The Uprising: The Paris Commune

The proclamation of the Commune, as described by left-wing political activist Jules Vallés, was seen by its supporters as “making up for 20 years of empire, six months of defeat and betrayals.”[4] The Commune was an appeal to something higher than majority rule at the national level: the right to local self-government.[5] The Communards believed that by having the right to self-govern, the source of all power rested with the people.[6] British journalist Frederic Harrison assessed the Communards in Paris, writing, they “are simply the people of Paris.”[7] The average Communards were working-class men and women who had suffered during the Siege, felt betrayed by their government, and threatened by monarchist machinations (Figure 2).[8] The inequalities of capital and labor formed the basis of the revolutionary class tensions reaching back to the 1848 Revolution. In turn, these inequalities also fueled the basis of the Commune’s economic concerns. Thus, the belief that such a revolution might lead to reforms that would reduce or even eliminate the considerable disparities in living conditions, opportunities, and expectations remained deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the Parisian workers.[9]

However, Thiers and other defenders of order viewed the uprising’s attempt at destroying hierarchies and radically recreating power relations as the antithesis of order. As a result, Thiers was determined to crush the Commune. By April 11, Thiers’s army started its attack on Paris. On May 13, all defensive forts had been occupied, and on May 18, Thiers ordered that “expiation will be complete. It will take place in the name of the law, by the law and within the law.”[10] Versailles troops entered Paris on May 21 with the intent to not only annihilate the Commune and what it had come to represent, but also to exterminate the people who had built it. May 21 to 28 became known as “Bloody Week,” seven days of brutal destruction and slaughter by the Versailles army. Thiers’s army gunned down thousands of ordinary men, women, and occasionally, children. The French journalist and Communard Louise Michel stated that the Versailles troops “killed as in a hunt; it was a human butchery.”[11] While many were killed for their defense of the Commune, others died simply because their workers’ attire was reminiscent of a Parisian National Guard uniform. It became apparent that in a civil war, almost anyone, anywhere, could be an enemy.[12]

Figure 1. Bruno, Braquehais, Place Vendôme Group of Federated Soldiers near the Column, 1871. [Place of Publication Not Identified: Publisher Not Identified]

Figure 2: Unknown, Barricade de la Chaussée Ménilmontant, 18 mars 1871. Albumen silver print, 16.9 x 21.9 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France.

Figure 3: Bruno, Braquehais. Tuileries Palace; Pavillon de Flore. Paris Île-De-France France, 1871. [Place of Publication Not Identified: Publisher Not Identified] 

Figure 5: Unknown, Paris Commune, 1871, view of the Hotel de Ville after the fire of May 1871.

The seven days of battle left an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 Parisians dead, amounting to the biggest massacre in nineteenth-century Europe.[13] The poet Augustin-Malvina Blanchecotte recalled that there was “blood everywhere, filling the doorway, covering the sidewalk, even the gutter was red.”[14] During this week, Parisian sites and boulevards were once more transformed. Several central streets, including the rue Saint-Honoré, rue Saint-Florentin, rue Royale, the rue de Richelieu, rue de la Pépinière, and rue Rivoli, served as public execution sites where Versailles troops shot Communards. Streets and parks, such as the Parc Monceau and the Bois de Boulogne, were scattered with “mountains of cadavers,” as Michel later recalled.[15]

The Bloody Week also ignited Paris in flames. On May 22, the Committee of Public Safety issued an order to burn any house from which the Versailles soldiers had fired shots. While this order sparked the fire, the first major building set aflame was the Ministry of Finance, ignited by Versailles. Blanchecotte described “fireworks of bombardment in the frenzy of its fury… the thunder of explosions to the north, to the south, near, far, everywhere.”[16] By May 28, fire had destroyed numerous buildings—the Tuileries Palace (Figures 3 and 4), the Hôtel de Ville (Figures 5 and 6), and the Palais-Royal—and damaged many others, including the Palace of Justice, the Louvre library, the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Place Vendôme, and the Church of Saint Augustine.[17] Hundreds of apartment buildings lay in ruins along the Champs-Elysees, rue Royale, du faubourg Saint-Honoré, de Bac, and de Lille, leaving their inhabitants homeless.[18] Scholars estimate that one-fourth of Paris was destroyed in the battle that ended the Commune.

Figure 4: Claude Monet, The Tuileries, 1876. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm. Musée Marmottan, Paris, France.

Figure 6: Stanislaus Lépine’s Le Marché aux pommes, port de l’Hôtel de Ville, 1889. Oil on canvas,35 x 27 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

These events damaged both the physical infrastructure and the image of Paris. Through the circulation of newspapers (Figure 7) that contained images and first-hand accounts of the brutality of the Commune, the world witnessed the people of France, the country that Napoleon III had worked to shape as the epitome of civilization, turn on each other.[19] Anti-communards, including Théophile Gautier, associated the acts committed by the Communards to those of “wild beasts.” [20] These animalistic portrayals reinforced the images of working-class Parisians as barbaric and devoid of humanity. In the eyes of its supporters, the Communards became martyrs, but in the eyes of their enemies, they were savages who had smeared the perception of France as the great imperial empire it once was.

Due to the defamation it brought to France’s image, public mourning for the Commune’s bloody demise never took place. Instead, the French national government were determined to restore order and bourgeois legality by emphasizing civilization over anarchy. To do so, they worked tirelessly to rebuild Paris and to eradicate the memory of the insurgency. Although executions continued until at least June 7 in Satory, the Bois-de-Boulogne, and the prison of Cherche-Midi, workers rushed to clean up any signs of what had happened.[21] They began to sweep the rubble away and dispose of the corpses that piled high throughout the streets. In the ensuing weeks, thousands of bodies simply disappeared as they were covered by limestone, thrown into mass graves, or tossed into the Seine.[22] On June 6, Goncourt wrote in his journal about the immediate return to normalcy stating that “crowds reappear on the Boulevard des Italiens, on the pavement which was deserted a few days ago.”[23] By July, newspapers reported that Adolphe Alphand, a key player in Haussmann’s park system, was hastily restoring “to its original state… the lawns of the Trocadéro!”[24] However, while officials of the early Third Republic sought to rebuild Paris, some parts of the city remained damaged for years to come. The ruins of the Tuileries Palace stood still for the next 12 years, Garnier’s Opera House did not reopen until 1875, and it took 20 years to rebuild the Hôtel de Ville. Thus, when the Impressionists returned to Paris, they were met with a city and its surrounding environs that were laden with the physical reminders of the terrors of 1870-71.

Figure 7: New York Times, Front-page news, May 28, 1871.