The Paris Commune was the last of the nineteenth-century revolutions, but its defeat led to the formation of a new conservative order in Europe, argues Dominic Alexander

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed
Part 4: The French Revolution: the road to revolution
Part 5: The French Revolution: Revolution and the Sans Culottes
Part 6: How the Great Revolutions happened, France: Rise and fall of a popular republic
Part 7: The age of revolutions: Aftershocks of the French Revolution
Part 8: The nineteenth-century age of revolutions: betrayal to red revolution 1830-1849

Italian unification was the first of the issues left unsolved by the 1848 revolutions to be settled largely without further upheavals that could threaten property and order. Napoleon III, always trying to stabilise his rule with foreign-policy triumphs, was easily roped into aiding the ambitions of the ‘Prussia’ of Italy, Piedmont. Thus, France fought a war with Austria in 1859, in a sense on Piedmont’s behalf. Two bloody battles which Austria lost were sufficient to end the enthusiasm of both France and Austria for further fighting. Austria ceded Lombardy to France, which handed the province over to Piedmont, in return for Nice and Savoy.

The central Italian states, without the bulwark of Austrian support for their ducal houses, joined Piedmont to create an Italian kingdom. A democratic element in Italian unification came with Giuseppi Garibaldi, a veteran revolutionary. His expedition to Sicily raised a peasant revolt, and swept away the old regime in Sicily and Naples. Garibaldi’s revolutionary army was, however, politically outmanoeuvred, and the resulting Kingdom of Italy was a very conservative, if nonetheless, parliamentary, state.

In Germany, Prussia succeeded in keeping Austria excluded from the Zollverein, while its industrial development leapt ahead rapidly, making Prussia the economic centre of gravity in Germany. It also saw the increasingly confident development of worker organisation, with the origins of the mass Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany lying in the 1860s.

In these circumstances, the clash between Prussia and Austria over dominance in the German realm could hardly have been avoided, however much Otto von Bismarck, the minister-president of Prussia, claimed in his memoirs to have carefully plotted events. Austria’s defeat in Italy made it a wounded empire, easily provoked, and so the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 began, and ended seven weeks later with Austria’s defeat. The unification of most of the German states under Prussian leadership followed, leaving just the four southern states, from Baden to Bavaria, notionally independent.

The result was a huge change to Europe’s geopolitical balance, and Napoleon III felt his and France’s prestige and power being eclipsed. In fairly short order, Bismarck was able to sucker Louis Napoleon into a desperately unwise and unjustified war ostensibly over the possible succession of a German prince to the Spanish throne.

There was always an inherent fragility about the Second Empire; it was a strange political confection whose appeal was simply as a way to escape the class war of 1848. Napoleon III was conscious that his regime depended upon the good opinion of the public, the peasantry in particular. So long as it prospered, the bourgeoisie could be content, but when more difficult times arrived in the 1860s, with rising working-class unrest and militant strikes, loyalty to the regime wore thin. A liberal turn at the end of the 1860s, and towards a kind of parliamentary system in 1870, was not enough to save the Empire when war against Prussia/Germany turned into the crushing defeat at Sedan on 1 September, when the Emperor surrendered along with 84,000 soldiers, 2,700 officers and 39 generals.^[1]

A new republic

Upon the news of Sedan, major demonstrations in Paris forced the Assembly into declaring a new republic, and a provisional Government of National Defence was formed, including leaders of the parliamentary opposition. However, Paris was soon surrounded by German troops, and the entirety of France north and east of Orléans occupied. There were widespread expectations of a vigorous rallying of the nation for a war of liberation, but that would have meant in the first instance arming the people.

Marx wrote in 1871 that ‘Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workman over the French capitalist and his state parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate one moment to turn into a Government of National Defection.’^[2] Not for the last time, a bourgeois government had to pretend to be doing one thing, while actively pursuing the exact opposite course.

The memory of the victorious revolutionary wars of defence during the original revolution seized the imagination of many in Paris and beyond, but the wish to repeat past glories was a double-edged sword at best. On the one hand, it roused a mass will to resist in dreadful circumstances. On the other, it discouraged clear-sighted political thinking in dreams of recreating the Jacobin republic of 1793. Blanqui, in his paper, focused wrath on the Prussian invader in highly chauvinistic terms, apparently siding with the bourgeois government.^[3] Nonetheless, Blanqui also called for the arming of the people, and for a government prepared to wage revolutionary war.

After further defeats, and the news that the Government of National Defence had started negotiations for surrender, Blanquists and parts of the National Guard staged a demonstration in Paris which resulted in the declaration of a revolutionary government. As so often, this kind of insurrectionary strategy, assuming mass support rather than organising it, was a failure. Without the support of any mass crowds, the revolutionaries were soon dispersed by National Guard units loyal to the government. Blanqui was forced into hiding, and discovered and arrested months later.

The contradictory role of the Parisian National Guard in subsequent events was crucial. It was now the only force available to defend Paris, but rather than being a regular army, it was essentially a citizens’ militia, and troops elected their own officers. It was very susceptible to the political mood of Paris, particularly as membership in it became a major way to support families during the siege. Unlike in 1848, the Guard was now open to citizens in general, and was no longer a bastion of the middle class.

Meanwhile the Prussian siege and bombardment of Paris tightened, terrorising and starving the populace. The provisional government’s failure to make any effort to relieve the city turned the mood of Paris increasingly more radical. A botched attack on Prussian forces on January 19, 1871, led to suspicions the government was deliberately sabotaging the defence of the city. On 21 January, a crowd freed prisoners imprisoned after the 31 October incident, leading to troops firing on a demonstration of Blanquists and National Guards the following day, killing seven.

The provisional government launched a wave of repression against the left afterwards, ordering clubs and newspapers to close.^[4] The terms of the armistice agreed with Prussia were then announced, further enraging opinion in Paris. As Marx put it, Paris was put in the position of having to accept that ‘her revolution of 4 September meant nothing but a simple transfer of power from Louis Bonaparte to his royal rivals; or she had to stand forth as the self-sacrificing champion of France.’^[5] The insistence of Parisians to carry on the war somehow was not just nationalistic braggadocio and delusion, but a revolutionary necessity lest another reactionary regime be allowed to take the place of Napoleon III.

The desperate circumstances the siege imposed on working-class people, while the wealthy still dined in luxury restaurants (reputedly in part on the animals of the city zoo), helped fuel the idea of resurrecting the French Revolutionary commune to organise a social republic which would actually prioritise the people’s survival. The armistice with Germany finally removed a point of confusion over how to continue the war without supporting the government.

Fomenting civil war

However, that government, now led by the veteran liberal politician Adolphe Thiers, then acted in a way seemingly designed to provoke a civil war. Thiers ordered national elections at such short notice that their announcement arrived in some places only the day before they were to be held.^[6] This prevented any popular electoral mobilisation, and ensured the new assembly, which met at Bordeaux on 12 February, was staunchly conservative and royalist in complexion, raising fears that even the existence of a republic was in danger.

To relieve some of the economic pressure during the siege, there had been a moratorium on debt collections. On 13 March, Bordeaux refused to extend this. This immediately ruined countless shopkeepers and small masters in Paris, as well as putting tenants at the mercy of their landlords. This single act of bourgeois fiscal rectitude drove the lower middle-class mass of the Paris population into the revolutionary camp. Thiers was doing his best to rally the forces of order in order to crush working-class Paris, but was also driving even the middle class and left republicans in Paris towards the revolutionary left.

It was in a state of defensiveness and some desperation that the revolution that has come to be known as the Paris Commune took place, but the final spark that lit the fire came again from Thiers. A priority in the goal of disarming Paris was to induce the National Guard to surrender its 400 cannons, but when it came to it, the guards refused to give them up. The Parisian National Guard’s Central Committee remained firm also. This determination came from below; sub-committees had sprung up in local areas, and took action. For example, the ‘sub-committee of the Rue des Rosiers surrounded their cannons by a ditch and had them guarded day and night.’^[7] There was then convoked a general meeting of delegates from National Guard units who acclaimed a new commander-in-chief independent of the government. The renewed Central Committee, aware of tensions reaching crisis point, declared that it would simply defend itself against aggression, and that the people would not fire the first shot.

Thiers had far from sufficient forces to quell the revolution at this point, but was pushed to end the stand-off by financiers who warned that until Paris was subdued, the government could not make fiscal decisions. Unable to muster the strength to arrest the 25 members of the Central Committee, Thiers nevertheless ordered 6000 troops into the city to seize the cannons on 18 March.^[8] The execution of this plan was as botched as its conception. The cannons were largely taken through surprise, but no thought had been given to how they would be conveyed out of Paris. This allowed time for popular forces to intervene, and women began mobbing the cannon and berating the soldiers.

The National Guard and general crowds began then to mobilise, and General Lecomte found himself surrounded. He ordered his troops three times to fire upon the crowd, full of women and children, but they refused to do so, and after fraternising with the crowd, turned about and arrested Lecomte and his officers.^[9] Elsewhere in Paris, troops were similarly blocked by crowds, and often went over to the people, so that only ten out of hundreds of cannons were successfully removed. These events panicked Thiers, who fled with the provisional government to Versailles, leaving Paris without a government at all, since it lacked any city-wide municipal authority.

The Paris Commune

This left the Central Committee of the National Guard effectively in charge of the city, but things were quite chaotic on the day. General Lecomte and another captured general, Clément-Thomas, who was a leading perpetrator of the massacres of June 1848, were both executed by their own soldiers, before other officers taken prisoner were set free.^[10] The red flag now flew over the Hôtel de Ville and National Guard units occupied other key places of Paris, but the Central Committee was still slow to assert itself. It allowed remaining army regiments to be marched out of Paris with their baggage and equipment, when the National Guard could easily have stopped the disorderly exodus, and kept these resources for the revolution.^[11]

The Central Committee showed a fair degree of competence in its new task of governing Paris, but unfortunately it had little in the way of a political programme, or political strategy. The Commune’s first historian, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, argued that its very anonymity, its members being previously uncommitted politically, allowed its success: ‘Had it been sectarian, hatching decrees, the movement would have ended like that of 31^st October.’^[12]

However, the committee’s lack of politics meant an absence of strategy, and a fatally defensive posture dominated. Marx argued that the Central Committee made a major error in not pressing its advantage right away; at this point, the government at Versailles was completely helpless.^[13] Indeed, some in the Central Committee at the time argued for a march on Versailles, to disperse the Assembly and call on the rest of France to declare itself for the revolution. Others, however, argued that their only mandate was for Paris, so the provinces would do as they saw fit.^[14]

The issue arose again after an armed demonstration of about a thousand ‘dandies, petty squires, journalists’ and Bonapartists attempted to force the Central Committee out of the Hôtel de Ville.^[15] After being ordered to disperse, they fired on the National Guard, who fired back, killing perhaps a dozen. By the next day, a counter-revolutionary force had been organised within the city, but the manoeuvres of their leaders outraged Paris, and their forces dwindled away, as the Central Committee and National Guard re-asserted their authority. The counterrevolutionaries fled to Versailles. Again, the question of a march on Versailles was raised, but ruled out.

This was of course to adopt a narrow and passive attitude towards a political and class struggle. Lissagaray disagreed with Marx’s judgment, arguing that the government at Versailles would simply have fled further to Fontainebleau, and still have been able to ‘govern and deceive the provinces’.^[16] That point is debatable, but it doesn’t address Marx’s deeper point about the extreme caution and defensiveness of the leadership of the Commune, which was in evidence all the way until the last desperate days. There were in fact communes declared in a number of cities elsewhere in France, but while there were some initial successes, the revolts elsewhere were suppressed relatively quickly. The potential, however, should not be dismissed; even after the suppression of provincial communes, there were working-class acts of support for Paris, as when in Grenoble and Périgord, crowds prevented munitions from being sent to Versailles.^[17]

The Central Committee, however, instead of pressing its initial advantage, decided to engage itself in organising elections for a Council of the Commune. This council was successfully elected with enough enthusiasm and participation to dismay Thiers and Versailles. Its composition was, nevertheless, predictably varied, with some liberals and middle-class radicals, but a majority of revolutionaries, divided between Blanquists, Proudhonists and Internationalists (followers of the First International, but not thereby Marxists as such).

In so far as there was any consensus, socialism was the agreed goal, but there was little agreement on what this would be or how to achieve it. The Council was far less effective than the Central Committee, but if they shared a fault, it was that the Council also adopted a defensive posture. One of its most glaring errors, among many, was its failure to seize the funds of the central bank. These were at the mercy of the Commune: ‘All serious rebels have commenced by seizing upon the sinews of the enemy – the treasury. The Council of the Commune was the only revolutionary Government that refused to do so.’^[18]

The fall of the Commune

Thiers was still unable to gather sufficient troops to mount an attack Paris as the provinces did not respond to his plea for reinforcements.^[19] The mood of the provinces was turning against the government quite markedly, as was shown by the municipal elections held at the end of April, when the Party of Order (monarchists and Bonapartists) decisively lost. The national enemy, but class ally, Bismarck, however, came to the rescue. For a payment of a part of the indemnity which France now owed to Germany, on 2 April, Bismarck released a large enough body of prisoners of war, for Thiers to begin a second siege of Paris. Later, the Prussians would also allow French troops to pass through their lines in order to assault the city.

French government forces then began a savage shelling of Paris, while Thiers proclaimed to the country that ‘the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris. But only cannonades it.’^[20] As conditions deteriorated, the Council was driven to creating a Committee of Public Safety. The name seemed auspicious, but its authority and its members were a pale shadow of its namesake of the First Republic, and the noose gradually constricted around the Commune. Lissagaray concluded that ‘the Commune was a barricade, not a government.’^[21]

As April dragged on, government troops massacred Commune prisoners as they went, until the Commune threatened to retaliate in kind, but did not do so until nearly the very end, when government atrocities reached new levels of barbarity. It was not until 21 May that government forces finally began to assault the working-class areas of Paris, where resistance was strongest. The heroic resistance of the Communards throughout April and May did not lessen at this last, but was snuffed out with such great indiscriminate brutality that it ‘shocked the nerves even of the not over-sensitive London Times’, as Marx pointed out.^[22]

Looked at closely, the Paris Commune can appear a depressing story, but it needs to be seen in a wider lens as well. Whatever its faults, this was the first time a working-class dominated revolutionary government had taken power in a capital city, and socialism was the goal for all the major factions. It was inspiring to the radical left then all over Europe, with some hopes that the revolution in Paris would presage an international revolution. These hopes were dashed, of course, but the example of the Commune made the possibility of workers’ revolution a more concrete reality than it had ever been before.

Moreover, lessons would be learnt from the mistakes of the Commune. Firstly, the Proudhonists’ plans for workers’ cooperatives were found to be of no use in a revolutionary situation. Co-operative models for socialism had had an often revolutionary colouration up to this point, but this faded away thereafter, and co-operatism dwindled towards business-orientated apolitical ventures like the English Rochdale model. Also, while Blanqui remained a revered hero, the Blanquist model of revolution declined. Socialist ideas became therefore more focused on the power of trade-union organisation, and building mass political organisations. Secondly, in terms of political strategy, Lenin later on, for example, certainly saw that the workers’ revolution could not sit back defensively, awaiting the moves of the ruling class.

The working class and eighty years of revolution

The working class had come a very long way since 1792, when it formed just part of the larger plebeian mass, and its class concerns were submerged within the more inchoate aims of a mass of petty bourgeois and artisans, whose anti-capitalism was implicit at best. The class struggles of the bourgeois revolution in France had nonetheless raised economic questions of the rights of property as against the rights of humanity to life and livelihood. This contradiction produced the first revolutionary communism in the form of Babeuf’s conspiracy, and the echoes of that would reverberate through Jacobin secret societies in later decades, producing the Blanquist revolutionary party.

Britain, as the leading industrial nation with the largest and most modernised working class, produced in some ways the most advanced working-class movements, certainly in terms of the breadth and depth of trade-union organisation. There were, however, definite limitations to the political development of working-class organisation in Britain. The contrast with France highlights what even revolutionary defeats can achieve in terms of developing consciousness. France’s working class was less developed in economic terms, but far more revolutionary in consciousness. The difference was the experience of revolution.

It was not that socialist, and even communist, ideas were absent from Britain in the decades after the French Revolution. Many trade unionists, especially during the General Unionism movement of the late 1820s and 1830s harboured definite designs to overthrow capitalism through worker organisation. There were insurrectionary events, such as that at Merthyr in 1831, and northern towns in England were under intense working-class pressure at points. In Oldham, for example, the middle-class authorities never dared to implement locally the notorious Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, fearing working-class fury.

This atmosphere was the one in which the organisationally most sophisticated working-class political movement of its time appeared, Chartism. A revolutionary wing did develop on the left of the Chartist movement in the 1840s, but it was not strong enough to force a real crisis in Britain in 1848 as happened elsewhere in Europe. All the ingredients were present in Britain for a revolutionary workers’ movement to compare to France’s, but it didn’t crystalise in the same way.

The reason for this is not some inherently moderate national character, as conservative writers have sometimes wanted to suggest, but the simple fact that the political ruling class never lost its grip; revolutions produce a vacuum of power in which social consciousness can make great leaps in the understanding of what is possible, and how society can be transformed. Britain came closest to revolution in 1832, but the reason why it didn’t tip over the edge is, ultimately, because of England’s early bourgeois revolution in the seventeenth century. The old ruling cliques could adapt to the new industrial society, without fundamentally endangering their social power.

Revolution from above?

The character of the age of revolution that followed 1789 was fundamentally shaped by the growth of working-class resistance and revolt. The fear of the working-class challenge to capitalist social relations loomed larger and larger in bourgeois calculations as time went on. In recent years, there has been considerable discussion of the concept of ‘revolution from above’, where social relations are transformed sufficiently by the ruling class to enable capitalism to grow strongly in previously pre-capitalist societies. The revolution from above obviates the need for mass participation in overthrowing the old ruling class, instead allowing it to remain at least politically dominant.

This is the pattern for the entry of Germany and Italy in particular into the capitalist world order. Germany’s final unification happened in 1871, following the Prussian defeat of France in the 1870 war. The failed German revolution of 1848 was thus completed from above, and German society was refashioned enough to allow massive industrial growth in a society whose politics were still dominated by an authoritarian monarchy and reactionary landowning class. In a modified way, much the same can be said of Italian unification in 1860, completed with the addition of Venetia in 1866 following the Austro-Prussian War.

The German ‘revolution from above’ only makes sense, however, in the context of international social revolution from 1789 onwards. It is not an option picked from a menu of particular ways to modernise society, but a process which can only emerge from wider revolutionary events. The old German ruling class acceded to transformational changes under the duress of growing capitalist power in the world around it. It was clear that to remain in control they needed to adapt, and so they would have to allow conditions for capitalism in flourish in German society. Revolution from above only happens because of a social revolutionary context.

For the German bourgeoisie, accepting a subordinate role in the new German Empire was possible precisely because, as its behaviour in 1848 testified, the fear of unleashing working-class revolt was more important than its need to rule Germany. It was the advancement of the working-class revolution which brought the age of bourgeois revolution in Europe to a close. The bourgeoisie clung to the existing order, however reactionary and uncomfortable, because the alternative seemed to be socialist revolution, not a comfortable liberal capitalist settlement.

Revolution from above is a transient historical moment in particular circumstances. It does not show that revolution was unnecessary in the first place. Without the English and French bourgeois revolutions, the historical context which made revolution from above in Germany and Italy a possible outcome of the class struggles produced by the growth of industrial capitalist society in the nineteenth century would not have developed. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 in Japan is the other major example of revolution from above in this era, but this also was the product of the pressure of international capitalism upon an old regime, which had the capability of transforming itself in way parallel to Germany and Italy. These consolidations of modern capitalist states also set the geopolitical scene for the era of imperialist conflict and the coming of World War I.

In Europe, the tragic defeat of the Commune nonetheless led to an age of mass working-class organisation, and the ever more widespread adoption of socialist ideas in the working-class movement. Germany in 1875 saw the fusion of two large workers’ parties to form a united Social Democratic Party, committed, in theory at least, to Marxism. Mass workers’ parties formed in most countries, although Britain’s Labour Party was a laggard in not being formally founded until 1906. The closing years of the nineteenth century also brought with them a new era of the mass strike, which in concentrated urban industrial areas soon gained something of the insurrectionary quality of the uprisings of the 1830s and 40s. This was particularly the case in the latest major state to enter into the capitalist world, Russia.

[1] Cobban, History, p.204.

[2] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’ in Karl Marx, The First International and After (London: Verso 2010), p.188.

[3] Greene, Communist Insurgent, pp.116-17.

[4] ibid. p.123.

[5] Marx, ‘Civil War’, p.200.

[6] ibid. p.195.

[7] Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (London: Verso 2012), pp.60-1.

[8] ibid. pp.62-3.

[9] ibid. p.65

[10] ibid. p.69.

[11] ibid. p.71.

[12] Ibid. p72.

[13] Marx, ‘Civil War’, p.204.

[14] Lissagaray, History, p.74.

[15] ibid. p.92.

[16] ibid. p.102.

[17] ibid. p.217.

[18] ibid. p.153.

[19] Marx, ‘Civil War’, p.201.

[20] ibid. p.220.

[21] Lissagaray, History, p.195.

[22] Marx, ‘Civil War’, p.206.