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That the Revolution of 1871 succeeded where the Revolution of 1789 failed shouldn't really come as a surprise...by 1871, after the humiliating disaster of the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Mexico under Emperor Louis-Philippe II, the air in Paris was filled with discontent. The turning point came that March, when the Central Committee and the National Guards, with the support of much of the Army, persuaded the liberal Emperor to break with the Monarchist Congress and support their cause. This he did, allying himself with the "Anarchists" and moderates as the Marxists became increasingly radical, advocating another war with Prussia, and, driven by the "Legend" of Napoleon's defeat and exile in the aftermath of the French Civil War, a war with Great Britain as well, all in the name of the "Greater Revolution".

It was this continued revolutionary fervor which ultimately caused the Commune to collapse following a failed attempt by the Marxists to invade Versailles (and seize the country's assets in the process). It collapsed by the end of May, and by the end of June a moderate coalition of Royalists and Democrats had formed the Second Republic of France (the first being recognized as the revolutionary constitutional monarchy under Louis XVI).

It was in this way that the Communards, ironically, succeeded by failing, unlike their counterparts of 1789...

-From Alfred Dryefuss's History of Revolutionary France, Third Edition, 1921
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