Giuseppe Fieschi s Infernal Machine | Amusing Planet amusingplanet.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from amusingplanet.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Introduction
The Paris Commune of 1871 only lasted from March 18 to May 28, just 72 days, yet it is one of the most celebrated events in socialist history. It is a legend. Yet, what was it? What is it for us today? A model for socialists? A heroic failure? Negation of the state? Or the first workers’ government? Karl Marx wrote the most famous contemporary account, yet he failed to take up some of the Commune’s serious problems. Why?
In Part I of this essay, below, I look at the events of the Commune as they developed, relying largely on the work of Jacques Rougerie, whom we might call a representative of the school of “history from below,” and of Carolyn J. Eichner, a historian of women in the Commune. (Where quotations have no footnote, they come from Rougerie’s books.) In Part II, which can be read online here or in print in the summer 2021 issue of
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Paris Workers’ Revolution and Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres
Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed.
On this point the Bordeaux Assembly was sincerity itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the surrender of Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy the
Decembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist
gendarme, and Aurelle de Paladines the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt. But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on a pretext which was the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the State, and to the State it must be returned. The fact was this: From the very day of the capitulation, by which Bismarck’s prisoners had signed the surrender of France, b