Introduction: 150 Years Since the Paris Commune¶
Core Argument¶
This introduction situates the republication of Marx’s The Civil War in France within a contemporary period of working-class struggle, arguing that workers must understand their own history to navigate the present. The pamphlet collects addresses Marx drafted for the International Workingmen’s Association between July 1870 and May 1871, applying the Marxist method to war, revolution and the state. Because these addresses were composed amid unfolding events, the introduction supplies omitted historical context and insights from Marx’s correspondence.
Nineteenth-century France endured three kings and two Bonapartes, never consistently republican. The 1848 revolution overthrew Louis Philippe, but the bourgeoisie soon preferred ‘Order’ to the republic, enabling Louis Bonaparte’s 1851 coup and the Second Empire. Capitalist expansion strengthened the working class, which turned to revolutionary ideas, including those of the IWMA. By 1869, workers were on the offensive. Bonaparte declared war on Prussia in July 1870 to rally support, but suffered catastrophic defeat at Sedan on 1 September, surrendering to Bismarck. On 4 September, Parisian workers forced the declaration of a new republic, but power fell to a bourgeois ‘Government of National Defence’. The workers, initially intoxicated by national defence, allowed themselves to be led by their ‘superiors’—a phenomenon explained by the contradictory nature of mass consciousness. The government proved a ‘Government of National Defection’, deliberately sabotaging Paris’s defence because a victory of armed workers would threaten capitalist rule. Workers began creating their own organs, including a Central Committee of the twenty arrondissements. The Red Poster of 7 January 1871 declared the government had failed, demanding general requisition, free rations, and massive attack, ending with the cry ‘make way for the Commune’.
Thiers became head of government after February elections that gave monarchists 62 per cent of the vote. The National Guard formed a Central Committee and resolved to resist disarmament. On 18 March, Thiers sent troops to seize the Guard’s cannon; women confronted the soldiers, who fraternised and arrested their officers. Thiers fled. The Central Committee occupied the Hôtel de Ville but hesitated to march on Versailles—a missed opportunity Marx criticised. Communal elections on 26 March produced a Council of 70 seats, with maximum salary of 6,000 francs and the right of recall. The Commune dissolved the standing army, replacing it with the armed National Guard, banned night-work and fines on wages, suspended rents, and ordered abandoned workshops handed to workers’ corporations. The old police were abolished; crime disappeared.
The women of Paris led the 18 March uprising but were denied the vote in the elections—a key limitation. Despite this, working women participated equally in building and defending workers’ power, forming the Women’s Union for the Defence of Paris, demanding equal wages. The Commune made major errors: it left the Bank of France untouched, accepted a daily loan rather than seizing its three billion francs, and failed to publish compromising state documents. The leadership lacked a clear plan, hoping for conciliation while Thiers assembled an army. Insurrections in Lyon, Marseilles, and elsewhere were isolated and crushed. The Commune failed to win the peasantry; its address to peasants was distributed haphazardly by balloon. After seven weeks of resistance, Versaillais troops entered Paris on 21 May, initiating Bloody Week. Up to 30,000 Communards were killed, 38,568 imprisoned, thousands deported. The experience proved the working class cannot simply seize the existing state machinery but must smash it and replace it with their own democratic organisation.
At the September 1871 London Congress, Marx drafted a resolution stating the working class must constitute itself into a distinct political party, dealing a decisive blow to Bakuninist and Proudhonist tendencies advocating abstention from politics. The Commune thus clarified both the end goal of workers’ struggle and the means to achieve it, shaping Marxism itself. Every fundamental point of the Marxist programme—the political independence of the working class, a centralised workers’ party, the international character of the struggle, and the need to smash the bourgeois state—was forged in the rise and fall of the Commune. Its lessons, distilled in The Civil War in France, educated millions