The Paris Commune

Thure de Thulstrup, Artist. *A Communist barricade.* 1871. Cabinet of American illustration. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In 1871 France was at war with Prussia — and losing badly. Napoléon III had been captured and he agreed to a humiliating peace. Many Parisians did not want to surrender to Prussia, and there were many who also felt the gains of the 1789 Revolution had been lost. The Paris Commune was a seizure of power by a popularly-led government that ruled Paris for three months. Some call it a failed revolution, as it was certainly violent and had the hallmarks of a French revolution — including barricades in the streets. However, after three months, it was crushed by the conservative forces that were still essentially in control of the French nation. Despite its inauspicious start, the Third Republic would endure until 1940 when it was defeated by the German Nazis and replaced by the government of Vichy which collaborated with the Nazis. After the Liberation of France, the Fourth Republic was formed and lasted until 1958 when a new constitution was created by Charles de Gaulle establishing the current Fifth Republic.

During the Paris Commune some 4,000 French déportés were sent to New Caledonia as political exiles. New Caledonia (a group of islands off the coast of Australia) had been taken over by the French in 1853 with the intention of setting up a penal colony. Indeed by 1872 radical socialist activist Louise Michel was sent into exile in New Caledonia. Even in exile, where she lived for eight years, Michel found ways to advocate for marginalized groups. Befriending the indigenous Kanak people she met, she encouraged them to revolt against the French colonial power and contributed to the first French-Kanak dictionary. For more information about New Caledonia and their independence movements search the Library's catalog, New Caledonia--History--Autonomy and independence movements and this online article External. There are also books included below in the bibliography.

You can identify additional material by searching the Library of Congress Online Catalog using the following headings: Paris (France)--History--Commune, 1871. For primary sources on the Paris Commune see the Marxist International Archives, Paris Commune External and the Gallica External, the digital Library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For satirical illustrations and caricatures by artists such as Honoré Daumier and Cham (Amédée Charles Henri, Comte de Noé) search HathiTrust Digital Library External and Gallica External.

For a recorded discussion, view the Library's presentation, The Ruins of Paris: Much of central Paris was burned during the Franco-Prussian War that saw the death of the Commune. The resulting ruins of Paris at once became a tourist attraction, and the subject of remarkable photographs made for the tourist trade. The novelist Gustave Flaubert came to visit the ruins, and found in them a lesson for his contemporaries: if only they had understood the novel he had published some months earlier, "Sentimental Education," this cataclysmic destruction never could have happened. Peter Brooks explores that cataclysm, and the specific role of photography in the historiography of the moment. To view the presentation by historian and Kluge fellow, Peter Brooks click the link here. Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale and author of several books on this period.

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Art and the French Commune by Albert Boime
Call Number: N6850 .B64 1995
ISBN: 0691029628
Published/Created: 1995
In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"--the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"--the bourgeois order. Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of the reinstated conservative government to "rebuild" Paris, to return it to its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat. Boime contends that an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating impulse to its complicity with the state's program. The exuberant street scenes, spaces of leisure and entertainment, sunlit parks and gardens, the entire concourse of movement as filtered through an atmosphere of scintillating light and color all constitute an effort to reclaim Paris visually and symbolically for the bourgeoisie. Amply documented, richly illustrated, and compellingly argued, Boime's thesis serves as a challenge to all cultural historians interested in the rise of modernism.
Commemorating Trauma by Peter Starr
Call Number: DC316 .S73 2006
ISBN: 0823226034
Published/Created: 2006
Nothing says more about a culture than the way it responds to deeply traumatic events. The Reign of Terror, America's Civil War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Kennedy assassination, September 11th-watershed moments such as these can be rich sounding boards for the cultural historian patient enough to tease out the traumatic event's complex cultural resonances. This book is about one such moment in the history of modern France. The so-called Terrible Year began with the French army's crushing defeat at Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire in September of 1870, followed by the Prussian occupation of France and first siege of Paris in the fall and winter of that year. But no event of the period proved so deeply traumatic as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the bloody reprisals that attended its demise. Commemorating Trauma engages the rich body of recent scholarly work on cultural trauma to examine a curious conundrum. Why do French literary, historical and philosophical texts written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune so often employ the trope of confusion (in both the phenomenal and cognitive senses of that term) to register and work through the historical traumas of the Terrible Year? And how might these representations of confusion both reflect and inflect the confusions inherent to an ongoing process of social upheaval evident in late nineteenth-century France-a process whose benchmarks include democratization and the blurring of social classes, a persistent and evolving revolutionism, radical reconfigurations of the city as lived environment, and the development of specifically capitalist logics of commerce? These are the two principal questions addressed in this important study of cultural memory.
Communal Luxury by Kristin Ross
Call Number: DC317 .R5813 2015
ISBN: 9781781688397
Published/Created: 2015
The Commune is back on the agenda. From Madrid to Istanbul, from Cairo to New York, people are reappropriating public and private spaces, reorienting them towards a new function in common. A return to the great 19th century insurrection that most fully instantiated urban insurrection may well be due. Communal Luxury revisits what Marx called the Commune's own working existence, a lived experience of equality in action, focusing particularly on questions of the commune form itself, internationalism, work, art, education and ecology. Ross intertwines the actual words spoken, positions taken, and physical displacements made by the event's participant and its fellow travelers, as well as the bubbling thought it generated. In its original engagement with, but not slavish allegiance to, anarchism and Marxism, the Commune experience is of particular timeliness today.
Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris by Peter Brooks
Call Number: PQ2247 .B683 2017
ISBN: 9780465096022
Published/Created: 2017
From a distinguished literary historian, a look at Gustave Flaubert and his correspondence with George Sand during France's "terrible year" -- summer 1870 through spring 1871. From the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871, France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia and witnessed bloody class warfare that culminated in the crushing of the Paris Commune. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks examines why Flaubert thought his recently published novel, Sentimental Education, was prophetic of the upheavals in France during this "terrible year," and how Flaubert's life and that of his compatriots were changed forever. Brooks uses letters between Flaubert and his novelist friend and confidante George Sand to tell the story of Flaubert and his work, exploring his political commitments and his understanding of war, occupation, insurrection, and bloody political repression. Interweaving history, art history, and literary criticism-from Flaubert's magnificent novel of historical despair, to the building of the reactionary monument the Sacré-Cœur on Paris's highest summit, to the emergence of photography as historical witness-Brooks sheds new light on the pivotal moment when France redefined herself for the modern world.
Histoire des femmes dans la Commune de Paris by Gérald Dittmar
Call Number: DC317 .D58 2003
ISBN: 2951919239
Published/Created: 2003
History of the Paris Commune Of 1871 by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray; Eric Hazan (Preface by); Eleanor Marx (Translator)
Call Number: DC316 .L543 2012
ISBN: 9781844677764
Published/Created: 2012
The classic history of the Paris Commune In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, the heroic battles fought in its defence, and the bloody massacre that ended the uprising. Its author, Lissagaray, was a young journalist who not only saw the events recounted here first-hand, but fought for the Commune on the barricades. He spent the next twenty-five years researching and writing this history, which refutes the slanders levelled at the Communards by the ruling classes and is a vivid and valuable study in urban political revolution, one that retains its power to inspire to this day. This revised edition includes a foreword by the writer and publisher Eric Hazan.
The Kanak Awakening by David A. Chappell
Call Number: DU720.75 .C47 2013
ISBN: 9780824838188
Published/Created: 2013
In 1853, France annexed the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia to establish a convict colony and strategic port of call. Unlike other European settler-dominated countries in the Pacific, the territory's indigenous people remained more numerous than immigrants for over a century. Despite military conquest, land dispossession, and epidemics, its thirty language groups survived on tribal reserves and nurtured customary traditions and identities. In addition, colonial segregation into the racial category of canaques helped them to find new unity. When neighboring anglophone colonies began to decolonize in the 1960s, France retained tight control of New Caledonia for its nickel reserves, reversing earlier policies that had granted greater autonomy for the islands. Anticolonial protest movements culminated in the 1980s Kanak revolt, after which two negotiated peace accords resulted in autonomy in a progressive form and officially recognized Kanak identity for the first time. But the near-parity of settlers and Kanak continues to make nation-building a challenging task, despite a 1998 agreement among Kanak and settlers to seek a "common destiny." This study examines the rise in New Caledonia of rival identity formations that became increasingly polarized in the 1970s and examines in particular the emergence of activist discourses in favor of Kanak cultural nationalism and land reform, multiracial progressive sovereignty, or a combination of both aspirations. Most studies of modern New Caledonia focus on the violent 1980s uprising, which left deep scars on local memories and identities. Yet the genesis of that rebellion began with a handful of university students who painted graffiti on public buildings in 1969, and such activists discussed many of the same issues that face the country's leadership today. After examining the historical, cultural, and intellectual background of that movement, this work draws on new research in public and private archives and interviews with participants to trace the rise of a nationalist movement that ultimately restored self-government and legalized indigenous aspirations for sovereignty in a local citizenship with its own symbols. Kanak now govern two out of three provinces and have an important voice in the Congress of New Caledonia, but they are a slight demographic minority. Their quest for nationhood must achieve consensus with the immigrant communities, much as the founders of the independence movement in the 1970s recommended.
La Commune de Paris, 1871 by William Serman
Call Number: DC316 .S45 1986
ISBN: 2213013543
Published/Created: 1986
French history of the Paris Commune of 1871.
La Commune de Paris : bibliographie critique, 1871-1997 by Robert Le Quillec ; préface de Alain Dalotel
Call Number: Z2179 .L47 1997
ISBN: 2910828085
Published/Created: 1997
Bibliography of French sources on the Paris Commune.
The Last Communard by Gavin Bowd
Call Number: DC342.8.L384 B6913 2016
ISBN: 9781784782856
Published/Created: 2016
The story of an unexpected hero. The Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story. In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was imprisoned for treason when the Commune fell and narrowly avoided execution for his role in the struggle for a new future. In later life, he immigrated to Soviet Russia, finding fame as a revolutionary icon. In his native country, he was vaunted as a hero, a touchstone of revolutions past during France's interwar dramas. Abandoned by the Soviet regime, he languished, fortunes foundering, in Russia. Having led a long and extraordinary life, he died in Siberia in 1942 while fleeing Moscow as the Nazi armies swept across western Russia. It was another thirty years before he returned to Paris, his ashes coming to rest in the Communards' plot of the Père Lachaise cemetery, on the centennial of the uprising, a symbol of France's undying radical tradition. Gavin Bowd's stunning narrative shows how an individual can be swept up in the fierce tides of history, and at the same time be defined by his own efforts to force those tides into a different, and better, course. Lejeune's life captures war and revolution in a tumultuous period of European history.
Louise Michel by Louise Michel; Nic Maclellan (Editor)
Call Number: DC342.8.M64 L67 2004
ISBN: 1876175761
Published/Created: 2004
Louise Michel was the incendiary French leader of the 1871 Paris Commune. An anarchist and irrepressible rebel, she spent much of her life in the run from police, in jail, or in danger of being locked away in mental asylums. Known as 'The Red Virgin', Louise was a central character in one of the greatest popular rebellions in history. Includes commentary by Emma Goldman, Bertolt Brecht, Sheila Rowbotham, Howard Zinn, Victor Hugo and Karl Marx.
Massacre by John Merriman
Call Number: DC317 .M365 2014
ISBN: 9780465020171
Published/Created: 2014
From a pre-eminent Yale historian comes the first popular history of the 1871 Paris Commune, a seminal episode in modern European history. The Paris Commune lasted for only 64 days in 1871, but during that short time it gave rise to some of the grandest political dreams of the nineteenth century -- before culminating in horrific violence. Following the disastrous French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, hungry and politically disenchanted Parisians took up arms against their government in the name of a more just society. They expelled loyalists and soldiers and erected barricades in the streets. In Massacre, John Merriman introduces a cast of inimitable Communards -- from les pétroleuses (female incendiaries) to the painter Gustave Courbet -- whose idealism fueled a revolution. And he vividly recreates the Commune's chaotic and bloody end when 30,000 troops stormed the city, burning half of Paris and executing captured Communards en masse. A stirring evocation of the spring when Paris was ablaze with cannon fire and its citizens were their own masters, Massacre reveals how the indomitable spirit of the Commune shook the very foundations of Europe.
New Caledonia: Essays in Nationalism and Dependency by Michael Spencer (Editor); Alan Ward (Editor); John Connell (Editor)
Call Number: DU720 .N56 1988
ISBN: 0702221260
Published/Created: 1988
Essays in Nationalism and Dependency
The Paradise of Association by Martin Phillip Johnson
Call Number: JS5170 .J64 1996
ISBN: 0472107240
Published/Created: 1996
The Paradise of Association is the first comprehensive treatment of the tumultuous revolutionary clubs in the Paris of 1871. It proposes an innovative approach to the Paris Commune, the largest urban uprising in modern European history. For Marx and Lenin the Commune was a brilliant harbinger of proletarian dictatorship; for others, it was merely the last of the nineteenth-century revolutions. The Paradise of Association argues instead that the Commune resulted from revolutionary action by popular clubs, and it was shaped by the unique political culture fostered within them. The volume combines a detailed social analysis of 733 club militants with a "new cultural history" perspective, examining the language and practices of popular organizations in relation to such topics as historical memory, gender difference, definitions of citizenship, and revolutionary symbolism. The first study of popular organizations during the Commune to take full advantage of the abundant archival materials, this book reveals previously unsuspected coordination and consciousness by revolutionaries in preparation for a seizure of power. "Clubistes" were socially diverse individuals very likely to have a history of revolutionary activity. They did not constitute a social class, but rather a culturally and politically defined revolutionary community. A prominent feature of the political culture of popular organizations was the cult of revolutionary violence, based upon the memory of the French Revolution. By dominating the Commune, club militants imposed their political culture upon the nascent revolution and upon the capital. This new perspective on the Commune entails revising several assumptions about the development of socialism and the evolution of party structures and popular movements in the late nineteenth century. It will be of interest to historians, to those interested in the relationship between popular culture and politics, and to researchers and students of gender relations and class dynamics in revolutionary movements. Martin Johnson is Lecturer in History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The Paris Commune by Carolyn J. Eichner
Call Number: DC316 .E43 2022
ISBN: 9781978827691
Published/Created: 2022
At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France's revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolution's long wake, for others the first "successful" socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, keeping alive the revolution's now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event. The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.
The Paris Commune by Donny Gluckstein
Call Number: DC316 .G58 2011
ISBN: 9781608461189
Published/Created: 2011
For two months in 1871, the workers of Paris took control of Europe's most celebrated capital city. When they established the world's first workers' democracy--the Paris Commune--they found no ready-made blueprints, and no precedents to study for how to run their city without princes, prison wardens, or professional politicians. All they had was the boundless revolutionary enthusiasm of Paris's socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins, all of whom threw their energies into creating a new society. As the city's bakers, industrial workers, and other "ruffians" built new institutions of collective political power to overturn social and economic inequality, their former rulers sought to thwart their efforts by any means necessary--ultimately deciding to drown the Communards in blood. By paying particular attention to the historic problems of the Commune, critical debates over its implications, and the glimpse of a better world the Commune provided, Gluckstein reveals its enduring lessons and inspiration for today's struggles. Donny Gluckstein is author of The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class and The Tragedy of Bukharin. He is a lecturer in history in Edinburgh and is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
The Paris Commune by David A. Shafer
Call Number: DC316 .S47 2005
ISBN: 9780333723029
Published/Created: 2005
During the week of 21-28 May 1871, between 20, 000 and 30, 000 Parisians were killed in the repression of the Paris Commune; a ten-week revolution that followed the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. As evidenced by the brutal reaction against it, and its relative absence from the French historical memory, the Commune has been surrounded by controversy since its advent. David A. Shafer examines the emergence of the Commune out of a political culture influenced by both the traditions bequeathed to the nineteenth century by the French Revolution and contemporary events, circumstances and ideas. This essential guide provides readers with a survey of the Commune's foundations and its narrative history, as well as an assessment of the evolution of its historiography and topics which have rendered the Commune vital to an understanding of the concept of revolution.
Réalités calédoniennes : la Nouvelle-Calédonie disséquée en 100 coups de scalpel by Pierre Bretegnier
Call Number: DU720.8 .B744 2021
ISBN: 9782343243047
Published/Created: 2021
This work is all the more valuable as few Caledonians express themselves in the “land of the unspoken”. In fact, certain communities favor orality over writing. Many consider that to express oneself is to expose oneself. Finally, the majority of political-economic reflections are based on half-truths and regrettable omissions. However, here we have
a former leading actor in Caledonian public life, lucid commentator on current developments, who uncompromisingly dissects and dissects behavior often paradoxical of the different New Caledonian communities. On the one hand, each news spike forces us to ask ourselves almost existential questions: Who are the New Caledonians?
Soldiers of Revolution by Mark Lause
Call Number: DC293 .L378 2022
ISBN: 9781788730549
Published/Created: 2022
How war gave birth to revolution in the 19th century. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 introduced new military technologies, transformed the organization of armies, and upset the continental balance of power, promulgating new regimented ideas of nationhood and conflict resolution more widely. However, the mass armies that became a new standard required mass mobilization and the arming of working people, who exercised a new power through both a German social democracy and popular insurgent French movements. As in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Paris Commune of 1871 grew directly from the discontent among radicalized soldiers and civilians pressed into armed service on behalf of institutions they learned to mistrust. If this militarized class conflict, the brutality of the Commune's subsequent repression not only butchered the tens of thousands of Parisians but slaughtered an old utopian faith that appeals to reason and morality could resolve social tensions. War among nations became linked to revolution and revolution to armed struggle.
Surmounting the Barricades by Carolyn J. Eichner
Call Number: DC317 .E38 2004
ISBN: 0253344425
Published/Created: 2004
This book vividly evokes radical women's integral roles within France's revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. It demonstrates the breadth, depth, and impact of communard feminist socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection. Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J. Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied politics subsequently affected fin-de-siècle gender and class relations. She focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own path to gender equality and social justice.
Unruly Women of Paris by Gay Gullickson
Call Number: DC317 .G85 1996
ISBN: 0801432286
Published/Created: 1996
Although this book is focused on women in the Paris Commune of 1871, it is a valuable resource for making comparisons between the two eras in French history. In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal, for example, raved: "Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers." Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
Voices of the Paris Commune by Mitchell Abidor (Edited and Translated by)
Call Number: DC316 .V65 2015
ISBN: 1629631000
Published/Created: 2015
The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations; reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action. As both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working class's three-month rule through their own prism, distant in time and space. Voices of the Paris Commune takes a different tack. In this book only those who were present in the spring of 1871, who lived through and participated in the Commune, are heard. The Paris Commune had a vibrant press, and it is represented here by its most important newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, edited by Jules Vallès, member of the First International. Like any legitimate government, the Paris Commune held parliamentary sessions and issued daily printed reports of the heated, contentious deliberations that belie any accusation of dictatorship. Included in this collection is the transcript of the debate in the Commune, just days before its final defeat, on the establishing of a Committee of Public Safety and on the fate of the hostages held by the Commune, hostages who would ultimately be killed. Finally, Voices of the Paris Commune contains a selection from the inquiry carried out twenty years after the event by the intellectual review La Revue Blanche, asking participants to judge the successes and failures of the Paris Commune. This section provides a fascinating range of opinions of this epochal event.

Digital Primary Resources on The Paris Commune

Album du siège recueil de caricatures publiées pendant le siège de Paris (1870-1871) dans le Charivari by Daumier et Cham External
Daumier and Cham (Amédée Charles Henri, Comte de Noé) offer their signature caricatures of figures during the Paris Commune in the publication Charivari. A daily satirical periodal issued in Paris between 1832 and 1937, Le Charivari began publishing caricatures satirizing daily life after the 1835 ban on political satire. Artists including Charles Vernier and Cham contributed lithographs and wood engravings
Documents of the Paris Commune External
Ephemera from the collection in the Bibliothèque nationale de France translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor. From the Marxist International Archive.
Femmes de la Commune de Paris External
The Paris Commune of 1871 marked the massive arrival of women in the political arena and in revolutionary engagement. They will invest in the thousands during the 72 days that the Commune will last, and play a fundamental role. Most come from the working class and more often from the sewing and embroidery sectors. Others are intellectuals, committed to feminist and revolutionary socialist ideas.
Gallica: Bibliothèque national de France: Paris Commune External
Search Gallica for primary and secondary sources in French on the Paris Commune. Includes images, texts, maps, and original manuscripts.
History of the Paris Commune: 18 March-30 May 1871 External
From the Marxists Internet Archive. In multiple languages. Cite contains: Documents of the Commune, Archives of Communards, Contemporary Observers Photos, Timeline of Events, Encyclopedia.
Les Communeux 1871 External
Contains contemporary and well-rendered illustrations of various characters or "type de la commune" in the Paris Commune as rendered by an artist of the day. For example, the costume de général en chef, état-major, and citoyenne quéteuse. A collection by the evening news during the Paris Commune by one of the few newspapers still functioning. By Bertall, Paris 1871.
Les Folies de la Commune par Cham External
A small color-illustrated book of the "follies" of the Commune. Cham (Amédée Charles Henri, Comte de Noé).
The Paris Commune: A Story in Pictures External
A fascinating history of the Paris Commune along with illustrations. Part of a series of pamphlets sponsored by the John Reed Club, an organization of revolutionary writers and artists, and is published in 1932 by International Pamphlets, NYC. By William Siegel
The Paris Commune: From the Archive External
Images and accounts from contemporary journalists at The Guardian newspaper, UK.
The Paris Commune External
A contemporary account of the Paris Commune from an American perspective. Published by W.J. Linton, Boston, in 1871.
The Siege and Commune of Paris, 1870-1871 External
This site contains links to over 1200 digitized photographs and images recorded during the Siege and Commune of Paris cir.1871. In addition to the images in this set, the Library's Siege & Commune Collection contains 1500 caricatures, 68 newspapers in hard-copy and film, hundreds of books and pamphlets and about 1000 posters. Additions are made regularly. The originals are located in the Charles Deering McCormick of Special Collections in the Deering Library at Northwestern University.

France: Women in the Revolution

The Paris Commune

Digital Primary Resources on The Paris Commune