num_pages: 156
description: At dawn on March 18 1871 Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune Frances revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth.Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolutions long wake for others the first successful socialist uprising and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic feminist and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries keeping alive the revolutions now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event.The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class religion and gender the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.
language: English
title: The Paris Commune: A Brief History
publisher: Rutgers University Press