# Paris Commune The **Paris Commune** was the radical municipal government that ruled Paris from **18 March to 28 May 1871**, and was destroyed in a week of street fighting and mass executions that the French call the *semaine sanglante* — "Bloody Week," **21–28 May 1871**. Government forces killed an estimated **10,000 to 15,000 Communards** in battle or by summary execution; one unconfirmed 1876 estimate ran as high as 20,000. The army took **43,522 prisoners**, tried about **15,000**, convicted **13,500**, and deported **1,169**, mostly to New Caledonia. The Commune matters to this knowledge base less for what it was than for **what it was made to mean**. For a generation afterward, on both sides of the Atlantic, "the Commune" functioned as the all-purpose image of what happens when people without property acquire political power. That image did specific political work in the United States at a specific moment: in **1871**, exactly when the [[Fourteenth Amendment]] and [[Fifteenth Amendment]] had made explicitly racial disenfranchisement unconstitutional, and reactionaries in the South needed a new vocabulary. The Commune supplied it. See [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] for how the substitution worked. ## What happened The Commune grew directly out of military defeat. France declared war on Prussia in 1870; Napoleon III was captured at Sedan in September 1870; German forces surrounded Paris by **20 September 1870** and the city endured a winter siege, with an armistice signed **26 January 1871**. Paris had been armed for its own defense and was not inclined to disarm for the new conservative national government seated at Versailles. - **18 March 1871** — Versailles troops attempted to seize National Guard cannons at Montmartre. The attempt failed, the soldiers fraternized with the crowd, and the government withdrew from the city. - **28 March 1871** — The elected Commune took up business at the Hôtel de Ville. - **21 May 1871** — Versailles forces entered the city, beginning Bloody Week. - **23–24 May 1871** — Communard fighters set fire to the **Tuileries Palace**, which burned for roughly three days, until 26 May. The Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Palais d'Orsay and the Préfecture de police burned on 24 May. - **28 May 1871** — The last resistance ended and government forces held the city. The Commune executed **63 hostages** during Bloody Week, by the count of Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, himself a defender of the Commune. That number sat beside the many thousands killed in the suppression, and in the press of the period the proportion was almost always inverted. > [!warning] Disputed casualty figures > The 10,000–15,000 range is the conventional estimate and is what both cited general sources carry. A revisionist literature argues for a substantially lower figure, and the historiographical argument (Robert Tombs's revision and the responses to it) has not been resolved to two sources. Treat any single precise number as contested. ## The fires and the "pétroleuses" Large parts of central Paris burned between 22 May and 2 June. Some fires were Communard arson, some were caused by Versailles shelling, and the division between the two was disputed at the time and remains so. What was not disputed, in the conservative press, was the explanation: the press settled immediately on deliberate, motiveless barbarism, and produced the figure of the **pétroleuse** — the working-class woman going house to house with a can of kerosene. Contemporary records do not support widespread female arson. The myth outlived the evidence by decades. This is the template the KB cares about: **a disaster of contested cause, assigned immediately to the political enemy, and the assignment surviving long after the cause is known.** It recurs in American politics continuously, from the blaming of "communists" for the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 through modern [[Scapegoating]] of immigrants and protesters for arson, looting and civic collapse. ## Why it travelled to America The Commune reached the United States as newspaper copy, and American papers rendered it as a mob atrocity rather than a municipal government. That rendering arrived in the middle of two American fights at once. **The labor fight.** The **National Labor Union**, founded in Baltimore on **20 August 1866**, had issued the first national call for an eight-hour workday at its founding convention. Organized labor was making a claim on politics, and the Commune gave opponents of that claim a ready picture of where the claim ended. **The Reconstruction fight.** In **South Carolina**, where a Black-majority legislature was taxing property to fund public schools and infrastructure, white Democrats convened the **Tax-Payers' Convention** in Columbia in **May 1871** — called together by the Charleston Chamber of Commerce and the Charleston Board of Trade, with **W. D. Porter** presiding. The convention's framing was the decisive move: it **denied that race was the issue at all**, insisting the problem was "simply and exclusively" that people who owned no property were governing those who did. The same organization had petitioned Congress on openly white-supremacist grounds in **1868**. By 1871 the argument had been recoded as a tax argument, which let its authors court poorer whites and avoid provoking Northern opposition at the same time. A second convention met in Columbia in **February 1874**. The man who ran the 1871 convention's floor fight, **Martin W. Gary**, went on to write the 1876 "Plan of the Campaign" for intimidating Black voters — the [[Red Shirts]] campaign that installed [[Wade Hampton III]] and ended Reconstruction in South Carolina. The tax argument and the paramilitary were the same project with two faces. ## The "dangerous classes" The clearest statement of the transatlantic transfer is a book. **Charles Loring Brace**, the New York reformer who founded the Children's Aid Society, published *The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them* (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, **1872**). Writing directly about "the recent terrible Communistic outbreak in Paris," Brace concluded that Americans were wrong to think the danger was French: > there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris. Brace was a reformer, not a reactionary — which is the point. The Commune had made "the dangerous classes" a category that respectable opinion could use without embarrassment, and a category defined by **property rather than race** could be applied to Black voters in South Carolina and Irish laborers in New York with the same words. That portability is what made it durable. The property-qualification argument it licensed ran forward through the [[Poll Tax]] and the [[Grandfather Clause]] to [[Benjamin Tillman]]'s 1895 South Carolina disenfranchisement convention — which stripped the vote from a state that had sent [[Robert Smalls]] to Congress five times — and into the [[Jim Crow Era]]. ## Intellectual afterlife The Commune's suppression is also the founding trauma of the European study of crowds, and that lineage runs straight into twentieth-century authoritarian theory: - **[[Gustave Le Bon]]** — Paris in 1871 convinced him that crowd behavior was civilization's greatest internal threat, the conviction that produced *The Crowd* (1895) and, through it, a durable handbook for leaders who wished to manage one. See [[Crowd Psychology]]. - **[[Émile Durkheim]]** — Formed intellectually by the Franco-Prussian defeat and the Commune's suppression, and by the fragile Third Republic that followed. - **[[Karl Marx]]** and **[[Friedrich Engels]]** — Read the Commune as the first instance of the dictatorship of the proletariat; Engels wrote, "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." See [[The Communist Manifesto]]. All surviving prisoners and exiles were pardoned in **1880**. ## See Also - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — The American fight the Commune was imported into, and where the race-to-class recoding is traced - [[Crowd Psychology]] — The field the Commune's suppression founded - [[Gustave Le Bon]] — Whose life's work is a response to 1871 - [[The Lost Cause]] — The parallel project of assigning a contested history a settled political meaning - [[Poll Tax]] — The property-and-payment test as a disenfranchisement instrument - [[Grandfather Clause]] — Its companion device - [[Benjamin Tillman]] — Who completed in 1895 what the 1871 tax argument began - [[Red Shirts]] — The paramilitary half of the same South Carolina project - [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] — The American property politics the Commune scare served - [[Scapegoating]] — The mechanism by which a disaster of contested cause acquires a culprit