A rebel’s guide to Paris’s revolutionary history

The Storming of the Bastille in Paris

1789: The Great French Revolution

It erupted on 14 July 1789 when Parisian men and women stormed the Bastille prison and armoury. It was a hated symbol of the tyrannical power of the Bourbon monarchy.

The French Revolution became a beacon of hope for radicals across the world. The poet William Wordsworth, one of many English radicals who flocked to Paris, wrote, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

The uprising was provoked when King Louis XIV tried to crush an attempt at limited parliamentary reform initiated by the Third Estate. The Third Estate, part of sort of advisory body without any real power, included everyone who was not among the privileged members of the court or the clergy.

The merchants, manufacturers and professionals of the Third Estate defied the king by convening a National Assembly and demanding a new constitution.

The demands of the rising capitalist class for political power coincided with the aspirations of the Parisian poor. They were sick of funding the opulent lifestyles of the court through their taxes and of rocketing food prices.

The king summoned 20,000 troops to Paris and sacked his chief minister, Jacques Necker, who supported reform. The crowds in the streets were determined to see off any aristocratic conspiracy and marched to the Bastille to seize muskets and gunpowder.

The news of the fall of the Bastille had an explosive impact in the country. In city after city “municipal” revolutions took place and the new authorities were often forced to reduce the price of bread.

The king was forced to recognise the National Assembly and went to Paris to accept the tricolour rosette—the symbol of the victorious insurrection.

The new Constituent Assembly met on 4 August. Fearing peasant revolts, the deputies voted to “destroy the feudal regime entirely”. The lands of the Catholic church were nationalised. On 26 August, the new government adopted the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen with its promise of liberty, equality and fraternity.

The Assembly aroused hopes of fundamental change, but it defended the right to property. Equality meant equality before the law, not economic or social equality.

The king continued to hatch plans to restore royal authority by force. When he summoned troops to Versailles on 1 October 1789, the women of Paris invaded the City Hall demanding bread and searching for arms. Then they marched off to Versailles—where the king and Assembly still resided—“armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols and muskets” to demand the promise of bread.

Women began to organise in their own clubs and demand their rights. In early 1791, the king and his family tried to escape abroad but were caught and dragged back to Paris. Public opinion drastically turned against the king, who was conspiring with foreign governments.

He was executed on 21 January 1793 and the hated Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was guillotined on 16 October. The divine right of kings was no more.  

The new government, led by the Committee of Public Safety, took drastic measures to protect the revolution from its enemies at home and abroad. The Reign of Terror sought to purge France of those considered a threat to the revolutionary order.

But revolutionary France remained isolated and under attack from other European governments and could not survive. One of the architects of the revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, was arrested and executed in July 1794.

The revolution suffered terrible reversals. Army officer Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and declared himself emperor in 1804.

But the new way of organising production, along capitalist not feudal lines, remained intact.

July 1830: “It is a revolution!”

In July 1830 Paris was at the centre of another revolutionary storm. A government crackdown on reformers and free speech combined with a spike in unemployment.

When police raided a news press to seize illegal newspapers, they were greeted by a sweltering, unemployed mob angrily shouting, “Down with the Bourbons!”. The monarchy had been restored after the downfall of Napoleon in 1815.

The next day, troops moved into Paris’s central squares and gardens. Parisians began to rain down paving stones, roof tiles, and flowerpots from the upper windows on the troops. Twenty-one civilians were killed. Rioters began to shout, “Death to the ministers!” and, “Down with the aristocracy!”

King Charles X ordered his ministers to repress the disturbances, but his troops began to desert. The king received a letter from an aide saying, “Sire, it is no longer a riot, it is a revolution.”

In only a day and a night, over 4,000 barricades had been thrown up throughout the city. The tricolour flag of the revolutionaries flew over buildings, including the Hotel de Ville town hall.

Politicians quickly established a provisional government and on 2 August, Charles X and his son abdicated and departed for Great Britain.

Scottish radical Frances Wright rushed to Paris and observed, “It is no longer nation pitched again nation for the sport of kings, nor sect persecuting sect for the glory of God, nor army butchering army to transfer from a James to a George or from a Charles X to a Louis Philippe, for the privilege of making laws, coining money and creating peers and dividing the good things of the land among his followers.

“It is now everywhere the oppressed millions who are making common cause against their oppressors. It is now the ridden peoples of the earth who are struggling to throw from their backs the booted and spurred.”

1848: The Springtime of the Peoples

In the spring of 1848, a wave of revolutions cascaded across Europe, beginning in Sicily and reaching a crescendo in Paris.

On 23 February the people of Paris defied a ban on political assemblies and marched to the home of the prime minister, Francois Guizot.

They shouted, “Long live reform.” The national guard refused to shoot the crowds. Other troops fired on the crowds, killing 52 people. Barricades went up across Paris. The French king Louis Phillippe, who had sponsored the French conquest of Algeria, was forced to abdicate on 24 February.

A republic was declared, and the tricolour fluttered over the Hotel de Ville once again.

Working women joined men on the barricades dressed as soldiers, waving sabres and planting red and tricolour flags.

Barbes Chiron, a cook, took her two sons and went with her partner to the barricades at the Palais-Royal. She declared to her lover, “If I or your sons perish, you will be proud to say, ‘They died for rightful justice and the fatherland’.”

Barbes was granted a pension when her partner was killed, and she was wounded on the barricades on 24 February.

Radicals in the government demanded that “social workshops” run by workers be set up.  But the moderate republicans who dominated the government wanted to keep labour cheap and set up national workshops.

On 22 June, the government announced that even these workshops were too expensive and would be closed, sparking huge protests.

Around 15,000 Parisians threw up new barricades in protest at the government’s compromise with the old order.

The government ordered the bombardment of the workers’ districts, and troops dealt out summary justice to the men and women they captured.

During the June Days authorities killed around 3,000 rebels, arrested 15,000 and deported 4,000. Despite the bloodshed, the revolutionary spirit of the people of Paris was far from extinguished.

Revolutionaries, including Marx, had believed that capitalists would be the forefront of fighting to get rid of the old feudal and monarchic order. He looked to the experience of the 1989 French Revolution.

But the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, proved too cowardly—fearing the working class and poor would push for greater social changes.

Marx called Paris in 1848 “first great battle between the two classes which divide modern society”. The capitalists were clearly no longer a revolutionary class.

1871: Storming the Heavens

On 18 March 1871, the labouring poor of Paris ran their city for 72 days. The Paris Commune, the first workers’ government, saw unprecedented levels of freedom, democracy and social provision.

The French government agreed an armistice to end a war with Prussia, the most powerful German kingdom, at the end of 1870. Ordinary Parisians and their National Guard militia were enraged.

The leader of the government, Adolphe Thiers, ordered the army to seize the city’s cannons. The women of Paris flocked to their cannon and began to appeal to the soldiers. The soldiers turned their guns on their own generals and Thiers and his government fled to the safety of Versailles.

On 26 March, Parisians elected their own council. All officials were paid the same as other workers. All members were instantly recallable. The Commune made the National Guard the main armed body.

The Commune closed pawn shops, suspended debt and separated the church and state. It abolished child labour and granted pensions to unmarried partners of killed guardsman. And it established the right of employees to take over a business whose owners had run away.

Women like Louise Michel, Elizabeth Dimtrieff and Natalie Lemal created their own organisations to influence how things were run and to defend the revolution. There was an explosion of art in the streets. The painter Gustav Courbet led a crowd to topple the statue of Napoleon in the Place de Vendome. The guillotine was dragged from a prison and burnt.

On 21 May the French government sent troops to retake Paris. The men, women and children of Paris fought heroically on the barricades, but during what’s known as the “Bloody Week” 30,000 Parisians were executed.

The Commune created an example of the sort of democratic society that workers could set up if they seized control. Eugene Poitier wrote The Internationale anthem to celebrate the international legacy of the Communards.

Marx rejected the idea that the working class could advance just by moving to the head of the existing state. What the Commune showed was “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”.

“Instead, the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it,” Marx wrote.

1968: Demand the Impossible

In May 1968 Paris astonished the world with the largest general strike in the whole of human history.

More than nine million workers were involved, from huge car factories to the performers at the Follies Bergere cabaret music hall.

The mass strike movement was ignited by France’s growing student population. Students were frustrated by overcrowded and impersonal universities and were radicalised by the movement against the Vietnam War. They were also demanding the right of male and female students to visit each other in university housing.

On 3 May the authorities attempted to regain control by closing the Sorbonne in Paris. On the night of 10 May, the vicious riot police, the CRS, confronted students in Paris’ Latin Quarter.

By midnight, the students were building barricades, using cobblestones torn from the streets. That night, students and workers erected 60 barricades to beat back the police. The CRS was routed by the “night of the barricades”. The government was forced to reopen the Sorbonne and released all imprisoned student activists.

France’s trade union federations called a one-day general strike and mass demonstration in Paris. One million workers marched in Paris on 13 May. The next day workers at the Sud Aviation aircraft factory in Nantes went on indefinite strike and occupied their factory.

They locked managers in their offices and forced them to listen to The Internationale, the anthem of the Paris Commune. Within days the strike spread to the whole of France.

The revolutionary process which began with street barricades had developed into a demonstration of the power of the working class to transform society.

But eventually the government—with the cooperation of the trade union leaders and a Stalinist Communist Party obsessed with electoral politics—managed to regain control.

It showed the power of the working class and the need for a revolutionary organisation committed to fighting for workers’ self-emancipation