The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy

For two months in 1871, the workers of Paris took control of Europe’s most celebrated capital city. When they established the world’s first workers’ democracy the Paris Commune they found no ready-made blueprints, and no precedents to study for how to run their city without princes, prison wardens, or professional politicians. All they had was the boundless revolutionary enthusiasm of Paris’s socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins, all of whom threw their energies into cre...