“A Barricade, Not a Government”: The Paris Commune and the Universal Republic

• In Event: Capitalism and Self-Determination: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

The Paris Commune of 1871 was not a revolution made by Marxists, but it was the revolution that made Marxism. Marx’s defense of the Commune, in The Civil War in France (1871), made him notorious. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (1876) – translated into English by Eleanor Marx, and “entirely revised and corrected” by her father – incorporated into the first and most widely-read history of the Commune many elements of Marx’s earlier eulogy. In tandem, the two texts inaugurated an account of proletarian revolution that hovers between empirical history and “history as rhetoric.” This paper examines the theoretical dialogue between the two texts, focusing especially on the negative role of the nation in the constitution of the Commune’s social republican identity. Despite the fact that the Commune arose as an act of national defence against the conquering Prussian army, Lissagaray and Marx agree that the Commune never aspired to anything like “national self-determination.” The social republic pursued three liberations: a liberation of the city, a liberation of the working class, and a universal liberation. None of these coalesced, on the Marxist telling, into a project of nationalism or national self-government. My paper reads this as an early model for anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles which contrasts with the dominant model of national liberation.

Author

• William Clare Roberts, McGill University