Paris Commune Survives

But they'd be vastly different socialists states-- assuming that the Commune can not only hold off the Versailles government, but seize control of the whole country. The Parisian communards were much less Marxist-Communist than the Bolsheviks, for one. It's hard to pinpoint their ideology since it was such a mess of different groups vying for control, but generally it seemed much less centralized (at least within the city), much less organized and a tad more democratic than the Soviets in 1918 onwards, so there's that.

Odds are that no matter how the Communards gain control of France, they're going to be diplomatically isolated worse than the USSR was in OTL. Germany ain't going to touch 'em-- historically, they even offered to help bolster Republican forces, though the Republicans wisely refused this-- Britain's unlikely to be fond of a Socialist state just across the channel, and everybody else is either a monarchy or Switzerland.

Also unlike the USSR, there's France's growing overseas empire to deal with. I don't even know how the colonial governors would react to the new regime.
 
What if Paris Commune Survives? France a socialist state at 1871 as Russia at OTL in 1917? What the impact?

Well, first and foremost the Paris Commune surviving is incredibly unlikely. I admire the fact that the working class of Paris gave it their all, but...it was all in vain in real life. :(

In the alternate history however, assuming they beat back both the French army and Prussians, took all the money used to finance the French army that would destroy the commune, and spread nationwide, the Commune of France would be a lot different from Socialist Russia in 1922(founding of the U.S.S.R).

First of all, it was and would be still a representative Socialist democracy.This would be a far cry from the U.S.S.R of OTL. The workers appointed local people to democratically represent them, who btw received worker's wages.

I could imagine other European nations either A) ganging up on the Commune of France, or B) the CoF(Commune of France) attempting to spread Communist revolution beyond it's borders.

Beyond that, it is pure speculation of how the Commune would have looked like, especially if we are assuming it lasts well into the 20th and possibly 21st centuries.

Many consider it a true Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Me, I could care less, as it failed miserably. Until something like it crops up again, Communism will continue to be associated with Totalitarian "Socialism", such as what the USSR claimed to be upholding.
 
In both cases the labouring classes formed their own state, you cant get any more Marxist than that.
Yeah you can. The Paris Commune never had a dictatorship of the proletariat. The wealthy bourgeoisie who remained in the city pitched in as much as anyone else, and the Communards never touched the central reserves or really disturbed much else besides paving stones.
 
Yeah you can. The Paris Commune never had a dictatorship of the proletariat. The wealthy bourgeoisie who remained in the city pitched in as much as anyone else, and the Communards never touched the central reserves or really disturbed much else besides paving stones.

lets start with the first bold sentence. Yes, they did have a DotP. Even Karl Marx(I do believe) agreed on this point. Although the rich class did contribute to building up the Commune, the working class had most of the power and influence in the Commune. Who knows-if it succeeded maybe the rich would be suppressed once they weren't need anymore?

Second bold sentence: Ah, true democracy in its finest state. Everyone could pitch in towards helping the Commune.

Here is what Marx had to say about the Commune of Paris: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
 
lets start with the first bold sentence. Yes, they did have a DotP. Even Karl Marx(I do believe) agreed on this point. Although the rich class did contribute to building up the Commune, the working class had most of the power and influence in the Commune. Who knows-if it succeeded maybe the rich would be suppressed once they weren't need anymore?

Second bold sentence: Ah, true democracy in its finest state. Everyone could pitch in towards helping the Commune.

Here is what Marx had to say about the Commune of Paris: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
What Marx spoke of there (in broad, sweeping rhetoric which no doubt wowed the crowds) had little to do with what was going on on the ground. Yeah, on paper the Commune was swell. Emancipation of labor, downfall of the monarchal establishment, policemen paid at workingmen wages, &c. and so on. In practice? Blanquists gleefully seized control of the police department, rich people opened up their homes as hospitals and hoarded food, the number of delegates who were part of the central committee kept swelling until the thing was too bloated to do any good, and everybody with an iota of military experience kept screaming that they needed something better than the pissant militants who were pretending to be real soldiers.

On the ground, the Commune was too fragmented to be anything. Everybody pitched in because it was clear that the central committee couldn't even tie its own shoes, so they had to care for themselves
 
I think Europe would have seen it very badly; there are still people around who remember the last time France was possessed with revolutionary fervor. I cannot see Germany allowing France to go communist. They will not allow France to try to spread the Revolution into German lands again. Fear of France was a large part of what drove southern Germany into the Empire.
 
I don't think the Paris Commune has chances of surviving... Remember the contest of the Parisian Commune: France had just been utterly crushed by Prussia in the 1870-71 war. The German Emperor had been proclaimed in Versailles palace and Paris was besieged by Prussian/German troops.

At the time, the Monarchists won the legislative election and they signed peace with the Germans... something the Parisians didn't like: it's one of the reasons the Commune was born. From then on, it was pretty much Paris versus Rest of France+Germany. The odds are largely against the Commune.

Not to mention that the Siege proved incredibly thorough for those who stayed in Paris. Food was scarce: Parisians were sometimes reduced to eating Rats or the beasts of the zoo. I'm not joking: the zoo of Paris most notably lost a Rhino and an Elephant because of the food shortage... The Commune might have lasted longer, but I think it would have still failed.
 
To turn the question around a bit, what it would have taken for the Paris Commune to even survive would have been for its revolutionary inspiration to spread. Certainly it would have had to trigger other urban Communes in France's major cities and towns; it would also have had to inspire some more or less compatible movement among country people, otherwise Paris and all the other Communes would simply starve.

But if the Communard movement could get that kind of traction in France, what would stop its inspiration from overturning the established order in many places outside of France? In the Lowlands, in Germany, in Britain...

This of course is the very thing the rest of Europe, or more precisely, the consensus among the propertied ruling classes of Europe, including French ones outside of Paris (and presumably some in Paris, who either fled or kept their heads down and mouths shut for the moment)--this is what they feared. This is why the PC was so many light-years from a prospect of long-term success. It's not that they certainly could not work out their organizational problems--we don't know, the forces of reaction were quickly mustered to crush it, precisely because it just might have worked.

So--a Paris Commune that survives at all is a Paris Commune that has touched off revolutionary civil war, not just in France but throughout western Europe, and who knows maybe even the United States! Assuming the Communard movement prevails, there's no reason to assume it does so only within the boundaries of France and every likelihood all the international borders get redrawn--in fact that the nation-state gets abolished in favor of some federated hierarchy of city-states. If they prevail that is.

Or one can imagine that this wave of revolution does prevail in some places and not others and the upshot is two armed camps glaring at each other across the smoldering ruins of Europe; it would take a detailed timeline (one that has to cleverly and plausibly solve a lot of problems the PC faced that make it hard to argue with the "ASB" dismissal, much as I hate that sort of blanket labeling on principle!) to suggest where the strongholds of which sides would be, where zones of contention would lie, what sort of polarizations and reconfigurations the long hard civil war would catalyze, and so on.
 
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