"The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage"
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Calling the Paris Commune "first and foremost a democracy" is C. L. R. James doing two things at once: stripping away the romance and panic that cling to 1871, and re-centering the story on legitimacy. In a century of Cold War caricature, the Commune is often filed either as heroic insurrection or anarchic breakdown. James refuses both frames. He insists on a plain, almost procedural fact: universal suffrage, an elected council, a government that can claim a mandate.
That dryness is the point. James, a journalist-historian with an anti-colonial instinct for who gets recognized as political, knows that revolutions are routinely delegitimized by treating their leaders as mobs rather than institutions. By foregrounding elections, he flips the burden of proof: if the Commune is a democratic government, then its suppression is not the restoration of order but the crushing of a rival sovereignty.
The subtext is a rebuke to liberal narratives that celebrate democracy as an ideal while denying it when it appears in radical form. Universal suffrage sounds comforting until it produces the "wrong" program, the "wrong" class, the "wrong" city in revolt against the "right" state. James is also arguing, quietly, against elitist accounts of history: the working population of Paris was not merely agitated; it governed.
Context matters: the Commune emerged from military defeat, siege, and a legitimacy crisis between Paris and Versailles. James highlights suffrage to show that, even under catastrophe, ordinary people built a state. That claim turns a doomed uprising into a serious democratic experiment - and makes its bloody end read like a political choice, not an inevitability.
That dryness is the point. James, a journalist-historian with an anti-colonial instinct for who gets recognized as political, knows that revolutions are routinely delegitimized by treating their leaders as mobs rather than institutions. By foregrounding elections, he flips the burden of proof: if the Commune is a democratic government, then its suppression is not the restoration of order but the crushing of a rival sovereignty.
The subtext is a rebuke to liberal narratives that celebrate democracy as an ideal while denying it when it appears in radical form. Universal suffrage sounds comforting until it produces the "wrong" program, the "wrong" class, the "wrong" city in revolt against the "right" state. James is also arguing, quietly, against elitist accounts of history: the working population of Paris was not merely agitated; it governed.
Context matters: the Commune emerged from military defeat, siege, and a legitimacy crisis between Paris and Versailles. James highlights suffrage to show that, even under catastrophe, ordinary people built a state. That claim turns a doomed uprising into a serious democratic experiment - and makes its bloody end read like a political choice, not an inevitability.
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| Topic | Human Rights |
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