Communards - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Communards were members and supporters of the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune

Paris Commune

The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

formed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

and France's defeat.

Following the war's conclusion, according to historian Benedict Anderson

Benedict Anderson

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983...

, thousands fled abroad, roughly 20,000 Communards were executed during the Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week"), and 7,500 were jailed or deported. Until a general amnesty

Amnesty

Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...

during the 1880s, this action by Adolphe Thiers

Adolphe Thiers

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French politician and historian. was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871...

forestalled the proto-communist movement in the French Third Republic

French Third Republic

The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...

(1871–1940).

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

The working class

Working class

Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

of Paris were feeling ostracized after the decadence of the Second Empire

Second French Empire

The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...

and the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

. The Prussians invaded Paris in September 1870, causing suffering among Parisians. The poor ate cat or rat meat or went hungry. Out of resentment from this situation grew radical and socialist political clubs and newspapers. While Paris was occupied, socialist groups tried twice to overthrow the provisional government.

In January 1871, Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck

Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...

and the French minister of foreign affairs, Jules Favre

Jules Favre

Jules Claude Gabriel Favre was a French statesman. After the establishment of the Third Republic in September 1870, he became one of the leaders of the Opportunist Republicans faction.- Early life :...

, decided that France would hold national elections. Adolphe Thiers

Adolphe Thiers

, who had been loyal to the Second Empire, was elected head of the newly monarchist republic. During the war, the capital had moved from Paris to Bordeaux. When the war ended, the government declined to move back to Paris and instead moved to Versailles. In the early morning of March 18, the government stationed in Versailles sent military forces into Paris to collect a reserve of cannons and machine guns. The detachment was still gathering the munitions when the Parisians awoke, and soon the soldiers were surrounded. In the chaos that followed, the soldiers killed two of their own, and by the end of the day, they were mainly sided with the Parisians. Insurgents now controlled the city, and they declared a new government called the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871.

Thiers refused to bargain with the Communards, despite their attempts to do so. He taught newly-released French soldiers the "evils" of the Communards as the government prepared for a battle. Starting on May 21 and continuing through May 28, soldiers chased the traitorous National Guard

National Guard (France)

The National Guard was the name given at the time of the French Revolution to the militias formed in each city, in imitation of the National Guard created in Paris. It was a military force separate from the regular army...

members through the streets. Around 18,000 Parisians were killed, 25,000 were imprisoned, and thousands more were later executed. The outrageous violence of Bloody Week became a rallying cry for the working classes; politicians would later proudly brag about their participation with the Commune.

Deportation

After Bloody Week, the government asked for an inquest into the causes of the uprising. The inquest concluded that the main cause of the insurrection was a lack of belief in God, and that this problem had to be corrected immediately. It was decided that a moral revival was needed, and a key part of this was deporting 4,500 Communards to New Caledonia

New Caledonia

New Caledonia is a special collectivity of France located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east of Australia and about from Metropolitan France. The archipelago, part of the Melanesia subregion, includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands, the Belep archipelago, the Isle of...

. There was a two-part goal in this, as the government also hoped that the Communards would civilize the native Kanak people on the island. The government hoped that being exposed to the order of nature would return the Communards to the side of "good."

New Caledonia became a French colony in 1853, but just ten years later it still only had 350 European colonists. After 1863, New Caledonia became the principle destination of convicts transported from France after French Guiana

French Guiana

French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...

was deemed too unhealthy for people of European descent. Thereafter, convicts from France made up the largest number of arriving residents. During the busiest time of deportation

Deportation

Deportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. Today it often refers to the expulsion of foreign nationals whereas the expulsion of nationals is called banishment, exile, or penal transportation...

, there were estimated to be about 50,000 total people on the island. This included 30,000 Kanak, 2,750 civilian colonists, 3,030 military personnel, 4,000 déportés (political criminals, including the Communards), 6,000 transportés (common-law criminal convicts), and 1,280 criminal convicts who had served their sentences but were still living on the island. There were four main penitentiary sites on the island, one of which, Isle of Pines

Isle of Pines, New Caledonia

The Isle of Pines is an island located in the Pacific Ocean, in the archipelago of New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France. The island is part of the commune of L'Île-des-Pins, in the South Province of New Caledonia. The Isle of Pines is nicknamed l'île la plus proche du paradis...

(1870–1880), was for the Communards deportees exclusively.

Sentences

There were three sentences given out to the déportés: simple deportation, deportation to a fortified place, and deportation with forced labor. A simple deportation sentence was given to about two-thirds of the Communards. These people were sent to live in small villages on the Isle of Pines. Those sentenced to deportation to a fortified place were sent to the Ducos

Ducos

Ducos is a town and commune in the French overseas department of Martinique. It is where the prison is located-External links:*...

peninsula. About 300 Communards were sentenced to deportation with forced labor; these were the people convicted of crimes such as arson

Arson

Arson is the crime of intentionally or maliciously setting fire to structures or wildland areas. It may be distinguished from other causes such as spontaneous combustion and natural wildfires...

in addition to their political crimes. They were sent to be with the criminal convicts on Nou. Some prisoners’ sentences were changed by the local penal administrators, and some were changed by the French government after petition

Petition

A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer....

s for leniency.

Life in New Caledonia

The government did not give out enough food, clothing, or shelter for all of the déportés. Some were assigned housing in rickety structures, but others had to find their own materials to build huts. Construction tools could be bought from the administration. Hunting

Hunting

Hunting is the practice of pursuing any living thing, usually wildlife, for food, recreation, or trade. In present-day use, the term refers to lawful hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species contrary to applicable law...

for food became part of the daily routine. Some even traded their clothing for food with the Kanak. Not every part of life on the island was bad, however. Those living on the Isle of Pines and Ducos peninsula had freedom of movement, allowing them to live where they wanted and swim and fish

Fishing

Fishing is the activity of trying to catch wild fish. Fish are normally caught in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping....

at their leisure. They lived in simple wood huts that formed small, face-to-face communities that were intended to be self-governing.

Those sentenced to forced labor often endured abuse at the hands of their jailers. They were habitually mistreated while imprisoned, with whippings and the use of thumbscrews as common punishments for minor infractions.

The National Assembly passed legislation that gave the wives and children of déportés freedom to go to New Caledonia

New Caledonia

. It also gave wives a much greater right to property than they had in France, giving them half the property rights over any grant given to their husbands. Through this legislation, 174 families making up 601 people were reunited by 1877.

Escape

The relatively laid back period of deportation ended when six déportés successfully escaped from the Ducos peninsula in 1874. François Jourde was the main planner of the escape, which he developed while living in the port town of Nouméa. He had developed connections with a ship’s captain, John Law, who was paid for his participation. The escapees, who included Jourde, Henri Rochefort, Paschal Grousset, Olivier Pain, Achille Ballière, and Bastien Grandhille, boarded the boat under the cover of darkness and hid in the ship’s hold until they cleared the harbor. Law dropped them off in Sydney, Australia, where crowds gathered to see them. Reports of their escape and the strict conditions they had lived under were printed in newspapers in Australia, the United States, and Europe. While the escapees attempted to publicize the plight of those still on the island, the déportés who remained had to deal with the repercussions of the escape. New rules forbade the prisoners from approaching the sea without permission, subjected them to daily roll calls, and banned them from entering the forests, even to collect firewood.

Relationships with the Kanak

There are clearly documented examples of friendships between the Communards and the Kanak. Achille Ballière and his friends visited the Kanak in their homes, shared meals with them, and played with their children. In the first few years of the deportation there were at least two marriages between the Kanak and Communards. However, the separation of the groups enforced after the 1874 escapes prevented any more such relationships from forming. During the eight-month long Kanak insurrection in 1878, the Communards displayed a solidarity with their effort in the local press. This solidarity did not last long, however, as beliefs of racial differences soon took over.

Louise Michel

Louise Michel

Louise Michel was a French anarchist, school teacher and medical worker. She often used the pseudonym Clémence and was also known as the red virgin of Montmartre...

looked to the Kanak youth for guidance and inspiration, and offered them moral support when they joined the 1878 insurrection. She ran a school for the Kanak and encouraged a local theater to perform a Kanak drama. She fully expected the achievements of the Kanak to match those of the French, though she wrote about them in very paternalistic terms that were common for her time period.

Famous Communards

Henri Rochefort gave a series of lectures that were published in the New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...

while staying in the United States after his escape from New Caledonia. They were highly critical of the French government for denying its citizens "liberty." His 1884 novel L’Évadé: roman canaque helped shaped the legend of the deportation. It offered a portrayal of the deportation and the policies of the government in New Caledonia that was different from what the governmental propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

was promoting.

Georges Eugene Raoul Pilotell 1845-1918 was the son of a Judge but pursued art and moved to Paris in 1862 . As a prolific political caricaturist he was frequently imprisoned and became an active member of the commune in which he appointed himself ‘ Directeur des Beaux Art’ but later properly appointed a ‘commissaire special’. In 1874 he escaped a death sentence by fleeing to London. Whilst he was well known for his caricatures in France he gained a reputation in England as a fashion designer, society portrait painter and theatre costume designer. He has work both in the National Portrait Gallery, The British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Amnesty

By the summer of 1878, the concern of amnesty for the Communards had become a significant political issue for France. In January 1879, the prime minister, Dufaure

Jules Armand Dufaure

Jules Armand Stanislas Dufaure was a French statesman.-Biography:Dufaure was born at Saujon, Charente-Maritime, and began his career as an advocate at Bordeaux, where he won a great reputation by his oratorical gifts. He abandoned law for politics, and in 1834 was elected deputy...

, granted mass pardons for the Communards in an attempt to stop the calls for amnesty

Amnesty

. The pardons excused the convictions of the Communards. This was a problem for many people, however, because the men had never actually been convicted, only indicted. On January 16, the government published a list of déportés whose sentences were pardoned. These people were allowed to return to France. More than one thousand Communards, however, were not included in this list. Men who had been convicted of crimes other than political or whose political opinions were considered too dangerous were left behind.

After the announcement of the pardons, many people in France were hoping for a stronger declaration of total amnesty. Petitions were passed around in all Paris neighborhoods to try and influence the government. A bill calling for total amnesty was introduced into the Chamber of Deputies

Chamber of Deputies of France

Chamber of Deputies was the name given to several parliamentary bodies in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:* 1814–1848 during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, the Chamber of Deputies was the Lower chamber of the French Parliament, elected by census suffrage.*...

by Louis Blanc and into the senate by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

. The legislation that was eventually pushed through ensured full civil rights to those not convicted of crimes beyond political, and officially ended the prosecution of Communards in military courts. In July 1880, parliament finally voted for total amnesty.

Nine ships brought the déportés back to France. The first arrived in August 1879 and the last arrived in July 1880. Large crowds greeted the ships with celebrations. Donations of money were collected for the Communards and festivals were held to raise money. A committee of aid, headed by Louis Blanc

Louis Blanc

Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French politician and historian. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor....

and Victor Hugo, planned a dinner at which they dispersed a small amount of money to all who attended. Offers of employment were made, overcoats were given out, and temporary housing was offered.

Aftermath

Some Communards chose never to come back to France after having built successful lives in New Caledonia or adopting other countries, such as Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, as home. Many Communards who did come back returned to public life, such as Louise Michel

Louise Michel

Louise Michel was a French anarchist, school teacher and medical worker. She often used the pseudonym Clémence and was also known as the red virgin of Montmartre...

. However, many found the adjustment to freedom difficult. Meetings between Communards and their former jailers occurred in the streets, at times leading to minor skirmishes. In December 1879, an investigative committee was formed to look into charges of torture in New Caledonia. The inquiry lasted two years, collecting the results of previous government studies, more than forty deposition

Deposition (politics)

Deposition by political means concerns the removal of a politician or monarch. It may be done by coup, impeachment, invasion or forced abdication...

s, and testimonials to parliament by the Communards. The Communards’ memories of abuse then became public record, which helped to heal the relations between the former prisoners and the state.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

Deportation

Sentences

Life in New Caledonia

Escape

Relationships with the Kanak

Famous Communards

Amnesty

Aftermath

See also