The Franco-Prussian War of July 1870 - January 1871 had ended in catastrophic French defeat. The French Second Empire under Napoleon III had been overthrown after the September 1870 surrender at Sedan; the Third Republic government that succeeded it had been forced to accept Prussian terms in January 1871. The cession of Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, the imposition of a 5-billion-franc war indemnity, and the German military occupation of northeastern France were the peace terms.

Paris itself had been besieged from September 1870 to January 1871. The Parisian population — armed through the war as the National Guard, with approximately 300,000 active members — had been heavily politically radicalised by the siege experience and by the humiliation of the surrender. Substantial Parisian republican, socialist, and anarchist political clubs had been forming through the previous winter.

March 1871

The new conservative French government under Adolphe Thiers, based at Versailles outside Paris, intended to disarm the National Guard and to restore conventional bourgeois civic government in the capital. On the morning of 18 March 1871 Thiers ordered French regular army troops to seize the National Guard cannons stationed on the heights of Montmartre.

The operation failed within hours. The Montmartre population — particularly its women — surrounded the regular army units, fraternised with them, and persuaded them to refuse the disarmament order. The local French general Lecomte ordered the troops to fire on the crowd; the troops mutinied instead and arrested Lecomte. By the afternoon Lecomte and a second general, Clément-Thomas, had been shot by the crowd in the rue des Rosiers.

Thiers ordered the French regular army to evacuate the entire city of Paris on the same day. The army withdrew to Versailles in good order through 18-19 March. Paris was left under the control of the National Guard and its political committee — the Central Committee that had been organising the National Guard since February.

The Central Committee called municipal elections for 26 March 1871. The elected council of 86 members — predominantly republican, socialist, and Blanquist — declared the Paris Commune on 28 March 1871 at the Hôtel de Ville. The new government was the first urban socialist government in European history.

What it did

The Commune ran for 72 days — 18 March to 28 May 1871. Its substantive programme in the available time included:

— Separation of church and state; confiscation of church property; suspension of clerical involvement in public education — Cancellation of all rent arrears owed since the start of the war — Restitution of pawned articles below 20 francs in value — Suspension of bakery night-shift work — Establishment of the Commission for Labour, Industry, and Exchange to investigate workers’ cooperatives — Recognition of free union between men and women without legal marriage — Confiscation of factories abandoned by their owners and their reopening under worker cooperatives — Restoration of the revolutionary calendar (Year 79) — Demolition of the Vendôme Column (the Napoleonic monument celebrating the 1805 Austerlitz victory) as a symbol of military imperialism, accomplished on 16 May 1871

The Commune was politically diverse and partly disorganised. The socialist, Blanquist, Proudhonist, and republican factions disagreed on fundamental questions. The military situation — a hostile Versailles army of approximately 130,000 troops, regrouping outside Paris with German military support — left little time for political consolidation.

The Bloody Week

The Versailles army began the final assault on 21 May 1871. A Versailles informant within the Paris defences had passed a message that the Point du Jour gate was undefended. The Versailles army entered the city through the gap and worked street by street toward the centre over the next seven days.

The Commune’s military response was the barricade defence that the Parisian revolutionary tradition had used in 1830, 1848, and 1851. Approximately 1,000 barricades were constructed across the city through the week. The Versailles army’s modern artillery — the same artillery that had been used against the German army the previous winter — was now used at close range against the Communard barricades.

The seven days of street fighting are called the Semaine Sanglante (“Bloody Week”). The Versailles army’s pattern was to take each barricade by artillery preparation followed by infantry assault; the Communard defenders who survived the artillery and assault were generally summarily executed; suspected Communards in the surrounding buildings were dragged out and shot in the street without trial.

The scale of the killing was unusual for European urban warfare even by 19th-century standards. The conventional estimate is 10,000-15,000 Communard deaths during the week — approximately three-quarters of them killed after surrender rather than in combat. The maximum estimates run as high as 30,000. The Versailles army casualty figure was approximately 880 dead.

The central episodes included:

— The execution of Archbishop Georges Darboy and 51 other hostages by Communard guards at La Roquette Prison on 24 May 1871 in retaliation for the Versailles executions — The destruction by fire of the Tuileries Palace, the Palais de Justice, the Cour des Comptes, and portions of the Hôtel de Ville on 23-24 May 1871, set by retreating Communards — The execution of approximately 147 captured Communards against the wall of Père Lachaise Cemetery on the evening of 28 May 1871 — the Mur des Fédérés (“Communards’ Wall”) still marks the site

The last Communard barricade — at the rue Ramponeau in Belleville — fell on the morning of 28 May 1871.

What followed

The Versailles government conducted military trials of approximately 38,000 captured Communards through 1871-1872. About 7,500 were transported to the penal colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific; about 12,500 were imprisoned in metropolitan France; the rest were either acquitted or sentenced to short terms. The 1880 amnesty law eventually permitted most surviving Communards to return to France.

The post-Commune Third Republic was politically conservative for the subsequent two decades. The labour-political movement that the Commune had represented was suppressed but not destroyed; the French socialist parties that consolidated through the 1880s-1890s drew direct organisational continuity from the surviving Commune participants.

Louise Michel — the schoolteacher and anarchist who had been one of the most prominent women of the Commune — was deported to New Caledonia, returned to France in 1880, and spent the rest of her life (until her death in 1905) as a active French anarchist organiser. The public memory of the Commune within the French left has remained continuous since.

Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France, published on 13 June 1871 — sixteen days after the Bloody Week — established the Commune as a model for the dictatorship of the proletariat in subsequent Marxist political theory. The direct continuity from the 1871 Paris Commune to the 1917 Russian Revolution was asserted by Lenin in his State and Revolution (1917).

The Vendôme Column that the Commune had demolished was re-erected by the Third Republic in 1873 using the original bronze. The Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise is the annual French left commemoration site each spring; the 154th anniversary was observed in May 2025.