Table Of ContentC om m u n ards
The story of the Paris Commune of 1871,
As told by those who fought for it
Texts selected, edited, and translated by
Mitchell Abidor
and published by the Marxists Internet Archive, 2010
Marxists Internet Archive
P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA.
CC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0)
2010 by Marxists Internet Archive
Printed by Bookmasters, Inc., Ohio.
Cover design by Joan Levinson.
Distributed exclusively by Erythros Press and Media.
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste; Rochefort, Henri; Reclus, Élie; Marancourt, Lé
on Massenet de; Malon, Benoît; Da Costa, Gaston; Vermersch, Eugène;
Pottier, Eugène.
Abidor, Mitchell
Communards.
ISBN: 978-0-9805428-9-9
ForJoan
Contents
Introduction...................................................................................................1
Timeline of the Civil War in France............................................................6
Prologue.......................................................................................................13
Ephemera of the Siege and the Commune................................................15
The End of the Commune.........................................................................37
Louis-Auguste Blanqui: “La Patrie en Danger”........................................38
Inquiry on the Commune...........................................................................50
Élie Reclus: The Paris Commune Day by Day.........................................87
Men and Tilings from the Time of the Commune..................................124
Benoit Malon: The Third Defeat of the French Working Class...........153
Gaston Da Costa: The Commune Lived.................................................165
Debate on the Hostages and the Committee of Public Safety...............183
The Sessions of the International in Pans During the Commune.........204
Eugène Vermersch: The Incendiaries......................................................266
A Word to the Public................................................................................281
Epilogue......................................................................................................285
Biographical Index of Names of Communards Mentioned in Texts 287
I n t r o d u c t io n
Commune member and National Guard general Antoine Brunei said that the
revolution that began on March 18, 1871 was “provoked by a patriotic sen
timent,” and he was right. For Benoit Malon, member of the Commune and
the International Workingmen’s Association, the Commune was essentially a
socialist undertaking, and he too was right. Gaston Da Costa, a follower of
the great revolutionary conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui and deputy proc
urator of the Commune, saw the Commune as continuation of the Jacobin
tradition of the first great French Revolution, and he too was right. The
journalist and poet Maxime Vermersch saw in the flames set by the dying
Commune a foretaste of the purifying revolution that was still to come, and
he also was right. Massenet de Marancour, leader of a National Guard battal
ion and participant in the Commune’s batdes, saw the entire event as the
working class falling into a trap set by the bourgeoisie so the latter could
have done with any threat to their rule, and he was right as well.
The Commune, the first instance of a working class seizure of power, of, as
Engels later said, the dictatorship of the proletariat, was noble, heroic, and
doomed from the start It was also, as these pages will show, gloriously poly
phonic. No one voice dominated the Commune, nor was there any attempt
by any of the factions that participated in it to impose one viewpoint Every
thing that had been stifled by nearly twenty years of Bonapardst dictatorship
exploded and was given free rein during the two and a half months the
Commune lived. Every current of opinion had seats on the Commune, all of
them had newspapers, and all of them distributed posters expressing their
views. It is this multiplicity of voices will be recalled here.
The currents that fed into and led to the Commune had struggled to survive
under the repression of the Second Empire, when neo-Jacobins, followers of
Blanqui, radical republicans, neo-Babouvist communists, and socialists of all
stripes published newspapers that were, as Maxime Vuillaume recounts in
these pages, quickly banned. They published pamphlets that were seized,
held meetings that were broken up, and went into exile, prison, or were as
sassinated. This multitude of viewpoints, united only in the drive to
overthrow Napoleon III and establish a republic—social or otherwise—
carried over to the legislative body they formed in March 1871, the Com
mune, and the society they attempted to construct within the walls of Pads.
As these pages will reveal, both at the time and in the post-mortems that fol
lowed its defeat, there was much disagreement as to what the priorities of
2 COMMUNARDS
that that legislature and that society should be. No one involved in the
Commune denied that mistakes were made, but just what these mistakes
were remains an open question. The debates were lively, the disagreements
strong, and they are all presented here.
If the writings included here, in their occasional hints at the futility of the
events, resemble the analyses that appear on every ten-year anniversary of
May 1968, they more nearly resemble those writings produced in the after-
math of two far more consequential events: the Spanish Civil War of 1936-
1939 and Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile of 1970-1973. In the
se two events the stakes were infinitely higher than those in 1968.
Did the Parisians of the Commune go too far in proclaiming their own gov
ernment in opposition to the established state? Did they go too far in
declaring its socialist measures, in the tearing down of the Vendôme column,
in the execution of the hostages? Or did they not go far enough? Should they
have seized the money in the Bank of France, been more repressive, execut
ed hostages early on, as their Versaillais enemies did?
Similarly, in Spain, who was right: those in the Republican camp who be
lieved that revolutionary measures should be taken immediately in order to
ensure working class and peasant support for the Republic, or those—
particularly the Communists—who believed that victory over the fascists was
the primary goal and that only once that was achieved should radical steps be
taken? And in Chile, those who survived the military coup of September 11,
1973 continue to debate the wisdom of Allende’s having maintained his poli
cies, or even remaining in power, once it became clear that a military solution
was a real threat Others, however, feel that the coup’s success was owed in
large part to Allende’s failure to arm the working class and take advantage of
the sentiment behind the popular chant: “Allende, Allende, el pueblo te de-
fiende,” Allende, Allende, the people defend you!
Such debates are unavoidable after a failed revolution—even in the case of
successful ones—and are irresolvable, as is any historical counter-factual
And so a reading of the accounts of the Commune, of its ephemera, of the
minutes from its political meetings and governmental body, serve as a verita
ble type for the analysis of revolutionary events everywhere. In the
Commune one can see a foreshadowing of all the revolutionary history that
was to follow.
The Communal revolution was fought at the barricades, but also within the
Commune itself, at rallies, in the newspapers, on the streets, on the walls, and
at the meetings of the Parisian sections of International Workingmen’s Asso
ciation, and all of them have a voice here.
INTRODUCTION 3
What we will not hear are the voices of supporters, critical and otherwise,
from afar, or neutral or partisan historians working from documents. The
Commune was in a fight for its life from the moment of its birth, and the
members of the Commune, the officers and soldiers of the National Guard,
the Commune’s administrators, and the people who took up arms in its de
fense behind the barricades didn’t have the leisure to reflect calmly on
events. Across the border, across the Channel, across an ocean, it is relatively
easy to make considered decisions. In these pages only those who were there
at the time describe and judge the days in Paris between March 18 and May
28, 1871, for only they paid the consequences of these decisions.
The writers who figure here were not the literary lights of France. This class,
the Flauberts and the Zolas and their fellow gens de lettres, detested the Com
mune, and in their private and public writings didn’t attempt to disguise their
hatred. Théophile Gautier spoke of “the gorillas of the Commune,” Flau
bert’s friend Maxime Du Camp described them as “obtuse brutes,” and
Emile Zola, who distinguished himself as thé voice of republican reason in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, praised the massacres of the
Bloody Week as “a horrible necessity to calm certain of {the people’s] fe
vers.” Some writers, such as Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Victor Hugo supported
the Commune, and Jules Vallès, revolutionary journalist and member of the
Commune, produced the sole great novel of the revolution, dnsurge (The
Rebel), the final volume of his autobiographical trilogy. The writers found
here were revolutionaries first and writers second.
There is another important conclusion to be drawn from this anthology. In
1891 Engels wrote in his preface to the twentieth anniversary edition of
Marx’s analysis of the Commune, The Civil War in France, “Look at the
Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat” Engels’s opinion,
was correct as welL As co-inventor of the term “dictatorship of the proletari
at,” he could not be wrong, since the dictatorship of the proletariat was
whatever he said it was. And so if we view die Commune through (he writ
ings that follow, we get a different view of the meaning and destiny of the
term “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
For Engels (and Marx), aside from the fact that it was a government made up
of workers, the most important characteristic was that “it filled all posts—
administrative, judicial, and educational—by election on the basis of univer
sal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the
electors. And, in (he second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only
the same wages received by other workers.”
If this Paris Commune, with its flaws and errors, with its coundess political
currents, with its furious disagreements, with its polyphony of voices was
4 COMMUNARDS
Engels’s dictatorship of the proletariat, then none of its heirs can claim that
tide.
Repression played no part in this dictatorship, and though pro-Versailles
newspapers were ultimately banned, this ban met strong opposition, not least
from as uncompromising a revolutionary as Jules Vallès. No school of
thought was silenced, and even bourgeois candidates were elected to the
Commune, though they immediately resigned, feeling they had no place on
that body.
The Commune’s experience puts the lie to those who would later defend
revolutionary regimes’ explanation that they must crush dissent because they
were under siege. From the moment of its foundation the Commune was
under literal state of siege, yet it remained a democratic body. Perhaps as lat
er critics maintained, most violendy Leon Trotsky in his Terrorism and
Communism, this played a part in its fall; perhaps, as many of the contributors
here say, it should have spent more time fighting and organizing defense and
less time legislating. But it iS of more than passing interest that when in its
final two weeks the Commune formed a body with near-dictatorial powers,
the Committee of Public Safety, it was those in the Commune closest to
Marx, the “minority” made up of members of the Parisian sections of the
International Workingmen’s Association, who announced they could no
longer sit on the Commune because it had abdicated its powers.
The Commune, with its memory of universal suffrage, the right to recall, a
free press, and working-class power, lived only seventy-two days, yet it can
still serve as an inspiration, it can still touch all whose hearts are on the left.
These pages will serve as a reminder that another path was, and is, possible
for those who hope for revolutionary change.
*
A note on the selections. The guiding principle here was to not only repre
sent all the points of view within the pro-Commune camp, but also to
provide translations of texts previously unknown in English. P.O. Lissa-
garay’s history is readily available, both in book form and online, so his
masterpiece isn’t excerpted here. Jules Vallès’s autobiographical novel cover
ing the Commune, The Rebel, has also been translated into English. Most of
the writers here are all but unknown to an Anglophone readership, yet they
provide vital insights into the life of the Paris Commune.
Louis-Auguste Blanqui, La Patrie en Danger. Poulet-Malassis, Paris, 1862.
La Revue Blanche, 1897.
