Yet after only a week, the commune came under attack by some elements of the French army, which was being reorganised and reinforced rapidly by the government at Versailles. At the start of April the National Guard began fighting regularly with the regular French army. Throughout April and May the guard were pushed back and on May 21 the Versaillese troops began the reconquest of the city, from the wealth districts of the West. There was no big defence plan. Rather each local district, or quartier, fought desperately for survival. This was made easier of course by Haussmann’s destruction of the tangle of narrow streets and widening of the boulevards. They also had greater numbers and a centralised command from Versailles. Government troops slaughtered the National Guard. There was a ‘bloody week’ of fighting at barricades and the toughest resistance came from the east of the city. According to legend the last barricade was at Rue Ramponeau in Belleville (ironically now a gentrified district).
The number of communards slaughtered during the bloody week of fighting is hard to ascertain although some estimate the number may be close to 50,000. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned at Versailles for supporting the commune. The living dialectic of control and resistance can be extremely violent.
Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris. The crimes of the insurgents have surpassed the most gloomy forebdings of what would be accomplished under the Red Flag. The burning of paris was diabolical; the shooting of the hostages ‘a deed without a name’. But it seems as if we were destined to forget the work of these maddened savages in the spectacle of the vengeance wreaked upon them. The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘party of Order’, sicken the soul. (The Times, 1 June 1871)
Socialists and communists continue to revere the Paris Commune. Lenin and Marx described it as a living example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At Lenin’s funeral his body was even wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the commune. Urbanists tend to view the commune as an example of how cities can perform an emancipatory function, they can be forces of dynamic processes, the site where the possible can be realised. Government’s, the police and business community are more to think about how such events can be prevented in the future.
Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris. The crimes of the insurgents have surpassed the most gloomy forebdings of what would be accomplished under the Red Flag. The burning of paris was diabolical; the shooting of the hostages ‘a deed without a name’. But it seems as if we were destined to forget the work of these maddened savages in the spectacle of the vengeance wreaked upon them. The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘party of Order’, sicken the soul. (The Times, 1 June 1871)
Socialists and communists continue to revere the Paris Commune. Lenin and Marx described it as a living example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At Lenin’s funeral his body was even wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the commune. Urbanists tend to view the commune as an example of how cities can perform an emancipatory function, they can be forces of dynamic processes, the site where the possible can be realised. Government’s, the police and business community are more to think about how such events can be prevented in the future.
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