The Paris Commune
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Place du Tertre

On March 18, 1871, in the place du Tertre, Montmartre's most illustrious mayor and future prime minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, flapped about trying to prevent the bloodshed that gave birth to the Paris Commune and the ensuing battle with the national government.

Paris had finally fallen to the Prussian army on 28 January, after four months' siege, with peace terms agreed by the end of February, but the future of the newly declared Third Republic was still uncertain. Adolphe Thiers' conservative government dispatched a body of troops under General Lecomte to take possession of 170 guns, which the National Guard, most of them workers, controlled on the high ground of Montmartre. Although the troops seized the guns easily in the dark before dawn, they had failed to bring any horses to tow them away. That gave Louise Michel, the great woman revolutionary, time to raise the alarm.

A large and angry crowd gathered, fearing another restoration of empire or monarchy, such as had happened after the 1848 Revolution. They persuaded the troops to take no action and arrested General Lecomte, along with another general, Clément Thomas, whose part in the brutal repression of the 1848 republican uprising had won him no friends among the people. The two generals were shot and mutilated in the garden of no. 36 rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, behind the Sacré-Cœur. By the following morning, the government had decamped to Versailles, leaving the Hôtel de Ville and the whole of the city in the hands of the National Guard, who then proclaimed the Commune.

Divided among themselves and isolated from the rest of France, the Communards finally succumbed to government assault after a week's bloody street-fighting, the semaine sanglante, between May 21 and 28. No-one knows how many of them died – certainly no fewer than 20,000, with another 10,000 executed or deported. By way of government revenge, Eugène Varlin, one of the founder-members of the First International and a leading light in the Commune, was shot on the selfsame spot where the two generals had been killed just a few weeks before.

It was a working-class revolt, as the particulars of those involved clearly demonstrate, but it hardly had time to be as socialist as subsequent mythologizing would have it. The terrible cost of repression had long-term effects on the French left wing: thereafter, not to be revolutionary seemed like a betrayal of the dead.