first International Workingmen’s Association.
Marx, a leading figure in the IWMA, had advised Paris not to seek revolution and instead told them to use the period during the provisional republic to form strong working-class organisations in order to push toward revolution. But his counsel fell on deaf ears of those who had survived the Siege of 1870. Immediately after the defeat of Paris Commune, Marx read his Civil War in France at the general council of IWMA in London. It was translated into English and several other European languages. Several editions were brought out, read with great interest by not only workers, but bourgeois ideologues as well. Marx wrote, “The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of ‘social republic’, with which the February Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself.”
