Part IV - Empire and Internationalism

Summary

The final part of the book considers the reactions of ex-Communards to the ‘imperial turn’ of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter appraises the thought of some of the 4,500 ex-Communards who were deported to the French penal colony of New Caledonia during the 1870s. Historians have often sought to discover a stance on imperialism in their work, but even after many years in a colony most deportees remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and colonial questions. Their focus was instead the French Republic, and they primarily used their experiences of deportation to criticise the established order and legitimise their renewed participation in political discussions after the 1880 Communard amnesty allowed them to return to France. The chapter also draws attention to the similarities between the deportees’ ideas in the 1870s and 1880s and socialist critiques of protectionism and free trade from the 1840s, reinforcing earlier chapters’ claims that there was much more continuity in revolutionary thought before the mid-1880s than previously suspected.