"The Commune was both rallying cry and the thing itself. Attempting to differentiate the two or establish the moment when the one was transformed into the other may be beside the point. For Communard Arthur Arnould, this is because the Commune was less an uprising than the advent or affirmation of a politics:
[After January 1871] Paris had no government—gone to Bordeaux, the army in disesteem and poorly armed, generals universally held in contempt, no police on the streets … We had nothing but an anonymous power, representation by Monsieur Tout le Monde. At that moment, and this is a point on which I can’t insist too much, because it’s so important and it seems to have gone unnoticed, the Commune already in fact existed.
Arnould, who after the Commune’s demise would try to survive his exile in Switzerland by selling chickens, wrote a theoretical analysis of the Commune with the same title Lenin would choose a few decades later: The State and the Revolution. He continues:
Paris had been left to itself, separated from the government in Bordeaux, in terms of physical distance as well as emotional distance. Paris was living its own life, following its own will … It had learned absolute contempt for the only two governmental forms that had existed up until then in our country: the monarchy and the bourgeois, oligarchical Republic…
The Paris Commune was something MORE and something OTHER than an uprising. It was the advent of a principle, the affirmation of a politics. In a word, it was not only one more revolution, it was a new revolution, carrying in the folds of its flag a wholly original and characteristic program.
And its flag was the flag of the Universal Republic.
How does republicanism change when one’s republic is conceived as a universal one?
On the second day after the Commune was proclaimed, all foreigners were admitted into its ranks, because “our flag is the flag of the Universal Republic.” Leo Frankel, elected as member of the Commune, writes to Marx on March 30:
I was elected with several other members of the International to the Commission of Labor and Exchange and this fact compels me to send you this note. My election was validated in today’s meeting and it’s unnecessary for me to add how overjoyed I was by this action, and that I appreciate it not from a personal point of view but uniquely and exclusively for its international character.
The phrase “universal republic” gained prominence during the Siege in the clubs, in the committee movements, and among members of the International, who used it interchangeably with République des travailleurs. The phrase alluded to a set of desires, identifications and practices that could not be contained or defined by the territory of the state or circumscribed by the nation, and vividly differentiated its users in this way from parliamentary or liberal republicans who believed in the preservation of a strong, centralized state authority as guarantor of social order. The Universal Republic meant the dismantling of the Imperial bureaucracy, and first and foremost its standing army and its police. Wrote Elisée Reclus:
It is not enough to emancipate each nation in particular from under the thumb of the king. It must be liberated from the supremacy of other nations, its boundaries must be abolished, those limits and frontiers that make enemies out of sympathetic peoples … Our rallying cry is no longer ‘Long live the Republic’ but ‘Long live the Universal Republic’.
But the term did not originate with the Commune. Reiterated throughout the insurrection and the years preceding it, universal republic in fact owed its existence to a brief moment of internationalism during the 1789 revolution. Its creator, Prussian-born Anacharsis Cloots, supported the French Revolution along with Tom Paine on internationalist grounds; this did not, however, save Cloots from the guillotine. Yet far from implying a return to the principles of the bourgeois 1789 revolution, the slogan universal republic, when spoken by Communards, marks their break from the legacy of the French Revolution in the direction of a real working-class internationalism. They were to show the extent to which they had reworked the slogan for their own purposes in three important acts: with the burning of the guillotine on the Place Voltaire on April 10; with the May 16 destruction of the Vendôme Column, built to glorify Napoleonic imperialist conquests; and with the establishment on April 11 of the Women’s Union.
When a group of mostly women hauled a guillotine under the statue of Voltaire and lit it ablaze, they were trying, it seems, to break down any equivalence or equation between revolution and the gallows. The destruction of the Vendôme Column, according to Communard Benoît Malon, was conducted as an indictment of wars between peoples and as a promotion of international fraternity. In part because the Column was to plague the remainder of the life of Gustave Courbet, who was held responsible for its destruction, its toppling is one of the Communards’ most well-known acts, and will not concern us here. (What is less well-known, however, is the re-baptism they performed after they tore the column down. “The Place Vendôme is called from this moment onwards: Place Internationale.”) …the Union of Women and its founder, the twenty-year-old Russian Elisabeth Dmitrieff .. in an astoundingly compressed span of time, went about establishing a kind of transversal or conduit between the two most significant political thinkers of the time, Marx and Chernyshevsky … theoretically and in act.”
- Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London & New York: Verso, 2016), 34-39.
