In the article below, first-time designer Fred Serval writes about the specific context and events of the Paris Commune. You can find part one of this series here. For more information on this game, see the December 2019 GMT Customer Update.

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Following the Franco-Prussian War (see The Terrible Year – Part 1), Paris had been besieged by German troops since September 18, 1870. Way before the Government of National Defense’s decision to sign an armistice with Germany in January of 1871, politicized members of the National Guard started to express their dissatisfaction and their mistrust of the provisional government. Composed mainly of Parisian workers and craftsmen, the National Guard undertook a significant role in defending Paris against the invading Prussian army. Besides, the people of Paris, hard-hit by the siege, felt humiliated. The common folk were hungry and angry.

This popular Parisian song from October of 1870 satirically portrays a member of the local bourgeoisie supporting the provisional government’s effort to find an agreement with Prussia.

Excerpt from the lyrics:

“The bumpkins are free to remain patriots,

And to die under enemy fire;

I prefer the shallot sauce…

For a beefsteak, gentlemen, let’s surrender Paris.”

In February of 1871, while a new National Assembly (mostly composed of monarchists and conservatives) was elected and the new government led by Adolphe Thiers was formed in Bordeaux, a rival government was being organized in Paris. The results of those elections made the divide between a belligerent Paris and the countryside, tired of the war, apparent. In March of 1871, the National Guard created a Central Committee that refused to recognize the authority of the French government and the legitimacy of the regular army. In compliance with the armistice agreement, the National Guard had not yet been disarmed at the end of the war. Hundreds of cannons, partly paid for by the Parisians via a subscription, remain in the French capital. Moreover, the people of Paris were not willing to let them go. Repeated attempts by Adolphe Thiers to recover these artillery pieces all failed, while the measures taken by the National Assembly and the government (end of the debt moratorium, suspension of several radical newspapers, etc.) further contributed to the exacerbation of tensions.

So when Adolphe Thiers decided once again to try to seize the cannons from the National Guard and sent troops to Paris on March 18, 1871, the Parisians rose against the government and military leaders, which retreated to Versailles, and took control of the French capital. The following week, the Paris Commune was declared, and a low-intensity civil war began in France. The newly formed insurrectional government was of socialist inspiration, heavily influenced by the philosophy of Proudhon and Blanqui, but also by socialists and anarchist militants from Eastern Europe fleeing the repression of the Tsar, especially following the Polish insurrection of ’63. Foreign militants like Wroblewski, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and many others profoundly influenced the history of the Commune. As the first attempt at creating a socialist government, the Commune innovated on a lot of political reforms that would inspire republicans for decades to come: women’s rights, secularized education, abolition of child labor, social control of the means of production, etc.

The conflict between Versailles and Paris was not strictly political. The government of Versailles only had 20,000 troops and around 5,000 gendarmes to assure its protection and was nowhere near prepared to retake control of Paris defended by the Fédérés, for which estimations vary from 50,000 to 200,000 soldiers. This imbalance of power gave the Communards some ideas, and they tried to march on Versailles on a few occasions: April 2nd and 3rd, attacking through Neuilly and Issy. Those offensives were poorly planned, as the Commune leadership did not expect the opposing side would use their weapons to push them back. To the National Guard’s surprise, the abandoned forts around Paris, most notably on Mont Valerien, had been occupied by the regular army as soon as late March. In Versailles, Favre and Thiers negotiated with the Prussian invader to secure the return of prisoners of war in order to create an army capable of taking back Paris. Bismark and German leadership were very keen on supporting Thiers’s efforts as they grew concerned with the insurrection. Indeed, revolutions tended to inspire the peoples of Europe; the Märzrevolution was not a pleasant memory for the Prussian aristocracy.

The situation would escalate for weeks. Tensions crystalized around events such as the Commune’s hostage decree in mid-April, the capture of Fort d’Issy by Versailles in early May, the imprisonment of Blanqui, and Commune inspired insurrection in other major French cities (Marseilles, Lyon, Toulouse). In May, the Versailles government finally had an army under Marshal MacMahon that was in a position to attack the Capital. On the morning of the 21st of May, two battalions entered Paris at Point-du-jour. This would mark the beginning of one week of battle and the beginning of the massacre of members of the Paris Commune known as the Bloody Week—one week of fighting during which the National Guard tried to fight back unsuccessfully. Haussman’s renovation of Paris during the previous decades made the city difficult to defend, and the barricades were easily outflanked. On the 28th of May, the Commune came to an end after one final battle in Père Lachaise, and the mass execution of soldiers and political activists ensued.

“Au Mur,” a French song describing the mass executions that took place in Père Lachaise in front of what would be later called Le Mur des Fédérés

The Paris Commune and its tragic end had a considerable impact on the political struggles to come, as it was the first socialist experiment after decades of theory. The way the young Third Republic repressed it served as a cautionary tale for all future revolutionaries: the bourgeoisie was ready to use the army in the most brutal way to maintain its power. One of the consequences of this demonstration of violence was Karl Marx’s reassessment of his views on how the working classes should take and exert political power: “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” The theoretical consequence of this had a significant impact on 20th-century history, as it was the ideological foundation for the concept of Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a theory behind major political events such as the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and Mao Zedong’s revolution in China and many more.

French song to celebrate the third international; you can read how the tone is radically insurrectional and almost militaristic:

“Take power,

Worker battalions.

Take your revenge!

Worker battalions.

The best of ours

Died in the fight

Struck, knocked out

Chained in the convicts.”

Ludography: to my knowledge, no game has depicted the events of the Paris Commune…

Bibliography:

• Pierre Milza: L’Année Terrible, 2009, Perrin
• Robert Thomb: The War Against Paris, 1981, Cambridge University Press
• John Merriman: Massacre, The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871, 2014, Basic Books
• Karl Marx: The Civil War in France, 1871

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The Terrible Year Part 1: The Franco-Prussian War