Voices of the Paris Commune

Voices of the Paris Commune
Author:
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1629631825

The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations; reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action. As both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working class’s three-month rule through their own prism, distant in time and space. Voices of the Paris Commune takes a different tack. In this book only those who were present in the spring of 1871, who lived through and participated in the Commune, are heard. The Paris Commune had a vibrant press, and it is represented here by its most important newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, edited by Jules Vallès, member of the First International. Like any legitimate government, the Paris Commune held parliamentary sessions and issued daily printed reports of the heated, contentious deliberations that belie any accusation of dictatorship. Included in this collection is the transcript of the debate in the Commune, just days before its final defeat, on the establishing of a Committee of Public Safety and on the fate of the hostages held by the Commune, hostages who would ultimately be killed. Finally, Voices of the Paris Commune contains a selection from the inquiry carried out twenty years after the event by the intellectual review La Revue Blanche, asking participants to judge the successes and failures of the Paris Commune. This section provides a fascinating range of opinions of this epochal event.

Communards

Communards
Author: Mitchell Abidor
Publisher: Marxists Internet Archive Publications
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2010
Genre: Paris (France)
ISBN: 9780980542899

Communards: The Story of the Paris Commune of 1871, As Told by those Who Fought for It. Texts selected, edited, and translated by Mitchell Abidor. Published by Marxists Internet Archive Publications, 2010. In this unique collection of texts translated into English for the first time, we hear the genuine voices of the Paris Commune of 1871. Every Communard drew something different from the experience of the Commune, and "Communards" allows all of them to have their say. "If socialism wasn't born of the Commune, it is from the Commune that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed, but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an end to the capitalist regime." - Edouard Vaillant, a member of the Paris Commune. Documents include the records of stormy meetings of the Commune deciding on the execution of hostages, minutes of meetings of the First International throughout the siege as well as reminiscences of participants written down 25 years after the event. Much of this would be new to French-speakers; it is all new for those who do not normally read in the French language. No history of the Commune may be written in the future without reference to "Communards." Communards is available only through Erythros Press and Media and proceeds go towards the operations of the Marxists Internet Archive.

The Commune

The Commune
Author: Louise Michel
Publisher: On Our Own Authority!
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-04-02
Genre: Paris (France)
ISBN: 9780985890933

On 18 March 1871, the Parisian working class began a rebellion that shook the foundations of European society. Laborers seized direct control over their city, expelling their government and capitalist rulers. These revolutionary men and women declared Paris an independent municipality and commune where they would collectively manage their society through new institutions of their own creation, providing for their own welfare and defense. The Commune was annihilated 71 days later in one of the deadliest campaigns in French military history, La Semaine Sanglante, "The Bloody Week," during which over 30,000 men, women, and children were murdered for their revolutionary aspirations. Despite the brutality of its destruction, the Paris Commune uprising inspired revolutionaries the world over. In the near century-and-a-half that has passed since the Commune's destruction, anarchists and libertarian-socialists across the generations have looked to the 1871 Paris Commune, seeking to learn from its example--both its strengths and its limitations. The Commune: Paris, 1871, is a new collection of writings and critical reflections on the Paris Commune by classic anarchist and libertarian-socialist authors like Louise Michel, William Morris, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alexander Berkman and Maurice Brinton.

Massacre

Massacre
Author: John M. Merriman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300212909

One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary government that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in ‘Bloody Week’ – the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government’s forces. By then, the city’s boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile – a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters. In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards – the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women – and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.

The Civil War in France

The Civil War in France
Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2022-05-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

Communal Luxury

Communal Luxury
Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1784780545

Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

"Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth": The First International in a Global Perspective

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2018-03-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004335463

“Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth” provides a fresh account of the International Working Men’s Association. Founded in London in 1864, the First International gathered trade unions, associations, co-operatives, and individual workers across Europe and the Americas. The IWMA struggled for the emancipation of labour. It organised solidarity with strikers. It took sides in major events, such as the 1871 Paris Commune. It soon appeared as a threat to European powers, which vilified and prosecuted it. Although it split up in 1872, the IWMA played a ground-breaking part in the history of working-class internationalism. In our age of globalised capitalism, large labour migration, and rising nationalisms, much can be learnt from the history of the first international labour organisation. Contributors are: Fabrice Bensimon, Gregory Claeys, Michel Cordillot, Nicolas Delalande, Quentin Deluermoz, Marianne Enckell, Albert Garcia Balaña, Samuel Hayat, Jürgen Herres, François Jarrige, Mathieu Léonard, Carl Levy, Detlev Mares, Krzysztof Marchlewicz, Woodford McClellan, Jeanne Moisand, Iorwerth Prothero, Jean Puissant, Jürgen Schmidt, Antje Schrupp, Horacio Tarcus, Antony Taylor, Marc Vuilleumier.

The Voice of the People

The Voice of the People
Author: Jean Vautrin
Publisher: Phoenix
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781861591746

Horace Grondin, deputy head of the Sureté, is in fact Charles Bassicousse, sentenced sixteen years earlier for a murder he did not commit and obsessed with wreaking his revenge on Antoine Tarpagnan, the man he believes did commit the crime. Tarpagnan, an army captain, has fallen in love with Gabriella Pucci, the mistress of Paris's greatest villain. As Tarpagnan searches the underworld for Gabriella, unknown to him, Grondin is searching for him. Reminiscent of Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES, with the zest for characterisation of Dickens, Vautrin's novel revels in the chaos and passion of the period culminating in the savage repression of the Commune. The final climactic moments between Grondin and Tarpagnan take place on the barricades as Paris descends into a fury of bloodletting and panic. Fiction on a grand scale, Vautrin's multi-peopled novel exuberantly recreates the moment.