Paris Commune

In 1871 Paris workers and radicals governed the city for two months as the Paris Commune before its bloody suppression.

Overview

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the hardship of the German siege, and distrust of the conservative National Assembly elected after the armistice led Parisians to elect a Communal council on 26 March 1871. The Commune separated church and state, made officials elected and recallable on workmen wages, cancelled rents, and planned cooperative production. It fought the Versailles government of Adolphe Thiers in a civil war for the capital. During the Bloody Week of 21 to 28 May, government troops took the city street by street, killing an estimated ten to twenty thousand people and deporting thousands more. Marx called it the first workers government, and its memory divided French politics for generations.