Paris Commune

Paris Commune 'Commune de Paris'
Capital and largest city	Paris
Official languages	French
Mode of production	Socialism
Government	Dictatorship of the Proletariat
• General	Jarosław Dąbrowski
• Military commander	Louis C. Delescluze

The Paris Commune (French: Commune de Paris) was a revolutionary uprising that seized state power in the city of the same name on the 18th of March, 1871. The Commune was the first proletarian dictatorship and the first revolution where the proletariat played a central role in instigating and leading the movement. It led and defended Paris for 71 days before being defeated by the new Third French Republic.

Historical background

The people’s movement began with the repression of members of the First International by the reactionary Louis Napoleon III, whom after the Ems Dispatch wherin Prussia attempted to claim the Spanish throne, declared war on Prussia and the German States, thus commencing the Franco-Prussian War. After numerous defeats on the French by the Prussians and their southern German allies, Napoleon III would later surrender to the latter and a new Government of National Defense (GND) was established to continue the war against France. The Prussians would later encircle and occupy Paris and unify the German Empire, to the anger of workers towards them and the GND. After months of demostrations and struggle, the French Workers were able to secure power after not complying to Adolphe Thiers' call to disarm the National Guard and French Army, who later defected to the Communards. The Paris Commune was established.

Communard rule

Governance

The commune numbered, at its height, 81 members, many of whom lacked political experience. The political factions that used to share power in the Commune were the Blanquists and the Phroudhnists, none of whom were Marxist, revolutionary parties, nor had any experience waging revolution. They would make numerous mistakes in governance, such as falling for a fraudulent peace negotiation request whilst Thiers prepared his army to reinvade Paris, failing to completely wipe the reactionary threat out.

Policies and decrees

The Paris commune pushed for numerous progressive socio-economic and socio-political policies. One of these was the separation of church and state. This later pushed for the secularization of schools and religious property was distributed among the masses as national property, all of which was decreed on April 3, 1871. The commune also destroyed symbols of chauvinism of the old reactionary state, such as the Place Vendôme which was built in the orders of Napoleon I.The Commune abolished the hated “Morality Police” and army conscription into the National guard. Women were also given privileges and rights.

In regards to economic reform, The Commune imposed the highest annual salary must not exceed 6000 francs and that leaders of the commune received equivalent wages to that of workers. State and private functionaries were heavily punished by the laws of the Commune as They also abolished rent for houses from October 1870 until April 1871. Child labor was abolished and nightwork in bakeries was abolished.

Fall of the Commune

On May 21-28, 1871, the Prussians allowed the reassembled French government troops in Versailles to invade the Paris Commune, which was met with ever growing resistance from the Commune. It was largely lead by the French Marshal Patrice de MacMahon and lead an all-out bandit warfare on the workers movement, even shooting civilians on sight. 30,000 Communards, workers, and civilians were executed, 38,000 imprisoned, and 7,000 were forcibly deported to far off territories such as New Caledonia

Influences in contemporary Marxism

Two days after the defeat of the Commune, Karl Marx spoke about the Commune as:

“The political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.”

and revolutionized the laws of revolution after the failures of the February Revolution of 1848 in Germany as Marx expanded on with:

“One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”

Engels wrote in his 1872 work, “On Authority” on how revolution is authoritarian as it involved the use of arms to enforce power, which also cited the Commune to exemplify this concept.

“But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”

Revolutionary communists, such as Marxist-Leninists and Maoists praise the Paris commune as a movement where the people enforced their power through violence and with the use of weapons, alluding to Mao Zedong’s “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”.