LA COMMUNE : LE PLUS INCROYABLE MOMENT DE L’HISTOIRE DE FRANCE - ÉPISODE 16

Summary

The episode presents the Paris Commune as more than a brief revolt: it argues that the Commune offered a new political and social possibility, and that its violent suppression and later vilification reveal the limits of the French Republic when its established order was threatened. The presenter’s approach is openly interpretive and polemical rather than a claim to neutral or exhaustive history.

The Commune’s origins

• The episode places the Commune against decades of political repression, popular uprisings, and economic hardship, from the First Empire through the Second Empire.
• Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris is described as both a social and military project: rising rents displaced poorer residents, while broad boulevards made the city easier for authorities to control during uprisings.
• France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, shortages, and the armistice intensified resentment. Paris’s working population felt betrayed by a government that did not share its sacrifices.
• After Adolphe Thiers’s government tried to seize the National Guard’s cannons at Montmartre, residents resisted. Soldiers refused to fire on the crowd, and the government withdrew to Versailles. The Commune was then proclaimed, and municipal elections were held.

A different political experiment

The episode emphasizes the Commune’s democratic and social measures, including:

• More direct accountability: Elected representatives were described as revocable and responsible to the public, rather than members of a separate political class.
• Relief from economic pressure: Rent deadlines were extended, evictions restricted, and a period allowed for debt repayment.
• Worker protections and control: Abandoned workshops could be transferred to worker cooperatives; night work and certain employer fines and wage deductions were prohibited. Some workplaces were to have elected management councils.
• Social provision: Pensions were promised to the partners and children of National Guardsmen killed in action, whether or not their relationships had been formally recognized.
• Secular, free education: The Commune sought to make education free and available to all children, girls and boys.
• Women’s organizing: The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris was formed, and women helped defend the city.
• Religious separation: The Commune separated church and state and ended public funding for religious affairs, while the presenter says it did not prohibit private religious practice.
• Internationalism: Foreigners were welcomed into the Commune and given social rights. The episode presents its aim as a federation of autonomous communities rather than a centralized French nation-state.
• Public culture and symbols: Gustave Courbet advocated art free from government privilege. The Commune also dismantled the Vendôme Column, which it viewed as a symbol of militarism and imperial rule.

The presenter contrasts this experiment with the official republican narrative, arguing that the Commune’s challenge was not simply to replace one government with another, but to alter how power was organized.

Louise Michel and the Commune’s legacy

Louise Michel is the episode’s central figure. It traces her development from teacher and poet to revolutionary, highlighting her opposition to political and social hierarchy, her concern for women and animals, and her conviction that forms of domination were connected.

After the Commune’s defeat, Michel was imprisoned and deported to New Caledonia. There, she befriended Nathalie Lemel, learned about Kanak culture, and supported the Kanak struggle against French rule. The episode presents this as a continuation of her solidarity with oppressed peoples. Michel later returned to France after amnesty was granted and remained a prominent revolutionary.

The presenter also stresses the conduct and outlook of former Communards after defeat: despite imprisonment, exile, and the deaths of comrades, some retained hope in their ideals and did not respond with the same vindictiveness as their persecutors.

Defeat, repression, and colonial violence

• The Commune was defeated when Versailles forces entered Paris and began the Bloody Week. The presenter describes the repression as a mass killing of civilians and stresses that the death toll remains disputed; the episode cites estimates ranging from roughly 7,000 to 30,000.
• Thousands were tried, imprisoned, or deported. Among those sent to New Caledonia were Communards and Algerian insurgents.
• The episode links the repression of the Commune to French colonial violence, particularly the suppression of the 1871 Kabyle/Mokrani revolt. It argues that methods used in colonial campaigns helped shape the violence later inflicted on Paris.
• It also presents the episode as a turning point in the political use of “democracy”: a word once associated with popular demands, it argues, could now be used to justify colonial rule and the suppression of popular movements.

Memory, writers, and political ideas

The presenter criticizes writers who condemned the Commune or justified its repression, including Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola. He argues that many writers who attacked “bourgeois” manners still depended on bourgeois and aristocratic audiences, and often avoided challenging the economic order itself. Victor Hugo is presented as a notable exception because he defended political exiles and retained a popular readership.

The episode also connects the Commune’s legacy to later thinkers and movements:

• Élisée Reclus is presented as an anarchist geographer whose work linked social organization to the environment, animal welfare, and human impacts on the land.
• Marx is said to have recognized the Commune as an unexpected political form, while also identifying strategic failures, including not moving quickly against Versailles or securing the Bank of France.
• Rimbaud, who was a teenager during the Commune, is portrayed as inspired by its possibilities and as part of a wider artistic break with inherited ways of seeing.
• The presenter ultimately links the Commune’s political and imaginative legacy to surrealism: an opening toward new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting.

Speakers and sources featured

• Pacôme Thiellement — Presenter and principal narrator. He says the program is an interpretive “colloquium of spectres,” not an objective or exhaustive history.
• Historians credited with helping the episode: Marie-Emieux, Raphaël Carbon, and Carl Zimmer. The first name may be mistranscribed in the subtitles.
• Historical voices and writings quoted or discussed: Louise Michel, Victor Hugo, Arthur Arnould, Jules Vallès, Karl Marx, Benoît Malon, Nathalie Lemel, Élisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Gustave Courbet, and Arthur Rimbaud.
• Modern and historical works or commentators referenced: Christine Ross’s The Emergence of the Paris Commune (rendered differently in the subtitles), Paul Lidsky’s work on writers opposing the Commune, and historian Robert Tombs.
• Public figures whose remarks are criticized: Pierre Nora, Christophe Barbier, and Emmanuel Macron.