“Before the Commune’s demise, the people of Paris had set about reconstructing authority and governance in the city along unprecedentedly revolutionary lines, grounded in the popular euphoria surrounding the central government’s retreat from Paris on March 18, 1871. Despite near-constant threats to the Commune’s existence from the rival government occupying Versailles, the audacious common folk of Paris imagined and began to constitute a new city and a new politics of their own design.”
Tag Archives: Paris Commune
Shelton Stromquist: “The Paris Commune Was a Unique Experiment in Running a City for Its People”
Posted in anarchism, autonomy, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution
Tagged Paris Commune
Carolyn Eichner: “Women at the barricades”
“The Paris Commune exploded onto the world stage. At the intersection of political developments, resistance movements, emerging liberatory ideologies and community-based organisations, the Commune resulted from the political will of a wide range of actors to embrace the revolutionary opportunity, and put hopes and ideas into action. They drew not only on their prior liberatory plans and resistant experiences, but also on Paris’s revolutionary legacy – a potent set of available memories embraced by socialists and feminists of many stripes. This combination of history, ideology, opportunity, lived experience and hope facilitated a radically democratic urban experiment.”
Posted in anarchism, defeat, gender, Nota Bene, revolution, the common
Tagged Paris Commune
David A. Bell: “The Experiment: The life and afterlife of the Paris Commune”
“The ghost of the Commune continued to haunt the regime that had killed it and helped to push the Third Republic and future regimes in the more progressive direction they eventually took. For all of the contradictions that accompanied its short life, the Commune, as Carolyn Eichner insists, played a key historical role.”
Posted in anarchism, defeat, governance, Nota Bene, revolution, the common, tragic politics
Tagged Paris Commune
Billy Anania: “The Iconography of the Paris Commune, 150 Years Later”
A look back at how artists captured those few revolutionary months.
Posted in fine arts
Tagged Paris Commune
Sumanta Banerjee: “Embers of the Paris Commune”
“This year we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871 – the biggest urban insurrection of the nineteenth century, that led to the setting up of a grass roots based popular government in Paris, albeit for only about two months, before it was crushed by the Versailles troops at the end of May that year. But during that brief period of popular sovereignty, that government – known as the `Commune’, meaning the smallest unit of local governance – laid the foundations of a model of decentralization of power, that has continued to inspire generations all over the world.”
Posted in autonomy, freedom, justice, Nota Bene, power, revolution, the common, tragic politics
Tagged India, Paris Commune, Shanghai, Soviets
The Paris Commune
Posted in anarchism, Nota Bene, revolution, the common, the Left
Tagged Berardi, Negri, Paris Commune
John Westmoreland: “The Paris Commune: When workers ran a city”
“Between March and May 1871 the workers of Paris ran their city as a collective, democratic government of the workers known as the Paris Commune.”
Posted in autonomy, defeat, fraternity, governance, Nota Bene, revolt, tragic politics
Tagged Paris Commune
Crimethinc: “Against the Logic of the Guillotine: Why the Paris Commune Burned the Guillotine—and we should too”
“Even when we are engaged in pitched physical struggle with our adversaries, we ought to maintain a profound faith in their potential, for we hope to live in different relations with them one day. As aspiring revolutionaries, this hope is our most precious resource, the foundation of everything we do. If revolutionary change is to spread throughout society and across the world, those we fight today will have to be fighting alongside us tomorrow.”
Posted in ethics, Nota Bene, revolution, terror, violence
Tagged Paris Commune
Owen Holland: “‘What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents’: The Paris Commune and the Poetics of Martyrdom in the Fin de Siècle Socialist Print Culture”
“The problem of how to relate to, and retrospectively valorise, the Commune’s failure created a tension in the socialist periodical press between the motivational need to celebrate such a heroic defeat, in order to justify sacrifices both past and present, and the evaluative need critically to assess the reasons that underlay the defeat.”
Posted in anarchism, defeat, melancholy, Nota Bene, poetry, revolution
Tagged Paris Commune
Lynn Clement: “The Commune’s Marianne: An Art History of La Pétroleuse”
“The near-mythical pétroleuse was one of the principal figures to emerge from the short-lived, yet radical Paris Commune (1871). The pétroleuse represented those women accused of setting devastating fires that gutted government and cultural institutions during the Semaine Sanglant (The Bloody Week). … Damaging ideologies coalesced around the pétroleuse and as such, a study of these symbols of female destruction reveals the fears and tensions that surrounded French women’s political power and agency by way of the proletariat’s civil war and revolution.”
Posted in defeat, fine arts, gender, Nota Bene, revolution, violence
Tagged Paris Commune
