Abidor - Voices of the Paris Commune

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Gilles Dauv and Franois Martin

Voices of the Paris Commune

edited and translated by Mitchell Abidor

From Crisis to Communisation

Gilles Dauv

Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed

edited by Mitchell Abidor

Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction

Elliott Liu

Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 18961917

Emma Goldman

Voices of the Paris Commune

Edited and translated by Mitchell Abidor

This edition copyright 2015 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-100-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930871

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Paris Commune of 1871 has been a blank screen upon which schools of radical thought have sought to project their interpretation. The Bolsheviks celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1921 by claiming that they were the fulfillment of its promise, and it is said that on the sixty-fourth day of the Soviet governments existence they celebrated their surviving longer than the Commune. Anarchists, too, consider it theirs, an example of working people spontaneously taking power and determining their own fate. Often lost in these appropriations of the event is what the Commune and the Communards had to say, what they fought for, what they implemented, and what they believed. The Commune has been interpreted for over 170 years; the goal of this volume is to allow those who knew the Commune bestthose who fought for it, to explain and interpret it for themselves.

Karl Marxs The Civil War in France, perhaps the earliest interpretations of the Commune, is also the best-known work on the Commune. Despite Marxs support, however, the Commune was not a Marxist-inspired or led revolution. The International Working Mens Association had members who sat on the Commune, but this group, which came to be known as the minority, represented not Marxism but rather a number of trends within the French left of the time. It was largely Proudhonian and strongly republican, and would famously take a strong position against dictatorship and censorship, even threatening to refuse to attend sittings of the Commune when a Committee of Public Safety was to be implemented in its dying days. The bitterness of the debate on this subject can be clearly seen in the transcript from the Communes Journal Officiel. Among the most Daniel Gurin would write of the Commune that it was not libertarian, but to a certain extent Jacobin.

As many of the voices in this anthology stress, the Commune was a product of a particular place and timea patriotic and uncompromisingly republican working-class outburst, set off by the French defeat at the hands of the Prussians, the rigors of the siege Paris suffered under, the insult of the Prussian entry into the city, and the onerous indemnities that had to be paid to the victors. Though the Commune was born without ideological parents, it did have a tutelary figure: the tireless conspirator, Louis-Auguste Blanqui. In fact, the Commune itself was preceded by two failed Blanquist uprisings, in October 1870 and January 1871, the first of which had a distinctly patriotic tone, occurring when it was learned that the ruling Government of National Defense was preparing to negotiate with the besieging Prussians. Blanqui himself was held in prison throughout the life of the Commune by the Versailles forces as a result of the January 1871 uprising, which had called for the establishing of a revolutionary Commune. The government based in Versailles and led by Thiers refused to exchange him for hostages held by the Commune, feeling he presented too much of a threat. In the absence of Blanqui, his followers along with a strong contingent of neo-Jacobins made up the majority of the Commune, the majority that would press for dictatorial measures modeled on those of the Jacobin period of the French Revolution.

The opening shots of the Commune were fired on March 18, 1871, when forces under the leadership of Generals Lecomte and Thomas attempted to seize the cannons paid for and held by the workers of Montmartre. For the people, after the military defeat and the four-month siege, this was one insult too many, and the two generals were killed on the spot. The government of the republic no longer held sway in Paris and a provisional government led by the Central Committee of the National Guard governed until the elections on March 25, when the Paris Commune officially assumed power. The elections occurred in all of Pariss arrondissements, even the most bourgeois, though none of those elected from the wealthier districts agreed to sit on the Commune. In the end, seventy men did, including twenty-five workers. In effect, Paris had seceded from France.

The young Commune (made up of men inexperienced in politics but battle-hardened in the revolution in which they had been uncompromising fighters against the dictatorship of Napoleon III) set out immediately to construct a new society. The guillotine was burned, the standing army was abolished, and separation of church and state was declared, along with the suppression of the religious budget. Goods held in pawnshops were liberated, rents were rolled back and the payment of debts owed were suspended. The members of the Commune were subject to recall and were only paid 600 francs. Night work for bakers was banned, easing the lives an important sector of the Parisian working class.

Versailles had early demonstrated its viciousness, summarily killing Communards taken prisoner. On April 5, the Commune issued its decree on hostages, stating, If, continuing to fail to recognize the customary conditions of war between civilized peoples our enemies massacre yet one more of our soldiers, we will answer with the execution of either the same or twice the number of prisoners. The Commune was already holding Darboy, the archbishop of Paris, as a hostage and had offered to exchange him along with a number of other hostages for Blanqui, but the Versaillais had refused the bargain, to dire consequences.

The Commune did not just concern itself with substantive measures; it also recognized the importance of symbols, ordering the dismantling of the Vendme Column, a symbol of the military might of Napoleon I made from the melting of captured cannons. This decision was carried out on May 16, less than two weeks before the death of the Commune; its organizer, the great artist Gustave Courbet, was held responsible for it and made to pay 323,000 francs in indemnity. Shortly before the destruction of the column, the Commune had also ordered the destruction of the Chapelle Expiatoire, built to atone for execution of the French monarch during the Great Revolution. The Commune was thus both a symbolic and a substantive rupture with Frances reactionary past.