This may not necessarily be the place to bring this up, but I think it's time to bust a myth that so many of us (including me) have held for a long time. Our concept of officials receiving a "worker's wage" comes directly from The Civil War in France, and we have held to that concept like a child holds on to its security blanket. But the fact is that the highest salaries paid out by the Paris Commune were well above the average "worker's wage". Indeed, they were also significantly higher than the highest paid workers.
According to Engels' 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France, the highest salary paid was 6,000 francs. This comes out to about 16.4 francs a day (figuring a 365-day workyear, which was common at that time). The lowest paid auxiliary workers for the Commune made a provisional wage (until their skills could be assessed) of 5 francs a day (about 1,825 francs a year).
According to Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, by Ronald Aminzade, the highest paid workers in 1869 (just before the Franco-Prussian War) were armaments workers, who made 10 francs a day (about 3,650 francs a year), but also suffered months-long periods of unemployment. Artisan workers made at most 3 francs a day (1,095 francs a year) and unskilled workers made 1.5 francs a day (547 francs a year) in 1867.
Unless there was a spike in inflation and prices that would have resulted in wage raises (something not mentioned in The Civil War in France by Marx, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 by Lissagaray, or any of the other materials readily available on the Internet), it's pretty clear that the Commune paid officials and employees more or less what it thought workers should be paid, not what they actually received. Even the wage received by auxiliary employees was 40 percent higher than what artisan workers received, to say nothing of the 60-percent difference between the wages of armament workers (which were due to their part-time work status) and the highest salary of Commune officials.
