Lecture notes: The socio-political forces that made the Paris Commune

Outline of a talk at the Critical University 15 May 2021

If we go back to March 18th, and look at the famous imagery of the National Guard on their barricades, we’re only seeing one half of the story. This is the French labour movement as it saw itself: orderly, respectable and quite obviously gendered — the men have the guns, flags and uniforms, the women and children stand to the side.

The battalions were rooted in local communities but, as Martin Phillip Johnson shows, there was a lot of crossover — so that a man in one area might actually travel to be with friends in another area’s battalion. Which suggests they were based both on community and workplace.

But March 18th itself, and the subsequent trajectory of the Commune as a revolutionary government, involved a completely different demographic: la canaille, the mob: the shanty-dwelling ultra poor, including migrants from outside Paris, overlapped with the classic bohemia of artists, impoverished law students, registered sex workers, slum children… and nobody took their photos, although they drew them.