Outlook March 18 the leadership went on the defensive, defending Paris against skirmishes of the Versailles Rurals instead of delivering the deathblow to the crippled bourgeoisie.
Even then the problems posed for the "Party of Order" were massive. The municipal elections of April 27 in the 35,000 remaining French communes elected 700,000 councillors - of whom less than 8,000 were supporters of the assorted Royalists and Bonapartist rubbish that made up the majority of the Versailles National Assembly. This deprived the "Rurals" of their last claim to represent France in crushing the Commune.
Bismarck
Bismarck chose his moment to intervene signing Dullilve treaty with the National Assembly in Frankfurt on May 10. The conditions included the release of the Prisoners of War held by the Prussians - for the specific purpose of crushing Paris, and that Prussian troops would stay in France, until Bismarck was satisfied with the state of the country.
The Prussians remained occupying the Northern and Eastern forts of Paris to assist in the smashing of the Paris workers. This was signed by the Assembly on May 18.
By May 21, the Versailles troops gained entry to the city and eight days of slaughter began. Men. women and children fought on the barricades as the bourgeois army forced its way across the city, culminating in the last stand in the cemetery Pere la Chaise.
The firing squads used mitrailleuses to annihilate over 20,000 men, women and children of the Commune. Their monument is the "Wall of the Federals" (so called because of their demand for Federal Communist state) or "Wall of Communards" in the cemetery where the last atrocities were carried out.
Some escaped. Fifteen thousand were deported to New Caledonia. Many made their way through the Prussian lines with assistance of the Prussian soldiers. Marx's epitaph for the Commune was:
"Working men's Paris with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators' history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them."
(Marx, The Civil War in France).
The Commune's political tasks were largely democratic in nature, carrying out the unfinished tasks of the 1789 bourgeois revolution. It freed the system from the fetters of religion, the people from the fetters of usurv and crippling taxation. and opened up democracy for the massco SITI its driving torce was the working class allied to the petty bourgeoisie and extending the arm of liberation to the peasantry who made up the majority of the French population.
In this way it exemplified the fight for • MOTT called mermanent (uninterrupted) Revolution, with the working class carrying forward the democratic as a part of the fight for socialism.
The measures carried out by the Paris workers: regulation of employment; abolition of unsocial hours; the workers' takeover of parts of manufacturing industry, were what Lenin called a minimum socialist programme.
Bolshevik revolution The true heirs of the Paris Commune were the Bolsheviks of 1917. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September 1917 using the lessons of the Commune to urge opposition to the bourgeois Provisional Government, a seizure of power in Russia, the smashing of the state machine, and carrying into its full flower the Commune's embryo programme.
In 1891 Engels wrote an introduction to The Civil War in France to commemorate The twentieth anniversary of the Commune.
He used it to argue against the reformist attitudes then creeping into the Second International (revolutionaries of the time still called themselves Social Democrats). His closing words were:
"Of late the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. torship looks like? Look at the Paris Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Commune. That was the