The first workers' government in history — 72 days that changed the world forever
On 18 March 1871, the working class of Paris did what no class had done before: they seized political power and held it. For 72 days, the workers of Paris governed themselves, abolished the standing army, elected and recalled their own officials, capped all public salaries at a worker's wage, and began to reorganise society from the bottom up.
The Paris Commune was not an accident. It arose from the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the treachery of the French bourgeoisie who preferred surrender to the Prussians over arming the proletariat. When the government of Adolphe Thiers attempted to disarm the National Guard — the armed workers of Paris — the people refused. Thiers fled to Versailles. Power fell into the hands of the Central Committee of the National Guard, and from there to the elected Commune.
France had been defeated by Prussia in 1870. Napoleon III was captured at Sedan. The new bourgeois government signed a humiliating armistice. Paris had endured months of siege and starvation. The workers who had defended the city with their own arms were now told to hand those arms over to the same class that had sold them out.
"Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."
— Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)In just over two months, the Commune enacted measures that remain revolutionary to this day. These were not abstract decrees — they were the organised will of the armed working class put into practice.
The professional army was replaced by the armed people organised in the National Guard. Every citizen was a soldier, and the army could never again be turned against the people. This was the single most important act of the Commune.
All officials — from magistrates to administrators — were elected by universal suffrage and could be recalled at any time. No bureaucrat could entrench themselves against the will of the people. All received a worker's wage.
Church property was nationalised. Religious instruction was banned from schools. Education became secular and free. The ideological apparatus of the ruling class was dismantled at its root.
Abandoned workshops were handed over to workers' cooperatives. Night work in bakeries was abolished. Fines and wage deductions were banned. The Commune began the transformation from capitalist to socialised production.
All rent payments were suspended. Evictions were halted. The workers who had suffered through the siege would not be bled dry by landlords for the privilege of surviving. Pawnshop items were returned free of charge.
Education was made free, compulsory, and secular. Vocational and polytechnic education was introduced. The Commune understood that the emancipation of the working class required the education of the working class.
The women of Paris were among the most militant defenders of the Commune. They built barricades, served in the National Guard, organised ambulance services, and established the Union des Femmes pour la Defense de Paris — the Union of Women for the Defence of Paris — led by the revolutionary Elisabeth Dmitrieff and others.
The Union demanded equal pay for women, the right to divorce, recognition of common-law marriages, pensions for the partners of killed National Guards regardless of marital status, and the establishment of women's workshops. These demands prefigured by decades the struggles of the women's movement.
Louise Michel, the legendary schoolteacher and anarchist-turned-communist, fought on the barricades during the Semaine Sanglante and was deported to New Caledonia. She became one of the most celebrated revolutionaries of the 19th century.
Elisabeth Dmitrieff (1851–1910) was a young Russian revolutionary and member of the First International who arrived in Paris during the Commune. She founded the Union des Femmes at age 20, organised women workers into cooperative workshops, and fought on the barricades during the final week.
"The Commune is the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it."
— Karl Marx, First Draft of The Civil War in France (1871)On 21 May 1871, the troops of the Versailles government entered Paris through an undefended gate. What followed was one of the most savage acts of class warfare in modern history. For seven days, the army of the bourgeoisie — with the tacit consent of the Prussian forces surrounding Paris — systematically massacred the workers of the capital.
The Communards fought street by street, barricade by barricade. Men, women, and children defended the working-class districts of Belleville, Menilmontant, and the 11th arrondissement to the last. The final barricade fell at the cemetery of Pere Lachaise on 28 May. Against the Mur des Federes — the Federalists' Wall — 147 captured Communards were shot and thrown into a mass grave.
The bourgeoisie's revenge was monstrous. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Parisians were killed — most of them after the fighting had ended, in summary executions. Thousands more were arrested, imprisoned, or deported to penal colonies. The working-class movement in France was decapitated for a generation.
The Versailles government killed more Parisians in one week than the Jacobin Terror had killed in the entire French Revolution. This was not random violence — it was calculated class warfare. The bourgeoisie understood, even if the Communards did not yet fully grasp, that political power grows from the barrel of a gun.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin drew essential lessons from the Commune that shaped the entire subsequent development of revolutionary theory.
The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. The bourgeois state — its army, police, bureaucracy, judiciary — must be smashed and replaced by new organs of proletarian power. The Commune proved this: it replaced the standing army with the armed people, and elected officials with recallable delegates.
The Commune's greatest error was its failure to march on Versailles immediately. The Central Committee hesitated, organised elections, and gave the enemy time to regroup. A revolution that does not advance, retreats. The bourgeoisie will never accept the loss of power peacefully — the revolution must be prepared to crush counterrevolution decisively.
The Commune left the Bank of France untouched out of respect for private property. While the workers of Paris starved, the bank continued to finance the Versailles government. This was a fatal mistake. A revolution that does not expropriate the expropriators, that does not seize the financial apparatus of the bourgeoisie, signs its own death warrant.
"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms."
— Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)Lenin studied the Paris Commune more intensely than any other revolutionary. His masterwork The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917, is largely a commentary on the lessons of 1871.
For Lenin, the Commune demonstrated three truths that all subsequent revolutions confirmed:
The Bolsheviks succeeded where the Communards had failed because they applied the lessons of 1871: they seized the banks, smashed the state, armed the workers, and built a party capable of leading millions.
Every year on 18 March, communists around the world commemorate the Paris Commune. The red flag that flew over the Hotel de Ville in 1871 became the flag of the international workers' movement. The Internationale, written by the Communard Eugene Pottier in the days following the defeat, became the anthem of the revolutionary proletariat worldwide.
The Commune was defeated, but its spirit lived on in every subsequent workers' revolution. The Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the workers' councils of Germany and Hungary, the revolutionary committees of China and Cuba — all drew on the experience and example of the Paris Commune.
The bourgeoisie understood this. That is why the Mur des Federes at Pere Lachaise cemetery remains, to this day, a site of annual pilgrimage for the French working class. The wall where the last Communards were shot stands as a monument not to defeat but to the undying struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation.
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