Lawrence W. Reed finds the developments in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone of Seattle remind him of the Paris Commune:
Otto von Bismarck talks with the captive Napoleon III after the Battle of Sedan in 1870.
“‘Autonomous zone’ has armed guards, local businesses being threatened with extortion.”
That was quite a striking headline to behold. My immediate reaction was, “Oh my gosh, the Paris Commune is back!”
Except that it wasn’t Paris, and it wasn’t 1871. It was Seattle, Washington, USA — today. According to multiple reports, radical protesters seized a six-block area of the city. They declared it a police-free fiefdom, posted armed guards at its perimeter, began extorting money from local businesses (normally called “taxation”) and were even requiring residents to provide ID to enter their own homes.
The Paris Commune that lasted just 70 days in the spring of 1871 was born amid the ruins of France’s wartime loss at the hands of Prussia in the fall of the previous year. When the Prussians captured France’s Emperor Napoleon III, the monarchy collapsed, and the French Third Republic was born. In Versailles, just a few miles from Paris, its leaders sat on their hands as Parisians stewed in the toxic juices of defeat, resentment, and a rising tide of Marxist-inspired class warfare. The voices of the big mouths increasingly drowned out those of the more moderate citizens who preferred to get the city back to normal and work for a living.
On March 18, 1871, the socialist radicals seized the upper hand in the City of Lights. They occupied government buildings and ousted or jailed their opposition. It was a “People’s Revolution” (unless you were one of the people who didn’t support it). Karl Marx’s communist scribblings provided the radicals — called “Communards” — with their primary inspiration, but Marx himself later criticized their failure to immediately seize the Bank of France and march on the government in Versailles. In the early days of the Paris Commune, however, he hoped he was witnessing a fulfillment of his own delusions:
The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.
Barricades of the Paris Commune, April 1871. Corner of the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville and the Rue de Rivoli.
Photo by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg (1818-1875) from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
