The Commune's Shadow

The Paris Commune of 1871, though primarily a political uprising, profoundly influenced the development of French labor movements. For 72 days, Parisian workers controlled their city and experimented with radical social reforms. The Commune's labor commission, led by Léo Frankel, a Hungarian-born member of the First International, implemented measures that would take decades to achieve elsewhere: the abolition of night work in bakeries, the prohibition of employer fines, and the transfer of abandoned workshops to worker cooperatives.

The savage repression that followed—with over 20,000 Communards killed and thousands more deported—taught French workers lasting lessons. First, that the bourgeois state would use extreme violence to protect property rights. Second, that international solidarity was essential, as Prussian and French armies cooperated to crush the Commune despite having just finished a war against each other. Third, that political and economic struggles were inseparable—workers needed political power to secure economic justice.

The memory of the Commune created a revolutionary tradition within French labor movements that distinguished them from more reformist movements elsewhere. While British trade unionists generally accepted capitalism while seeking better terms within it, many French workers dreamed of its overthrow. The red flag, the "Internationale," and the rhetoric of class war became central to French labor culture in ways that seemed extreme to outside observers but felt natural to workers who had inherited the Commune's legacy.