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2 free months of valuable education. The story might be one of the few things universal
to the human experience. Larger than life characters, plots, twists, turns, action and
suspense are part of our lives. It's almost as if it's part of our genetic code. Unless
you are a scientist in which case, I never said that and I denounce and reject my claim.
This is true in things as simple as the story we tell about our day, but also how you define
yourself. In some ways, identity itself is about the stories we tell about ourselves
and those told about us. A good story can change governments. They can bring people
together, or even justify some of the worst actions in history.
The political left from democratic socialists to Stalinists, to anarchists tells the story
of the Paris Commune. It was a radical experiment in democracy in the late 19th century. For
two months these people fought overwhelming forces. At the same time, they tried to build
the society of their dreams. Since the fall of the commune, those on the political left,
from Karl Marx, to Noam Chomsky have claimed it as a foundational myth. Historians turn
the raw events of the past, like the commune into narratives. So, you know, we have some
value. Today, let’s tell this story. Let’s show the world what happened in Paris in 1871,
and find what these Communards as they were called have to say about us now.
Let’s begin with the divide in leftist activism today. Those on not familiar with left wing
circles might not know, but the left is always in a debate over one issue or another. The
most significant divide though is likely over states. Specifically, whether they are necessary.
Do we follow Karl Marx and make a government and army to end capitalism before it too withers
away? Or do we believe the anarchist argument that no state by definition could serve anyone
but a political elite? Both Marxists and anarchists point to the
Paris commune as their case for how to run a revolution. So this story hits the core
of their ideological divide. People will say I insert politics into history, which is like
inserting water into an ocean but whatever. I want to dig into the story here and answer
what happened at this famous Paris commune, and what we can learn.
Europe in 1871 was… a messy place. The industrial revolution created vast quantities of new
wealth. The problem is it created that wealth in an extremely uneven fashion. Many historians
would argue the life of an urban wage worker was much worse than even a medieval peasant.
Medieval peasant lives weren’t as bad as we think, but that’s a different video!
This 19th-century industrial society was urban. People crammed into massive cities. They worked
long hours and barely made ends meet if they did at all. It's a volatile mixture for revolution
we see over and over again in human history. Hey, completely unrelated, but did you know
26 people have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Neat fact!
Many working people in Europe realised the liberal revolutions left them behind. You
know, the ones which tossed the English out of America and beheaded the King of France?
They seemed to result in no real changes to the working person’s daily life. They merely
replaced an aristocratic elite with a capitalist one.
Around Europe, a new political movement began to rise. These new revolutionaries started
a series of more and more radical actions. They wanted to address the gross cruelty and
inequalities of the world one way or another. These angry people pushed towards socialism
or nationalism. France had always been a hotbed of radical
politics, so early socialists were popular. In the age of Emperor Napoleon III, many Parisians
supported a democratic republic. An organised international group of socialists, communists,
and anarchists called the first international was gaining popularity. With it, they developed
ideas for radical changes to the way society functioned.
Then everything changed when the German nation attacked. War broke out between France and
the coalition of countries not far from becoming Germany in 1870. Historians call it the Franco-Prussian
War. If you were watching a more conventional youtube channel with many more subscribers
than this one, this video would be about that instead. Then we could have maps and arrows
and make the wholesale slaughter of thousands of people look like a fun little war game
or something. OK, moving on. Long story short, soldiers rode horses, fired
guns, died, and the French lost the war. By September, the Germans surrounded Paris. To
hold off the Germans, the French recruited less-desirable men from Paris. Those enlisted
from the middle and upper-middle-class, the closest neighbourhoods to like today’s white
suburbs were pro-government and happy to serve the Emperor. Those from the lower class neighbourhoods
were all hopped up on this radical leftism. Let’s just say, leftists and emperors, don’t
get along. Radical leftists in France noticed their army
had little left to resist the Germans. They saw an opportunity to make a strike against
the government. On September 19th those lower-class soldiers marched to the centre of town. These
activists demanded a new government in Paris, a commune. Commune is a loaded word, but let
me channel historian Donny Gluckstein to explain. The Paris Commune it seems terribly radical.
Commune, it sounds like something to do with communism. Actually it's not. The commune
was literally and its still the unit of local government in France. If you look around you
have the commune de Paris the commune of Montpelier the commune of Leon. It just means town council.
So what people do is they elect the town council and by people I mean the men.
But the September 19 demonstration would be the beginning of the unrest, not the end.
Leftist protestors who wanted a commune in Paris would meet again on October 5th and
8th. Then, things started to change after a failed attempt to break the German siege.
France’s defence minister fearing capture escaped Paris by hot air balloon.
On October 28th, Parisians learned the Germans surrounded another French army, the bulk of
their remaining men. Yet another attempt to break German lines had failed with heavy losses.
On October 31st, leaders of revolutionary groups in Paris called for major demonstrations.
Some 15,000 people came out to protest the government and demand a commune. Again. The
government put the demonstration down. Yet during this massive upheaval, the protestors
stormed the local government. They even set up their own revolutionary government for
a few hours. Time marched on. Unrest got stronger and stronger.
It became clear there was not going to be any resolution to the war with the Germans
save the French surrender. Parisians starved, froze, and starting in early January, the
Germans began to shell their city day and night.
Under this pressure, extreme factions of the left-wing resistance to the government got
desperate. This led to real firefights with government forces. As France negotiated a
ceasefire with Germany, a leftist militia called the National Guard seized 400 old bronze
cannons. They took the cannons into the working class neighbourhoods in Paris. They were ready
to arm themselves against the French government. Paris would be for the people. The government
tried to negotiate some of them back. Yet they also refused to prolong a freeze on debt
collection and shuttered radical newspapers. These government actions only succeeded in
making the Parisian radicals even angrier. They were now less willing to come to the
table. The army tried to come for those cannons,
planning to regroup outside and attack the city if they refused… well… they refused.
So on the 18th of March very early in the morning they went to monmartre all the cannons
were stores in montmartre to keep them from the Prussians and the Versailles government
tried to sieze them. and Louise Michel and various women stopped the soldiers and said
"how dare you disarm the working class? These are out cannons. Go away." The soldiers, ordinary
people, refused to follow their officer's orders. The officers said shoot, shoot the
women. The soldiers refused to do that. They turned their guns upside down and were not
going to fire and actually arrested the officer and a couple of them were killed. And at that
point the ruling class panicked and what was left of it in Paris ran away to Versailles.
So, Paris was left literally without any government of the bourgeoisie. What was left was the
federation. In ofther words the armed soldiers. The armed working class and they began to
run for themselves. And that in the sense is the origin of the commune.
In no time, the city of Paris belonged to the revolutionaries. They would soon be under
siege, and there was no state. What did they do?
The rubber would hit the road on March 28th, when the new Paris commune held their first
meeting. They made imprisoned socialist leader their honorary president. On top of that,
they abolished the death penalty and conscription and voted in a dozen other measures.
Honoraries aside, this was a remarkable experiment in democracy. The commune had no president,
no mayor, no general, nothing. They organised commissions for different aspects of running
the city. So the revolution of the 18th of March takes
place, the bourgeois government runs to Versailles and then there's a debate. What do we do?
There are basically two main currents that will sort of win out in the end in all the
debates. There's the elements of the bourgeosie, the old mayors who ran the various arrandisements
local mayors, they're fairly bourgeois and they drift away quite fast. So you got two
currents left and the two currents are the Blanquists and the Proudhonists. And the Blanquists
trace their origins way back to 1789 and 1793 and they see a sort of daring minority that
take action and decide for everybody else. So Blanquis invented the concept of dictatorship
of the proliteriot. It was his term that Marx sort of borrowed. He wanted to establish this
and he was very keen on the issue of power. They said we need to march on Versailles,
destroy our enemy, and then we can construct a new society. That's the blanquists who sort
of action by a dedicated very mentally advanced as they think of themselves minority acting
for everybody else. You've got the Proudhonists on the opposite
side who are Anarchists who basically say all authority is bad and therefore we shouldn't
be marching on versailles to overthrow it because we're not interested in authority
either. To defeat it or to even construct one in Paris. Everyone should just do their
own thing. And then you got the Jacobins who are sort of in the middle and the Jacobins
are not a socialist current actually. They're a sort of radical bourgeois current. Quite
a large group actually but they trade their origins obviously back to the Jacobins of
the French Revolution. These people debating and they say what do we do? And the decision
is and this is the decision which I think is quite fateful actually. They decide to
hold a municipal election. Before long, separation of church and state,
the abolition of rent and debt interest, worker self-management were all law.
Women also played a massive role in the commune, bucking the status of women at the time. One
example is Louise Michel who carried out both combat and the maintenance of the commune.
She was a teacher and nicknamed the “French grande dame of anarchy”. Louise helped the
injured, and even reportedly grabbed a gun and a uniform herself. Though don’t expect
a paradise, these women still couldn’t vote. No women served IN the commune’s decision-making
body itself. I haven't mentioned. For example, how advanced
it was in terms of education for women and women's rights. It's not a thing that's often
talked about but the revolution was started by women, by Louise Michel and the people
around her. The last defenders were prostitutes. Companies of prostitutes who were fighting
alongside the national guard who fought to the bitter end because they recognized the
liberation. In terms of equal education, equal pay, all sorts of things.
There was also long disagreement over the bank of France. Different leftists since the
fall of the commune have played Monday morning quarterback. They debate to this day whether
the people who ran the commune should've raided it for the money. You’ll find Monday night
quarterbacking of the commune’s actions quite common.
It’s easy to forget this radical new seed of democracy was at war with the nation of
France. Granted, the whole Germany thing occupied France. But still, they weren’t going to
let the French capital manage themselves. The government was in Versailles. Some Parisians,
such as the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, wanted to send their men to march on it. Some
tried, but the offensive was a quick failure, and the French army put them on the defensive.
On that note, the commune's or Communard military was… disorganised at best. They boasted
200,000 men on paper, but to be honest, they had about a quarter of those tops. Significant
percentages of the military just abandoned their posts without leave. Moreover, many
of the big cannons and stuff had few people trained to use them.
But, like many of the best things in this world, the Paris commune’s time upon this
earth was short. By the 21st of May, the French army began its offensive on the city of Paris.
They found an area of the city unfortified, and French troops marched into Paris. The
disorganised military began to dissolve as the battle moved street to street. Soldiers
broke ranks to save their neighbourhoods. This takeover of the city is often called
the bloody week. The government wanted not only to suppress this revolt but make sure
no one would ever think to go do this again. We have stories of mass executions, and mass
graves yet uncovered to this day. The government exiled the few survivors around the globe.
Hey friends, I want to keep giving this channel the time it needs to put out great stories
from our past. I also enjoy luxuries like paying rent and eating food. So, I want to
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Back possible. Several prominent left-wing thinkers were
alive to witness what happened at the commune. This included the big daddy of them all Karl
Marx. For left-wing activists, thinkers, and revolutionaries, the Paris Commune was a unifying
story. For a short amount of time, a revolutionary experiment in democracy took place. The Commune
was the model for how to run a democracy, and overthrow the oppressors.
That’s not to say there wasn’t disagreement. We can begin with the Anarchists. Anarchists
are a left-wing movement which espouses a strong opposition to anti-authoritarianism.
Anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was influential on the commune. Many anarchists
participated in the commune's organisation. During the commune, many businesses reopened
as co-ops under an anarchist model and were successful. Anarchists can point to these
successes as an example of how their economic models do hold water.
Other left-wing activists, communists, and socialists use the commune as a case study.
Marxists believe the state is required to establish communism. But, once capitalism
is defeated their state would wither away. They point to the commune’s successes and
failures to make their case for a revolutionary state. The democratic organisation of the
commune was a success. Yet many Marxists would argue running the military as democracy was
more than a little responsible for the commune’s downfall.
The Soviet Union sang the commune’s anthem. Lenin himself celebrated when the Soviet revolution
had lasted longer than the Paris Commune. But whoop dee doo, that’s an excellent story
for revolutionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, but what does the Paris commune’s story
mean today? I tried to paraphrase this a few times, but I should leave the last word here
to Dr Gluckstein. I think the Paris Commune is very very important
in the sense that people say oridinary people are too stupid, too thick, not clever enough
to run society. You need to have the very rich, well-bred people who've been to the
right schools and the right universities and have the right share portfolio and they should
run the world. And I think if that's the case then we're
all doomed. Look at global warming and all the rest of it. Look at wher they're taking
us. So the Paris Commune shows that ordinary people can run society, the tragedy was that
it was a very very short time for them to show that. But in a sense that's what it achieved
and that cannot be taken away. I want to thank Dr Gluckstein for talking
to me about the Paris Commune. His book on the subject is available down in the description.
I will have a playlist on other great revolutions in this vein you can check out there too.
Stay strong friends, keep fighting the good fight, and come back soon for more Step Back.