In this video at the Communards’ Wall, Stan Miller, an activist in the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France, explains the background to the Paris Commune, the first workers’ revolution in the world.
March 18, 2021, was the 150th anniversary of the day that the working people of Paris took power. The revolution was sparked on that date in 1871 when a large group of working women surrounded the machine guns that the National Guard had set up in Montmartre and convinced the soldiers to put away their weapons. The heroic Communards held the city for two months, setting up a model democratic workers’ government, until reactionary troops from Versailles retook the city, slaughtering at least 20,000 working people in the process.