March 18, 1871 · Paris Theater
March 18, 1871
Six weeks after the armistice, Paris erupted in revolution. The Commune — the radical municipal government that controlled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871 — was the product of four compounding tensions: the humiliation of defeat, the rage of an armed working class that had defended the city for months while bourgeois politicians negotiated surrender, the political radicalism of the Parisian labor movement, and the specific fury at the new National Assembly's plan to disarm the National Guard and move the government to Versailles. The Commune enacted a cascade of radical measures: separation of church and state, free education, the right of workers to take over abandoned workshops, abolition of interest on debts. The Versailles government surrounded the city and waited. The Semaine Sanglante — Bloody Week — began on May 21, 1871, when government troops entered Paris through an unguarded gate. Street fighting of extraordinary violence lasted six days. Communards shot hostages including the Archbishop of Paris. Government troops executed prisoners and suspects on a massive scale — conservative estimates put the dead at 10,000, some historians argue for 20,000 or more. The last Communards made their final stand in the Père Lachaise cemetery on May 28.
Commanders