That was the response that the Versailles troops got after the
Semaine sanglante (“Bloody week”) and the subsequent massacre (Deleurmoz, 2020: 297). The Paris Commune would from then on survive as a myth for the popular classes, superior to that of the 1789 Revolution, since in contrast to the interclass character of the latter, it was led mainly by the working class. It provides the international labour movement with “an autonomous tradition, a legitimation” (Haupt, 1986: 42) that makes it destined to guarantee the emancipation of the “human race”, in the expression popularized by Eugene Pottier in The Internationale, written in June 1871. Élisée Reclus, the well-known anarchist and Communard geographer, vindicated the legacy of the Commune because it “set up for the future, not through its governors but through its defenders, a more superior ideal to all the revolutions that preceded it… a new society in which there are no masters by birth, title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary.”(Ross, 2015:8).