Defeat in 1870 and the Paris Commune
Prussia crushes France, the Second Empire falls, Alsace and part of Lorraine are lost, and the revolutionary Paris Commune is drowned in blood.
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
In July 1870 Napoleon III, nephew of the first Napoleon and emperor since 1852, blundered into war with Prussia. Within weeks the French army was beaten and on 2 September the emperor surrendered at Sedan. Two days later a republic, the Third Republic, was proclaimed in Paris, which then endured a four-month siege. The peace of 1871 handed Alsace and part of Lorraine to the new German Empire, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
On 18 March 1871 Paris, radical and humiliated, rose against the conservative national government at Versailles and set up its own Commune. In the “Bloody Week” of 21–28 May, government troops retook the city street by street, with mass summary executions. The death toll is debated: older estimates ran to 20,000 or more, while Robert Tombs has argued for roughly 6,000 to 7,500; others reject his revision. Thousands more were deported, many to New Caledonia.
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
The Third Republic survived both shocks and lasted until 1940, longer than any French regime since 1789.
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
The Commune was the first workers' government, a brief experiment in direct democracy, secular schools and women's activism, crushed by a vengeful bourgeois republic. Every May the left lays flowers at the Communards' Wall in Père Lachaise cemetery.
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
At the time, and for many afterwards, the Commune was an insurrection against an elected government in the midst of national defeat, which shot hostages including the archbishop of Paris and burned the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville.
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
Why it matters today
The loss of Alsace-Moselle fed the hunger for revenge that carried France into 1914, and its special legal status today (the region still keeps the pre-1905 Concordat with the churches) is a leftover of that history. The Commune remains a touchstone for the French left; the white basilica of Sacré-Cœur, built partly as an act of atonement after 1871, still divides opinion about what it stands for.