The Communards and the long shadow of the Paris Commune of 1871
- Daniel Holland
- 30 minutes ago
- 11 min read
In the spring of 1871 Paris felt like a city that had been shaken awake and left slightly dizzy. All around were Parisians who had endured hunger during the siege, humiliation after defeat, and a government that felt both distant and unsympathetic. Into this atmosphere stepped a remarkable collection of workers, intellectuals, printers, seamstresses, journalists and idealists. They would later be known simply as the Communards, a word that still carries an echo of both hope and tragedy.
The Paris Commune lasted for only a little more than two months, yet it became one of the most studied and mythologised uprisings in modern history. It left behind enormous archival traces, thousands of political prisoners and a legacy that stretched from French working class politics to social movements across Europe and even as far as New Caledonia in the South Pacific where many exiled Communards spent years building new lives among the island’s Indigenous Kanak population.
This is the wider story of the Communards, told not only through the grand political events but also through little known moments, personal encounters and the quieter details that often fall between the cracks of traditional histories.
Before the Commune
France in the late eighteen sixties and early eighteen seventies was already uneasy. The Second Empire under Napoleon the Third had encouraged decadence and display, but it had also left much of the urban working population feeling as though they were observing prosperity rather than participating in it. When the Franco Prussian War erupted in eighteen seventy, that resentment deepened.
By the time the Prussian forces surrounded Paris in September eighteen seventy, food was so scarce that restaurants began serving horse, then mule, and finally cat and rat. Market stalls displayed whatever could be caught. A Parisian diarist wrote with grim practicality that boiled rat with mustard was “not as unpleasant as one might fear.” The siege hardened political views and created a hunger not just for food but for a new social order.
Radical clubs flourished. Newspapers appeared that spoke of workers rights, secular education, and the idea that Paris might govern itself. Twice during the siege these groups attempted to topple the provisional government. Though they failed, the attempts revealed how far the city’s political mood had shifted.
Once elections were held in early eighteen seventy one the centre of government moved to Versailles. Its new head, Adolphe Thiers, was deeply wary of the radicalised National Guard who still controlled large parts of Paris. When the government attempted to seize cannons belonging to the Guard on eighteen March, Parisians saw the move as an act of provocation. Crowds gathered, soldiers mutinied, and two generals were killed. By nightfall the city was effectively in the hands of the insurgents who proclaimed the Commune.
The short life of the Commune
From March to May eighteen seventy one the city became a laboratory for political experimentation. The Commune abolished conscription, reopened factories under workers committees and talked frequently about universal education and support for abandoned children. It also indulged in a great deal of debate. One Communard later joked that every second citizen seemed to be preparing to deliver a speech about the future of France.
Despite the stereotypes, the Commune was not purely a socialist uprising. It included Jacobins, republicans, feminists, printers associations and a few dreamers who believed Paris could become the model city for the entire world. Women played a notable role. Louise Michel, schoolteacher and revolutionary, later recalled that she spent the early weeks “running from meeting to meeting with barely time to eat.”
Yet the Commune was troubled by internal disagreements and hampered by the approach of the French Army massing at Versailles. Thiers refused all negotiation, and his officers prepared to retake the capital step by step.
Between twenty one and twenty eight May the French Army entered Paris. Street by street the Communards resisted. Barricades rose in every district. Fires swept through parts of the city. The week became known as Bloody Week and remains one of the darkest episodes in nineteenth century European history.
The exact number of deaths has been debated for one hundred fifty years. Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, who fought for the Commune and later wrote its first great history, estimated twenty thousand killed. Modern historians usually place the figure between ten and fifteen thousand, though some argue it may still be higher. What is certain is that the repression was swift and ruthless.
After the guns fell silent
In the days following the collapse of the Commune more than forty thousand people were arrested. Many were imprisoned in makeshift camps, some were executed without trial, and others simply disappeared into the confusion. Around six thousand fled abroad, forming temporary communities in Belgium, Britain, Switzerland and the United States.
A government inquiry concluded with predictable conservatism that the true cause of the uprising was a lack of religious belief among the working classes. The remedy, according to the committee, was a moral rejuvenation combined with the removal of undesirable political elements from the country. Deportation was chosen as the main solution.
Executions during and after Bloody Week
One part of the story that is often simplified in popular retellings concerns the executions carried out by both sides. During the final days of fighting, as the French Army pushed deeper into the city, captured Communards were often lined against walls in courtyards or along garden walls and shot within minutes of being seized. One of the most well known sites is the Mur des Federes in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where a group of National Guard fighters made their last stand among the tombs and winding pathways. Contemporary witnesses wrote that the smoke from the muskets drifted through the cemetery like morning mist.
What is less known is that executions also took place in much smaller and more improvised locations. One parish report mentions a group of suspected insurgents brought to the back yard of a small primary school where they were shot beside an apple tree that continued to bear fruit for many years after. Another policeman recalled that several firing squads operated from the stables of commandeered houses because they provided space to line up prisoners away from the public gaze.
In some districts the French Army used portable wooden barriers as makeshift execution points. These barriers had originally been built to control horse traffic during the Second Empire and were still stacked in municipal storerooms. Soldiers dragged them into position to create instant walls for firing squads. The fact that such mundane objects were repurposed in this way is a reminder of how quickly order collapsed into violence.
After the fighting ended, formal and informal executions continued for several days. Some officers insisted on quick field trials that lasted only a few minutes. Others avoided even this. One military doctor later testified that an officer told him the goal was to act so swiftly that there would be no chance for sentiment. By contrast, a rare few officers refused to participate and even tried to shield captured Communards by registering them as wounded soldiers rather than prisoners.
The number of those killed in these executions is still debated. Estimates range widely, partly because the distinction between battlefield death and summary execution was not recorded with any consistency. Yet most modern scholars agree that the executions form a significant portion of the overall death toll of Bloody Week and were a major cause of the bitterness that persisted long after the Commune had fallen.
How the executions shaped memory, politics and art
The executions of Bloody Week did not fade quietly into the background of nineteenth century France. They became part of the political language of the era and a reference point for generations of activists. In the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties trade union meetings often opened with a short tribute to the Communards. Some speakers would pause and say simply that they remembered “the walls of May,” a phrase understood instantly by the audience. Even moderate republicans who had once viewed the Commune with suspicion gradually absorbed its imagery into their own campaigns for expanded rights.
The socialist leader Jean Jaurès wrote in eighteen ninety five that the silence surrounding the executed Communards had become “a hollow in the national conscience” and argued that France needed to confront the full history of the repression if it wanted to claim the values of liberty and equality with honesty. His writing helped revive public interest in the individual stories of those who had died.
Artists found the subject no less compelling. Painters in the late nineteenth century frequently depicted the barricades, the chaos of the fighting and the grim aftermath. One little known example is the painter Maxime Maufra who created a quietly unsettling canvas of a deserted Paris street with a single abandoned rifle propped against a wall. Though no figures are shown, the painting was recognised immediately as a reference to the executions of eighteen seventy one.
Writers were equally drawn to the theme. Victor Hugo, already deeply sympathetic to the cause of amnesty, wrote several poems that hinted at the suffering of the condemned without naming them directly. Louise Michel became one of the most prolific chroniclers of the experience. She spoke about the executions with a mixture of sorrow and defiance, reminding audiences that many of the dead were ordinary workers who had simply believed Paris could be governed more fairly.
The executions also influenced the political culture of the early French Third Republic. Each anniversary of the Commune drew crowds to the Mur des Federes in Père Lachaise Cemetery. By the early twentieth century these gatherings had become major events with banners, speeches and brass bands. Some mourners brought flowers while others placed small handwritten notes at the base of the wall. One tradition involved leaving a handful of red carnations which became a quiet symbol of remembrance for the executed Communards.
Later in the century the memory of the executions travelled further still. In the Soviet Union, where the Commune was revered as a heroic forerunner of the workers state, murals and posters depicted idealised versions of the firing squads and the last stands. Streets and districts were named after Communards and the events of May eighteen seventy one were incorporated into official school textbooks.
Deportation to New Caledonia
New Caledonia, a distant archipelago in the South Pacific, had been annexed by France in eighteen fifty three and converted into a penal colony. Conditions were harsh, and tropical diseases had previously discouraged widespread settlement. By the eighteen seventies it contained a mixture of Indigenous Kanak communities, European colonists, regular criminal convicts, and a steadily growing number of political prisoners.
More than four thousand Communards were transported to the island. Their sentences fell into three categories. Some received simple deportation which often meant being sent to the Isle of Pines and allowed to live in self organised communities. Others were sent to fortified sites on the Ducos Peninsula. Three hundred received the harshest classification, deportation with forced labour, usually to the main island where they were mixed with ordinary convicts.
A few unusual administrative details survive from this period. One record from the Isle of Pines describes a group of tailors from Paris who created a small cooperative workshop and began producing shirts for sale. Another mentions a former piano tuner who tried to build a small reed organ from driftwood but found that the tropical climate warped every piece of wood he prepared. These tiny fragments remind us that the deportees were not only political symbols but practical people trying to recreate pieces of their former lives.
Daily life in exile
The French authorities provided almost nothing for the deportees. Many had to build huts from scattered timber. Food allotments were frequently insufficient, especially in the first years. Some Communards recorded that they exchanged clothing or small tools with the Kanak in return for fruit and fish. Others took up fishing themselves and discovered that the reefs near the Isle of Pines were rich in shellfish.
For those under forced labour conditions life was considerably worse. Accounts from the period describe beatings, the use of thumbscrews and punishments that echoed earlier European penal traditions. Yet not every moment was bleak. A school was established for the children of deportees and the wives who travelled to join their husbands were given greater property rights than they had enjoyed in France.
One little known detail comes from a report written by a military doctor. He noted that Communard prisoners had introduced a form of communal cooking where each person contributed what little they had to a shared pot. The practice reminded him of rural French customs and he commented that it seemed to improve morale more than any official measure.
Escape across the ocean
In eighteen seventy four a daring escape transformed the atmosphere on the island. Six prisoners including François Jourde, Henri Rochefort and Paschal Grousset boarded a ship operated by Captain John Law. They hid in the hold until the vessel was well beyond the harbour and resurfaced only after hours at sea. Their arrival in Sydney created an immediate sensation. Crowds gathered at the quayside and local newspapers described the escape as “a triumph of ingenuity against tyranny.”
Jourde later joked that the best part of the escape was the first breakfast eaten in freedom. He wrote that Australian bread was “lighter than any I had tasted in years, perhaps because it did not share the flavour of supervision.”
The escape however made conditions much worse for those who remained. New rules banned prisoners from walking near the sea, entering forests or meeting in informal groups. Curfews were imposed and the authorities tightened surveillance across the island.
Contact with the Kanak
Before the severe restrictions of the mid eighteen seventies relations between Communards and Kanak communities were surprisingly cordial. Achille Balliere, for example, frequently visited Kanak homes and later wrote fondly about evenings spent listening to stories he described simply as “wisdom carried in spoken form.”
There were even marriages between Communard men and Kanak women in the early period, though the government later discouraged or outright prevented further unions.
When the Kanak rose against French colonial rule in eighteen seventy eight some Communards expressed public sympathy. Yet this solidarity was short lived. Many still held racial ideas common in nineteenth century France which quickly diluted any deeper alliance. One exception was Louise Michel who supported Kanak youth, taught at a small school and encouraged the performance of Kanak theatre. Her writings show both admiration and the paternalistic tone of the era.
Notable Communards
Henri Rochefort spent time in the United States after his escape and delivered lectures that criticised the French government with considerable flair. He also wrote a novel, L Evade, which contributed greatly to the romanticised view of the deportations.
Another remarkable figure was George Pilotell, a political caricaturist who became self appointed director of fine arts in the Commune. After escaping to London he enjoyed an entirely new career as a portrait painter and costume designer. His work can be found today in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Adrien Lejeune gained fame long after the events themselves by surviving into the twentieth century. When he died in nineteen forty two in the Soviet Union he was widely publicised as the last living Communard.
The long road to amnesty
By the late eighteen seventies pressure grew inside France to pardon the Communards. Early pardons in eighteen seventy nine left many unsatisfied especially those who had never been formally convicted. Calls for complete amnesty were made in petitions across Paris. Victor Hugo became one of the strongest supporters.
Finally in July 1880 parliament granted total amnesty. Ships carried the deportees home and thousands of Parisians gathered at the docks to greet them. Donations were collected, employment was offered and temporary accommodation was arranged by committees led by figures such as Louis Blanc.
Yet returning home was not always easy. Many deportees struggled to resume their former lives. Encountering former jailers in the street sometimes ended in angry exchanges. Others felt oddly distant from Paris after so many years in the Pacific.
An investigative committee examined allegations of torture in New Caledonia. The resulting depositions and testimonies gradually opened the door for reconciliation, though the memories of repression remained vivid.
Some Communards never returned. They built new lives in New Caledonia or settled in Australia where their descendants remain today.
Legacy
The story of the Communards travelled far. In the Soviet Union entire neighbourhoods were named in their honour. In France the Commune became a reference point for political thinkers from anarchists to social democrats. And for many working class Parisians the memory of Bloody Week remained a warning about the cost of social transformation.
The quieter details of the exile experience, from communal cooking to improvised workshops, remind us that history is made not only through dramatic revolution but also through the resilience of ordinary people forced to rebuild their existence in unfamiliar places.
Britannica: Paris Commune
Gallica Digital Library Collection of Paris Commune Documents
OpenEdition Journals: Scholarly Articles on the Paris Commune and New Caledonia Deportations
State Library of New South Wales Archival Material on Communard Escapees in Sydney
Victoria and Albert Museum Collection Record for George Pilotell
British Museum Database Entry for Works by George Pilotell
Musée d Orsay Digital Archive for Louise Michel and the Commune
French National Archives Documents Relating to the New Caledonia Penal Colony
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Collection on Franco Prussian War Context
