The Paris Commune and the Anarchist Movement by Nicholas Walter

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The Paris Commune, whose centenary has been widely commemorated this year, is seldom thought of as having much connection with the anarchist movement.
Its connection with the Marxist movement is well known, from Marx's own Address The Civil War in France written immediately after its fall, through the writings of such figures as Lenin and Trotsky, right down to the work of Marxist scholars and propagandists today.
But the Commune was at the time an inspiration for the whole revolutionary socialist movement, and the annual commemoration of the rising of March 18 used to be one occasion in the year when all the groups of the far left were united.
Moreover there are certain aspects of the crisis of 1870 through 1871 which are open to a specifically anarchist interpretation, though this is scarcely mentioned in the enormous literature on the subject, and there have been important links between the Commune and the anarchist movement from the very beginning.

The closest personal link is represented by Louise Michel, who was not just one of the most active women in the Commune but was also one of the bravest of all its leaders.
After agitating in the groups which prepared for the rising of March and fighting on the barricades in the struggle of May, she gave herself up to the authorities to secure the release of her mother, who had been taken as a hostage.
At her trial on December 16, 1871, soon after the execution of Ferre, Rossel, and Bourgeois at Satory, she caused a sensation by not only not denying her part in the Commune, as so many others did, but deliberately glorying in it, in the speech which opens this FREEDOM Pamphlet--for which Victor Hugo wrote her a poem, Viro Major ('Greater than a Man').

Instead of being sentenced to death, as she had demanded, she was transported to New Caledonia in the South Pacific for life.
But she never gave up her convictions, as so many others did, and remained active in her exile.
And from her return to France under the amnesty of 1880 to her death in 1905 she remained ceaselessly active in the revolutionary socialist movement, moving rapidly towards anarchism and becoming the most energetic anarchist propagandist of the late nineteenth century--being arrested over and over again (she was imprisoned in 1883 through 1886, in 1886, and in 1890), even being shot and wounded in 1888 by a lunatic (whom she characteristically not only refused to prosecute but actually tried to save), and finally dying in Marseille in the middle of one of her vast speaking tours and receiving a gigantic funeral in Paris (said to have been the largest since Victor Hugo's in 1885).
Her grave next to her mother's in the Levallier-Perret cemetery is still a place of pilgrimage, and there are still anarchist groups in France which take the name of the woman who literally devoted her whole life to the cause of the social revolution--which she identified first with the Paris Commune and then with the anarchist movement.
(A full account of her life--Louise Michel, by Edith Thomas--has recently been published in France by Gallimard; let us hope it is soon translated into English.)

A link which is personally more tenuous but politically more significant is that with Bakunin.
He was not in Paris at all during the crisis, but he was active in the commune movement of southern France, and took a crucial part in the events at Lyon and Marseille in autumn 1870.
Moreover, during and immediately after the Paris Commune he wrote the first anarchist attempt to analyse its meaning--especially in The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (the first English edition of which has just been published by CIRA, and will also appear in Anarchy 5).

Thus Bakunin played a small but significant part in the movement which culminated in the Paris Commune; and the Paris Commune played a small but significant part in the final elaboration of his thought.
Following the line in the Russian revolutionary tradition laid down by the populists from the 1840s, Bakunin saw the Russian peasant commune (obshchina) as the basis of a socialist society, to be realised by a movement involving peasants as well as urban workers.
No such movement came into full existence in Russia in his lifetime: but the revolutionary insurrections which broke out in France during 1870 through 1871 took the form of independent communes in dozens of towns--including Lyon and Marseille where he was himself involved, and above all Paris itself.
So it is not surprising that the last stage of Bakuninism (overlaying the insurrectionism which ran through it from the barricades of Paris and Dresden in 1848 through 1849 to the abortive rising of Bologna in 1874) was based on a combination of the Russian peasant commune and the French urban commune --of populism and communalism.
And after Bakunin's death in 1876 this position was developed further--especially in Switzerland by refugees from the Paris Commune such as Elisee Reclus, working with refugees from the Russian, Italian, and Spanish revolutionary movements--into the theory of anarchist communism, in which the commune played (and a century later still plays) an important part.

There are also personal links with other tendencies in the anarchist movement.
One is represented by such Communards as Benoit Malon.
Gustave Lefrancais, and Jean-Louis Pindy, also refugees in Switzerland who were for a time active as anarchists or near-anarchists, but who later became reformist socialists, especially after returning to France.
The same is true of Paul Brousse, a French radical who moved to the left and went into exile as a result of the commune movement and its repression, and became an extremist anarchist--one of the first exponents of the theory of propaganda by deed during the 1870s--but who similarly turned to reformist socialism after 1880 and led the moderate Possibilists in the French socialist movement.
(A full account of his political career--From Anarchism to Reformism by David Stafford--has recently been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.)

There are even personal links with the terrorist wing of the anarchist movement, which is frequently but mistakenly supposed to have no connection with the wider social movement.
Emile Henry, the most intelligent and impressive of the anarchist propagandists by deed in the 1890s--the one who deliberately set out in 1894 to kill people at random, commenting that 'no bourgeois can be innocent'--was the son of a Communard : Fortune Henry, a member of the International who represented the 10th arrondissement on the Commune Council and managed to escape to Spain, being condemned to death in his absence.
It seems likely that one of the motives behind the wave of revolutionary terrorism in late nineteenth-century France (which caused about 20 deaths) was the bitter personal memory of the counter-revolutionary terrorism at the end of the Paris Commune (which caused more than 20,000 deaths).

But perhaps the most significant single case is that of someone who did not actually take part in the Paris Commune but who was deeply influenced by it and who mediated its influence on the whole anarchist movement: Peter Kropotkin.
In 1871 he was a clever young geographer in Russia, but he became a socialist that year in the shadow of the Commune, and began to turn away from a promising scientific career towards a dangerous political career.
In the spring of 1872 he travelled for the first time to Western Europe, and joined the International in Switzerland.
At the masonic Temple Unique which was the headquarters of the International in Geneva, he decided to devote his life to the socialist movement; and the circumstances of that decision are particularly significant in the present context.
In his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kropotkin describes the event as follows:

"... every revolutionist has had a moment in his life when some circumstance, maybe unimportant in itself, has brought him to pronounce his oath of giving himself to the cause of revolution.
I know that moment; I lived through it after one of the meetings at the Temple Unique, when I felt more acutely than ever before how cowardly are the educated men who hesitate to put their education, their knowledge, their energy, at the service of those who are so much in need of that education and that energy...."

This is vague enough; but in the material which Kropotkin later added to his Memoirs and which has been printed only in the Russian editions published since his death, he gives the date of the meeting as March 18 and the occasion as the celebration of the Paris Commune--so it was in fact at the first anniversary commemoration of the Commune that Kropotkin began the political career which was to last for almost half a century.

When he then went on to the Jura and met James Guillaume at Neuchatel in April 1872, he tells us that he also met 'a French communard, who was a compositor', and who described the fall of the Commune while he was setting the type for a novel; Guillaume identified him in his history of the International as Andre Bastelica--a Corsican who was the leading Bakuninist in Marseille and who took part in the risings in both Lyon and Paris.
Kropotkin also met Malon, then still close to anarchism.
It was in the Jura, of course, that Kropotkin became specifically an anarchist, and when he returned to Russia in May 1872 he began anarchist activity in the Chaikovski Circle, the leading group in the populist movement at that time.

Kropotkin's chief activity in Russia from 1872 to 1874 was as a speaker at meetings of peasants and workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the two main subjects of his lectures were the International and the Paris Commune.
When he was arrested in St. Petersburg in March 1874 his lodgings were searched by the police, and the great majority of the books and pamphlets which they seized were about the Commune (a list, preserved in the state archives, was printed in the edition of his Diary published in Russia in 1923).
Kropotkin was held in prison without trial from 1874 to 1876, first in the Peter-Paul Fortress, then after March 1876 in the St. Petersburg House of Detention where, as he tells us again in his Memoirs, by the traditional method of tapping on the walls he was able among other things 'to relate to a young neighbour the history of the Paris Commune from the beginning to the end.
It took, however, a whole week's tapping'.

In 1876 Kropotkin managed to escape from the St. Petersburg prison hospital, and left Russia to live in exile for forty years.
In 1877 he went to Switzerland to work in the Jura Federation, and met more Communards, especially Pindy, Lefrangais, and Elisee Reclus.
There he joined in developing the theory of anarchist communism, which as we have seen derived to a large extent from the experiences and implications of the Commune.
In 1877 through 1878 he was active for a time in Paris, trying to revive the socialist movement there after the eclipse following the destruction of the Commune, and in his Memoirs he mentions 'the first commemoration of the Commune, in March, 1878', when 'we surely were not two hundred'.
(According to Jean Maitron, the historian of French anarchism, the Commune had in fact been commemorated in March 1877, but only by private meetings.)

In 1879 Kropotkin, who had been contributing to various anarchist papers, began to publish his own, Le Revolte; it was then that he started the series of essays which established his reputation as the leading theorist of anarchism, including several on the Paris Commune.
Every March he wrote an anniversary article, and the three for 1880, 1881, and 1882 were put together to form a single chapter in his book Paroles d'un Revolte, which was made up of essays from Le Revolte and published in 1885 while he was in prison in France.
(A new translation of this chapter is included in this pamphlet.)

Other chapters in Paroles d'un Revolte include an essay on the modern commune, as distinct from the medieval commune (and, it is now necessary to add, as distinct from the more recent sense too), making use of the experience of the Paris Commune; and also essays on representative and revolutionary government, both emphasising the Commune's error of relying on elected representatives to carry out the work of the social revolution which the people should have carried out themselves.
And in the essay on order (which was included in FREEDOM Pamphlet 4 last September) he took the Paris Commune as the final example of both order and disorder:

Order is the Paris Commune drowned in blood.
It is the death of 30,000 men, women and children, cut to pieces by shells, shot down, buried in quicklime beneath the streets of Paris....

Disorder ... is the people of Paris fighting for a new idea and, when they die in the massacres, leaving to humanity the idea of the free commune, and opening the way for the revolution which we can feel approaching and which will be the Social Revolution.

After he was released from prison in France in 1886, Kropotkin settled in England, where he lived for thirty years.
As he says in his Memoirs, 'the socialist movement in England was in full swing', and he took an active part in the growing agitation, writing in FREEDOM (which he helped to found in October 1886) and other papers and speaking at meetings all over the country.
One of his particular subjects was still the Paris Commune, and he produced anniversary articles and speeches every March.
Thus William Morris, writing about the Commune meeting at South Place on March 18, 1886, described it as 'a great success, and the place crowded.
Kropotkin new come from prison spoke, and I made his acquaintance there' (Letter to John Carruthers, March 25, 1886); and a year later he similarly described the Commune meeting at South Place on March 17, 1887:
'We had a fine meeting last night to celebrate the Commune--crowded.
Kropotkin spoke in English and very well' (Letter to Bruce Glasier, March 18, 1887).
(The latter speech was published in the seventh issue of FREEDOM, April 1887, and would be well worth reprinting.)

At the same time Kropotkin continued to write in the French anarchist press, especially in his old paper, which was now published in Paris and changed its name to La Revolte.
Once more his most important essays were collected in a book, La Conquete du Pain, a sequel to Paroles d'un Revolte, which was published in 1892 and later translated into English as The Conquest of Bread (1906).
This time there was no chapter specifically about the Paris Commune, but the whole conception of the future society expounded in the book is based on it.
As Kropotkin put it in his preface to the second English edition of 1913, the Commune "was too short-lived to give any positive result....
But the working-classes of the old International saw at once its historical significance.
They understood that the free commune would be henceforth the medium in which the ideas of modern Socialism may come to realization....
These are the ideas to which I have endeavoured to give a more or less definitive expression in this book."

And the same point was made in the prefaces to the Russian editions of The Conquest of Bread, and also in the postcript to the last Russian edition of Paroles d'un Revolte, (which was included in FREEDOM Pamphlet 5 last November):
'I had in view above all a large urban commune getting rid of the capitalist yoke, especially Paris, with its working population full of intelligence and possessing, thanks to the lessons of the past, great organising capability.'

Kropotkin maintained his interest in the Paris Commune for many years more.
In 1892 he wrote a preface for the Russian pamphlet edition of Bakunin's essay on the Commune, which was also included in the French pamphlet edition of the essay in 1899.
Then in 1899 he included several references to the Commune in Memoirs of a Revolutionist, repeating the criticisms of the Communards for wasting time and energy on elections to and debates in the Commune Council and for not expropriating private property--i.e. because they were not anarchist or communist:
'The Commune of Paris was a terrible example of an outbreak with insufficiently determined ideals.'

He returned to the same theme in Modern Science and Anarchism (first published in Russian in 1901; an American translation was published in 1903, and an enlarged English translation was published by the Freedom Press in 1912).
The Paris Commune and other similar risings in France and Spain during 1870 through 1873 showed 'what the political aspect of a Social Revolution ought to be': 'the free, independent Communist Commune'.
But once more the anarchist and communist morals were drawn:
'If no central Government was needed to rule the independent Communes, if the national Government is thrown overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation, then a central municipal Government become equally useless and noxious.
The same federative principle would do within the Commune.'
And at the same time the failure of the communalist risings 'proved once more that the triumph of a popular Commune was not materially possible without the parallel triumph of the people in the economic field'.

Then in his letters to Max Nettlau of 1901 through 1902, refuting the claims of individualism and the argument that anarchists should seek allies among bourgeois sympathisers, Kropotkin insisted that it is the masses of the people who fight for liberty and equality against, not with, the bourgeoisie--above all in Paris in 1871.
In his preface to the Italian edition of Paroles d'un Revolte (which was included in FREEDOM Pamphlet 5 last November), he suggested that the defeat of France in 1870 and the fall of the Commune in 1871 together led to the eclipse of revolutionary France and the triumph of militarist Germany in Europe; and in his letter to Gustav Steffen about the First World War (published in FREEDOM, October 1914) he went so far as to suggest that the failure of the Commune had led to the war.

In his writings for the Russian anarchist movement, Kropotkin frequently returned to the subject of the Paris Commune, notably in a series of articles on it in his paper Listki 'Khleb i Volya' during 1907 which were immediately reprinted as a pamphlet--Parizhskaya Kommuna (1907).
This was quite separate from the pamphlet reprinted from Paroles d'un Revolte, though they are often confused, but the message was still the same.
After the 1917 Revolution, however, Kropotkin seldom mentioned the Paris Commune again, and referred much more often to the Great French Revolution of 1789 through 1794 during the last years of his life.

But it was in the month after Kropotkins death--in March 1921--that Kronstadt rose and fell, and that Alexander Berkman pointed out the irony of the Bolsheviks celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune the day after they had destroyed the Kronstadt Commune.
By that time the idea of the commune had deeply penetrated the consciousness of the anarchist movement and scarcely needed to be mentioned to be understood.
Yet there are times when it should be mentioned.
This year we have commemorated at the same time the hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the Paris Commune by French liberals and the destruction of the Kronstadt Commune by Russian communists.
However many times it is destroyed, and whoever destroys it, the idea of the free city which rises in revolution and abolishes authority and property together cannot be destroyed, and remains one of the basic components of political anarchism.
Following the consistent anarchist critique of the Paris Commune over a century, we would not do everything the Communards did or leave undone everything they left undone; but we do feel that we are closer to what they tried to do than either the liberals or the communists who have patronised and misinterpreted them with false praise.
For us at least, in the words of the old song,

'the Commune is not dead!'

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