Just north​ of Oxford Street, at its eastern end, a dim entry called Newman Passage curves away from the plate glass and glitz into a silent Victorian alley. Wet cobbles gleam; the narrowing walls have survived slum clearance, redevelopment and the Blitz.

In one sense, the Paris Commune of 1871 – the mightiest urban insurrection in history before the 1944 Warsaw Rising – ended up in Newman Passage. As the Commune foundered in defeat and slaughter, survivors fled abroad. The largest group, about 3500 refugees and their families, headed for London, where so many European revolutionaries of that century (French, Russian, Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian) had been allowed to settle. Fitzrovia, the web of streets around Fitzroy Square, had always attracted French exiles, and it was in Newman Passage that the Communards set up their main soup kitchen. They named it La Marmite (‘The Cooking Pot’), after a Paris bistro that had fed the defenders of the barricades. An English observer remembered that the new Marmite ‘was situated on the top floor of so wretched a building that there was no place for a staircase … the room was reached by means of a ladder with a very greasy rope … But here any refugee who could prove that he had fought for the Paris Commune was able to obtain a meal for twopence.’ Other, less basic venues soon sprang up. In Charlotte Street, the prosperous Communard Victor Richard opened a grocery which became a centre of advice and help for arriving refugees – and a haunt for police spies. A few doors along, Elisabeth Audinet – a militant in the radical socialist Blanquist faction – ran a restaurant. These places resounded with furious political argument as exiles defied their own political impotence, until an amnesty in 1880 allowed most of them to return to France.

Laura Forster’s new book aims to explore the impact of the Paris Commune on early socialist movements in Britain, as transmitted by this revolutionary emigration. It’s a lively, scholarly account, full of bold personalities and surprising connections. In 1888, for example, it was to the red flag of the Commune that the founders of the Scottish Labour Party looked, imitating the Commune’s defiant autonomy to frame the matter that still torments the Scottish left: ‘London has shown itself to be unable to organise Scotland. Therefore be resolved: That a Scottish organisation be formed.’ In the wake of an uproarious visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow by ‘sixteen French socialist workmen’, the orator John Bruce Glasier proclaimed: ‘We are hastening to reach the City of the Commune before night falls.’

But as Forster points out, solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ‘Vive la Commune!’ and ‘Down with Capitalism!’, but no barricades or storming of town halls. Most people in the country had swallowed the ‘reptile press’ version of the Commune: the myth of ragged pétroleuses setting streets and palaces on fire, the mass murder of priests and nuns, the total abolition of private property. It was true that, after hearing that the army was executing all prisoners, the Commune took hostages, including the archbishop of Paris, and shot them in its final frenzy. And it was true that Communards deliberately set fire to historic buildings, including the Tuileries Palace. Britain did not yet know that the overwhelming majority of atrocities had been committed by the army; instead, the nation read its newspapers and shuddered at the depredations of the Communards. Les Anglais have a long tradition of enormous property-wrecking riots, but not of deliberate political violence. (I remember how shocked old Manchester workers were by the 1956 Budapest uprising: ‘Nobody has the right to go out gallivanting and put his wife and kids at risk. It’s just irresponsible.’)

As Forster shows, the use of the 1871 Commune by the left in Britain has changed sharply over the years. In the 1880s, as socialist ideas began to coagulate into organised political parties and trade union movements, the Commune and its rich legacy – the banners and slogans, the songs and the cast of martyrs – became their supreme reference. This changed rather abruptly after 1891, when May Day parades, whose political origins lay in demonstrations in favour of an eight-hour working day, were endorsed by the Second International as a global working-class festival. The anniversary of the Commune, 18 March, was gradually replaced as the main socialist celebration by 1 May, with its flowery processions and ‘feasts of oratory’. In Britain, the memory of the Commune began to fade. The other day, no one in the tiny pub off Newman Passage had heard of it.

The Commune was a consequence of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire was quickly overthrown and replaced by the Third Republic. Paris endured a five-month starvation siege by the Prussians. The members of the new French government had moved first to Tours and then Bordeaux during the siege and most of the remaining rich and propertied Parisians fled the city as the siege ended on 28 January 1871, leaving Paris under the control of the armed and radical National Guard. Fighting broke out on 18 March when the right-wing government, led by Adolphe Thiers and now based in Versailles, tried to seize the four hundred cannon left in Paris but was prevented from taking the 170 parked on the heights of Montmartre. The Central Committee of the National Guard then declared Paris a revolutionary commune, a democratic, equal and self-managing society. The Commune lasted just 72 days until the army, which was under the control of the Versailles government, fought through the defences. It ended in the ‘semaine sanglante’, with the soldiers massacring more than ten thousand Communards and civilians found near the barricades.

How to categorise the Commune? Forster describes it as having a ‘heterogeneous anarcho-syndicalist programme born of federations of citizen organisations, artist associations and neighbourhood networks’. She goes on to consider some of the contrasting labels that have been hung on it over the 156 years since a working-class crowd fought the troops sent to seize the Montmartre cannon. For generations, Karl Marx and his followers dominated the analysis: the Commune had been a class war, the first victory of the proletariat over bourgeois capitalism. ‘Working-men’s Paris, with its Commune,’ Marx wrote, ‘will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.’ But he also referred to the Commune as ‘that sphinx, so tantalising to the bourgeois mind’. Within months of its end, some said it had been simply a patriotic uprising against Prussian occupation. Much later, shrewder analysts recognised the Commune as a revolution, but not of a strictly Marxist proletarian sort. The ardent masses who joined the Communards in battle were seldom industrial workers (Paris in the 1870s had relatively few factories), but more often small shopkeepers, café proprietors, shoemakers, students and self-employed craftsmen of every trade. In other words the petty bourgeoisie, which together with industrial workers constituted the People, the fabled dragon which had carried French revolutions since 1789.

Forster surveys these interpretations and others by recent generations. Was the Commune ‘a vision of radical municipal democracy’, she writes, ‘an urban festival reclaiming the streets of Paris’? Or was it essentially political, a desperate attempt to head off the restoration of the monarchy by right-wing elements in the new Versailles government? Or, more convincingly, was it really about Paris itself, a tremendous assertion of the city’s identity and independence within France?

The protests of May 1968 in Paris saluted the Commune and copied its pavé barricades. The 2016 Nuit Debout movement, resisting the reform of French labour laws, occupied the place de la République and renamed it place de la Commune. Some voices in Nuit Debout and in the enormous gilets jaunes protests which raged from 2018 to 2020 suggested that their new model of leaderless, formless insurrection was inspired by the Commune. But that is hard to justify. For all its direct democracy, the Commune did have identifiable leaders, men and women who made plans and gave orders. Individuals took responsibility. When all was lost, the Commune’s final military commander – the frock-coated old Jacobin Charles Delescluse – slowly mounted the last barricade. He stood there for a few seconds until army bullets cut him down.

Forster admires the French historian Quentin Deluermoz for offering a ‘multi-scalar analysis’ of the Commune’s impact. In her view, he shows that ‘the Commune created a Parisian identity: it also had national relevance as the French state built itself against it; and it was a global event, insofar as it took aim at French imperialism, reverberated in colonial centres … and represented a major worldwide media event.’ That it certainly was. No staged political spectacle until the fall of the Twin Towers would seize imaginations like the fall of the Vendôme Column on 16 May 1871. Before a crowd of many thousands and the world’s press, the great pillar glorifying the Bonaparte emperors was pulled down, breaking into pieces.

In​ its short life, the Commune could fulfil little of its programme. But it transformed Paris into a network of elected democracies, cancelled rent arrears and abolished religious education. A minimum wage was set; trades were reformed into co-operatives and encouraged to take over empty factories. Contrary to the propaganda of its enemies, the Commune did not aim to abolish private property; as one of its posters put it, the idea was ‘to universalise power and property’, to combine individual and co-operative property in a single state-regulated system. Workers’ control of production had scarcely begun when the Commune fell. Although it failed to grant women the vote, several outstanding feminists were prominent in the Commune, which took action to promote equality in pay and pensions. ‘Women had been involved with the establishment of the Commune through politicised clubs and unions,’ Forster writes, ‘and they had defended the Commune on the barricades and in the streets.’ Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a flamboyant Russian friend of the Marx family, set up the Union des Femmes, committed to fight both on the barricades and in the struggle for equal rights. Louise Michel, courageous in battle and on political platforms, survived imprisonment and deportation to New Caledonia to become an unrepentant exile in 1890s London, ‘a familiar face at radical meetings and Commune celebrations’. She set up an anarchist school for the children of political refugees in Fitzroy Square, closed after a police raid found bomb-making materials in the basement, ‘almost certainly planted by … an undercover Special Branch agent provocateur’ who had been working at the school.

The Commune is often admired for its spontaneity. No organised forces planned it. Paris, especially the newer working-class arrondissements, certainly harboured plenty of revolutionary conspiracies, and the proud memory of 1789 and the century of urban revolutions that followed was still alive. The principal factions were the neo-Jacobins inspired by the French Revolution, Proudhonists seeking an anarchist society of workers’ co-operatives, and Blanquist radical socialists who argued that proletarian dictatorship must follow a revolution. All these tribes later became strident and powerful in the Commune leadership, but none of them prepared or launched the insurrection itself. The ordinary people of Paris had been simmering for more than a year. Fury built up at the miseries of the defeat and the siege, at the callous greed of landlords and the rich and privileged. After the siege, the new republican government seemed to see Paris as an enemy to be suppressed. All these grievances flared up in debates held at the local headquarters of the National Guard, a huge plebeian militia that still had its weapons. Red flags were already flying over Paris when the failed army raid on the Montmartre cannon took place. Angry enthusiasm brought Parisians out into the streets. ‘Vive la République Universelle!’ was the war cry of people suddenly convinced that Paris was creating a new alternative world, an ‘Utopie réelle’. They did not wait for instructions to form new associations and unions, but set them up almost street by street and office by office.

The refugees in London brought their competing visions with them. Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, who was for a time engaged to an ex-Communard, Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagarey, wrote a few years later that ‘in England most persons are still quite ignorant of the events … To most English people the Commune still spells “rapine, fear and lust”.’ But Forster is determined to correct the conventional historians’ view of an ‘English exceptionalism’ that sealed Victorian Britain off from Continental ideas. Much of her book records the connections between the Communard exiles and radical British reformers, including friendships, relationships, even pub conversations. Forster also wants to correct the view that in Britain ‘a largely uncontested popular liberalism’ dominated ‘between the end of Chartism and the socialist revival of the 1880s’. In fact, there were ‘important and influential currents of radical internationalism and cosmopolitan socialisms of which the refugees of the Commune formed a part’.

Many pages are devoted to the tiny sect of English Positivists, humanist and radical. Almost alone in London, they instantly welcomed the Commune and when it fell led the campaigns to shelter and support the refugees. Their leaders were two middle-class intellectuals, Frederick Harrison and E.H. Beesly (one of the very rare figures whom Marx liked while despising his ideas). Politically insignificant, they wrote passionate and widely read articles in ‘respectable’ journals to counter Fleet Street’s version of a Paris drowning in Red anarchy. Both, as Forster records, were privately tormented by bourgeois guilt. Harrison had to cope with the discovery that the refugees were not stainless socialist heroes but human beings. With noble exceptions, he wrote, ‘most were conceited adventurers, fond of sneering at their English friends and speaking ill of their French colleagues.’

The two Positivists disagreed with Marx’s interpretation of the Commune, seeing it not primarily as a class struggle but as a revolt against centralised government. This view has had a remarkably long life. Influenced by the Communard refugee Victor Delahaye, some of the first members of the London County Council wanted to apply the Commune’s pioneering principles of ‘radical decentralisation’. The inspiration carried into Ken Livingstone’s visions for the doomed Greater London Council and is there more recently still, for example, in the writings of the critic Owen Hatherley. In accounts like Hatherley’s, Forster writes, ‘the Commune emerges as a historic touchstone for municipalism – meaning socialised cities made through a “commitment to the provision of housing, infrastructure and public space for all” … and administered, not via a top-down urban welfare state, but rather brought to life through radical direct action by workers, social movements, unions and creative interventions.’

Outside London, workers’ movements drew harsher lessons from the Commune. Members of the Aberdeen Revolutionary Socialist Federation wheeled a fish cart down the street bearing the slogan ‘Vive la Commune!’, with the effigy of a top-hatted capitalist swinging from a gibbet. In Edinburgh, the exile Léo Melliet (who had been on the executive council of the Commune) made a speech at a Commune celebration in which he told the crowd that ‘without the shedding of blood, there can be no salvation – social salvation, I mean.’ In the crowd was a young man from an Irish family in the Cowgate called James Connolly. In Dublin many years later, not long before the 1916 Easter Rising and his own execution, Connolly would write: ‘Without the Shedding of Blood, there is no Redemption.’

Forster​ reminds her readers that ‘before it became fully canonised by socialists in the 1880s, the story of the Commune was available as a resource to a wide range of people and could be utilised to suit a wide range of agendas.’ One of these agendas was Christian Socialism, which sought to rescue the working classes from the depravity caused by poverty and exploitation. She quotes from a forgotten but extraordinary novel called The True History of Joshua Davidson: Christian and Communist by Eliza Lynn Linton. Published in 1872 and ‘wildly successful’ (it went through eleven editions), it is the story of a young Christian carpenter who, shocked by the poverty around him, travels to France to fight for the Commune. ‘The modern Christ would be a politician,’ he declares. ‘His aim would be to raise the whole platform of society … Friends, the doctrine I have chosen for myself is Christian Communism.’ Joshua returns to England, where he is lynched before the altar by a maddened Church of England congregation. The Jesus parallel is obvious, though Lynton herself was an agnostic Liberal, neither Christian nor socialist. Other Commune fiction in English included G.A. Henty’s trashy A Woman of the Commune (1895), which joined his long shelf of Empire-building romances for boys.

Despite all the ideas and examples that British radicals drew from the Communard emigration, Forster’s book leaves the feeling that there was ample sympathy but a gap in empathy. Popular doubt about foreigners, especially French ones, was always in the background: as late as 1889, the socialist organisers of a Commune commemoration wrote that ‘it is intended to make the celebration as distinctively English as possible,’ even though foreign comrades were also due to speak. Two attitudes must have been especially hard for the British hosts to grasp. One was the Communards’ sense of historical entitlement. They could look back on a century of violent revolutions in France, some crushed, others world-changing, and could say to their oppressors: ‘We did it before. And if we have to, we can do it again.’ A second sentiment was almost inaccessible to the Victorian English, who had been trained to forget that in the 1640s their own ancestors had set out to ‘turn the world upside down’. This was the memory of revolutionary joy. For many, perhaps most, of the refugees the outbreak of the Commune had been a blinding moment in which they felt transfigured. The mountains walling in humanity turned out to be made of plasterboard, stage scenery; every stranger in the street was your brother and sister. To live through the ecstasy and mirages of early revolution, and then to see them disappear, is an experience never overcome. Once, the men and women waiting for soup in Newman Passage had believed that everything was possible. Now they knew it wasn’t.