Part I - The Paris Commune and Accounting for Failure

Summary

The first part of this book explores how French revolutionaries narrated, interpreted, and debated the Commune in the decade following its suppression during the Semaine Sanglante in May 1871. I delineate this output into two clear interpretations of the Commune: the ‘realist’ and the ‘violent’. Chapter 1 examines the ‘realist’ interpretation of the Commune, whose chief advocates were proponents of a ‘federal’ socialism. These accounts were highly detailed and focused on the practical dimensions of the Commune, heavily contextualising its inception and acknowledging the organisational flaws that contributed to its defeat. Exponents of this interpretation aimed to reverse the prevailing narrative of the Commune, which cast revolutionaries as dangerous criminals and the army as agents of order. They also celebrated the Commune’s concrete achievements and drew attention to its progressive ideas, which they claimed offered a genuine alternative to contemporary French society. The chapter further suggests that this interpretation’s emphasis on the value of personal experience and eyewitness testimony represented an attempt to wrest back control of the Commune narrative from Karl Marx, whose influential work Civil War in France appeared just days after its fall in May 1871.