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Women and the Paris Commune

This was originally a discussion post for my organization but I figured it belongs here.

Before we begin our discussion, I would just like to preface that I am a man, and while I am discussing and providing a history of women’s participation in the Paris Commune, I may not be 100% correct in my analysis, as I cannot detach myself from sexism and misogyny of our patriarchal society and its legacies. For that, I apologize ahead of time, and will immediately adjust and correct any oppressive analysis that people will reveal in the discussion. I will do my best to present the views and analysis of female historians whom I have encountered during my research on the topic.

The Paris Commune is one of the most pivotal moments in revolutionary history as it was France’s closest moment to socialism in the nineteenth-century. Before we delve into its specifics, I will provide some context about how this commune came to fruition so we get a better sense of the material conditions in 1870s France and why the Commune occurred.

Students of history cannot understand the Paris Commune without considering two key events: the revival of radical thought and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1870s experienced a bust in the capitalist economic cycle, which lead to a revival in republic and socialist organizations and anarchist thought. In June 1868, Napoleon III legalized public meetings, which the French government banned partially due to the women demanding equal rights during the French Revolution. As people held public meetings, they began to organize strikes against their bosses and other corporations for better working conditions and wages. This occurred in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The second context, the Franco-Prussian War, also served as the catalyst for the Commune. This war briefly summarized, Otto von Bismarck goaded France into a war for which it was not prepared and lost miserably. In the summer of 1870, the Germans captured the French emperor Napoleon III in the Battle of Sedan, which led to insurrection in Paris and then its eventual siege by the Germans. The siege of Paris lasted months; people who did not die of starvation resorted to eating all kinds of animals to survive. Additionally, there was a moratorium placed on rent, as people could not work and their property owners escaped Paris prior to the siege.

In January of 1871, France, not Paris, capitulated to the Germans, and the war ended. At the same time, the Blanquists began to mobilize French workers to demand a new government, a Commune. Part of the reason for mobilization was due to the landlords demanding their rents with interest. In February that same year, the Parisians held an election unbeknownst to the rest of France, and this new Parisian government established peace treaties with the Prussians. Paris was a highly volatile place and what sparked the Commune was a dispute over its cannons, which protected a working-class neighborhood. On March 18, 1871, the French army forcibly attempted to seize the cannons and a few of its defenders died in the process. That day the Parisians revolted and the Commune began.

Many Marxists focus on the role of the working class in the Paris Commune and its futility most notably by Leon Trotsky who believed the Commune came too late and did not attempt to spread the revolution. His focus is on the meaning of the commune and not on the participants themselves; he specifically ignores the role of women and the roles they performed during this revolutionary moment.

Women played a leading role in this revolutionary moment. Paradoxically, historians have credited them with the defeat of the army and blamed for the death of the two generals despite having no guns. From two o’clock to six o’clock in the morning, the struggle for the cannons was a male-centered drama; however, after six, women played a key role in the taking of the cannons for in the opening hours of the day as they opened their blinds, fetched food for breakfast, they observed the army attempting to steal the cannons. One woman, the most famous Communard, the anarchist Louise Michel, rifle in hand, alerted the city of Paris about the treasonous actions of the French army. Her and other women battled the soldiers over control of the cannons. They charged the guards shouting, “Unharness the horses [who were pulling the cannons]! Let’s go! We want the cannons! We will have the cannons! Cut the traces [the reigns]!” The women and men detached the horses from the cannons and established control over the weapons. In this chaotic moment, the French army balked at firing into a crowd of citizens to which Michel remarked, “The Revolution was made.” Working class women of the Paris set the stage for the radicalization of the Commune.

In April as the city of Paris fought Versailles to maintain autonomy, female demonstrators played an integral role in rallying supporting. Seven hundred to two thousand women gathered in Paris to propose a march to Versailles to explain the need for the Commune and they discussed also joining the men in their fight against Versailles. One working class woman suggested that women had one final attempt to reconcile with Versailles before more the armies shed more blood. Another woman, Beatrix Excoffons, reported that a group of seven hundred women was not large enough to convince Versailles of a ceasefire, so instead they tended to the wounded. Women were also warriors in the Commune. On April 11 and 12, newspapers called for the Citizenesses of Paris to join the army. Eight women formed the Union des Femmes pour la Défense de Paris et les Soins aux Blessés (The Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and the Health of the Injured) and responded to the call. The Union des Femmes declared, “It is not peace but all-out war that the women workers of Paris demand! Conciliation today is betrayal” and “Paris will not give in…The women of Paris will prove to France and to the world that…they are truly as capable as their brothers of giving up their lives in the cause of the Commune, the cause of the People.” This call to defense scared the conservatives who resided both in and out of Paris for women were acting outside of their expected gender roles. As women organized to join the fight, men joined as well, for they felt their masculinity was at stake for they clung to their toxic conceptualizations of masculinity. Fifteen hundred women ended up signing up for the military, but the National Guard did not pursue any interest in incorporating these women into their ranks.

Women were not just in the military ranks but they also composed of a significant number of them played integral roles to raising political consciousness and demanding for equality. While men excluded them from official political power, it did not stop them from exerting political pressure on their politicians. They formed women exclusive political clubs and mixed clubs as well. Anticlericalism frequently appeared in popular discourse as women, and men, demanded for the investigation, arrest, and execution of priests and nuns, which terrified the bourgeoisie. A few women demanded the people toss the nuns into the Seine for poisoning wounded soldiers. Their passion and rhetoric propelled some workers to capture churches and turned the altars into places to feed and house people.

The merits of socialism also appeared in popular discourse at the time. Women proposed the abolition of prostitution, the legalization of divorce, and the recognition of free unions (which were illegal in France until the 1880s). Additionally, some women demanded the end of religious instruction. Women who participated in these debates were largely working class. The female organizers wore red scarves like their male counterparts, some carried pistols to meetings others did not; nursing children and smoking was a typical occurrence at these events. The men who attended these discussions were horrified absolutely about the nonchalant ways in which women would suggest an end to marriage, equality between the sexes, and they asserted the superiority of women. One man remarked that these women endangered western civilization as he heard a woman comment, “To be married is to be a slave…It cannot be tolerated any longer in a free city. It ought to be considered a crime and suppressed by the most severe of measures.” She later continued that divorce was not a solution but rather an “Orléanist [bourgeois] expedient.”

Now that we have a basic idea of what happened in the Commune, we should examine and understand why women were so passionate about the “free city.” Life in the Commune for women revolved a lot around maintaining the frontlines. Women formed cooperatives to make uniforms for the soldiers. The National Guard explicitly protected women’s wages so that they were not exploited for their labor. People established contracts that defined a minimum wage. The men understood the power of female agency in the Commune for it would not exist without their participation, and given how often women threatened to disrupt the social disorder if the men did not meet their demands, and so for that reason protecting women’s wages was a top priority.

Education was another top priority for the Commune. France has had a history of demanding free, compulsory, and secular education. The socialists of the Paris Commune advocated for technical education of children so they can also have useful trade skills if, and when, they entered the workforce. Women planned and reformed the education system and soon after, they opened up an industrial arts school for girls. Further, some educators demanded and received free equipment and school meals. They dedicated most of their efforts to the secularization of education. Additionally, the Paris Commune decreed that women should receive equal pay for equal work in the education field. Further, the Union des Femmes actively fought to preserve women’s wages in a man’s world and they won repeatedly. Additionally, women fought and earned an 8-hour workday and childcare, making the Commune the most progressive socialist force at the time.

The biggest break from patriarchal oppression came from a decree on April 10 when the Commune paid women who had children, both married and single, a 600 Franc pension if they had a husband or lover who died in battle. Part of this radical decree resulted from anticlericalism and for practicality. Anticlerical in that the church held a lot of power over the lives of women, and marriage was an official part of it. Practical for marriages were costly affairs for working class families, and giving women pensions for being unwed granted them personal agency. Despite this radical break, we must remember that misogyny still pervaded socialist thought for some of them, namely the Jacobins, insisted on making no distinction between married and unmarried women whereas others were reluctant to recognize equal rights. Further, those same socialists also wanted to remove children from the care of widowed and unwed mothers.

The most famous individual from the Paris Commune was Louise Michel. She was a schoolteacher who, as I previously mentioned, played an active role in defending the cannons. She was also an anarchist and a medical worker. She regularly preached resistance to the Prussians during the siege of Paris, and tended to the wounded during the Commune. When the Parisians initially established the Commune, she immediately joined the National Guard to protect the city. When the Commune collapsed, the French government charged her with the following crimes: attempting to overthrow the government, encouraging women to arm themselves, using weapons, and wearing a military uniform. Her militancy was so infamous throughout France, that many people often shamed her and called her a lesbian; anarchists defended her by giving her the nickname, which would persist throughout history, The Red Virgin.

Ultimately, the Paris Commune was doomed to fail. It did not have enough resources to survive beyond 71 days as it went against the great French military, and it had dwindling resources. Leon Trotsky goes so far as to claim the Commune “was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy.” There is a fruitful discussion on the possibility and counterfactuals in that the Parisian Commune could have spread the revolution throughout the rest of France, especially as we have more than 140 years of distance from the events. However, the purpose of this discussion is to examine the ways in which women benefited from the Paris Commune, and the ways in which they played an integral role in creating the Commune. Given we have a 21st-century perspective, what can the role women played in the Commune tell us about the role women and all genders should perform in current events. What are new demands for women and other marginalized genders and how can a socialist society address them?