The Paris Commune was the name of the state set up to run Paris during civilian uprising in the spring of
1871. At the time,
France was a
plutocratic psuedo-
democracy ruled by the
National Assembly, a nominally elective body dominated by the wealthy classes. That March several radical
socialist workers' groups, growing desperate because of faltering economic conditions and humiliated by national failure in the
Franco-Prussian War, banded together to rise up and and expel the Assembly, which fled to
Versailles.
For three months the "Communards" controlled Paris, attempting to remake the city into an idealized communal society in which all people were equal and all property was collectively owned. Meanwhile, smaller copycat uprisings developed in other French cities and the governments of Europe held their collective breath, fearing uprisings in their own territories.
But in May the National Assembly struck back brutally, invading Paris with an army of 130,000, utterly crushing the Commune in a week of bloody, block-by-block fighting. Almost 20,000 people were executed in the ensuing reprisals.
The Paris Commune cannot be considered a success, but it served as a powerful inspiration to the worldwide socialist movement. Its leaders were remembered as heroes and martyrs and its symbol - a plain red banner - became, via the bolsheviks, the enduring color of the communist movement that is still found in the present-day Chinese and North Korean flags.