Storming the Heavens – 140th anniversary of Paris Commune
In the wake of the
two-month-long Franco-Prussian war of autumn 1870, which saw the French
capitalist state resoundingly defeated (with its self-styled emperor,
Napoleon III, being captured on the battlefield) and witnessed the birth of a
united Germany, the workers of Paris briefly established, for the first time, a
dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the exploited majority over
a parasitical minority of bankers, factory-owners and landlords.
It ended bloodily, and with the French bourgeoisie
fully restored to power, but communists, socialists and all progressive
humanity are justified in celebrating the Paris Commune and its 140th
anniversary as a milestone in proletarian history.
At the time, Karl Marx spoke of the workers of
Paris “storming the heavens” and, upon the Commune’s violent demise at
the hands of a defeated French capitalist class rearmed by Germany’s ruling
military clique and its industrialist backers, he famously wrote in The
Civil War in France that “working-men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be
forever celebrated as the harbinger of a new society.
“Its martyrs,” he declared, “are
enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its executioners are
consigned to that dustbin of history from which all the prayers of their
priests will not avail to redeem them.”
On March 1, 1871, the conquering Prussian – soon to
be German – army staged a victory parade along the main avenue in Paris, the Champs
Elysées (a symbolic humiliation which was to be re-enacted 69 years later
by the occupying Nazis). But within a fortnight of this, the people of the
capital had transformed the local volunteer army which fought in the previous
year’s war into a democratic workers’ militia, with delegates to its central
committee elected from each of the city’s twenty boroughs.
And, on March 18, this National Guard led the
proletariat of Paris in an uprising against attempts by the new, bourgeois “provisional
government” and its German paymasters to disarm the city.
The exploiting class and its political leaders took refuge at Versailles, to the west of the capital, which had been the seat of royalty before the
French Revolution of the late eighteenth century.
Paris was now in the hands of its working men and
women.
March 26 saw the election of a popular
administration, the Paris Commune, comprised mainly of workers, small craftsmen
and trusted members of the National Guard. When the Commune was publicly
proclaimed two days later, there were scenes of wild rejoicing outside the city
hall and in practically every other part of Paris.
Meanwhile, it took the Versailles government until
May 10 to sign a formal peace agreement with the German empire so as to turn
all of its military efforts against the Paris workers. The Versailles troops
did not have an easy time of it, though. It took them two weeks of bitter
fighting to fully wrest control of the capital from proletarian forces, but the
bourgeoisie was a lot quicker when it came to wreaking its revenge.
During the bloody week of May 21-28, 17,000
communards – supporters of the Commune — were summarily executed. Many
of these judicial murders took the form of workers, both men and women, being
shot by firing squad in Père Lachaise cemetery. The wall against which they
were stood is still there, opposite the graves of successive leaders of the
French Communist Party, and it remains a site of pilgrimage for revolutionaries
and progressives from around the world.
By the time the last barricades had fallen, in the
north-east of the city, working-class political power in Paris had been in
place for some two and half months. There is a song which remains popular to
this day among advanced French workers: Les 72 Jours de la Commune [The
Commune’s 72 Days].
The ferocity of the ruling class and its army in
the final week was surely a measure of its tremendous fear. Twenty-three years
earlier, in 1848, the bourgeoisie had already torn off the mask of its fine
republican slogans – “liberty, equality, brotherhood” – when it crushed
the previous generation of revolutionary Paris proletarians. In 1871, however,
it also tore off the mask of its patriotism when it colluded with the
German army of occupation in moving against the insurrection in the capital.
It is nonetheless an error to present the Commune
simply as a popular, patriotic uprising against the capitulation of a
collaborationist bourgeoisie. From being national in character, the struggle
very quickly became a social one. An extremely short war against Prussia had transformed itself into a civil war, a war of class against class.
The measures taken in such a short time by the
Commune and its leaders amply illustrate this point: abolition of the police
and the standing army (March 30); disbanding of the religion-inspired “morality
police”, practically all of whose victims had been workers, of course; and
the full accountability to the working class, up to and including immediate
recall, of all public officials (April 1). It should be added that political
leaders and civil servants were also banned from receiving more than the
average worker’s wage.
Then there was the secularisation of the state –
and the confiscation of the assets of the clergy – along with the establishment
of universal primary and vocational education (both of these decrees being
promulgated on April 2).
There was a moratorium on rents (March 30); the
freezing of the price of bread (May 9); and the banning of most night-shift
work (April 20).
Most significantly of all, the Commune passed a law
granting workers’ associations ownership of property which had been abandoned
by the fleeing Paris bourgeoisie (April 16).
For generations now, the Commune has come to
represent the possibility of a different society, one which is truly democratic
and participative, one in which those who produce the wealth hold sway over the
state and over an economy planned in the interests of human need rather than
private greed.
It also came to represent the internationalism of
the French proletariat, which elected a number of foreign workers to the
Commune. And, while symbolically burning the guillotine in public on April 6,
as a repudiation of the Terror, it went on to demolish the chapel built in
memory of Louis XVI after his execution.
Despite all of these audacious moves, it must be
said – as Marx himself did – that the Paris workers still showed too much
timidity when confronted with the capitalist taboo of expropriating private
property. In particular, they did not dare to take over the Bank of France.
Careful not to be held responsible for unleashing
civil war, the Commune also allowed the Versailles army time to organise itself
for a counter-offensive.
On balance, however, these weaknesses in no way dim
the bright vision held out in Paris during that spring of 1871, the vision of a
revolutionary, socialist alternative to the exploitation of man by man.
Another French song ends with the declaration: “La
Commune n’est pas morte!” – “The Commune is not dead!”
Long may it live in our hearts as we mark this, its
140th anniversary. And long may it inspire us with confidence in the
proletariat as we march on towards the new world of socialism and communism.