On 18 March 1871, Adolphe Thiers’s government sent troops to Montmartre to seize the National Guard’s cannons. Paris had just endured a Prussian siege; many of those guns had been paid for by public subscriptions. Women and neighbours filled the streets, and some soldiers refused to fire on them. Thiers withdrew to Versailles. This was more than a quarrel over artillery. Working-class Paris refused to surrender its defence to a government that had lifted rent protections and intended to disarm the city. Paris Archives, “La révolution communale”.
From defending neighbourhoods to governing them
Parisians elected a Commune council on 26 March; the new municipal authority was proclaimed on the 28th. It lasted 72 days, until 28 May. Its delegates were to answer to their voters and could be recalled. Marx, following events from London, saw more than workers taking charge of the old state machine: he saw another form of political power. In The Civil War in France, he described a working, accountable body rather than a chamber of speeches.
Only men could vote in the election. That did not keep women out of the revolution. They defended their neighbourhoods and organised working women; the Women’s Union called for delegates from different trades to organise work and resistance. The Commune’s history cannot be told only through its councillors.
A city organised for its people
The Commune cancelled rent arrears from the siege, banned night work in bakeries and ended employers’ fines and deductions from wages. On 16 April, it asked workers’ organisations to inventory workshops abandoned by their owners and prepare their transfer to workers’ cooperatives. That decree set a process in motion; it did not mean every workshop was already collectively run. In weeks, the question changed from “What does the owner want?” to “What do the people living and working here need?” City of Paris, social measures; 16 April workshop decree.
Bloody Week and the idea that survived
From 21 to 28 May, Versailles forces retook Paris street by street. Thousands of Communards were killed; many survivors were imprisoned or deported. The government could crush the Commune, but not erase its central question: why should workers be confined to asking for reforms when they can decide how society is governed? Marx published his defence of the Commune immediately after its defeat. Its example endured throughout the workers’ movement. City of Paris, Bloody Week; Marx, The Civil War in France.
Read further
- Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) — his contemporary Marxist account.
- Paris Archives, “La révolution communale” — documents and a March 1871 timeline, in French.
- Paris Commune, appeal to working women — a primary source on women’s organising.