Paris Commune

[Y Chwyldro Comiwnyddol Cymraeg]

Why did the Paris commune fail?
Was it the press and the way they portrayed the workers to be violent and brutal when the military where the brutal ones?And the way the ruling class used hedgemony to portray the workers that way
Or was it the lack of control and lack of a vanguard party that let the workers down
Or was it the failure to spead the revolution across France, and Europ and the fact that it was contained to one city that led to its failure???

[MarxistFuture]

They were too moderate at a time when there was great uncertainty. They weren't ruthless enough. They should have eliminated their enemies in Versailles. They even left the National Bank untouched IIRC. This money went to the groups that eventually toppled the Commune ( if I'm thinking of the right incident).

[rouchambeau]

What year are we talking about?

[OneBrickOneVoice]

There were many reasons. First, it was just one city and would've needed to spread. Marx's biggest critiscism of the Paris Commune was that they didn't seize the banks.

[chimx]

Actually the Paris Commune did spread. There were about half a dozen communes that sprang up throughout France. Lyons, Marseille, Toulouse, and Saint-Étienne, to name a few, erected barricades in solidarity with Parisian communards.

Most of them were suppressed more quickly than Paris, ending in late March of early April.

I would note that the 1871 commune movement in southern France often times had more to do with nationalism than socialist ideology. (of course, the 1871 paris commune also has nationalist roots). The southern communes alignment with Paris had more to do with the failures of Thiers and Napoleon in the war against Germany than the evolution of the conflict into a politicized class struggle that transcended national boundaries.

Thus there is a clear distinction between the southern communes, and the Paris commune. As is the case in most revolutionary movements, ideology alone did not provide sufficient fuel to continue the rebellion efforts. Although a radical political culture had developed in all the communes of 1871, it was the economic hardships placed on Paris during the four-month siege (by Germany) that provided the material basis for revolution--allowing for political culture to evolve from nationalistic to class oriented. When Thiers attempted to seize the National Guard’s cannons, he symbolically associated his own conservative government with the ruling elites of Germany, thus cementing the transformation of the antagonist from nation to class, from the perspective of Paris.

This never happened in the south. That is why they so quickly fell. They were socialist communes rooted in nationalism and ideology, as opposed to class and material hardships.

If any of you are interested in the Paris Commune, I suggest the book The Paris Commune 1871 by Stuart Edwards and Ballots and Barricades by Ronald Aminzade. The latter dives farther into the southern French commune experience.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

point is, all around national power wasn't seized like in the bolshevik revolution.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by Y Chwildro Comiwnyddol [email protected] 20, 2007 02:32 pm
Why did the Paris commune fail?
The French and Germans had a big ass, well equiped army.