I think the Paris Commune was a strikingly powerful moment for the working class, but I must humbly step in for my anarchist brothers & sisters and remind folks it wasn't just a Marxist affair; one of the main figures, Louise Michel, was herself a lifelong, stubborn anarchist.
And at the time of the Commune, Bakunin wrote:
"I am a supporter of the Paris Commune, which for all the bloodletting it suffered at the hands of monarchical and clerical reaction, has nonetheless grown more enduring and more powerful in the hearts and minds of Europepis proletariat. I am its supporter, above all, because it was a bold, clearly formulated negation of the State.
full: http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/bakunin/paris.html
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And, it should be remembered that many, many of the Communards in leadershp positions were followers of the vanguardist, political-revoulutionist Blanqui: ************** Blanqui, as an experienced revolutionary might just have provided some political cohesion but he had been picked up by police and spent the second revolution of his lifetime in prison. Charles Delescluze was the most notable political figure from the past to sit on the commune. He had been a radical Jacobean figure in the 1848 revolution until forced into exile and was imprisoned when he tried to return secretly. However years on Devil's Island had ruined his health. He could only speak in a croaking voice and stayed above the personal struggles and quarrels of the commune until called upon to play a dignified but doomed role at the end, walking deliberately to his death on a barricade at what is today is the Place de la Republic.
18 members of the commune came from middle class backgrounds from which they had extricated themselves during their school and student days. In all some 30 members of the commune can be classed as from the provinces, half of them being journalists on republican papers. The rest included 3 doctors, only 3 lawyers, three teachers, one vet, one architect and 11 who had been in commerce or working as clerks.
About 35 members were manual workers or had been before becoming involved in revolutionary politics. These were mainly craftsmen in the small workshops that made up the long established trade centres of the capital. Typical of his group were copper bronze and other metal workers, carpenters, masons house decorators and bookbinders. What is striking is how few came from the new heavy industries that had grown up on the outskirts of Paris. In the whole workers in the new large scale industries in the factories and suburbs of Paris had not yet formed their own ways of organisation and combat. It seems that the local leadership as it had developed felt too unsure of itself, too unsuited to play a more important role on a wider scale. This they left to militants from other more petty bourgeois districts.
About 40 members had been involved in the French Labour movement and most of them had joined the international. Their experience in trade unions and workers association had made them suspicious of political power and this gave their thinking an anarchist tinge (more in the tradition of Proudhon rather than Mikhail Bakunin). About a dozen members of the commune were Blanquists. Their main hope was to save the revolution by getting Blanqui released, either by helping him escape in exchange for hostages... the Archbishop of Paris being the most notable.
http://lacomune.club.fr/pages/english.html
Regards, Mike B)
Wage-slave's Escape http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
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