I50 years of the Paris Commune
Why the Paris Commune Still Resonates, 150 Years Later
Thursday 3 June 2021, by Enzo Traverso
There is a paradoxical discrepancy between the meteoric rise and fall of the Paris Commune, whose life did not exceed seventy-two days, and its lasting presence as a central experience in the Left’s historical consciousness.
Viewed through the lens of what some scholars call “world history,” what happened in Paris between March 18 and May 28, 1871, is almost insignificant. Most recent historians of the nineteenth century think of the acclaimed works of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel just mention it as a minor detail of the Franco-Prussian War. From the point of view of the takeoff of industrial and financial capitalism, urbanization and modernization, the consolidation of colonial empires, and the persistence of the Old Regime in an already bourgeois continent, the Paris Commune means nothing.
Letters will require more black stamps than white ones, which will become “a reflection of the inequality created by racism”, Spain’s postal authority announced, a highly criticised statement.
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