A brief history of the world's first socialist working class uprising. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous National Guardsmen, seized the city and set about re-organising society in their own ...

On Saturday, the World Socialist Web Site marked the 150th anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune, the first time in world history that the working class took state power, with an international online ...

Bruno Braquehais, "Toppled bronze statue of Napoleon from the Vendôme Column" (1871), albumen print (all images courtesy Getty Research Institute) This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris ...

Five French priests who were executed by an anticlerical insurrectionist government in Paris in 1871 were beatified as martyrs on Saturday, April 22, in a Mass in which increased security precautions ...

In France, historical anniversaries tend to divide rather than unite. This year, which marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and the bicentennial of Napoléon Bonaparte’s death, certainly ...

Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form traces a political tradition—based on reimagining class relations—that stretches from the 1871 uprising to the modern-day struggles of ZAD. A man walks past a statue of ...

We generally don’t see Paris as a city scarred by war. It is not like London and Berlin, where the drab modern architecture of the urban centers offers silent reminders of past aerial bombardment. It ...

Recently, the Sussex University library dedicated part of its space for a small exhibition on the Paris Commune. At first this came with some surprise: how was it that, in the midst of the boredom of ...

Americans are notoriously dense when it comes to history. But if all history lessons were as compelling as English writer/director Peter Watkins’ docudrama about the Paris Commune, then maybe that ...

IN 1871, the working class in Paris rose up against their rulers and proclaimed the Paris Commune. It was the first example in history of ordinary people taking control of society and running it ...

White-knuckle thriller, history lesson, polemical mass-media critique, genre-bending docudrama: British provocateur Peter Watkins' "La Commune (Paris 1871)," the 12th film in a thematically consistent ...

The first part of Peter Watkins’ six-hour docudrama focuses on the euphoric rise of the Paris Commune, and part two tells the story of its quick decline. The commune was a sort of aftershock of the ...