“Look at the Paris Commune — that was the dictatorship of the proletariat,” -Friedrich Engels (Introduction to Marx’s ‘The Civil War in France’)
The story of the Paris Commune begins with France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In March 1871, the Parisians, humiliated by the Prussian march across Paris and feeling betrayed by the central government, rose in revolt. On March 18, soldiers refused to fire cannons on the people, and the armed people of Paris, the National Guard, seized control of the city. Barricades were erected and the government was forced to relocate to Versailles. On March 26, the Central Committee of the Guards organized municipal elections. Parisians cast their votes against the central government, electing the revolutionaries, resulting in the subsequent formation of the Commune government. On March 28th, the government known as the ‘Paris Commune’ was born and Paris was under self-rule for 72 days, as an autonomous revolutionary commune. The Commune however could not stand up to the vast range of forces against it. All governments united to crush the Commune and the German government even quickly released its French prisoners-of-war to speed up the war effort to seize Paris. This situation came to an end on 21 May, 1871 when the French Army re-entered Paris and initiated a Bloody Week of repression. By the time the final Communards were defeated on 28 May, thousands of Communards were killed. The cold-blooded massacre after the take-over was however much greater. Over 30,000 Communards were shot down and over 45,000 arrested, of whom many were executed, and sentenced to prison or exile. Over the next five years, thousands of prisoners were tried, proving what atrocities the bourgeoisie was capable of if the proletariat dared to attempt to seize power. As one account described, “a revolutionary experiment led by those who dreamed of a society of peace, justice, and equality came to a blood-soaked end”.
Though the Paris Commune was extremely short-lived, it has a historic significance, as a Communard said, ‘The body may have fallen, but the idea still stands’. In ‘The Civil War in France’ Marx wrote, “The principles of the Commune are eternal and indestructible; they will present themselves again and again until the working class is liberated.” During the Commune’s short-lived establishment, the city of Paris enacted progressive policies. The major political changes were the separation of Church and State, abolishing of subsidies to the church, doing away with the standing army in favour of a people’s militia, the election of all judges and magistrates, fixing an upper limit for the salaries for all functionaries and making them strictly responsible to the elect-orate, organising political clubs, and engaging citizens in debate and decision making, etc. Among the socio-economic measures were free and general education, abolition of night work in bakeries, abolition of child-labour, cancellation of fines imposed by employers in workshops, the closing of pawnshops, abolition of interest on the debts, seizure of closed workshops housing the home-less, etc. The Commune also committed certain mistakes which proved to be lessons to future generations of the working class. The most important lessons stressed by the experience of the Commune were – the absolute need for a strong, clear-sighted, and disciplined proletarian party for the success of the revolution, and the need to smash the bourgeois bureaucratic-military state machine in order to build the workers’ state. Marx said, “… One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes…”.
Paris Commune was a qualitative change in the nature of the state. In the Paris Commune, the workers took the political power into their own hands and took up the running of society. It also provided the first basic form of the new society as well as the first experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Mao considered the Commune as an inspiration for the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. It was as Lenin said, “the greatest example of the greatest proletarian movement of the nineteenth century.” Paris Commune is a brief yet important chapter in the worker’s struggle for liberation.
