Paris Commune

The Paris Commune was a short-lived insurrectionary municipal government that controlled Paris for roughly ten weeks in the spring of 1871. It emerged from the political vacuum created by France's collapse in the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris by Prussian forces, and the conservative settlement pursued by Adolphe Thiers's National Assembly, which had relocated to Versailles.

The immediate trigger came on 18 March 1871, when Thiers ordered regular troops to seize cannons held by the Parisian National Guard on Montmartre. The operation failed, two generals (Lecomte and Clément Thomas) were killed by their own soldiers and crowds, and government forces withdrew from the capital. On 26 March, Parisians elected a Commune Council, which proclaimed itself on 28 March.

The Commune's measures combined municipal reform with radical social policy:

• Separation of church and state and seizure of church property
• Remission of rents accrued during the siege
• Abolition of night work in bakeries
• Handover of workshops abandoned by owners to worker cooperatives
• Adoption of the red flag and the revolutionary calendar
• Election and recallability of officials, who were paid workers' wages

Politically, the Commune was a coalition of Jacobins, Blanquists, Proudhonian federalists, and members of the International Workingmen's Association rather than a unified Marxist project.

Versailles forces, reinforced after a prisoner-exchange agreement with Bismarck, retook the city during the Semaine sanglante ("Bloody Week") of 21–28 May 1871. Estimates of Communards killed in fighting or summary executions range widely, commonly cited between 10,000 and 20,000; thousands more were deported to New Caledonia.

The Commune became a foundational reference point for later left-wing thought. Karl Marx analysed it in The Civil War in France (1871), and Lenin later treated it as a prototype of proletarian power, while anarchists drew different federalist lessons from the same experience.