In perhaps the most eloquent epitaph on the Communards ever uttered by a non‑Marxist, Auguste Renoir (who so narrowly escaped with his life in those days) said of them: `They were madmen; but they had in them that little flame that never dies.' The memory of Louis‑Napoleon's glittering masked balls at the vanished Tuileries had been swallowed up by the mists of the past; little enough is still recalled about Trochu's spiritless defense of Paris; and in France even the humiliation at Bismarck's hands is largely forgotten. But the `little flame' of the Communards continues to be kept alight. The link between the brave balloonists of Paris and the spacemen of ninety‑five years later may seem a tenuous one. But the course of history often flows down strange and unexpected channels. In 1964, when the first three‑man team of Soviet cosmonauts went up in the Voskhod, they took with them into space three sacred relics; a picture of Marx, a picture of Lenin and a ribbon off a Communard flag.
Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965)