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Getting around paris, paris travel guide, paris essentials, train travel, paris arrondissements, the paris commune of 1871 – history of a revolution in eight sites.

You say you want a revolution? How about this for a set of circumstances — Your country starts and immediately loses one of the most useless and foolish wars in its history. Your leader and president-for-life abdicates and flees to England. Your city is bombarded, besieged by enemy troops, and starved into submission. Any remnants of a national government flees the capital, leaving its population to fend for themselves.

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Discover what's on when you're here, the franco-russian war.

The Franco-Russian War of 1870 resulted in the dissolution of the empire of Napoleon III and left Paris in a shambolic state. In the resulting political power vacuum a spontaneous radical, socialist, and anti-religious republic was established in the city called the Paris Commune. At odds with the national government (now located in the former royal enclave of Versailles) the short-lived (March 18 to May 28, 1871) Commune resulted in further death and destruction. Let's explore this brief, turbulent chapter in the life of the city by visiting some of the sites of the Paris Commune.

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1. montmartre & the cannons affair.

Following the abdication of Napoleon III, Adolphe Thiers became the head of the national government. He was disliked in Paris after he unilaterally surrendered to the Prussians, ceded the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine, and allowed the Prussian army to parade down the Champs-Elysées. The dislike was mutual, and the conservative Thiers was eager to suppress what he viewed as revolutionary elements in Paris.

During the Prussian siege Paris had been defended, not by the French army, but by La Garde Nationale (the National Guard, commonly called the fédéré) , troops who had stuck by Parisians during the Prussian siege. Thiers struck a blow to the city by abolishing the fédéré , ending the pay of its members, thereby depriving many Parisian families of income.

The last straw, though, was the "cannons affair". 227 cannons were seized from the National Guard just before the parade of the Prussians and removed to the hills of Montmartre and Belleville. On the night of March 27, 4,000 French army troops stormed Montmartre to retrieve these guns, but found themselves surrounded by a crowd of Communards and Fédérés . (These two terms were to become interchangeable. The French army troops were referred to as Versaillais .)

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Two Versaillais generals were seized and shot (despite the intervention of future World War I Prime Minster Georges Clemenceau, then the mayor of the 18th Arrondissement) and across Paris barricades were erected by Communards. Imagine, if you will, Place Blanche and Rue Lepic blocked by barricades. (Actually, you don't have to image it; there's an illustration just above.) Thiers and his government quit Paris for Versailles, the very symbol of royal power.

2. The Vendôme Column

After the departure of the Versaillais , the Paris Communards organized elections and a new city council begin sitting on March 28. It was a very diverse group with mostly republican and socialist tendencies that included thirty-three artisans, twenty-four intellectuals, six workers, and one painter — Gustave Courbet.

Certain elements of the Fédérés embarked on a mission to eliminate what they considered to be symbols of imperialism and ruling power. One of these was the column in the center of Place Vendôme. Napoleon had created this monument in 1810 to commemorate his victory in the battle of Austerlitz. Its bronze spiral frieze was made from 1,250 canons captured during the battle. And, of course, the perfect way to cap off the monument was with a statue of Bonaparte himself.

In the middle of May 1871 a group of Communards equipped with ropes, pulleys, and scaffolding pulled down the 44-meter-high column, sending the statue of Bonaparte crashing to the pavement of Place Vendôme. Courbet may or may not have been involved in the demolition, but post-Commune he was the one who was blamed. ( Photo portrait of Courbet .) Courbet was later convicted of the destruction and ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding the column. Instead, he fled to Switzerland, where he died a few years later.

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3. hotel de ville.

Within days of the felling of the Vendôme Column the national government brought the full force of its army down on the city. Versaillais troops started bombarding and invading Paris; the levels of violence and destruction mounted. May 21, 1871 saw the beginning of La Semaine Sanglante (Bloody Week), bringing further death and devastation to the Ville Formerly Known As The City Of Light.

On May 24 the Hotel de Ville was among a passel of buildings torched by the mobs. The fire here and at the Palais de Justice destroyed not just buildings, but centuries of civic records.

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4. palais des tuileries.

Catherine de' Medici (1519-1589), queen of Henry II and mother to kings Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, moved out of the Louvre following her husband's death and began building a palace and gardens next door. The wide, narrow palais faced the Louvre and backed onto the then-new Jardin des Tuileries . Eventually, the palace would be the final residence of the doomed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as well as the residence of France's two emperors Napoleon and Napoleon III.

As a sort of royal red flag the Tuileries became a symbol of monarchical oppression, a concept that didn't sit well with the revolutionary Communards. So, it's no surprise that it, too, was torched in May of 1871. The fire lasted forty-eight hours and thoroughly gutted the palace. All that remained was the ceremonial gateway to the palace, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.

The Hotel de Ville would be rebuilt to its original splendor, but the Palais des Tuileries was left in ruins until it was razed in 1883. Some of the stone pieces from its courtyard can be seen today in the gardens at Trocadero .

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5. palais d'orsay.

Before it was a museum it was a train station. And before it was a train station there was a imposing palais on the site. Like so much about Paris, this project on Quai d'Orsay was started by Napoleon. And, like so many projects, it wasn't completed by him. But, the grand government administrative building known as Palais d'Orsay was finished in about 1840, when the French Conseil d'État (Council of State) moved its offices here. The building was celebrated for frescoes on the main staircase painted by artist Théodore Chassériau, fragments of which are today preserved at the Louvre.

As a government office building Palais d'Orsay became a target for the arsonist Commune mob and it, too, was gutted by fire during Bloody Week. Fortunately, when Theirs moved the government to Versailles the Conseil d'État had gone with him, along with all the documents. The shell of the building sat vacant for more than thirty years until it was chosen as the site for a new gare to serve the visitors who would be arriving for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle .

6. Rue Saint-Jacques

As the Versaillais troops advanced through Paris the Communards erected more and more barricades in the streets. And, when the national army captured the revolutionaries, improvised war trials were held, where thousands of Parisians were judged, condemned, and immediately shot. There were dozens of sites where barricades were erected and dozens of sites of mass execution. On the Left Bank, for one example, there were sites along Rue Saint-Jacques.

Rue Saint-Jacques is one of the oldest (and longest) streets in Paris. It was the Roman's cardo maximus , that is, the primary road through the settlement and the basis for the grid layout of the rest of the city. On May 24, 1871 a number of Communards were executed in the apse of Église Saint-Sevérin at 10 Rue Saint-Jacques. Further up the hill, at 50 Rue Saint-Jacques (today the entrance to one of the universities of the Sorbonne) barricades were created in an attempt to protect the Pantheon from the Versaillais . (That attempt was unsuccessful and there were executions on the very steps of the Pantheon.) Further along, at number 195 (Institut Océanographique de Paris) troops were able to bypass another barricade and kill all of its defenders.

On Rue d'Haxo in the 20th Arrondissement there was a sort of retaliatory episode where, on May 26, fifty-two people, including eleven priests, were shot by the Communards. And so it went for those seven terrible days.

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The most popular paris experience, 7. père lachaise cemetery.

The human toll of La Semaine Sanglante was horrendous. Estimates vary, even among historians of the period, but it seems that between 3,000 and 5,000 Fédéré troops died in the fighting and around 20,000 Communards were massacred.

Our last virtual visit to these bloody sites is in the 20th Arrondissement, at Père Lachaise Cemetery. On May 27, when the end of the uprising was near, a battle, fought among the gravestones, between Versaillais troops and Communards armed mainly with knives, resulted in 147 Fédérés shot with their backs to the wall that now bears their name, Mur des Fédérés .

8. Basilique du Sacré Coeur

It's interesting, ironic, and still controversial that the very place where the Paris Commune started, on the hill of Montmartre, would become the site of the city's most visible church. In October 1872, just one year after the Paris Commune was savagely put down, the plot of land on which the battle of the cannons was fought was chosen as the site of a new church to "expiate the crimes of the Commune". The National Assembly passed a law allowing the Archbishop of Paris to acquire the land, if necessary by expropriation, a power normally granted only to public authorities.

The church, which would be the large white domes of Sacré Coeur that any current visitor to Paris can't avoid seeing, was begun in 1875 but not completed until 1923. Even today some consider the basilica to be a symbol of the crushing of the Communard revolution in the very heart of the district where the Paris Commune was born.

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Epilogue. the belle époque.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the devastation of The Commune is that, once over, Paris seemed to simply pick up where it had left off. In the world of painting, Impressionism really hit its stride in the 1870s. A new era of art and design began, one that came to be called the Belle Époque. Palais Garnier , the stunning opera house that had begun in 1861 as part of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris, a prime example of Belle Époque sensibility, was completed a few years later in 1875

Other notable works of the Belle Époque include Gare de Lyon and its restaurant Le Train Bleu , Pont Alexandre III, and the grands magasins Printemps & Galeries Lafayette.

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Paris Commune of 1871

By: History.com Editors

Published: November 17, 2022

The Paris Commune of 1871 was a short-lived revolutionary government established in the city of Paris after France’s crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Despite lasting only two months, the Paris Commune introduced many concepts now considered commonplace in modern democracies, including women’s rights, worker’s rights and the separation of church and state. The uprising came to an end when troops from the Third Republic reclaimed power following a vicious week of fighting that left at least 10,000 Parisians dead and much of the city destroyed. 

Roots of the Paris Commune

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Prince Otto von Bismarck sought to unify all German states under the control of his native state, Prussia. But the Second Empire of France, ruled by Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte ), declared war against Prussia to resist their ambitions.

In the months of war that followed, France’s army was consistently routed by the larger and better-prepared German troops. At the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, Napoleon III was captured by German troops, and his wife, Empress Eugénie, fled Paris. Soon, Paris was under a lengthy siege lasting into the winter months, and the French minister of war was forced to escape the surrounded city in a hot-air balloon.

After the French admitted defeat and Napoleon’s Second Empire collapsed, the final 1871 armistice between Germany and France gave billions of francs to Germany, plus the formerly French territories of Alsace and Lorraine, in a humiliating defeat for France.

Resentment over the punitive terms of the armistice roiled France, nowhere more than in Paris, whose starving citizens suffered so miserably during the wintry German siege that the animals in the Paris zoo were eaten, and some Parisians were reduced to eating cats, dogs and rats to survive.

The Third Republic

Following the collapse of France’s Second Empire, the remaining government officials established the Third Republic, formed a new legislative National Assembly and elected Adolphe Thiers, age 74, as leader. Because the government was more conservative than the citizens of Paris would tolerate, and because Paris was still dealing with the effects of the Prussian siege, the former royal palace at Versailles —about 12 miles west of Paris—was chosen as the government’s headquarters.

None of these new developments sat well with Parisians: The Third Republic had many hallmarks of the former monarchy and was supported by the Catholic Church, military leaders and France’s more-conservative rural population. Many Parisians feared the Versailles-based government—which had initiated the disastrous war with Prussia—would be a republic in name only and would soon reestablish the monarchy.

While Paris—at the time, a city of some 2 million residents—was under siege, the city was defended not by the French army, but the local National Guard, often called the f é d é r é , which had almost 400,000 members. When Thiers abolished the f é d é r é , depriving many families of their main source of income, it sparked a furious rebellion that spread throughout the now-radicalized National Guard and across Paris.

The Cannons of Montmartre

By the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris had hundreds of bronze cannons scattered across the city. The National Guard, now firmly opposed to the Third Republic and their military leaders ensconced at Versailles, moved many of the cannons to the working-class neighborhoods of Montmartre, Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and out of the reach of government troops from Versailles (the Versaillais ).

On the morning of March 18, 1871, Versaillais troops arrived at Montmartre to seize the cannons, but they were confronted by National Guardsmen and angry citizens intent on keeping the cannons. As the day continued and tensions ran high, many Versaillais soldiers switched sides and refused to fire on the crowds of citizens and guardsmen in defiance of orders from their leader, General Claude Lecomte.

By the afternoon, Lecomte and another Versaillais general, Jacques Clément-Thomas, had been captured by Versaillais deserters and the National Guard—both generals were soon beaten and shot to death. In response, Thiers ordered all remaining government officials and loyal army troops to immediately decamp to Versailles, where a counterattack was to be planned.

Paris Commune Established

Now that the government of the Third Republic had departed the city, the National Guard and sympathetic citizens of Paris wasted no time in setting up a local government and preparing for an expected battle against troops from Versailles. Within days, the city was militarized, with crude barricades made of cobblestones and other debris blocking roads.

City leaders also held elections to establish a new government for Paris, named after the Paris Commune that governed Paris for six years during the French Revolution . Though the newly elected Paris Commune began working on March 28 in the Hôtel de Ville , the Communards were riddled with internal divisions, and vociferous differences of opinion were commonplace.

Nonetheless, the Paris Commune of 1871 succeeded in establishing many basic rights that are now considered commonplace in modern democracies, such as child labor laws, laborers’ rights , the separation of church and state , no religious teaching in public schools and pensions to the families of National Guardsmen killed in service.

But the leaders of the Paris Commune were not entirely benevolent—their ways of dealing with political opponents could be barbaric. Many of the Communards’ rivals or opponents, especially within the Catholic Church, were imprisoned under the flimsiest of pretexts, and killed without a trial.

Women's Rights

Women played an active part in the Paris Commune, including fighting against the Versaillais and caring for wounded soldiers. Some women reportedly acted as p étroleuses , arsonists paid for throwing flammable petrol into opposition houses and other buildings.

There were also a number of feminist initiatives proposed to the Paris Commune, including equal wages for women, legalization of sex workers, the right to divorce and professional education for women. These proposals had limited success, however, since women were denied the right to vote, and there were no women in leadership positions in the Paris Commune.

Vendôme Column

Many participants in the Paris Commune had a decidedly destructive nature, and anything that smacked of monarchy rule was considered a target. Foremost among these was the Vendôme Column, a towering monument erected to honor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Called a “a monument of barbarism,” the movement to destroy the tower was started by artist Gustave Courbet , an elected member of the Paris Commune governing council. By May 16, the column was reduced to rubble before an enthusiastic crowd. Another target was the Paris residence of Adolphe Thiers, leader of the Third Republic. His home was looted and destroyed by an angry mob.

Paris Under Attack

In April 1871, fearing an impending attack, the leaders of the Paris Commune decided to mount an offensive against the Versaillais . After a couple of failed efforts, their attacks on the palace at Versailles were called off.

Thus emboldened, the Versaillais troops, led by Marshal Patrice Maurice de MacMahon, mounted an attack on the city of Paris, first entering through the unguarded city wall at Point du Jour. By May 22, more than 50,000 troops had moved into the city as far as the Champs Elysées, and the Paris Commune issued a call to arms.

But the city as a whole was unprepared for a massive invasion: Many street barricades were unmanned, and even the fortified hilltop at Montmartre had no stores of ammunition. Communard leaders, now fearful of any enemy, established a Committee of Public Safety, modeled after the notorious committee that carried out the most barbaric cruelties during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in 1793-94.

Bloody Week

By May 23, the third day of what became known as Semaine Sanglante or “Bloody Week,” Third Republic Versaillais troops had overrun most of Paris, and the slaughter of Communards began in earnest.

As mayhem and terror swept through Paris, shooting and killing of Communards, government soldiers, Catholic clergy and ordinary citizens occurred day and night, often without any real cause, and the streets of Paris were littered with corpses. In one horrific example, more than 300 suspected Communards were massacred inside the Church of Saint-Marie-Madeleine by Versaillais troops.

In retaliation, the National Guard responded by looting and burning government buildings citywide. The Tuileries Palace , opulent home of French monarchs since Henry IV in 1594, the Palais d'Orsay , the Richelieu library of the Louvre and dozens of other landmark buildings were burned to the ground by National Guardsmen.

Paris Burns

Indeed, burning buildings were a common sight during Bloody Week, when the skies above Paris were black with smoke. One diarist wrote on May 24: “The night has been dreadful, with reciprocal fury. Shells, shrapnel, cannonade, musketry, all kept on bursting in a frightful concert. The sky itself is red, the flashes of the massacre have set it on fire.”

The Hôtel de Ville, seat of the Paris Commune government, was torched by Communards when they eventually came to realize theirs was a lost cause. The Palais de Justice was also reduced to a smoldering ruin. Both fires destroyed centuries of public records and other irreplaceable historic documents.

Members of the Catholic clergy were often targeted during Bloody Week: Even the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, was executed on May 24 by the Communards’ Committee of Public Safety, along with three priests and several other people.

Pere Lachaise Cemetery

In one of the most dramatic final episodes of Bloody Week, the Pere Lachaise Cemetery was occupied by hundreds of Communards. But after Versaillais troops used a cannon to blast open the cemetery gates on May 27, they stormed the cemetery and fought a pitched battle against Communards among the gravestones.

As evening fell, the revolutionaries finally succumbed, were lined up against the cemetery wall and shot by a firing squad.

After a hasty trial, prisoners from the nearby Mazas prison were also taken to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, lined up against the same cemetery wall—now infamous as the Mur des Fé d é r é s or the Communards’ Wall—and shot. Roughly 150 people in total were executed and buried in a mass grave at the foot of the wall as Bloody Week ended.

Aftermath of the Paris Commune

Large sections of Paris were reduced to rubble after the madness and devastation of Bloody Week, which finally ended on May 28, when government forces took control of the city. More than 43,000 Parisians were arrested and held in camps; about half were soon released.

Some leaders of the Paris Commune were able to escape France to live abroad; others were exiled to the French territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, and a handful were executed for their role in the uprising. Eventually, many participants in the Paris Commune were granted amnesty.

For generations, researchers have tried to estimate the number of people killed in the Paris Commune, as well as its role in political history. At least 10,000 people were killed—most of those during Bloody Week—and as many as 20,000 deaths may have occurred, according to varying estimates.

Historians, politicians and French citizens continue to debate the significance, and the destructive violence, of the Paris Commune. Vladimir Lenin was favorably impressed by the revolutionary passions of the Communards; other leaders, including Mao Tse-Tung of China, were likewise inspired by the Paris Commune.

The event continues to spark debate: In May 2021—the 150th anniversary of the end of the Paris Commune—a “Martyrs' March” honoring the Catholic clergy killed during Bloody Week was attacked by an angry mob of anti-fascists. One marcher was hospitalized with injuries, and the march was ended early.

Many of the buildings destroyed or partially burned during the downfall of the Paris Commune were eventually rebuilt. All that remained of the Hôtel de Ville was its elegantly arched exterior shell, but it was rebuilt and once again serves as the city hall of Paris.

The ruined Palais d’Orsay is now reconstructed as the Musée d’Orsay , a popular destination for art lovers. Atop Montmartre, the white domes of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur gleam where the Communards’ cannons once stood. And the toppled ornate column was replaced in the Place Vendôme, where a statue of Napoleon once again looks across Paris.

Paris Commune: The revolt dividing France 150 years on. BBC News . The Paris Commune - from the archive, 1871. The Guardian . The Paris Commune: Ruins and Rebuilding. National Gallery of Art . The Paris Commune of 1871 – History of A Revolution In Eight Sites. Paris Insider Guide . Historical timeline: Paris, Montmartre and the Commune 1870 – 71. Montmartre Footsteps . The Fires of Paris. The New Yorker . Paris: a procession in memory of the Catholic martyrs of the Commune attacked by antifa. Le Figaro .

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Why the Paris Commune Still Resonates, 150 Years Later

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The Paris Commune ended on this day in 1871, after just two months in power. How do we explain, Enzo Traverso asks, the longevity and freshness of the memory of a fleeting revolutionary government?

A barricade in the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871. (Musée Carnavalet / Wikimedia Commons)

There is a paradoxical discrepancy between the meteoric rise and fall of the Paris Commune, whose life did not exceed seventy-two days, and its lasting presence as a central experience in the Left’s historical consciousness.

Viewed through the lens of what some scholars call “world history,” what happened in Paris between March 18 and May 28, 1871, is almost insignificant. Most recent historians of the nineteenth century — think of the acclaimed works of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel — just mention it as a minor detail of the Franco-Prussian War. From the point of view of the takeoff of industrial and financial capitalism, urbanization and modernization, the consolidation of colonial empires, and the persistence of the Old Regime in an already bourgeois continent, the Paris Commune means nothing.

Indeed, the Commune was even marginal in the Franco-Prussian War, since it happened seven months after Napoleon III’s capitulation and the proclamation of the Republic, and two months after signing the armistice that transferred Alsace-Lorraine to German sovereignty. At the beginning of March, the victorious Prussian army had already paraded down the Champs-Élysées.

How to explain, then, the longevity and freshness of the memory of such a fleeting event? The answer lies in that which, from the beginning, everybody realized: the Commune’s extraordinary symbolic dimension. They defended or stigmatized its legacy, but no one could ignore or diminish its impact. Many radical thinkers commemorated its martyrdom and welcomed it as both a sunset and a dawn: the end of the sequence of nineteenth-century democratic upheavals and the beginning of a new era of proletarian revolutions.

Carrying the Torch

Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin depicted the Commune as the announcement of the future, and Karl Marx emphasized the communist potentialities of the Paris experiment: “It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”

As a nuanced historian like Georges Haupt pointed out, the Paris Commune quickly became both a symbol and an example : a symbol of socialism as a possible and desirable future, and an example to be integrated into socialist memory and to be critically meditated upon in view of the forthcoming struggles.

In the twentieth century, the legacy of the Paris Commune was largely appropriated and reinterpreted in the light of the Russian Revolution. During the crucial year 1917, and later, during the Russian Civil War, the Paris Commune haunted the Bolsheviks’ mind as — alternatively — a warning and a model. October 1917 had reinforced the symbol: the announcement of a new socialist age was no illusion. But it had also assimilated the lessons of the tragic defeat of 1871: the Bolsheviks should not repeat the delays, hesitations, and weaknesses of the Communards. In Russia, the White Army had been defeated by a stronger and pitiless revolutionary Terror.

In 1891, Friedrich Engels had defined the Paris Commune as a paradigm: it had showed what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would look like. After 1917, the Commune became a prefiguration of the Bolshevik Revolution — it was relocated into a sequence representing the ascending march of socialism from its infancy in 1789 to its triumph in 1917, passing through 1830, 1848, and, precisely, 1871.

After the Second World War, this image was further reinforced by adding new steps on the irresistible advance toward socialism: China in 1949, Cuba in 1958, etc. The Commune ––a sudden, unexpected and creative break of the historical continuum — had become a landmark in a new linear evolution theorized with the categories of Marxist historicism. The Communards had become heroic precursors.

The Bolshevik attempt at inscribing the Paris Commune into a communist Pantheon is certainly debatable, but it should be critically understood rather than contemptuously rejected. No doubt, the Bolsheviks were obsessed with “the laws of history,” which they believed to have mastered and in which they located the supreme legitimacy of their political choices.

When Leon Trotsky wrote Terrorism and Communism (1920) from his armored train, in the middle of a bloody civil war, Soviet power was struggling for its survival. In his mind, the ghosts of the Paris Commune were not rhetorical figures; they strongly resonated with the present as dramatic warnings. This was neither propaganda nor mythology: it was rather an extraordinary moment of empathy with the vanquished, when the past resurfaced into the present and cried out to be rescued. But it remained a revisitation of the Commune through a purely military prism.

72 Days of Utopia

The Communards, however, did not consider themselves as the actors or forerunners of a communist revolution. It was the Versailles propaganda that, emphasizing the significant presence of the disciples of Louis Auguste Blanqui among its leaders, denounced the Commune as a dangerous form of atheistic, vandalic, and barbarous communism. In its journals and its public debates, as well as in many testimonies of its protagonists, the Commune was usually described as a model of the “universal Republic” or, more pragmatically, as an experience of the “democratic and social Republic.” In fact, with very few exceptions, its actors did not wish to apply ideologies or preestablished measures; they invented a new form of social and political power, maybe even new “forms of life,” in the extraordinary circumstances of war and civil war, in a besieged and impoverished city.

In a retrospective reflection, Élisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer who was one of its actors, described the Commune as:

a new society in which there are no masters by birth, title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary. Everywhere the word “commune” was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other.

Initially, the Commune was a new levée en masse , inspired by the example of 1792, against the German enemy that had invaded the country and against the French government that wished to dismantle the defense of the city: the cannons of Belleville and Montmartre controlled by the National Guard. In other words, this revolutionary patriotism was directed against both an external enemy and the internal threat embodied by Adolphe Thiers and his executive of a conservative and monarchist majority in the newly proclaimed Republic.

The insurgents wished to establish a popular power based on principles of freedom, horizontal democracy, self-government, social justice, and equality, without knowing very well how these goals could be concretely realized. Moreover, they claimed the restoration of municipal liberties and prerogatives confiscated by an authoritarian regime. They called “communalism” this federalist conception of democracy and self-management, a conception to which they were strongly attached (and which will become one of their major weaknesses in the eyes of Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky). Thus, their experience did not consist in applying preexisting models, according to the tradition of French utopian socialism; rather, they sought to invent a new utopia. They created something that did not exist before, brought forward by what Ernst Bloch called the “hot currents” of utopianism.

The Paris Commune did not put into question the principle of property but submitted it to the priorities of collective needs. Instead of being a source of inequalities, property had to be “just and equitable.” It abolished debts at the pawn shops, fixed decent salaries, and established the self-management of the factories abandoned by their owners, when a significant part of the bourgeois class left the insurgent city. It abolished night shifts in the bakeries and introduced everywhere the election of labor representatives. It suspended the payment of rentals and requisitioned vacant housing. It did not take over the Bank of France, which belonged to the entire nation, thus leaving to its enemies a powerful weapon (another symptom of weakness, according to Marx and the Bolsheviks). Paris was as a city — the third-largest city in the world at the time — in which the power had been conquered by the laboring classes.

Among its juridical and political conquests, the Paris Commune established complete separation between the state and the Catholic Church, which had been a pillar of conservatism and Napoleon III’s regime. Secularism was extended to education, where female teachers obtained the same wages as their male colleagues. A reactionary conception of family was laid down by recognizing cohabiting couples and giving equal rights to their members; prostitution was assimilated to a form of slavery and abolished. The Commune did not extend voting rights to women — it is significant that neither Marx nor Lenin mentioned this as one of its limits or mistakes — but it gave them a new position in society.

The presence of women in the Commune was remarkable to the point that it became an obsessive target of Versailles propaganda, which depicted them as the pétroleuses : witches, harpies, nymphomaniacs, hysterical bodies, degenerated females who destroyed their families and all traditional values, abandoned their children and enjoyed the spectacle of fire in rapturous rituals. For decades, this negative myth would haunt conservative imaginaries around the world.

For the seventy-two days the Commune existed, such emancipatory measures were proclaimed and had begun to be applied, but, beyond these formal policy reforms, the entire city seemed captured by an extraordinary effervescence and engaged in a process of social transformation from below. Artists and intellectuals — Paris was then the capital of European literary bohemia — created their own federations. Popular newspapers and graphic arts flourished for two months in a country whose official culture was radically hostile to the lower classes, usually depicting them as a despicable “mob.”

Anti-clericalism and revolutionary iconoclasm frightened the ruling classes of the entire continent. The demolition of the Vendôme Column, described by the Communards as a symbol of militarism, imperialism, “false glory,” and “an insult by the victors to the vanquished,” became evidence of the Commune’s “vandalism,” which Gustave Courbet, the famous painter who led the Federation of Artists, paid for with imprisonment and exile.

Born as an expression of revolutionary patriotism, the Commune was deeply internationalist. It proclaimed that “any city should be authorized to confer citizenship to the foreigners who serve it,” and gave a concrete meaning to its principle of “universal Republic” by integrating thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees who lived in the French capital. The archives record 1,725 foreign Communards, and in many cases, they took on important responsibilities: two out of three Commune armies were led by Polish commanders in chief, and the National Guard included an Italian legion. Many foreigners belonged to its board, like Léo Frankel, a Hungarian Jewish member of the International Working Men’s Association, who was appointed minister of labor.

The most indisputable evidence that the Commune had destroyed the bourgeois order lies in its replacement of the state military force with the National Guard, which had been rebuilt during the war as a popular militia. Writing on the spot, just after its final annihilation during the “bloody week” of May, Marx pointed out two distinctive features of the Paris Commune: its rupture with the state repressive machinery and its radical democracy. After conquering power, the working class quickly realized that it could not “simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” The old state military force had to be replaced with “the armed people.”

Similarly, the working class created its own organs of power:

The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

Nobody knows if such a form of radical, direct democracy could work in the long term. In the USSR, it never really worked, except for a few months, because of the breakout of the civil war and the establishment of a party dictatorship. The horizontal character of democracy under the Commune was probably reinforced by the lack of charismatic leaders dominating its assemblies and institutions. There was a plurality of remarkable personalities but no overwhelming figures such as Maximilien Robespierre, Lenin, or Trotsky.

This also depended on a curious coincidence: Bakunin was in Lyon and could not join Paris under siege; Auguste Blanqui had been arrested in southern France one day before the uprising of March 18. Therefore, radical democrats, social republicans, anarchists, Proudhonists, Blanquists, and even Marxists (a few Communards had a regular correspondence with the author of The Communist Manifesto living in London) worked together without struggling for a partisan leadership. In many cases, as during the crucial ballot for creating the Committee of Public Safety, the Blanquists and the members of the International Working Men’s Association did not vote unanimously. This plurality of views was fruitful.

The Commune was simultaneously a “destituent” power that destroyed the old state machinery, and a “constituent” power that established a new sovereignty opposed to the Versailles government. Thus, it was shaped by the tensions and ruptures that characterize any revolutionary process: on the one hand, the enthusiasm for a conquered freedom and the emotional élan of building the future; on the other hand, the necessity of creating new organs of coercion able to resist the inevitable reaction of the old rulers. Democratic communalism coexisted with a latent dictatorship in the middle of a civil war. The authoritarian measures claimed by Raoul Rigault, the Blanquist head of the Commune’s security, echoed the Jacobin Terror and foreshadowed the Soviet Cheka. In the most dramatic moments of its ephemeral existence, the Commune executed its hostages.

Enemies of the Commune

Between the bloody week of May 1871 and the Russian Revolution, the memory of the Commune was censured and exorcised. For a decade, it was silently preserved by the vanquished and critically transmitted by the exiled. In France, the Commune became an unnamable event, always evoked by frightening allegories as a natural catastrophe. Its actors and accomplishments became the objects of a damnatio memoriae that simply erased them from the public sphere. At the top of Montmartre hill, where the uprising had started, the Sacré-Cœur basilica was built “to expiate the crimes of the Commune,” which had executed the archbishop of Paris. Just after the repression, photogravures showing the Communards’ deeds — from the execution of priests and the burning of churches to the destruction of property — inundated the entire country, gathered under the title The Red Sabbat . In the following years, the adjective “red” was banned from official documents.

While attracting socialist, anarchist, bohemian, and nonconformist writers and artists — think of painters such as Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Édouard Manet, or writers like Jules Vallès and the young poet Arthur Rimbaud — the Commune was condemned by the overwhelming majority of French intellectuals. Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, George Sand, and Émile Zola viewed the Commune as an outburst of blind violence, even if some of them pleaded for amnesty after the bloody week.

For the French intellectual elite, the Commune did not result from a civil war; it was the awful expression of a collective disease, of a pandemic that threatened the national body and had to be crushed. As Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, the most significant feature of anti-Commune literature was its “social biologism,” which consisted in associating class conflicts with natural pathologies. In his novel devoted to the Franco-Prussian War, La Débâcle (1892), Zola described the Commune as “a growing epidemic” and a “chronic befuddlement” provoked by hunger, alcohol, and syphilis under the conditions of a besieged city. In The Origins of Contemporary France (1878), historian Hippolyte Taine analyzed it as “a pathological germ which, having penetrated the blood of a suffering and seriously sick society, produced fever, delirium, and revolutionary convulsions.”

According to Maxime Du Camp, “virtually all those unfortunates who fought for the Commune were what alienism terms ‘sick.’” Cesare Lombroso, the Italian founder of criminal anthropology, submitted the Commune to the indisputable “scientific” test of anthropometry and, after analyzing the skulls of dozens of Communards, concluded that most of them revealed the typical traits of the “born criminal.” Many commentators privileged the language of zoology, grasping among the Communards the symptoms of bestiality and lycanthropy, a form of “barbaric regression” within a civilized world. In October 1871, Théophile Gautier compared the Communards to zoo animals that had suddenly escaped from their cages and terrorized in the city:

wild beasts, stinking animals, venomous creatures, all the refractory perversities that civilization has been unable to tame, those who love blood, those who are as amused by arson as by fireworks, those for whom theft is a delight, those for whom rape represents love, all those with the hearts of monsters, all those with deformed souls.

Such a demonic portrait was not exclusively French. In the United States, the Chicago Tribune compared the Paris Commune to an uprising of Comanche Indians. In Buenos Aires, La Nación deplored the Communards’ crimes and denounced the inspirer behind their attacks against civilization: Marx, “a true Lucifer,” whose letters from London had been found in the files of the Blanquist Raoul Rigault, the leader of the Committee of Public Safety. The myth of a “cosmopolitan” conspiracy behind the deeds of the Parisian workers focused on the International Workingmen’s Association, which became a sort of Satanic nightmare for European reaction and, in parallel, according to Friedrich Engels, a “moral force” for the labor movement throughout the world.

The colorful rhetoric of the Commune’s enemies belongs to a rich counterrevolutionary tradition. After the Russian Revolution, the language of reaction did not change significantly. Think of the White Guards’ posters portraying Trotsky as a Jewish ogre, or even of Winston Churchill, who depicted the Bolsheviks as a horde of baboons jumping on a hill made of the skulls of their victims.

The bloody week of May 1871 was, at the same time, the sunset of the old counterrevolutions and the dawn of modern state repression. Fought on the barricades, it appeared at first glance as a repetition of June 1848, but this was a misleading facade. Most of the fallen Communards were not killed in the street combats but were executed, after summary trials, through methodic and serialized massacres. The Versailles army was composed neither of fanatic Bonapartists nor of provincial obscurantists who wished to punish a detested capital.

As historian Robert Tombs has convincingly explained, the soldiers who performed this planned, disciplined, organized, and impersonal slaughter did not carry the awareness that they were crushing a political uprising; they rather thought that they were extinguishing a criminal fire and cleansing the city of a dangerous disease. They acted without emotion, accomplishing a biopolitical task in order to sanitize a national body. Whereas General Patrice de MacMahon repeated in May 1871 the gestures of General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac in June 1848, his soldiers perpetrated a massacre that, revisited in the twenty-first century, brings to mind the systematic murder perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in 1943.

The magnitude of the repression was considerable. Historians are still investigating the number of the dead, with estimates varying from 5,400 to 20,000. This significant discrepancy results from the difficulty of accounting for the dead in the streets, the victims of military executions and the thousands who perished in the following days of untreated wounds. The report established in 1875 by General Raymond Appert of the Versailles army mentioned 38,614 arrests and 50,000 sentences issued by the war council, which resulted in more than 10,000 convictions. A further 3,800 Communards were deported to New Caledonia (where many of them supported the Kanak rebellion in 1878).

Almost 6,000 among those who escaped from capture spent the following decade in exile. Most of them fled to England, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, but also to the United States and several Latin American countries. We know the names of many exiled intellectuals (Gustave Courbet, Leó Frankel, Paul Lafargue, Louise Michel, Élie and Élisée Reclus, Jules Vallès), but the great majority of the exiles were craftsmen and manual workers.

Twenty-First-Century Communes

The ghosts of the Commune have resurfaced in the twenty-first century. We heard their echoes in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006 , then in 2011, first in Tunisia and Egypt, then in New York, with Occupy Wall Street, and in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, with the 15M. A few years later they came back to France, with the Nuit debout of spring 2017 in Paris and the ZAD (“zones to defend”) of Brittany. The Kurdish fighters of Rojava claimed the Commune’s legacy by creating an incredible experience of armed, egalitarian, feminist, direct democracy in a Middle East devastated by neocolonial, fascist, and fundamentalist wars. To all of them, the Commune was meaningful, the opposite of a dead realm of memory.

Once again, the Commune’s legacy has experienced an unexpected metamorphosis. An eloquent mirror of this change is the afterlife of Louise Michel, one of the most popular figures of the Paris uprising, whose virtuous and sacrificial image of the “red virgin” has been replaced by that of a queer feminist. And a similar shift has occurred with the social dimension of the Commune. Its actors are increasingly recognized as craftsmen, workers, teachers, militiamen of the National Guard, employees, bohemian artists and writers; a minority of them were factory workers, while a great number were seasonal or daily laborers.

The social profile of the average Communard was much closer to that of many contemporary young people — precarious workers, students, and intellectuals — than to that of twentieth-century industrial workers. The heterogeneous internal composition of this largely preindustrial working class is now seen to bear many affinities, despite their different historical contexts, with the postindustrial proletarian layers of neoliberal capitalism. They did and do not believe in linear and gradual progress, but rather express a certain proclivity for radical breaks, as profound as they are ephemeral. Whereas its social and political conquests were quickly destroyed — some of them would be achieved decades later — the Commune has survived throughout a century and a half as, above all, the interruption of the homogeneous and linear time of capitalism and the irruption of a new, qualitative time of self-emancipation. From this point of view, it has not become a “future past” — a bygone nineteenth-century utopia — but remains the representation of a possible future that still reverberates in the present.

Liberated from the historical teleology of twentieth-century communism, the Commune has been extracted from the sequence of defeated twentieth-century revolutions and rediscovered as a moment of singular and irreducible collective freedom. No longer viewed as an immature and ephemeral prefiguration of Bolshevism, its relevance and actuality are grasped precisely in what was usually considered its main limits: its lack of centralism, hierarchies, or hegemonic leadership; its federalism; and its search for new forms of horizontal democracy rather than building an effective dictatorship.

In short, what is rediscovered in the Commune is its communalism , which powerfully resonates with current debates about the “commons”: a collective reappropriation of nature, knowledge, and wealth against the neoliberal process of global privatization. Like the Commune, the recent experiences mentioned above did not aim at applying abstract models; they were creative moments of the invention of the future.

In this way, they fit remarkably the definition of the Commune given by Engels in 1875 in a letter to August Bebel whose relevance has been pertinently pointed out by Kristin Ross. The word “Commune,” Engels explained, does not correspond with “community” or “municipality.” He saw it as the equivalent of the “excellent old German word Gemeinwesen ,” which did not designate a “state” but rather “what exists in common.” In a letter to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann, written in April 1871, Marx defined the Paris Commune with a lyric image, a metaphor borrowed from Homer: “storming heaven.”

Like Titans assaulting Olympus, they had overthrown their own rulers. This is, perhaps, the key to understanding the incredible longevity of those seventy-two Parisian spring days in 1871.

When the Village was Red: Celebrating the Legacy of the Paris Commune in our Neighborhoods

By Lena Rubin

On March 18, 1871, the Paris Commune began — a three-month-long worker-led insurrection in Paris and experiment in self-governance. On that day, workers, anarchists, communists, and artisans took over the city, and began to re-organize it according to the principles of association, self-determination, and justice for all oppressed members of society.

Notably, among the so-called Communards who participated in the uprising, many were women. The Versailles press wrote that such women were “seduced by the theories of socialism developed in clubs and public reunions, thinking that a new era was going to open itself… they are throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the revolutionary movement…” 

As scholar David P. Jordan wrote, “unopposed and swept along by a ‘human torrent,’ workers occupied all the administrative offices and government buildings… the mayor, Jules Ferry, fled the Hôtel de Ville [the site of executive governmental power in Paris at the time]. Paris was in the hands of the commune.”

While in power, the communal government advocated for womens’ rights, universal free education, established a radical artists collective called Le Féderation des Artistes, and much more. 

The Commune only lasted for seventy-two days before it was brutally crushed by the Versailles government, in what is now known as Le Sémaine Sanglante (or, the Bloody Week). Communards were executed en masse, and many were deported to the French territory of New Caledonia or found themselves in exile elsewhere. Due in part to the many who fled retribution or were forced to leave after the Commune was crushed, its ideas spread far and wide in the decades that followed. Many scholars write on what is called the “afterlives” or “reactivations” of the Paris Commune — from the worker-led Mexican Zapatista revolution, to the urban insurrection of Occupy Wall Street and associated Occupy movements. As Kristin Ross author of the wonderful study of the Commune entitled  Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune ,   states, “the shockwaves of [the Bloody Week] propelled the hard-pressed Communard exiles and refugees into far-reaching new political networks and ways of living… creating networks and pathways of survival, reinvention and political transmission.”

One of the most prominent places in which the Communards created new communities, and ways to survive, was in our very own Greenwich Village — in the area just south of Washington Square, which was once known as New York’s “French Quarter.” 

By the later 19th century, this area was already considered to be the center of New York’s “bohemia,” and was teeming with multicultural communities. Other waves of immigration had created ethnic enclaves downtown, including the German community of Kleindeutschland and the Irish neighborhood of Five Points. In the “Quartier Français,” cafés and restaurants nurtured ever-growing communities of French artists, writers, and leftists activists in the wake of the Commune.

About eight years after the destruction of the Commune and the execution and deportation of the Communards, a journalist in  Scribner’s Monthly  wrote: 

“I CONFESS to finding no little pleasure in lazy explorations of the region that lies west of Broadway, south of Washington Square, and north of Grand street. This is the  Quartier Francais  of New York… The commonplace, heterogeneous style of the buildings, and the unswerving rectan­gular course of the streets are American, but the people are nearly all French. French, too, is the language of the signs over the doors and in the windows; and the population is of the lowest and poorest class. The Commune has its emissaries and exiles here….There are secret meetings in ob­scure little  cafés,  into which strangers sel­dom enter; where the last movements of the Nihilists are discussed… over draughts of absinthe and more innocent beer.” 

The writer also describes the manual labor trades taken on by these French immigrants: “Made­moiselle Berthe, with her little sisters, fabri­cates roses and violets out of muslin and wax in the high attics of the tenement houses. Madame Lange, with her arms and neck exposed, may be seen ironing snowy linen in front of an open window. Here is Triquet,  le charcutier;  Roux,  le bottier;  Malvaison,  le marchand de vin;  Givac,  le charcutier Alsacien,  and innumer­able basement restaurants, where dinner  vin compris, may be had for the veriest trifle.”

From the 1870s to the 1890s, approximately 20,000 French immigrants lived and worked in this area, according to the blog Ephemeral New York.  “Bakeries, butchers, cafés, shops, and ‘innumerable basement restaurants,’ occupied the short buildings and tenements of this expat enclave.”

The broader community may have categorized the Parisian exiles as “political refugees of dangerous proclivities,” or as “having a share in the blazing terrors of the Commune… in all their wanderings they had carried the spirit of revolution with them and spouted death to despots over their glasses of absinthe in cellar cafés.” Another  Scribners  article notes that at the  Taverne Alsacienne  on Greene Street, ex-Communards  “gathered around the tables… most of them without coats, the shabbiness of their other garments lighted up by a brilliant red bandana kerchief or a crimson over-shirt.” (Wearing red accents or accessories was a common practice of Communards during March-May 1871, as a way of demonstrating one’s commitment to socialist revolution.) The community was boisterous, its members frequently drinking “wine, vermouth, and greenish opaline draughts of absinthe… their eyes brighten and their tongues are loosened.”

One of the most notable sites of the “old Bohemia of the French Quarter” south of Washington Square was the Restaurant du Grand Vatel on Bleecker Street, where Parisian exiles mingled with American artists and authors. In fact, an eighth anniversary celebration of the bloody revolution of March 18, 1871 was held here. The celebratory scene, which involved, “grand festival, banquet, ball, and artistic tombola,” led the  Scribners  journalist to conclude, “the Restaurant du Grand Vatel has some queer patrons.”

Another important echo of the Communard’s  legacy in our neighborhoods was the Paris Commune bistro at 99 Bank Street. The restaurant originally opened on Bleecker Street in 1979 and relocated to Bank Street after a forced eviction—eventually closing in the early 2000s. It was a thriving and well-loved neighborhood gathering spot in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, run by the French chef Hugo Uys; the New York Times called it a “quintessential old West Village restaurant.” Its red interior accents and festive, communal atmosphere carried on the legacy of both 1871 Paris and the nineteenth-century French Quarter.

Interested in learning more about the afterlives of the Paris Commune in our neighborhoods? Be sure to check out our upcoming event on  April 7th,  with the scholar J. Michelle Coghlan, When the Village Was Red: Radical New York & the Paris Commune on its 150th Anniversary!

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The Paris Commune - from the archive, 1871

On 28 May 1871, French soldiers crushed the Paris Commune, a socialist government that had ruled the city for two months. See how the Guardian and Observer reported the insurrection

The Paris Commune was a radical, popular led government that ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May, 1871. It occurred in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-German war and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70). Parisians united to overthrow the existing French regime which had failed to protect them from the Prussian siege. The elected council of the Commune passed socialist policies and oversaw city functions but was eventually overthrown when the French army retook the city. About 20,000 insurrectionists were killed, 38,000 arrested and more than 7,000 deported.

Editorial: the capitulation of Paris

3 March 1871

Victor Hugo, in the Misérables, describes the 18th of June, 1815, as “the most mournful day in the history of France;” but he himself probably will now be the first to transfer the title to this sad pre-eminence to the 1st of March, 1871. On Wednesday last France was doubly humiliated; Prussian troops entered Paris for the third time this century and on the same day the French National Assembly, compelled to meet far away in a provincial city, ratified a treaty of peace which proclaims in every line the utterly prostrate and helpless state of the nation.

The state of Paris

From an occasional correspondent 3 April 1871

Paris is again a besieged city. The Government has interrupted the mails, and none of the trains are running. There is a report that the army is concentrating at Courbevoie and Puteaux to march upon Paris to-morrow. The Commune is strengthening all its positions. The Place Vendôme bristles with bayonets; every foot of ground is covered with armed men. The Grand Hotel has been occupied by the National Guards, and all the windows looking on the Rue de la Paix and the adjacent streets were barricaded with sand bags, loopholes being left for Musketeers.300,000 francs have been requisitioned from the railways.

The Bank of France has taken a large printing office for the purpose of printing 10-franc notes for the Commune. The notes will be issued under duress and protest. The Bank is still open and transacts business as usual.

There are no obstructions yet on the bridges. All the public buildings near the old Hotel Dieu, and the Hotel itself, have been turned into fortresses by the Commune. [Adolphe] Assi and the other members of the Comnune ride about in state, preceded by outriders and followed by a motley staff.

The spies of the Government at Versailles report that the Commune has 156,000 men under arms. The secret societies here reckon they have 120,000 men. Both these figures are exaggerated. The paper strength of all their battalions is 120,000 men, but not half their battalions number more than 80 men who will serve.

It is now said at Versailles, that Marshal MacMahon will command the army. General Chanzy did not give his parole to take no part in the operations against the insurgents. When the decree remitting house rent was published it was received in several model lodging-houses amid prolonged shouts of “Vive la Republique démocratique et sociale.”

The dissensions in the Commune are great, but the Head Committee of six remain of one mind and control everything. The number of regular soldiers of all arms now in Paris is amazing. They swarm in every street. It is positively known that 33 men have been put to death by the Central Committee or their myrmidons since the 18th of March. This number does not include those killed in the Rue de la Paix. They were executed on the most frivolous pretexts. Three of them were shot by National Guards at Belleville because the latter did not admire the way they were dressed. As I close my dispatch, I hear the Government will begin to throw its troops across the river at midnight to-night.

Paris in flames as communards vanquished

From our own correspondent 25 May 1871

A terrible fire is raging in the chief centre of Paris. The Versailles batteries are firing furiously against the quarters which still hold out. By the aid of the telescope the horrible fact is disclosed of numerous dead and wounded being left lying about the streets without any succour whatever.

Massacres in Paris as army takes control

1 June 1871

Civil government is temporarily suspended in Paris. the city is divided into four districts, under Generals Ladmirault, Cissey, Douay, and Vinoy. “All powers of the civil authorities for the maintenance of order are transferred to the military.” Summary executions continue, and military deserters, incendiaries, and members of the Commune are shot without mercy.

Paris after the conflagration

From our special correspondent The Observer, 4 June 1871

I doubt whether anyone out of Paris can quite realise the horror of the situation during the latter days of last week. For at least four days and nights every inmate of each one of the countless apartments in the city was in perpetual dread of death by fire. The inflammable shells of the insurgents were being sown broadcast over the town from the batteries of Montmartre and Belleville, and all about the city there were agents or emissaries of the Commune crouching about and trying to set fire to any house into whose apertures they could pour petroleum. I am quite willing to admit that there has been immense exaggeration about the number and the activity of these agents. In times of panic like the present there is no story too monstrous to be credited for the moment. Only yesterday I was speaking to a shopkeeper whom I have known for years, and was congratulating him on it all being over. “Ah. Monsieur,” he answered, “who can say it is over yet? I cannot shut my eyes without seeing the flames. I cannot sleep at night without dreaming the house is on fire.” And if, as I believe, this saying represents the feeling to-day of vast numbers of Parisians, one can realise what their agony must have been when the air was filled with smoke, and when on every side you could see nothing but flames.

There is no counsellor so cruel as fear, and I cannot doubt that the reprisals committed by the French troops have been often brutally, savagely cruel.

A woman’s diary during the Paris Commune

From a correspondent 26 July 1872

The Commune has had its military and its political historians, both friendly and unfriendly, the optimist account of these being as unworthy of credit as the pessimist account. A book which might adopt for its own the epigraph which precedes Montaigne’s essays, ‘ C’est icy un livre de bonne foi, lecteur ,’ was still a desideratum till Madame Blanchecotte published her Tablettes d’une Femme pendant la Commune . This lady is the authoress of two works on moral philosophy, crowned by the French Academy, and served in the ambulances during the Prussian siege. During that terrible period she had become accustomed to the smell of powder, and insensible of the horrid din of artillery. This rude apprenticeship, therefore, had fitted her to be a calm, though reflective, and feeling, spectator of the terrible civil war which broke out on the 18th March, 1871.

Tuesday, April 15 The people are greedy of strong emotions; they take pleasure in seeing the burials of slain insurgents pass; they are delighted if any ferocious exhibition of unrecognised dead gives them the spectacle of open coffins. I have heard pretty shop girls, with sweet eyes, complaisantly communicate these cemetery impressions. Young mothers take their children there; the little ones are glad; they have seen corpses, and they tell it with pride to the others.”

April 29 As I was going home in the ‘bus this afternoon, I could not help looking continually at the face of a growing lad, so naif , so good-humoured, so young, and so communicative beneath his military equipment of sword and gun, that I asked, “Why, my child, how old are:you?” “Seventeen, madame. I am a volunteer; for do you see, I belong to the people. My grandfather was killed in the insurrection of June, 1848; my father died of grief; and my mother said to me, ‘Avenge them.’ It’s not to say we shall win; we never do win. We are sheep, and we shall always be shorn.”

Wednesday, May 24 The night has been dreadful, with reciprocal fury. Shells, shrapnel, cannonade, musketry, all kept on bursting in a frightful concert. The sky itself is red, the flashes of the massacre have set it on fire; the action is quite near, at the Luxembourg; we can see the fire and smoke of the combat; they are firing from every part, from the roofs, the windows, the cellars.

3 am: Ambulance carts are passing red with blood; under blankets that are too short; dead bodies are jostled; they are picking them up by cartfuls at a time. Our barricade has at last become ‘serious,’ it is a model. They have made loopholes; a mitrailleur is already is position, and an enormous cannon is waiting to take its place. A young artilleryman bestrides it with fixed gaze and folded arms. He scarcely replies to those who speak to him. More and more powder passes by unceasingly to increase the frightful reserve of the Pantheon. It is the aged insurgents who have guarded the barricades during the night. They are shivering in the morning air.

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.

• From the Guardian archive

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The Paris Commune, 150 years on – from the siege of the capital to ‘Bloody Week’

The Paris Commune began an insurrection on March 18, 1871, when the largely left-wing, radical National Guard refused to accept the authority of the French government, killed two generals and took control of Paris – initiating the Communards’ febrile two-month rule over the City of Light. FRANCE 24 looks back at this seminal moment in French history, 150 years on.

Issued on: 18/03/2021 - 09:38

The catalyst for the Paris Commune was France ’s crushing defeat in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War – “La Débâcle”, as Émile Zola christened it in his renowned 1892 novel. France’s Emperor Napoleon III was captured in September 1870, the same month the Prussians besieged Paris. The 1.7 million Parisians spent 135 days under siege, increasingly starved of resources. The City of Light surrendered in January 1871.

The same month, the French government signed the Armistice of Versailles with Otto von Bismarck, Prussian leader and soon-to-be chancellor of a united Germany. Bismarck agreed that Prussian troops would not occupy Paris. Instead, France’s National Guard would keep order in the capital , where socialist movements such as the First International had burgeoned over the preceding years .

France’s largely Catholic, conservative electorate voted in a right-wing majority in February’s parliamentary elections. The left-wing radicals in the National Guard controlling Paris did not accept this result – setting the stage for the Commune’s emergence the following month.

“The sight of ruins is nothing compared to the great Parisian insanity,” one giant of French literature, Gustave Flaubert, wrote to another, George Sand, after visiting Paris following the Commune’s bloody defeat in May 1871. “One half of the population longs to hang the other half, which returns the compliment,” Flaubert continued, having opposed the Commune from the start.

FRANCE 24 discussed the Paris Commune with British historian Jonathan Fenby, author of "The History of Modern France".

What caused the inception of the Paris Commune in March 1871?

One can trace the long-term causes behind the Commune to the Revolution of 1789. France had gone through a series of revolutions, 1789, 1830, 1848, and each one had emerged from a big push from the left and had ended up – with Napoleon, with King Louis-Philippe and then with Napoleon III. Revolutionary sentiment had gestated during that time in Paris.

When in 1870 France lost the Franco-Prussian War, that led to the siege of Paris and then the peace treaty at the beginning of 1871, which a lot of the radicals in Paris refused to accept. They thought the war could go on, should go on, and when national elections in France returned a right-wing majority in the National Assembly, the radicals of Paris wanted to go their own way.

The parliamentary majority was very conservative and had a strong monarchist group within it. So there was a definite division between France as a whole and Paris, where the radicals were much stronger. 

How did the Communards take control of Paris?

Hostilities broke out between the National Guard, which was the military force within Paris itself, left over from the siege, and the national government of Adolphe Thiers over who should take control of several hundred old cannon guns in various parts of Paris. The National Guard refused to give way, and was supported by many sympathetic Parisians. Two generals were killed, and Thiers and the government left for Versailles – at which point what was to become the Commune took over in Paris.

The National Guard was the dominant force within Paris itself because the French army had largely been disarmed, either through being defeated by the Prussians during the war or through the subsequent peace treaty. The National Guard was left in Paris and was meant to keep control there, but it turned out to be a much more radical force than either Thiers or the Prussians had expected.

What was life like for Parisians under the Commune during its two-month reign over the City of Light?

As well as a divide between Paris and the rest of France, there was a divide within Paris itself – between the more radical parts of the city and the more bourgeois sections of Paris which had grown under Napoleon III, especially with Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris.

When there were elections for the 92-member council running the Commune at the end of March, there were very high abstention rates in the bourgeois areas of Paris. Quite a lot of their inhabitants left the city at some point or other during the Commune.

Life was very disjointed during the Commune period. Each district council ran itself; there was no single leader. Leadership decisions were often very confused.

There were a lot of differences between the different areas of the city, with a lot of the more radical revolutionaries trying out ideas of their own – such as workers’ control of businesses.

Church and state were separated, labour laws were brought in to reduce working hours, and there were initiatives like soup kitchens, free schools for children and so on in various parts of the city.

So there was a mixture of adrenalin and desire for change and, at the same time, an awareness that Thiers was waiting at Versailles and an army was regrouping outside the city.

The Vendôme Column was torn down on May 16 – as encouraged by the artist Gustave Courbet – as a symbol of the past, which the Commune wanted to get rid of. It had a statue of Napoleon on top to commemorate his victory in the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, and was rebuilt after the Commune’s defeat.

From the start there was certainly a very strong anti-clerical feeling. As tension rose, particularly as the Versailles government prepared to send troops in, there was a general tightening of suspicion of anybody who might be against the Commune.

The Archbishop of Paris Georges Darboy [considered a hero for organising care for the wounded during the Franco-Prussian War] was arrested and killed, one of many executions.

How was the Commune defeated in La semaine sanglante (“The Bloody Week”), which ended when the national army destroyed the last pockets of Communard resistance on May 28?

The regular army found their way into Paris – an undefended path through the fortifications around Paris that crossed into the city and pushed through into the centre, where there was very widespread arson and destruction, notably with the burning of the Tuileries Palace and the H ô tel de Ville (city hall), mainly by the retreating Communards.

The army pressed forward into the Commune’s strongholds in Montmartre and elsewhere in the north of Paris and broke the Communards’ resistance bit-by-bit, if only through sheer weight of numbers. There were massacres on both sides – it was a very bloody week indeed.

There has been a considerable argument amongst historians about the number of people killed during the Commune, particularly during La semaine sanglante . The figure they tended to give for this week was 10,000-20,000. But Robert Tombs, now an emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge University, did some convincing work in 2012 pointing to a figure of around 6,000 to 7,000 Communards killed, based on municipal records. So it appears that the numbers were considerably smaller than the legend has it.

What were the Commune’s long-term consequences in French politics?

The Commune was of course immediately followed by the Third Republic, which was a pretty conservative government all-round, and the Commune was held up as a terrible example of what could happen if the government lost control.

The Communards wanted to run Paris as they wished regardless of what happened in the rest of France and that led to a kind of a division for decades: Paris did not have an overall mayor until 1977, partly out of fear of what the capital would do if it had too much power and went its own way as it did under the Commune.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionaries seized on the Commune as an example of proletarian power, with Lenin’s alleged conclusion that the Commune’s problem was that it wasn’t ruthless enough. It remains an absolute landmark for the left and for the revolutionary strain in French politics. But the Commune’s violence also remains a warning from the right as to what radicalism can lead to.

The minoritarian revolutionary impulse provoked a majoritarian conservative reaction. It’s just not just in the nineteenth-century; you also get this into the twentieth-century. We saw this in the upheaval of 1968.

That minority, that revolutionary tradition, is extremely important for France itself. It harks back to 1789. Again and again, you get the revolutionary outburst that leads to conservatism of one degree or another.

It is an awkward element for the French in dealing with their own history. The French left in particular cherishes these revolutionary moments; they cherish the progressive side of the Commune. But at the same time they find the violence – exercised by the Communards as well as by the government troops – difficult to cater for.

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A Quick History of the Paris Commune Revolution

Barricade constructed by the Paris Commune, 1871 - WikiCommons

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It all started with the franco-prussian war.

The National Guard takes control

Cannons stationed by the National Guard at the top of Montmartre – WikiCommons

The Paris Commune governs for just a few months

The celebration of the election of the Commune, 28 March 1871 – WikiCommons

• Separation of church and state
• Abolishment of child labor and night labor for some industries
• No more fines set on workers by their employers
• The creation of a new calendar

The Bloody Week and the end of the Commune

Barricades during the Paris Commune, near the Place de la Concorde by Metropolitan Museum of Art – WikiCommons

A street in Paris in May 1871, by Maximilien Luce – WikiCommons

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What Was the Paris Commune (and Why Should We Care?)

Last Updated on March 11, 2024

One major public insurrection (or, some would argue, failed revolution) that is both poorly understood outside of France and obscured by cliché and caricature is the one known as the Commune de Paris (Paris Commune).

The brief but significant period of popular revolt began in March 1871 and ended on May 28th of the same year when armed forces brutally suppressed it– executing thousands of supporters and arresting thousands more. Many others were sent into exile.

If it was so important, why is it also seemingly so little-known and understood as one of France’s most important revolutionary moments? The fact is that when most people talk about the French Revolution , they’re in fact referencing the first one, which began in 1789.

That initial and legendary revolt was marked by the storming of the Bastille, the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and the “Reign of Terror” that saw thousands of people, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, publicly guillotined on the Place de la Concorde.

But the events beginning in 1789 represent just one of several revolutions and major popular revolts in France– each tumultuous and imperfect steps on the country’s path towards becoming a stable Republic.

One of these, of course, was the Paris Commune. In 2021, France marked its 150th anniversary with a large program of live and virtual commemorative events in Paris to celebrate what some say are its positive legacies– including fights for unionizing and employment rights, expanding civil rights to women and other oppressed groups, and the separation of church and state.

But what exactly was the Paris Commune about? Why does it deserve to be remembered? And why is its meaning and legacy fiercely disputed in France to this day? Keep reading for a brief look at a period that, however fleeting, changed the course of French– and possibly world– history.

( Just a caveat: what follows is far from exhaustive. It’s meant as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the Commune. If you’re looking for more discussion of the period and its significance, see this excellent piece from 2014 at The New Yorker . For more on the economic contexts and consequences of the conflict, see this piece .)

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A Bit of Historical Context: France’s Many Revolutions

“La République”, however solid and stable it may appear to be today, is a political system that was hard-won, emerging in bloody fits and starts. France has had five– count ’em– five– Republics since the first one was declared in 1792, interrupted and challenged by restoration monarchies, imperial regimes and occupations.

It was arguably only in 1945, following World War II and the establishment of the Fourth Republic, that France finally settled into the “habit” of representative democracy.

We won’t go into the detailed history of all these revolts here, but it’s important to note that they represent important precedents to “La Commune”. The roots of the Paris Commune lie partly in the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict started by the Emperor Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) in 1870 in a bid to reassert France’s dominant position in Europe. But France lost the war, Paris was besieged by Bismarck’s Prussian army for over four months, and Louis-Napoleon was exiled.

The Second Empire collapsed, and France was temporarily occupied by Prussia (which reclaimed the northeastern regions of Alsace and Lorraine and annexed them to Germany).

In 1871, Prussians forces had retreated, but France remained in serious debt to the victors. Severe famine and rising costs of living fomented unrest among France’s working classes, especially in industrial cities including Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. Increasingly, in these new urban and industrial centers, majorities favored an anti-monarchist brand of Republicanism or social democracy.

{Related: Bastille Day Once Celebrated Constitutional Monarchy, & Other Weird Facts}

But in France’s traditional rural areas, smaller cities and towns, Catholic conservatism and royalist loyalties tended to prevail. In February 1871, legislative elections were held, and the results favored conservatives and royalists.

Under the staunchly conservative politician Adolphe Thiers heading the National Assembly from Versailles, France’s Third Republic was declared, initially considered to be provisional. [ Side note: It would in fact stay in place (under changing guises) until 1940 and the invasion of France by Nazi German forces].

{Related: A Pretty Parisian Building–With a Dark History of Nazi Collaboration}

While the new government led by Thiers was in principle democratic, French Republicans and progressives who favored reducing the influence of the church and permanently abolishing non-democratic rule feared that royalists within the ranks of the new Assembly might restore the monarchy. The fact that Thiers governed from Versailles, the former home of Kings and created by the absolutist monarch Louis XVI, did not likely assuage those fears.

The new government, in turn, feared the restive Republican working classes in Paris and other cities– some of whom had served in the militia known as the National Guard during the Prussian siege of Paris just months earlier.

{Related: Follow the Traces of the American Revolution in Paris}

The Industrial Revolution had created new classes of urban workers who toiled in dangerous factories and poor conditions, and they had periodically staged revolts in the decades prior to the Commune. Some advocated for violent revolutionary revolt, or anarchy.

Major skirmishes between the government and revolutionary insurrectionists first broke out on March 18, 1871, when Thiers moved to dismantle the National Guard, and ordered the removal of its cannons stationed in now- Belleville and Montmartre to defend Paris.

Thousands took up arms in the streets to defend the cannons. Many soldiers sent to suppress the uprising defected and joined the insurrection. Two Generals were killed in the conflict. Barricades began appearing in the narrow streets, or Faubourgs , of Paris’ working-class neighborhoods on the right bank.

After government military forces retreated from Paris to Versailles, National Guard members moved to rapidly take over the city. In late March, the revolutionary Republicans won municipal elections in Paris and declared a “Commune” government, to be led by workers and ordinary citizens.

Elsewhere in France, including in Marseille and in Lyon, workers revolting against what they saw as inhumane conditions and standards of living declared their own, short-lived Communes . All but Paris’, however, were quashed almost immediately.

The Communards Take Paris: Factions & Ideals

The Paris Commune’s fleeting government was itself composed of several competing factions, including Jacobins (who followed in the footsteps of the 1793 Revolutionary club of the same name), Blanquistes (socialists who favored violent revolt), and Proudhonists, who promoted a utopian vision that involved establishing a network of Communes across France.

Despite their differences, the Communards devised a revolutionary program that in many ways recalled the ideals of the Jacobins in 1793, while adding more contemporary concerns to the table. They called for strictly curbing the influence and power of the church, a new Revolutionary (Republican) calendar that would no longer include religious holidays and references, the creation of a 10-hour workday, caps on rents and salaries, the abolition of child labor, and expanded rights for women, among other measures.

The movement included several prominent women, such as Louise Michel, who advocated for radical revolutionary action and rejected parliamentary reform. Others, such as the writer André Léo, joined a Communard Women’s Union and advocated for equal wages, the right for women to divorce, and other issues.

{Related: Remembering Olympe de Gouges, France’s First Revolutionary Feminist}

An Unprecedented Movement

Michel Cordillot, an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Paris 8-Vincennes Saint Denis and Editor of a book entitled La Commune de Paris 1871. Les acteurs, l’événement, les lieux (The Paris Commune 1871: The Participants, The Events, The Places), said in an e-mail interview that the Commune period is most significant for having led to the permanent end of monarchy in France.

“One can convincingly argue that the Commune saved the [French] Republic, in the sense that it barred the return of the monarchist past…by making the ruling classes understand that the [choice] wasn’t one between the Republic or the monarchy, but instead between the Republic or political instability…”

In the longer term, Cordillot says, the Commune marked a time when French public opinion began to turn irrevocably in favor of Republicanism. It was an extraordinary period, he notes, in that its leadership included numerous members of the working classes, who would address issues that had been the subject of popular revolt during the Second French Republic.

Finally, a new world seemed to be taking shape, Cordillot observes: one that radically broke with the old one and responded to the hopes and demands of working-class people in earlier decades.

Of course, the Commune would not last long. After roughly five weeks, Thiers’ armies had regrouped, and descended from Versailles on Paris to crush the resurrection. They did so handily.

Suppression & Executions: The “Bloody Week” and the Paris Commune

On May 21, 1871, the week now referred to by historians as the “Semaine sanglante” (Bloody Week) began, with the Versailles army directed by Thiers returning to Paris and systematically crushing the Commune forces.

Some 60,000 soldiers descended on the city to confront the Communard and National Guard forces, who were disadvantaged by a cobbled, neighborhood-based organization and by Haussmann’s recent transformation of Paris: one whose wide boulevards made (by design) revolutionary tactics such as barricades far less effective than they had been in past revolts.

{Related: The Odd Case of the French Revolutionary Calendar}

In response to the attacks, Communards set fire to swathes of the city, destroying important monuments and sites including Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall), the Tuileries Palace (which was never rebuilt), as well as several other government buildings. While some have placed in doubt the precise authors of these acts, few historians would argue that that the arson was not committed by National Guard members.

In the days that followed, bloody battles were fought in the streets of Paris, as the Versaillais army attacked and captured Communard strongholds throughout the city. Supporters attempted in vain to defend the districts behind barricades.

Versaillais soldiers summarily executed many Commune supporters, and in turn Communards took hostages from the opposing side and executed some of them, including several Catholic priests and the Archbishop of Paris. According to some accounts, over 60 hostages were executed by firing squad by the National Guard. Hundreds of Versaillais soldiers are also thought to have perished in the battles.

“Bloody Week” culminated on May 27th-28th, when a stronghold of nearly 150 National Guard officers camped inside Père-Lachaise cemetery were attacked, brought against a wall of the cemetery, and massacred by gunfire. Today, the memorial site is referred to as the Mur des Fédérés (Communards’ Wall).

On May 28th, the remaining Commune strongholds surrendered. Thousands were arrested, and many were executed later in summary trials by military tribunals. Thousands of Commune leaders and participants were exiled from France.

In total, historians estimate that the battles resulted in the death of between 17,000 to 20,000 Communards and 750 Versaillais troops.

The Aftermath: A Disputed Legacy

The legacy of the Paris Commune is a complex (and often bitterly debated) one. In the decades that followed the events, it inspired socialist and communist revolts that borrowed the name in Moscow (1905), Budapest (1919), Petrograd (1917) and Shanghai (both 1927 and 1967).

These came, of course, after Karl Marx widely praised the Commune and upheld it as a revolutionary model in his 1871 book The Civil War in France, and Vladimir Lenin was also a noted admirer. Today, many left-leaning political movements around the world point to the Commune as having laid the groundwork for progressivist policies and ideals such as combating income and gender inequality and expanding workers’ rights.

But for others, particularly political conservatives, the Commune and its National Guard were the authors of inexcusable violence and chaos– forming little more than an illegal militia fueled by demagogic populism, intolerance, and disrespect for tradition.

In France, these opposing perspectives have tensely coexisted for centuries. And people on different sides of the political aisle often still hold seemingly irreconcilable perspectives around how to represent and memorialize the events of the Commune.

For the historian Michel Cordillot, the period is the subject of so much heated debate in France because “it symbolizes the ultimate, climactic form of confrontation between right and left, one that has stuctured French political life since 1789, practically”.

He notes that even today, the Commune leaves almost no one indifferent, pointing to animated debates that have erupted among municipal officials in Paris during the planning of commemorative events for the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

Nevertheless, he says, almost everyone can agree that the conflict helped spur a paradigm shift around the class system in France:

“Alongside the horrific visions of the Bloody Week and the capital in flames, the image that remains the most firmly attached to the Commune– one that some see as positive, others as repulsive– is one of a moment that triggered a new awareness: long-term power gains among the representatives of the working classes were no longer unthinkable.”

Cordillot also notes that, despite profound disagreements around whether the project and tactics of the Commune were commendable or deplorable, many of its proposed policies appear surprisingly modern– and some have since been accepted into the political mainstream.

Among the ideas that have become taken for granted in France on both sides of the political aisle, he says, some of the most important are “the separation of church and state…the secularizing of schools, the [mandate for] equal salaries between men and women teachers, the recognition of partnerships outside of marriage and children born outside of marriage”, among others.

In short? If you take away the arson and the hostages, the massacres and the barricades, the major legacy of the Commune is (if you are to follow Cordillot’s line of reasoning) to have seeded several policies and ideas that the vast majority of French voters no longer consider up for debate.

Paris Commune Memorial Sites in the Capital

Four places in Paris stand today as important memorial sites: the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre, which was built starting in 1873 on the site of the cannon park where two Versaillais army generals, Jacques Leon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecompte– were shot and killed by National Guard troops.

The Basilica, commissioned in 1873, was subsequently viewed by many anti-Communards as a sort of expiation for the violent actions of the Commune. However, contrary to widely circulating myths, this symbolic function was never explicitly stated by the Assembly.

Its construction did, however, reinstate the importance of the Catholic Church in public and political life, particularly since it was commissioned directly by the National Assembly.

On nearby Rue Haxo, you can also visit a church called Notre-Dame-des-Otages (Our Lady of the Hostages) whose plaque commemorates the site where 50 hostages, including several priests and police officers, were shot by a National Guard firing squad during the “Bloody Week” in May 1871.

As mentioned earlier, the other major memorial site, at Père-Lachaise Cemetery , commemorates the 147 Communards who were summarily executed against a wall there, now known as the Mur des Fédérés. A plaque stands at the site, reading “Aux Morts de la Commune” (To the Dead of the Commune), inaugurated in 1908.

Every year in May, memorial commemorations to the victims of the massacre are held at the Communards’ Wall.

Finally, a lesser-known plaque behind Paris City Hall marks a mass grave where supporters of the Paris Commune were shot by the Versaillais army. Their remains were subsequently exhumed and reburied in cemeteries around the city.

Whatever your own perspectives on the period and its events, visiting these sites and remembering the Commune as a pivotal moment in French and Parisian history is one way to better understand the present.

Courtney Traub is the Founder and Editor of Paris Unlocked. She’s a longtime Paris resident who now divides her time (as well as she can manage) between the French capital and Norwich, UK. Co-author of the 2012 Michelin Green Guide to Northern France & the Paris Region, she has been interviewed as an expert on Paris and France by the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Le Figaro, Matador Network and other publications. Courtney has also written and reported stories for media outlets including Radio France Internationale, The Christian Science Monitor, Women’s Wear Daily and The Associated Press. In addition to going down various rabbit holes of curiosity when it comes to French culture, history, food and art, Courtney is a scholar of literature and cultural history whose essays and reviews have appeared in various forums.

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The Paris Commune – 150 Years Since the Bloody Week

• By Laura Moore
• on May 25, 2021

The mood in Paris this past week has been nothing short of joyful. Terraces are packed, musicians are playing in the streets, and not even the ever present threat of rain has dampened people’s spirits. Paris is re-emerging after a painfully long winter, and as I walked through the city this weekend, I couldn’t help but smile. I also couldn’t help but marvel at the timing, because this week also happens to mark the anniversary of one of Paris’ darkest chapters in its history. It’s been 150 years since the end of the Paris Commune, and specifically, this week marks the 150th anniversary of what is now known as the Bloody Week.

What is the Paris Commune?

In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Napoleon III personally led the French troops into battle, and they were promptly, and decisively, defeated a couple of months later. Napoleon III was captured, the Second French Empire collapsed, and the Third Republic was declared. The newly formed republican government vowed retaliation against Prussia, and Prussia responded by advancing into France and laying siege to Paris. The siege lasted for four months, during which time Parisians were forced to eat the animals in the zoo in order to survive. The city finally surrendered on January 28th, 1871, and an Armistice was signed.

This war was called the Franco-Prussian War , and during this conflict, Paris was defended by the National Guard. Many of these soldiers saw the Armistice and the subsequent peace treaty as a betrayal by their political leaders. Elections were held in February of 1871, and Adolphe Thiers was elected as the first President of the Third Republic. As is common with elections, not everyone was happy with the results. So much so, that eventually, the guardsmen in Paris decided to take matters into their own hands.

The Communards Take Control of the City

On March 18th, 1871, government troops moved to take control of the city’s cannons. In Montmartre, a crowd gathered to prevent this from happening, and as word spread throughout the city, barricades were erected across Paris. By the end of the day, the National Guard had taken control of the city, and a new government had been declared. These revolutionaries (or insurrectionists, depending on who you ask) established a radical socialist government called the Paris Commune. They themselves became known as the Communards, and they had big plans for their fledgling government. In the end, however, they were destined to rule the city for a mere 72 days.

It is interesting to note that the policies of the Paris Commune would not look out of place in modern day France. They advocated for the separation of church and state, equal pay for men and women, the abolition of child labour, and the rights of employees, tenants, women, and foreigners. They supported workers’ right to self management and the abolition of interest on debts. Children were granted free education and food, and orphanages were built throughout the city. The Communards were remarkably busy given how little time they were in power.

The Army Sweeps Through Paris

Ultimately, the Commune was not to last. Paris may have been under the control of the Communards, but the rest of France was still under the control of the Third Republic. In May of 1871, the government made their move. On May 21st, the French Armed Forces entered Paris in the west. Over the following week, they swept across the city, overpowering the Communards and Parisians alike. Fighting broke out in the streets. Buildings were set on fire. Hostages and church officials on both sides were executed. And the neighbourhoods of Paris fell one after another as the army moved east.

The Communards’ last stand was a bloody battle that took place in the Père Lachaise cemetery the night of May 27th. A mere 200 guardsmen held off the army for several hours before finally surrendering. Those who were still alive were lined up against a wall and shot. Today, that wall is known as the Communards’ Wall . The following day, on May 28th, the remaining Communards surrendered, and the Paris Commune was officially over.

The Legacy of the Bloody Week

It is hard to imagine the bloodshed of the Bloody Week. The army recorded 877 killed, 6,454 wounded, and 183 missing on their side. For the Communards, the numbers are still debated. Some historians estimate that 6,000-7,000 people were killed. Others think that number is as high as 20,000. 43,522 people were taken prisoner and marched to Versailles to await trial. Most of them were released before that could happen, but 15,895 were ultimately tried, with 13,500 being found guilty.

And it wasn’t just the human cost. Streets all over Paris, including the Rue de Rivoli pictured above, were reduced to rubble. Entire buildings went up in flames, including the Tuileries Palace, and the city’s archives at Hotel de Ville were destroyed. The events of 1871 bitterly divided the city, and the vestiges of the Paris Commune still inspire activists on both sides of France’s political divide to this day.

And yet, despite all this, the Paris Commune gave way to the Third Republic, the longest in France’s history to date. It led to the Belle Epoque, a series of World’s Fairs, and the Sacre Coeur . Impressionism, literary realism, and the invention of motion pictures. 150 years ago, the streets of Paris saw bloodshed, violence, and destruction. But the city re-built itself. And now, 150 years later, Paris is re-emerging yet again. Not from war, but from isolation. And as I walked the streets this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think to myself. No matter what history throws at it, Paris always manages to re-build itself. Hopefully it always will.

Laura Moore is a professional storyteller who loves history and the many stories that make Paris one of the most fascinating cities in the world. Join one of her  signature tours  to learn the story of a city.

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You are here,  - the paris commune and its legacy.

The Paris Commune of 1871 remained a potent force in Europe for several generations afterwards. The reprisals following the fall of the Commune anticipated the great massacres of the twentieth century. While the brief reign of the communards witnessed serious adversity in the form of food shortages and disease, it also presided over many progressive social measures, such as the relative emancipation of women. The brutality of the army’s actions against the communards would cast a pallor over leftist politics in Europe for decades to come.

Lecture Chapters

• The Paris Commune in Its Historical Context: Napoleon III and the Franco-Prussian War
• The Siege of Paris
• The Fall of France and the Formation of the Paris Commune
• Composition of the Commune: Tensions between Urban and Rural France
• The State Strikes Back: The Massacre of the Paris Commune

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The Fires of Paris

By Adam Gopnik

The Paris Commune of 1871 was one of the four great traumas that shaped modern France. It stands alongside the 1789 Revolution, the ascent of Vichy, in 1940, and (odd though it seems, given how nonviolent and small-scale they were) the Events of May, 1968. Other, more outward-bending crises—the Napoleonic campaigns, the two World Wars, the battle for Algeria—made as much noise and cost far more lives, but they now belong to the settled, archival past. That Napoleon was a bad man but a big figure, that the Great War was a valiant folly, that the war in Algeria could have ended only with Algerian independence: these are easy to assent to now. The four civic crises belong to the available, still contested past, the one that hangs around and starts living arguments. People ask whether the Revolution, with a little luck and better leadership, could have avoided the Terror and Bonaparte’s subsequent dictatorship, just as they argue over whether May of ’68 was a long-overdue assertion of liberty against hierarchy or the beginning of an infantile appeal to pleasure over value.

The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him . The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makes it a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.

Then, in February of 1871, new legislative elections were held throughout France, and a majority returned in favor of an as yet ill-defined form of republican royalism. The Assembly, led by the aging statesman Adolphe Thiers—a politician under the Second Republic, who had been don’t-poke-the-bear wise about the war with the Germans before it started—soon declared itself the Third Republic. The people of Paris, always farther to the left than the rest of France, feared that the new republic would be republican in name only, and began organizing their own, alternative regime in the capital. A confrontation between what remained of the regular French Army, the Versaillais, and Paris’s popular militia, known as the National Guard, ended with the death of two generals, and the royalist-minded government fled Paris for Versailles, the old seat of the French kings. In Paris, a left-wing Communard government, protected by the National Guard, rose up and seized power, and for about two months that spring tried to rule on radical principles. It made various feints at self-organization, and offered statements of purpose that still seem prophetically advanced—particularly the boldly feminist ones. It also insulted the clergy and the few remaining rich people, and committed mostly disorganized acts of looting and reprisal against its ancient political enemies, including tearing down Thiers’s house and toppling the Place Vendôme column with its statue of Napoleon. (It’s back.)

The Versaillais then invaded Paris and, with minimal military difficulty, though at maximal human cost, reconquered the city. The Communards, as they were crushed by the advancing and brutal Versaillais, set fire to much of the city, including the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground, though whether all the fires were the result of a deliberate nihilistic policy set by sinister female “ pétroleuses ,” proto-suicide bombers, or a largely accidental result of the general chaos and violence is one of the many things that are still, violently, debated.

“Massacre” (Basic) is the Yale historian John Merriman’s vivid account of all this, and it’s proof of just how passionately present the trauma remains that this new book could be among the most passionate accounts of a distant historical episode that the reader is likely to encounter from an American academic. Merriman, whose earlier books include an eye-opening study of nineteenth-century anarchist violence, “The Dynamite Club,” is pro-Communard, emphatically so, and this gives his book both its great virtues and its real faults.

Its greatest virtue is the way Merriman particularizes the people of the Commune. For almost the first time in the vast scholarly literature on the topic, they are complicated individuals who come alive, rather than set-piece proletarian heroes or mere faces in the “mob” or “rabble” of right-wing imagination. Two figures especially stand out. There is “the Red Virgin,” Louise Michel, of the working-class Eighteenth Arrondissement, a militant Communard (“I descended the Butte, my rifle under my coat, shouting: Treason! . . . Our deaths would free Paris”) and a staunch feminist, who welcomed even prostitutes into the corps of women nursing injured fighters (“Who has more right than these women, the most pitiful of the old order’s victims, to give their lives for the new?”). The feminist aspect of the Commune—Merriman’s work here draws on Carolyn Eichner’s “Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune” (2004)—is one of its most appealing features: women like Michel played a central role, building barricades and chairing committees and generally raising hell. One Citoyenne Destrée declared, “The social revolution will not be realized until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance of revolution.”

If Louise Michel represents the forward-looking aspect of the Commune, Raoul Rigault represents the backward-looking aspect—he is a kind of Danton reborn. A socialist polemicist of appetite and charm, he became, in effect, the head of the Commune’s police force. “In their free moments, they downed food, wine, and eau-de-vie, having moved one of their favorite brasseries from the Boulevard Saint-Michel into the prefecture of police,” Merriman writes. One day in May, Rigault breakfasted on Chateaubriand aux truffes; a few days later, the fare included bottles of Pommard, Veuve Clicquot, and Nuits-Saint-Georges. His taste for Burgundy and champagne was perhaps political in nature, Bordeaux presumably being judged too reactionary, especially given that the retreating Imperial government had gone there to give up. (This general taste for the good life among the Communards, though the material of Versaillais propaganda, is one of the things that make them so sympathetic.)

Merriman relates the story of the Commune’s brief rise and brutal fall in tight detail, with hour-by-hour intensity, and draws all the drama out of the tale—even though the story is unavoidably sad, because the practical ambitions of the Communards were so incoherent. There is something suicidal about it, an Occupy Paris movement destined to become an urban Masada in the middle of the Belle Époque. The Communards had no tactics for spreading the principles of the Commune, any more than members of the New Left in late-sixties America had a plan for how, exactly, the working class would convert to their politics. The most the Communards seemed to have was a vague hope that communal-syndicalist organization would spread outward from central Paris into the provinces. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, “an infirmity of the French mind”—that of “being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.”) The Communards could scarcely build a barricade in an organized military manner, and the barricades they did build were neatly circumvented by the Versaillais, who climbed the stairs of the surrounding buildings and fired down at the defenders.

What united the Communard front wasn’t economic theory, or even socialism; it was anti-clericalism. Indeed, one has a strong sense that the deepest unifying element on both sides involved attitudes toward religion. There were very few on the Versailles side who would have been announced atheists. There were almost none on the Communard side who went to church. The Communards hated the ideological dictatorship and royalist sympathies of the Catholic Church, and transformed one Paris church after another into a community “club.” The Commune banned all religious teaching, and removed the crucifixes from classrooms. In the ugliest episode of the Commune, Rigault and his confederates took the Archbishop of Paris hostage, held him in prison, and then killed him and his adjutants, even though the fight by then was almost over.

If the chief virtue of Merriman’s book is that, taking the Communards seriously as people, he humanizes their resistance to power, its chief fault is its single-minded advocacy. Merriman treats all Communard atrocities as the result of provocations and a misguided effort at self-defense—the Archbishop was taken hostage partly to protect the life of the left-wing leader Blanqui, then in a Versaillais prison—while atrocities committed against the Communards were, in his account, solely the consequence of an evil campaign of reactionary terror. Any horror story about the Versaillais is immediately credited; we are told that, during the defeat of the Commune, the “well-dressed ladies” of Paris used their parasols to strip off the caps and cloths placed over the eyes of the executed Communards. Would “well-dressed ladies” really do this? But parallel stories about a Communard pétroleuse being caught with fuse lines in her pocket are rejected, perhaps rightly, as incredible.

As much as Merriman humanizes his Communards, he summarily dismisses—with an indifference surprising in an academic historian—their opponents as categorical types, using derisive expressions like “fancy folk” or “elegant Parisians” or simply the “bourgeoisie.” And this despite Sarah Maza’s demonstration, in one of the most revelatory books of recent French history, “The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie,” that the term, pursued to its particulars, does not describe even a roughly identifiable social grouping but is always a “social imaginary,” some shifting, ugly Other, “bourgeoisie” being the mirror image of the “mob” and “rabble” beloved of right-wing history. Merriman quotes with apparent approval one Élie Reclus, a Communard, who, walking through the Seventh Arrondissement as the Commune began to collapse, saw the “secret jubilation of all the concierges, shop owners, merchants of holy articles, and the religious men and women who make up the base of the population there,” and whose “eyes follow you so that they can denounce you.” But these people—small shopkeepers, the clergy, and the rest of the mercantile and professional classes—were, after all, simply other Parisians who valued their lives and their traditions. They were “ordinary people,” too, with the same right to political expression as the Communards who frightened them. At another moment, Merriman sneers at Thiers weeping when he learns that the Commune is about to destroy his home, along with his art collection: “Thiers, one could easily conclude, loved objects, not people.” But is there any man, of any political allegiance, who would not be heartsick to hear that his house and goods were about to be destroyed by his enemies? And one may be as anti-clerical as Voltaire and still be nauseated by the pointless murder of the Church hostages.

It’s significant that Léon Gambetta, the greatest radical parliamentary leader of the era—who escaped from the Prussian siege of Paris in a balloon (really) but remained in exile in Spain throughout the crucial period that followed—never had a good word for the Commune, though its apparent goals were close to his own. He thought of 1871 as “a horrific adventure.” But then Gambetta’s father had been a grocer, and he knew that the Communards perceived the small merchants as class enemies. When it comes to actual people in nineteenth-century France, social classes are slippery. Thiers’s father was a provincial locksmith; Louise Michel was the illegitimate but acknowledged and well-educated daughter of a serving girl and, probably, the son of the lord of the manor where she worked; and so on. Gambetta rejected the Commune for the same reason that Camus rejected sentimental approbation of the Algerian independence fighters, knowing that his French-Algerian mother, counted as an evil colonist, was simply a domestic, a cleaning woman, with no more “colonial privilege” than Gambetta’s grocer dad had class privileges.

Merriman is certainly right to insist that the Versaillais massacred far more people than the Communards did, but all the evidence is that this is because they won, and had more people to massacre. When the Communards had helpless people at their mercy, they killed them, too. (The violence began with the lynching of a cop, thrown, hands tied, into the Seine and watched as he drowned.) The hatred between the two sides was implacable as it can be only in a fraternal dispute. There are many instances in Merriman’s account of people being saved by accident or by the act of a charitable and decent individual. But there is scarcely an incident of a principled humanity, where one side or the other refused to massacre captured civilian prisoners or hostages on the ground that it was the wrong thing to do, rather than impolitic at that moment.

A “people’s” revolution the Commune may have been—but never a popular one. For if one thing is certain it is that the Commune did not claim the allegiance of anything like a majority of Frenchmen. The previous legislative elections had been overwhelmingly monarchist, and there is no reason to doubt that they represented what the majority of the French thought, just as the mini-Commune of ’68 was followed by a right-wing electoral victory. The Commune was a putsch in the capital, but there was no chance of winning a larger civil war with the right wing, because the right wing was not a small concentration of fancy folk but the majority of France’s peasants and merchants and country people. This did not make the Parisians (as the disgusting, and often implicitly anti-Semitic, propaganda had it later) “less French” than the others. But it did not make the others less French than the Communards.

Historians from the right can sometimes write as though the nineteenth century did not take place; historians from the left can often write as though the twentieth century never happened. The abuses, the mass immiseration, the ever-present threat of renewed monarchical absolutism—all these things were very real in France in 1870, and so the great radical and revolutionary socialist movements were moved by real suffering and oppression, not utopian schemes. But Merriman writes as if what happened later on the planet, when violent left-wing Communards did take power, with results that we know, would somehow magically not have happened in some other, earlier luckier moment. This time is different, or else that time would have been—we convince ourselves that the Commune would not have become another Terror or another Bolshevik October coup, brutal, intolerant, and absolutist in itself. There seems little evidence for this confidence: the Communard leader Rigault, to take one small instance, may be a life-affirming man of appetite, but he was as bloodthirsty as his predecessors, stopping, even as the Versaillais invaded Paris, to personally arrange the execution of a fellow-Communard—an old friend with whom he was feuding—long after it could possibly have any political point. (Lenin is said to have danced with delight the day his coup lasted longer than the Commune.)

There had to be a better way, and the French found it. It was called the Third Republic. The defeat of the Commune was the last victory of the royalists, but the first battle toward a real republic. The right in France learned, in the eighteen-seventies, that it could rule only by abdicating royalism completely—even though the Thiers government had been elected on a royalist cast.

What the Communards fought and died for was, fifty years later, achieved, as France moved toward a modern welfare state, and firmly separated Church and nation. What the royalists killed for—and died for, too—was over, and for good. The real winner was the republic as it would become. The path from the death of the Commune to true republicanism was extremely knotty, but, by the end of the eighteen-seventies, France was on it. (Even Louise Michel was amnestied, and came home, to resume her career as an unapologetic provocateur.) The responsible left came to embrace legislative Republicanism single-mindedly, not out of fear but out of wisdom—knowing that the only way to maintain the real revolution was to accept in permanence the truth that rejecting the legitimacy of the opposition could end only in violence, real liberal republicanism being no more than the understanding that there are legitimate ideas about shaping the future of the nation other than your own.

Jean Jaurès—a founder of the social democrats, and the greatest left-wing populist hero France has produced—embraced the Republic, and all its exhausting parliamentary maneuverings, because he understood the unimaginable costs that renewed civic warfare would bring. The right had to be opposed, not eliminated. The experience of the Commune became one more warning—the Terror had already supplied a good one—of what a movement for social justice and liberty without an accompanying sense of political pluralism could cost. Jaurès, like his fellow-radical Gambetta, grasped that a social revolution without popular legitimacy was not a social revolution at all but yet another coup, sure to insure the next in the opposite direction. (That a coup could seize the government and then enforce its will by terror, if it was willing to conduct terror on an unimaginably large scale, was a Leninist possibility not yet revealed to them.) The practical radical Gambetta eventually came to captain a political grouping that called itself Opportunist Republicans. Surely no political movement in history has ever borne a less inspiring name. But its central insight was sound: that the future lay with coalitions of different estates, petty bourgeois and peasantry and proletariat mixed up, not with a Commune committed to one.

Perhaps the Commune continues to resonate as well because of its place in the smaller world of canvas and frames. Against all normal historical logic, the rise and fall of the Commune presaged not a period of repression and misery but one of the brightest and most pleasure-celebrating periods in the long history of culture: the blossoming of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in Paris in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, an explosion of light that continues to illuminate our lives today. The first Impressionist exhibition was held in 1874, on one of the barricaded boulevards of the Commune, while the ruins of the Tuileries Palace lay smoldering next to the Louvre. Even if the imagery of that pleasure is partly a myth, it is hard to square with the repressive brutality that was its forerunner. And all the more because, as Merriman shows, some of the leading painters of the group, including Manet, were broadly sympathetic to the Communards; Manet made two devastating graphic images of the massacre of Communards by the regular Army, all the more painful for their cool detachment.

The art historian Kirk Varnedoe used to give a lecture on the ruins of the Tuileries and their absence from advanced painting—most unforgettably, he gave it in the months after 9/11—and asked why the avant-garde painters, hardly lacking in courage or originality, almost entirely ignored them as a subject. Why did they turn their backs on the visible ruins, right in the traditional heart of Paris, to paint the new boulevards? (One can just see a piece of the ruins, near where the Pyramide of the Louvre now stands, on the left-hand edge of a single Monet.) It wasn’t because they were afraid of enraging conventional opinion. The Impressionists, with painters from the left, like Manet and Pissarro, and painters from the right, like Degas, broke later, over the Dreyfus affair, but at the beginning they were a model of opportunistic Republicanism in paint: they hung together, because they knew that the pursuit of artistic liberty evaded the usual ideological paths. They wanted to escape the cycle of violence between right and left that had disfigured the history of their city. It was better to build on the ruins than to make another.

This was not escapist or apolitical— the insight that one is not obliged to enroll in a perpetual cycle of violence and reprisal is not apolitical or escapist. When Renoir painted even a seeming chocolate-box cover such as the “Moulin de la Galette,” of 1876, a scene from a working-class Sunday evening in Montmartre, he was painting young people dancing whose families must have been around during the Commune. (Galettes are pancakes, cheap fast food, popular eats.) He paints them not as victims or ideological puppets but as resilient, active participants in pleasure-seeking. The peculiarly punitive kind of Puritanism favored by American art historians sometimes sees this as putting a smiley face on a horrible reality, again for the benefit of those bad bourgeois. But Renoir, who was a son of the working classes, though artisanal rather than industrial, wasn’t avoiding the political reality. If a vote could have been taken, the young men and women in his pictures would probably all have voted socialist, as their parents did. Renoir looks apolitical, but he grasped instinctively that the same kids whose families supported the Commune weren’t going to have their lives or pleasures defined by other people’s hatreds. Dancing, they were voting, in every sense, with their feet.

The Impressionists were witnessing the reconstruction of a civil society, canvas by canvas and frame by frame, capturing, and so creating, values that were better than what was on offer. They were showing a reality that ideology evades. There is always another way to envision modernity, a way that the violent categories of the political moment deny. Envisioning the other way is one of the things that artists are there to do. The fires of Paris gave rise to Paris light, just as the Commune eventually gave rise to the Third Republic, which fell only when the Nazis invaded. The postwar Fourth and Fifth Republics, though formally different, were essentially a continuation of it. Out of the ruins of the Commune, a very precarious kind of pluralism bloomed. It blooms, precariously, still. ♦

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11 replies to this topic

Greeters.paris.

Daniel was exceptionally knowledgeable ... alchemy in particular.

Give them a try ... you might be pleasantly surprised.

https://exploreparis.com/fr/4219-visite-guidee-la-commune-et-le-siege-de-paris.html

https://reservation.parisinfo.com/il4-offre_i1020-visite-guidee-sur-la-commune-de-paris-a-montmartre.aspx

https://www.montmartre-site.com/commune-de-paris-a-montmartre.html

https://www.sous-les-paves.com/produit/commune-de-paris-visite-de-montmartre-coeur-de-lhistoire/

Otherwise, there are a few English tours, but much, much more expensive! (like... $158)

https://www.toursbylocals.com/communedeparismonmartre

Or you have this "official" list of anglophone guides: https://en.parisinfo.com/discovering-paris/guided-tours/tour-guides-paris/guided-tours-english

Thank you! I appreciate this and have reached out to them.

Wow, this is exactly what I needed - thank you!!

Have you read his other books? To Lose a Battle or A Sabage War of Peace, for instance.

I seem to recall a museum section on that in Nancy but that museum is closed for work now anyway.

There is a section in a museum up in St Denis on the Commune FYI

https://musee-saint-denis.com/portfolio/le-siege-et-la-commune-de-paris/#

Perhaps because of that chance encounter the experience has stayed with me - so give Paris Greeters a go. I'd be very surprised if they cannot supply someone well informed on a topic of such historical significance.

The payment arrangement with Paris Greeters is by way of donation to the organisation, not to the guide. We shouted the guide and his companion drinks at the end of the morning. Nothing more would be accepted. So if the going commercial guiding service (earlier post) comes in at $158 (same number in Euros I think at the moment) I'm not suggesting you match, but it gives an idea of the dollar market value of the experience.

While I very much support the Greeter International Association, they are very clear that their greeters are not tour guides. They are residents of the city who volunteer their time to show you around the city as they would do for a friend or family member.

Do you understand and speak French? There's a lot of information on the website of « Les Amies et Amis de la Commune de Paris 1871 » https://www.commune1871.org/ You might consider reaching out to them to see if they could provide any information.

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Occupation and Liberation of Paris, from 1940 to 1944

Relive the period that marked French history 80 years ago, and immerse yourself in the historical and political context of the Occupation of Paris in the 20th century, on this unforgettable guided tour. N.B. : The visit with a scheduled date is only available for 2 people or more (from €140).

Behind the scenes of the UNESCO headquarters

Discover the headquarters of one of the most prestigious international organisations during an exclusive tour of the UNESCO house in Paris.

Les secrets de Paris à mobylette

Parcourez les rues parisiennes au guidon d'une ancienne mobylette, restaurée et convertie à l'électrique et (re)découvrez l'histoire de Paris et ses quartiers-villages sous cet angle insolite ! 

Classical music concerts in the Château de Grosbois

An exclusive programme of classical music concerts held in a prestigious venue: the Château de Grosbois at Boissy-Saint-Léger. Language: French speaking only.

Sing'In Montmartre

The guide and singer Anne-Sophie Guerrier brings you on a musical journey through Montmartre. This visit will retrace the life of famous singers who lived in the neightborhood : Édith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Dalida...

Guided tour of the Museum of Jewish Art and History

The Museum of Jewish Art and History (mahJ) replaced the Museum of Jewish Art, created in 1948 by survivors of the Shoah. It is housed, since 1998, in Hotel de Saint-Aignan, one of the most beautiful mansions of the Marais neighborhood in Paris. Its great collection features the evolution of the Jewish world.

Drancy Deportation Camp and Holocaust memorial

This Drancy Internment camp visit will lead you to the Shoah Memorial, opened in 2012 in Drancy, a place of history and education, located opposite the building - Cité de la Muette.

The rebel women of sport

Feminists in the City invites you to the 14th arrondissement of Paris to retrace the hidden history of women's sport.

Walking Tour of the Jewish Marais

Join le Marais historic district guided walking tour to discover Paris Jewish culture past and present.

Saint-Denis Basilica guided tour

Less known than Notre-Dame de Paris or Sacré-Cœur, Saint-Denis Cathedral is nevertheless a major Parisian landmark. Our English speaking guide will take you on a trip through the History of French royalty, funeral art and Gothic architecture in a chronological order.

The Parisian Chinatown

Discover the Chinatown district of the south of Paris with this guided tour. You will learn many things about Asian community of Paris : temples, food, usages.

Historical Guided Tour within hôtels particuliers of the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis in Paris

Step back in time and immerse yourself in the captivating aventure of Paris's historic treasures during an exclusive guided tour of the Ile de la Cité and the Ile Saint-Louis, with a passionate guide from L’Echappée Belle, who will reveal the secrets and fascinating history behind each iconic monument and hôtel particulier (private mansion).

The Paris Marais: the birthplace of parisian private mansions

Explore the elegant essence of Paris's Marais district on a captivating guided tour, by L'Echappée Belle, of its sumptuous hôtels particuliers. 

Parisian Père Lachaise cemetery: in the kingdom of celebrities

L'Echappée Belle will take you through the graves of renowned figures of this famous cemetery, a parisian relaxing place in the shade of the big trees.

Parisian Splendours: guided tour from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre

Let's take a guided stroll by L'Echappée Belle through the most emblematic places in Paris, discovering the wealth of our heritage and the interactions between France and other countries through the ages. 

The French Revolution in the Paris Marais

With your guide from Interkultur, dive into the tumult of the French Revolution in Paris, where every stone in the Marais harbours the secrets of an era seething with ideals and revolt.

Ciné-balade, guided walking tour in Montmartre in the footsteps of your favorite movies

During this ciné-balade (a movie-themed guided walk) in Montmartre, Juliette Dubois will tell you anecdotes and facts about the film industry in this famous Parisian district, the most filmed of the capital. 

Art route at Paris Père Lachaise cemetery: in the footsteps of the great masters

Join us on this two-hour tour to discover the poets, writers, musicians and painters in their final resting place, the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

An artistic stroll: discovering artists at Paris Montparnasse cemetery

Welcome to our guided tour of Montparnasse Cemetery, a place steeped in history and emotion where great artists rest in peace. Join us for a captivating exploration of this sanctuary of creativity and memory. 

Memorial of the former deportation station of Bobigny

Following a vast restoration and development project, the memorial of the former deportation station of Bobigny opened its doors on January 18, 2023. Visit this site with a guide, and discover the only example in France of a railway site used for the deportation of Jews that has remained almost in its original state.

Guided tour of the Shoah Memorial Drancy

This historical guided tour will take you to the Shoah Memorial, opened in 2012 in Drancy, a place of history and education, opposite the Cité de la Muette also known as the World War Two Drancy internment camp.

Women in the Paris Commune (1871) !

Join local guide Anouk Colombani on a tour of the streets of Paris in the footsteps of the women who took action during the Paris Commune.

Historical guided tour of Montmartre

Thanks to a guided tour that follows the Montmartre hill towards the rue de Clignancourt before starting its ascent and descent, discover the stories of the popular and working-class Montmartre with local guide Anouk Colombani.

Guided tours of the most important or most private heritage sites in Paris. Museums, archives, monuments ... discover France's architectural treasures.

Explore Paris also invites you to discover the skills and trades that help safeguard and restore France's national heritage in foundries, workshops of national monuments, museums, etc.

Learn more about the places and people who wish to pass on the history of the industrial, architectural, artistic and gastronomic heritage of Paris and its region . Don't miss our visits around craft and industrial know-how.  

Scars of Paris Commune

The Paris Commune, which took place from March 18 to May 27 1871, is a major historical episode of the late 19th century. Scars are still visible in Paris. Places of memory to discover during your walks.

Rue Haxo : la villa des otages

In the last days of the bloody week, communards held a few quarters of the east of the capital.

On 26 May, 52 hostages from La Roquette prison, including 34 gendarmes and 11 Jesuits, were taken to 85 Haxo Street (20th arrondissement), in an old café-concert serving as a command post. In response to the Versaillese massacres, they were all killed. The plaque “villa des otages” of 85 rue Haxo recalls this event. At the nearby Belleville cemetery, you can see a stele placed at the place where these hostages were buried.

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise : le mur des Fédérés 

In the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the Mur des Fédérés is one of the most important places of memory of Paris Commune

After the Rue Haxo events, the Communards took refuge in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, last bastion of the insurrection. On the 27th of May, the cemetery was a gigantic battle-field, where the Federates (name given to the Commune soldiers) fought with bladed weapons in the midst of burials. The last fighters (147) have been shot in front of the wall then thrown into a mass grave in front of it. The wall took the name of “Mur des Fédérés” only fifteen years after the events.

In front of the wall, you can see the tomb of Jean-Baptiste Clément, author of the famous song Le Temps des Cerises .

Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis

In the Marais, inside the Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis church, you can see a curious writing on the second pillar on the right when entering the church : “République française ou la mort”  (French Republic or death).

We don’t know much about this revolutionary message, except that it is the work of a Communard who, hearing that the Versaillais were entering Paris, have shared his republican convictions inside the church.

Guided Tours

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... six self-guided walking tours of Paris organized around six eras of Paris history and architecture. The walks are free, fun, and easy to follow. They’ll help you explore the city of Paris, and its many layers of history, at your own pace.

Most Paris walking tours are organized geographically around particular sections of the city. They usually cover a lot of historical territory and can get a bit overwhelming at times — too many people, events, and building styles — from too many centuries — all jumbled together.

These Paris “history walks” are different . They’re organized historically around eras of Paris history. As a result, you can focus — on common historical themes — a limited cast of characters — and buildings with similar architectural styles.

The walking guides for these walks are easy to print out, fold up, and take with you.

• Each guide begins with some historical background for the walk you’re about to take. Short summaries focus on politics and economics, religion and philosophy, architecture, and urban growth and development.

• You’ll also find a walking tour route map, detailed descriptions of the buildings and monuments on the tour route, walking directions, information on opening times and admission fees, and lots of photos.

To get started , just click on one of the pictures or titles to the left. The link will take you to an overview of that walk, and a quick list of information you’ll need to plan your day. From there, all you have to do is click on and print the Guide and Map pdf and you’re on your way.

Contact: [email protected]

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Can Paris live up to the hype? Find out on a walking tour of its gilded past

Weave between late-19th-century monuments on urban walking tours to learn about this defining era — and why it’s gilded with such intense nostalgia.

Of all the cities in the world, Paris is most afflicted by its own mythology. For many travellers, including the time-hopping protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), the allure of the city lies in its ability to evoke the charms of a bygone era. The romanticisation that ensues inevitably causes some to come unstuck, of course: the term ‘Paris Syndrome’ was coined in the 1980s for Japanese travellers sent spiralling into a state of psychosis by the collision of reality with their oversaturated expectations of the City of Light.

Undeterred, I’ve come to Paris to unpack what I can of the belle époque — a golden age of bohemia, optimism and technological progress that flourished in the peaceful years between 1871 and the start of the First World War. Impressionism was born; cinema invented; the can-can made popular in louche theatres like the Moulin Rouge. Was it a truly romantic era, or just romanticised? And can it be recaptured?

My first insights come from Spanish-born Ana Gimena, who does little to dispel my nostalgia when I meet her on the magnificent steps of the Petit Palais, built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle world fair and now an art museum. Regally costumed in a swishing skirt, lace bodice and a bonnet sprouting ostrich feathers, the historical tour guide turns every head. “If I were in a time machine, I wouldn’t hesitate: I’d come right back for the Exposition Universelle,” she says, neatly folding her gloves into her bag as we enter the museum.

The trapped-in-time character Ana plays for the public is wild about the world fair — an era-defining exhibition held at the height of the art nouveau period, for which the Petit Palais, Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre III bridge were constructed under the supervision of architect Charles Girault. The magnificent Musée d’Orsay, on the Left Bank of the Seine, and Galeries Lafayette, on Boulevard Haussmann, are also products of this period.

“People would have seen electricity for the first time; engines, moving pictures, flying machines, the Metro. Imagine!” she says breathlessly. “Over 50 million people came to Paris when the population of the whole country was just 39 million. I don’t think the Olympics will compare.”

Along with Girault, famous Frenchmen making their mark on the city in these years included engineer Gustav Eiffel, artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and composer Claude Debussy — luminaries whose graves can be visited in the city’s venerable cemeteries. But, crucially for Ana, this was a time when women started to shape public life.

We stand in front of a towering oil painting of actress and courtesan Sarah Bernhardt reclined exotically on cushions, her sinewy figure draped in satin, her face a study in bemusement. “The ultimate celebrity of the belle époque,” Ana says. “Men wanted her; women copied her fashion.” Christian virtues were still extolled by the ruling classes, however, and in a period where prostitution among the lower classes skyrocketed, her social capital was the exception rather than the rule. “Society was double-edged,” Ana says, checking the antique pocket watch pinned to her waist and donning her gloves to leave. “We must acknowledge the bad of the time, too.”

It’s easy enough to slip back in time in Paris; love and deference have been poured into preserving pockets of history in every quarter. For lunch, I drop into Bouillon Chartier, in the ninth arrondissement, a workers’ bistro built with breathtaking flamboyance in 1896, where uniformed waiters still tally the bill on the tablecloth. But to dine à la belle époque, I could have just as easily gone to Le Train Bleu or Bofinger — or a dozen more restaurants set in aspic.

I spend the evening in nearby Pigalle, home to Paris’s now-trendy red-light district, where the sumptuous four-star Hôtel Rochechouart, renovated in 2020 to its original Jazz Age splendour, hosts the great and the good of Paris. Think: foie gras in the classically French bistro; absinthe cocktails at the rooftop bar; and swaying the night away at Le Mikado Dancing, the underground speakeasy. The French windows in my suite open onto a view of the Sacré-Cœur, glowing atop Montmartre; down below, the neon lights of Boulevard de Clichy’s sex shops twinkle provocatively.

The next morning, I rendezvous with Julie Marangé, founder of Feminists in the City walking tours, and we head towards the Moulin Rouge, one of the most culturally loaded legacies of the belle époque. “Some historians describe the period as France’s ‘Golden Age of Prostitution’,” says Julie. “But to say there was anything ‘golden’ about this period for women tells you everything you need to know about who’s been writing history so far.”

Learning the stories of embattled and half-forgotten female figures is one of the appeals of the Visit Montmartre with Hysterical Feminists tour — that, and seeing Julie attempt to demonstrate a few can-can kicks. “There’s so much more symbolism and subversion to the dance than people know,” says Julie. “It speaks of sexual liberation and independence, of guns and self-pleasure.”

Asked to name French artists of the early 20th century, most people might say Claude Monet, Edgar Degas or Pierre-Auguste Renoir, all of whom kept studios in the vertiginous alleys of Montmartre. But few today would identify the Moulin Rouge’s sell-out headliner, the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again dancer Louise ‘La Goulue’ Weber, who formalised the can-can quadrille. Julie also extols the risqué performance art of the dancer and clown Cha-U-Kao and the novelist and mime Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, both of whom faced censure by expressing their love for women openly.

I’m seeing Paris in a new light, my guides helping solidify its reputation for great art and dynamic social progress, while undermining any attempt to simplify or sugar-coat the belle époque. Would I get in a time machine? With the era’s rich architectural and cultural legacy so entwined with the present day, perhaps there’s no need.

Related Topics

• WALKING TOURS
• CULTURAL TOURISM
• ARCHITECTURE

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• Carnavalet - History of Paris Museum
• What to see and do
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• Museums and cultural sites

Description

Community facilities, accessibility.

After four years’ work, the Carnavalet Paris History Museum has reopened, bringing you the opportunity to enjoy an incredible journey back in time, discovering the history of Paris and its inhabitants.

Based in the heart of the historical Marais district and housed in two private mansions, Carnavalet, where Madame de Sévigné lived, and Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, the Carnavalet Paris History Museum is the oldest museum in the City of Paris and one of the largest French museums with a collection of almost 625,000 works each more outstanding than the next.

The history of Paris and a collection of outstanding works

The paintings, sculptures, furniture items, wooden features, objets d’art, historical and memorial items, signs, photographs, drawings, prints, engravings, posters, models, medals, coins and archaeological collections presented in a completely redesigned museum layout trace the history of Paris in a unique manner, one which is both historical, artistic, documentary, sentimental and close to the people of Paris. Because all of the items here are authentic, and if only they could talk they’d have so much to tell you, with perhaps even some secrets to reveal. What stories would the campaign bag belonging to Napoleon I tell us? Or how about Zola’s watch or Marcel Proust’s bedroom and personal effects? A good many anecdotes will be shared with you during your journey to the beating heart of Parisian history.

An exciting immersion in the museum’s collections

The extensive collections presented in an exhibition area of almost 3,900 m² take you on a journey back in time, from prehistory, back when Paris was still Lutetia, up to the present day. Experience the turbulence and torments of the French Revolution in the exhibition rooms devoted entirely to it and those of the Paris Commune . The immersive displays and the reconstituted décors will help you learn more about the architectural transformation, the art of living or the artistic, political and religious heritage of a city like no other.

The Marais district, a place steeped in history

The numerous private mansions dotted throughout the Marais district contain a wealth of treasures as fascinating as their architecture, which in itself makes the visit worthwhile. As examples, the Hôtel Salé today houses the collections of the Picasso-Paris Museum while the treasures of the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism can be discovered at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan. A little further on, pay a visit to Victor Hugo’s apartment which you’ll find in Place des Vosges, one of the finest squares in Paris. The work of the famous writer is revealed through the furniture, objects and works of art that belonged to him or that he created himself.

Wherever you go next, there will still be museums and cultural sites for you to discover in Paris Region.

Access and contact

• http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/en/homepage

Metro: line 1 Saint Paul - Le Marais station Line 5 Breguet-Sabin station Line 8 Chemin Vert station Bus 29, 69, 91, 96

Days and opening hours

Every day throughout the year between 10 am and 6 pm. Closed on Monday. Closed exceptionally on January 1st, May 1st and December 25th. Free access to the permanent collections. Reservation of a free ticket is compulsory to visit the permanent collections (at the time of reopening). Reservation of a visit slot for the exhibitions is compulsory. Cash register closing time at 17:15.

Spoken languages

Guided tour languages, bulletin board languages, single mean time tour, single services tour.

• Unguided individual tours on request
• Guided individual tours on request
• Hearing disability
• Mental disability
• Visual disability
• Accessible for self-propelled wheelchairs
• Reception staff sensitized to the reception of people with disabilities
• Copyright image:
• Pierre Antoine

Expired session

Lunch in Paris: Montmartre

If the bohemian essence of Paris is what you’re looking for, Montmartre is the perfect call. This neighborhood, seated on the top of a hill in the 18th arrondissement, offers an escape from the hustle of central Paris. Montmartre’s narrow streets, lined with artists and quaint cafes, create a village-like atmosphere that invites leisurely strolls and quiet contemplation. This unique blend of artistic legacy and modern-day vibrancy makes Montmartre a must-visit destination for those looking to have a nice lunch in Paris.

Walking through Montmartre, one can’t help but feel the influence of the many artists who once called this place home. The neighborhood has long been a haven for creatives, with figures like Picasso and Van Gogh drawing inspiration from its picturesque streets and lively ambiance. Today, Montmartre continues to be a hub for artists, musicians, and performers, adding to its dynamic cultural scene. The area’s iconic landmarks, such as the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, provide stunning views of the city, making it an ideal spot for a relaxed afternoon.

Montmartre’s inviting atmosphere extends beyond its artistic appeal. The neighborhood buzzes with life, offering a mix of traditional and contemporary experiences. Visitors can explore local boutiques, enjoy street performances, or simply relax in one of the many charming cafes. Whether you’re seeking a quiet corner to read or a lively spot to enjoy a drink, Montmartre has something to offer everyone.

Montmartre’s Take on the Lunch in Paris Experience

Besides being an artistic heaven, Montmartre is also a culinary treasure. The neighborhood’s dining scene is diverse, offering something for every palate. From cozy cafes serving fresh pastries to gourmet bistros with exquisite dishes, Montmartre is a food lover’s paradise. The variety of dining options reflects the area’s rich cultural history, making it an exciting place to explore different flavors and culinary traditions.

Strolling through Montmartre, you will find an array of eateries that cater to every taste. Traditional French cuisine takes center stage, with many restaurants offering classic dishes like coq au vin, duck confit, and escargot . These establishments often use locally sourced ingredients, ensuring that every meal is fresh and flavorful. Besides traditional French fare, Montmartre is home to a range of international cuisines, providing a global culinary experience within this charming neighborhood.

The food scene in Montmartre perfectly represents Paris’s status as a top lunch destination. Cafes and bakeries line the streets, tempting passersby with the aroma of freshly baked bread and pastries. Wine bars and brasseries offer cozy spots to enjoy a glass of French wine paired with delicious cheese and charcuterie. For those seeking a more upscale dining experience, gourmet bistros and restaurants provide meticulously crafted dishes that showcase the best of French culinary artistry. Whether you’re looking for a quick bite or a leisurely meal, Montmartre has a dining option to suit your needs.

A Glimpse into Montmartre’s History

Montmartre’s history is as rich as its cultural offerings. This neighborhood has been a magnet for artists since the late 19th century, drawing in renowned figures like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec. These artists were inspired by Montmartre’s vibrant atmosphere and picturesque settings, capturing the spirit of the area in their works. The legacy of these creative minds can still be felt today, with numerous art studios, galleries, and the famous Place du Tertre, where artists display and sell their work.

The origins of Montmartre date back to Roman times, but it truly flourished during the Belle Époque period. During this era, Montmartre was the epicenter of artistic and cultural life in Paris. The area’s cabarets, such as the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir, became legendary spots where artists, writers, and bohemians gathered. These venues not only provided entertainment but also fostered a sense of community and collaboration among the creative minds of the time. This bohemian spirit is still very much alive in Montmartre, making it a unique blend of history and modernity.

For more detailed insights into Montmartre’s history, you can visit Culture Travel’s guide to Montmartre​ (Culture Travel) ​.

As Montmartre evolved, so did its culinary scene. Initially, it was a place where artists and locals could find affordable and hearty meals. Over time, Montmartre’s food offerings became more sophisticated, reflecting the area’s growing popularity and diversity. Today, visitors can enjoy a mix of traditional French cuisine and contemporary culinary innovations, all within the historic and charming setting of Montmartre. 

What to Expect From a Lunch in Montmartre  

This sweet neighborhood offers an array of dining experiences, from casual cafes to sophisticated bistros. Visitors can expect to find classic French dishes, such as escargot, beef bourguignon, and ratatouille, made with fresh, locally sourced ingredients. The emphasis on quality and tradition ensures that every meal in Montmartre is a memorable one.

In addition to traditional dishes, Montmartre is known for its charming patisseries and bakeries. These establishments are perfect for those with a sweet tooth, offering a range of pastries , cakes, and other desserts. A visit to a local boulangerie is a must, where you can enjoy freshly baked baguettes and croissants. Cheese lovers will also find plenty to enjoy, with fromageries offering a wide selection of French cheeses, each with its unique flavor and character.

Wine bars and brasseries add another layer to Montmartre’s culinary appeal. These spots are ideal for a relaxed lunch in Paris or an evening meal, with an excellent selection of wines and expertly prepared dishes. The neighborhood’s diverse food scene also includes international cuisines, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Paris. Whether you’re in the mood for Italian, Asian, or Middle Eastern flavors, Montmartre has something to satisfy every craving. 

Introducing Our Montmartre Food Tour

Secret Food Tours offers a unique way to explore Montmartre through its culinary delights. Our Montmartre food tour provides an insider’s look into the neighborhood’s best food spots, guided by experts who share fascinating stories and local knowledge. This tour is designed to give you an authentic taste of Montmartre’s food culture during your lunch in Paris, making it an unforgettable experience for any food lover.

Much more than just a lunch in Paris, the tour includes a visit to a local boulangerie, where you can savor freshly baked pastries that capture the essence of French baking. Next, we visit a fromagerie, allowing you to sample a selection of exquisite French cheeses. These tastings offer a perfect introduction to the diverse and flavorful world of French dairy products. Afterward, we explore a charcuterie shop, where you can enjoy the finest cured meats, a staple of French cuisine. Each stop on the tour is carefully chosen to highlight the best that Montmartre has to offer.

As the tour continues, we stop at a cozy bistro to enjoy traditional French dishes prepared with the freshest ingredients. This provides a wonderful opportunity to experience the hearty and comforting flavors that French cuisine is known for. You’ll also visit a renowned patisserie, where you can indulge in a sweet treat to end your culinary journey on a high note. Throughout the tour, our knowledgeable guides provide insights into Montmartre’s food history and local traditions, making the experience both educational and enjoyable.

Please check out the official Montmartre Food Tour page for the full itinerary.

Book Your Lunch in Paris Experience Today

If you want to elevate your lunch in Paris experience, booking a food tour with Secret Food Tours is the perfect choice. This tour offers a unique perspective on the neighborhood, allowing you to taste and enjoy its culinary delights. Our knowledgeable guides will take you to the best food spots, sharing their expertise and stories about Montmartre’s food culture.

Our tour is about understanding the history and traditions behind each dish. You’ll learn about the local ingredients and the culinary techniques that make French cuisine so special. The combination of delicious tastings and insightful commentary makes this tour a highlight of any trip to Paris.

Don’t miss the chance to explore Montmartre through its food. Book your Montmartre food tour with Secret Food Tours today and discover the flavors that make this neighborhood so unique. 

If you’re still not sure on which neighborhood you should have your food tour, here’s a guide on how to choose the perfect one for you.

Secret Foodie

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