Paris Commune - Retrospect

Retrospect

Karl Marx found it aggravating that the Communards "lost precious moments" organising democratic elections rather than instantly finishing off Versailles once and for all. France's national bank, located in Paris and storing billions of francs, was left untouched and unguarded by the Communards. They asked to borrow money from the bank, which they got easily.

The Communards did take over the Paris mint and issued a 5 franc coin (identifiable by a trident mintmark) which is today quite scarce. However, they chose not to seize the national bank's assets because they were afraid that the world would condemn them if they did. Thus large amounts of money were moved from Paris to Versailles, money that financed the army that crushed the Commune.

Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists and others have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration of, a liberated society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grass roots up. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, and later Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune. A more pragmatic lesson was drawn by the diarist Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote, three days after La Semaine Sanglante, "...the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it..."

Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, praised the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat.

Marx wrote that: "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators' history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.".

Friedrich Engels echoed this idea, later maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quarters", and other features meant that the Commune was no longer a "state" in the old, repressive sense of the term: it was a transitional form, moving towards the abolition of the state as such—he used the famous term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the Commune was, he said, the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", meaning it was a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. But Marx and Engels were not entirely uncritical of the Commune. The split between the Marxists and anarchists at the 1872 Hague Congress of the First International (IWA) may in part be traced to Marx's stance that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more harshly with reactionaries, instituted conscription, and centralized decision making in the hands of a revolutionary direction, etc. The other point of disagreement was the anti-authoritarian socialists' oppositions to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state (the anarchists were in favor of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralized workers' councils as those seen in the commune).

The Paris Commune has been regarded with awe by many Leftist leaders. Mao would refer to it often. Lenin, along with Marx, judged the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", though Lenin criticized the Communards for having "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over"; he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy. At his funeral, Lenin's body was wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the Commune. The Soviet spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a communard banner from the Paris Commune. Also, the Bolsheviks renamed the dreadnought battleship Sevastopol to Parizhskaya Kommuna.

Other assessments of the Commune's reign were highly critical. The approbation of Marx, Engels, and other communists/socialists/anarchists stands in sharp contrast to the disapprobation of the American Ambassador to France at the time. American Ambassador and eyewitness Elihu Washburne, writing in his personal diary which is quoted at length in noted historian David McCullough's book, The Greater Journey (Simon & Schuster 2011), described the Communards as "brigands", "assassins", and "scoundrels"; "I have no time now to express my detestation.... hey threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender." Ultimately, the fighting resulted in the burning by the Communards of the Tuileries Palace, the Library of the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, Prefecture of Police, Palais Royal, and many houses. Fires were also started in Notre Dame, but were extinguished before it could be destroyed. The sewers from the Hotel de Ville to the Banque de France had also been mined. Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted that "the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguishing themselves by the fury with which they fought" . Washburne unsuccessfully sought to save the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Georges Darboy, and many priests, from massacre by the Communards. Washburne wrote that the Commune was guilty of "unparalleled atrocities", followed by "awful vengeances" as the government troops retook Paris.