For seventy-two days in the spring of 1871, working-class Paris threw out the conservative national government and ran the city itself. The Commune separated church and state, handed idle workshops to worker cooperatives, and flew the red flag. In late May the French army fought its way back in the Bloody Week, killing many thousands in combat and summary executions — older estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000; in its final days the Commune shot hostages and burned public buildings. Karl Marx hailed it as the first workers' government; to its enemies it was catastrophe. Both readings outlasted it.
For seventy-two days in 1871, radical and working-class Paris governed itself. Then the state spent a week killing them for it. France had just lost a humiliating war to Prussia, and the people of Paris, hungry from a long siege and abandoned by a conservative government that fled to Versailles, seized the capital and governed it themselves. They called it the Commune. It separated church from state, decreed free and secular schooling, gave shuttered workshops to the workers, and raised the red flag over the city hall. It was idealistic, chaotic, and short. In late May the French army fought its way back street by street and carried out mass executions, killing many thousands of Parisians — older estimates often run from ten to twenty thousand — in what came to be called the Bloody Week. In its last days the Commune too shot hostages, among them the Archbishop of Paris, and set parts of the city ablaze. To Karl Marx it was the first government of the working class and a martyrdom; to its enemies, a violent and doomed insurrection. It was both buried and immortal.