The Paris Commune of 1871

Seventy-Two Days That Changed Political Theory

On March 18, 1871, the workers and National Guard of Paris seized control of the city. France had just been defeated in the Franco-Prussian War, the Emperor Napoleon III had been captured at Sedan, and the new republican government under Adolphe Thiers had retreated to Versailles. When Thiers sent troops to confiscate the National Guard's cannons on the heights of Montmartre, the soldiers refused to fire on the crowd, and the government's authority in Paris collapsed.

What emerged was the Paris Commune — an elected council of 92 members, predominantly workers, artisans, and radical intellectuals. In its brief existence from March 18 to May 28, 1871, the Commune enacted a remarkable series of measures: separation of church and state, remission of rents, the right of workers to take over workshops abandoned by their owners, election of judges, replacement of the standing army with a citizens' militia, and a cap on officials' salaries at the level of a skilled worker's wage. Women played active roles, with figures like Louise Michel and Elisabeth Dmitrieff organizing defense and social welfare.

The Commune was not Marxist — its members included Proudhonists, Blanquists, Jacobins, and members of the International. But Marx, watching from London, recognized it as something unprecedented: the working class actually holding political power.

Marx and The Civil War in France

Marx wrote his analysis, The Civil War in France, as an address to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, published just two days after the Commune's fall. It became one of his most important political texts. Marx argued that the Commune revealed the 'political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.' The Commune was not simply a new government — it was a fundamentally different kind of state.

Several features struck Marx as decisive. The Commune had abolished the standing army and police, replacing them with armed citizens. All officials were elected and subject to immediate recall. No official earned more than a worker's wage. The Commune was a 'working body' — simultaneously legislative and executive — rather than a parliamentary talking shop. This was not the bourgeois state repurposed but a new political form built from below.

Marx drew a crucial theoretical lesson: the working class cannot simply 'lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.' The existing state — with its bureaucracy, standing army, police, and judiciary — was built to serve ruling-class interests and had to be replaced entirely. Lenin would later make this argument central to The State and Revolution (1917), and it became a dividing line between revolutionary and reformist socialism.

A Legacy of Possibility

The Commune's practical importance lay not in what it achieved — seventy-two days is too short to transform a society — but in what it demonstrated was possible. Workers could govern. They could organize production, administer justice, defend a city, and make policy. The Commune proved that the existing state was not the only conceivable form of political organization.

For Marx, the Commune also revealed the proletariat's capacity for creativity under pressure. Nobody planned the Commune in advance; it emerged from a specific crisis and improvised solutions to immediate problems. This spontaneous inventiveness confirmed Marx's belief that the working class would develop new political forms through practice, not theory. Revolutionaries could not design the future state from their writing desks — the class struggle itself would produce the necessary institutions.