On Occupy Wall Street & the legacy of the Paris Commune

Excerpted from Commune plus one by James Panero:

Occupy Wall Street is but the latest revival of a spectacle that has been performed many times before—not necessarily in the Arab Spring, which saw regimes toppled through political means, but in certain incarnations of idealistic vision that emerged out of a seventy-two-day experiment in Paris nearly a century and a half ago. Before there were the Tompkins Square Park riots, the student takeovers of 1968, or Occupy Wall Street, there was the Paris Commune of 1871.

The Commune was born in a moment not unlike our own. After the extravagant Second Empire of Napoleon III came crashing down in the Franco-Prussian War, the establishment of the Third Republic left French radicals with unrealistic expectations for the new government. “A majority of the Republicans in the 1870s proved to be more conservative than they had been under the Liberal Empire, even less interested in social reform than before,” writes Roger L. Williams in his French Revolution of 1870–1871.

On March 18, two generals from the new government entered Paris and ascended Montmartre to recover cannon left over from the Prussian siege. A Parisian militia, along with some regular soldiers, turned on the generals and executed them. Local women desecrated their corpses. In The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871, Alistair Horne recounts how “maenads from the mob squatted and urinated upon them.” Many years later, the Sacré-Cœur basilica would memorialize their deaths and the thousands that followed, including the death of the Archbishop of Paris, murdered in cold blood.

As the Republican government fled, the city created its own communal government. Rather than merely reestablish municipal services, the Commune attempted to inaugurate a “new political era, experimental, positive, scientific,” declared by manifesto: “It is the end of the old government and clerical world, of militarism, of monopolists, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters.”

The barricades went up, and the Commune set about becoming an idealistic autonomous body inside the French state with much to hope for and little that could actually be done. Among its few lackluster achievements was the suppression of pawnshops and the prohibition of night-baking, reducing “all Paris to stale bread.” As Lord Elton writes in The Revolutionary Idea in France: 1789–1871: “Upon one thing they were in substantial agreement—the principle of the Commune. The principle of the Commune was the indispensable preliminary to the new Revolution. . . . The Commune was revolutionary not because of what it did but because of what it claimed.”