Editing Paris Commune (section)

== Critique ==

=== Contemporary artists and writers ===
[[File:Paris Commune rue de Rivoli.jpg|thumb|View of the Rue de Rivoli after Bloody Week]]

French writers and artists had strong views about the Commune. [[Gustave Courbet]] was the most prominent artist to take part in the Commune, and was an enthusiastic participant and supporter, though he criticised its executions of suspected enemies. On the other side, the young [[Anatole France]] described the Commune as "A committee of assassins, a band of hooligans [{{lang|fr|fripouillards}}], a government of crime and madness."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003">Pivot, Sylvain, "La Commune, les Communards, les ecrivains ou la haine et la gloire." December 2003. La revue des Anciens Élèves de l'École Nationale d'Administration"</ref> The diarist [[Edmond de Goncourt]] 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..."<ref>[[Edmond de Goncourt]], [[Jules de Goncourt]], [[Robert Baldick]], ''Pages from the Goncourt Journal'' (Oxford, 1962), p. 194</ref>

On 23 April, [[George Sand]], an ardent republican who had taken part in the 1848 revolution, took the opposite view. She wrote "The horrible adventure continues. They ransom, they threaten, they arrest, they judge. They have taken over all the city halls, all the public establishments, they're pillaging the munitions and the food supplies."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> Soon after the Commune began, [[Gustave Flaubert]] wrote to Sand, "[[Austrian Empire|Austria]] did not go into Revolution after [[Battle of Königgrätz|Sadowa]], nor Italy after [[Battle of Novara (1849)|Novara]], nor Russia after [[Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55)|Sebastopol]]! But our good Frenchmen hasten to pull down their house as soon as the chimney takes fire..." Near the end of the Commune, Flaubert [[Flaubert's letters|wrote to her again]], "As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages." On 10 June, when the Commune was finished, Flaubert wrote to Sand:<ref name="online-literature.com">[http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/ Correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140322001118/http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/ |date=22 March 2014 }}. online-literature.com.</ref>

{{blockquote|I come from Paris, and I do not know whom to speak to. I am suffocated. I am quite upset, or rather out of heart. The sight of the ruins is nothing compared to the great Parisian insanity. With very rare exceptions, everybody seemed to me only fit for the strait-jacket. One half of the population longs to hang the other half, which returns the compliment. That is clearly to be read in the eyes of the passers-by.}}

[[Victor Hugo]] blamed Thiers for his short-sightedness. At the news that the government had failed to have the cannons seized he wrote in his diary, "He touched off the fuse to the powder keg. Thiers is premeditated thoughtlessness."<ref>Hugo, Victor, Choses vues, 1870–1885. Paris. Gallimard (1972). {{ISBN|2-07-036141-1}}. p. 159</ref> On the other hand, he was critical of the Commune but sympathetic to the Communards. At the beginning of April, he moved to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who had just died. On 9 April, he wrote, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> He wrote poems that criticized both the government and the Commune's policy of taking hostages for reprisals, and condemned the destruction of the Vendôme Column.<ref>Hugo, Victor, ''L'Année Terrible''</ref> On 25 May, during the Bloody Week, he wrote: "A monstrous act; they've set fire to Paris. They've been searching for firemen as far away as Brussels." But after the repression, he offered to give sanctuary to members of the Commune, which, he said, "was barely elected, and of which I never approved."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> He became the most vocal advocate of an amnesty for exiled Communards, finally granted in the 1880s.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|pp=457–460}}

[[Émile Zola]], as a journalist for {{interlanguage link|Le Sémaphore|lt=Le Sémaphore de Marseille|fr|Le Sémaphore (journal)}}, reported on the fall of the Commune, and was one of the first reporters to enter the city during Bloody Week. On 25 May he reported: "Never in civilised times has such a terrible crime ravaged a great city... The men of the Hôtel de Ville could not be other than assassins and arsonists. They were beaten and fled like robbers from the regular army, and took vengeance upon the monuments and houses.... The fires of Paris have pushed over the limit the exasperation of the army. ...Those who burn and who massacre merit no other justice than the gunshot of a soldier."<ref>[http://www.deslettres.fr 4th letter of Émile Zola on the Commune] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122180843/https://deslettres.fr/ |date=22 January 2022 }}, 25 May 1871</ref> But on 1 June, when the fighting was over, his tone had changed, "The court martials {{sic}} are still meeting and the summary executions continue, less numerous, it's true. The sound of firing squads, which one still hears in the mournful city, atrociously prolongs the nightmare ... Paris is sick of executions. It seems to Paris that they're shooting everyone. Paris is not complaining about the shooting of the members of the Commune, but of innocent people. It believes that, among the pile, there are innocent people, and that it's time that each execution is preceded by at least an attempt at a serious inquiry ... When the echoes of the last shots have ceased, it will take a great deal of gentleness to heal the million people suffering nightmares, those who have emerged, shivering from the fire and massacre."<ref>[http://www.deslettres.fr 11th letter of Émile Zola on the Commune] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122180843/https://deslettres.fr/ |date=22 January 2022 }}, 1 June 1871</ref>

=== Anarchists ===
The anarchist philosopher [[George Woodcock]] said that "a notable contribution to the activities of the Commune and particularly to the organization of public services was made by members of various anarchist factions, including the [[Mutualism (economic theory)|mutualists]] Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the [[Collectivist anarchism|libertarian collectivists]] Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists Elie and [[Elisée Reclus]] and Louise Michel."<ref name="Anarchism 1962">{{Cite book |last=Woodcock |first=George |chapter=The Destructive Urge |title=[[Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements]] |date=1962 |publisher=The World Publishing Company |author-link=George Woodcock |oclc=179826}}</ref> Anarchist [[Mikhail Bakunin]] was a strong supporter of the Commune. He saw the Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State," and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.<ref>[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1871/paris-commune.htm The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140203222328/http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1871/paris-commune.htm |date=3 February 2014 }}, Mikhail Bakunin, 1871</ref>

[[Louise Michel]] was an important participant in the Paris Commune, though she was not formally introduced to anarchist doctrines until her exile after the Commune. Initially she worked as an ambulance woman, treating those injured on the barricades. During the Siege of Paris, she untiringly preached resistance to the Prussians. On the establishment of the Commune, she joined the National Guard. She offered to shoot Thiers, and suggested the destruction of Paris by way of vengeance for its surrender. In December 1871, she was brought before the 6th council of war and charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she vowed to never renounce the Commune, and dared the judges to sentence her to death.<ref name="flag">[http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws98/ws55_louise.html Louise Michel, a French anarchist women who fought in the Paris commune] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090710222744/http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws98/ws55_louise.html |date=10 July 2009 }}</ref> According to court records, Michel told the court, "Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Thomas |first=Édith |title=The Women Incendiaries |title-link=The Women Incendiaries |date=2007 |publisher=[[Haymarket Books]] |isbn=978-1-931859-46-2 |author-link=Édith Thomas |df=dmy-all |orig-year=1966}}</ref> Michel was sentenced to [[penal transportation]]. Following the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchist movement, as with the whole of the [[workers' movement]], was decapitated and severely crippled for years.

=== Marxism ===
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 [[grassroots]] up. [[Marx]] and [[Friedrich Engels|Engels]], [[Mikhail Bakunin]], and later [[Lenin]], 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.

Marx, in ''[[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 of the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them."<ref>Karl Marx, ''The Civil War in France'', English Edition of 1871</ref>

Later, however, in private, Marx expressed a different, more critical view of the Commune. In 1881, in a letter to a Dutch friend, Nieuwenhaus, he wrote: "The Commune was simply the rebellion of a city in exceptional circumstances, and furthermore, the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, and could not have been. With a little bit of good sense, they might, however, have obtained a compromise with Versailles favourable to the mass of the people, which was in fact the only real possibility."{{sfn|Rougerie|2004|p=269}}

Engels echoed his partner, 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", a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. But Marx and Engels also analyzed what they perceived to be the weaknesses or errors of the commune, including its inability to link up with the rest of the French people, its failure to completely re-organize state machinery, its Central Committee passing over power too soon to the representative assembly, its failure to immediately pursue the retreating bourgeois, and the failure to recognize the possibility that France and Prussia would unite against the commune.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Sison |first=Jose Maria |url=https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S20-Basic-Principles-of-ML-A-Primer.pdf |title=Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism: a Primer |publisher=Foreign Languages Press |year=2020 |edition=6th |location=Paris |pages=127 |access-date=3 October 2022 |archive-date=3 October 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221003193555/https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S20-Basic-Principles-of-ML-A-Primer.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>

The other point of disagreement was the [[anti-authoritarian]] socialists' opposition to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state: the anarchists were in favour of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralised workers' councils, as those seen in the Commune.

Lenin, like Marx, considered the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". But he criticised the Communards for not having done enough to secure their position, highlighting two errors in particular. The first was that the Communards "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over". Secondly, he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the [[class enemy]]. For Lenin, the Communards "underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war; and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lenin |first=Vladimir Ilyich |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/index.htm |title=Lenin Collected Works |publisher=[[Progress Publishers]] |year=2004 |volume=13 |location=Moscow |publication-date=1972 |pages=475–478 |translator-last=Isaacs |translator-first=Bernard |chapter=Lessons of the Commune |author-link=Vladimir Lenin |access-date=12 March 2018 |chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180312200100/https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm |archive-date=12 March 2018 |url-status=live |via=[[Marxists Internet Archive]] and Lenin Internet Archive; originally published in ''Zagranichnaya Gazeta'' (''Foreign Gazette''), No. 2 |orig-year=Originally published 23 March 1908 from speech at Geneva}}</ref>

In 1926, [[Mao Zedong]] published ''The Importance of Commemorating the Paris Commune.''<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last1=Cai |first1=Xiang |title=Revolution and its narratives : China's socialist literary and cultural imaginaries (1949–1966) |last2=蔡翔 |date=2016 |others=Rebecca E. Karl, Xueping Zhong, 钟雪萍 |isbn=978-0-8223-7461-9 |location=Durham |pages=423 |oclc=932368688}}</ref> Similarly to Lenin's analysis, Mao wrote that there were two reasons for the Commune's failure: (1) it lacked a united and disciplined party to lead it, and (2) it was too benevolent towards its enemies.<ref name=":2" />

=== Other commentary ===
[[File:Jules Bergeret.jpg|thumb|upright|National Guard commander Jules Bergeret escaped Paris during the Bloody Week and went into exile in New York, where he died in 1905.]]

The American Ambassador in Paris during the Commune, [[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 ... [T]hey threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender."

Edwin Child, a young Londoner working in Paris, noted that during the Commune, "the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere and distinguishing themselves by the fury with which they fought".<ref>Eye-witness accounts quoted in 'Paris under Siege' by Joanna Richardson p. 197 (see bibliography)</ref> However, it has been argued in recent research that these famous female arsonists of the Commune, or {{lang|fr|[[pétroleuses]]}}, may have been exaggerated or a myth.<ref>Robert Tombs, ''The War Against Paris: 1871'', Cambridge University Press, 1981, 272 pages {{ISBN|978-0-521-28784-5}}</ref><ref>Gay Gullickson, ''Unruly Women of Paris'', Cornell Univ Press, 1996, 304 pages {{ISBN|978-0-8014-8318-9}}</ref> Lissagaray claimed that because of this myth, hundreds of working-class women were murdered in Paris in late May, falsely accused of being {{lang|fr|[[pétroleuses]]}}, but he offered no evidence to support his claim. Lissagaray also claimed that the artillery fire by the French army was responsible for probably half of the fires that consumed the city during the Bloody Week.{{sfn|Lissagaray|2012|pp=277–278}} However, photographs of the ruins of the Tuileries Palace, the Hotel de Ville, and other prominent government buildings that burned show that the exteriors were untouched by cannon fire, while the interiors were completely gutted by fire; and prominent Communards such as Jules Bergeret, who escaped to live in New York, proudly claimed credit for the most famous acts of arson.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|pp=396–397}}