“There was a time in the history of France when the poor found themselves oppressed to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a virtue, and hundreds of heads tumbled into the basket. That time may have arrived with us.”
A cooper said this to a crowd of 10,000 workers in St. Louis, Missouri in July, 1877. He was referring to the Paris Commune, which happened just six years prior. Like the Parisian workers, the Saint Louis strikers openly called for the use of arms, not only to defend themselves against the violence of the militias and police who were sent to crush their strike, but for outright revolutionary aims.
The Great Upheaval was the first major worker uprising in the United States. It began in the fourth year of the Long Depression which, in many ways, was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It lasted twenty-three years and included four separate financial panics. In 1873, over 5,000 business failed. Over one million Americans lost their jobs. In the following two years, another 13,000 businesses failed. Railroad workers’ wages dropped 40-50%. And one thousand infants were dying each week in New York City.
By 1877, workers had suffered four years of wage cuts and layoffs. In July, the B&O Railroad slashed wages by 10%, their second wage cut in eight months. On July 16, 1877, the trainmen of Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work. They occupied the rail yards and drove out the police. Local townspeople backed the strikers and came to their defense. The militia tried to run the trains, but the strikers derailed them and guarded the switches with guns. They halted all freight movement, but continued moving mail and passengers, to successfully maintain public support.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1871: Over 200,000 people turned out at the Paris City Hall to see their newly elected revolutionary officials of the Paris Commune. The red flag, emblematic of the Commune, was raised over all public buildings.
Today in Labor History February 23, 1903: Jean-Baptiste Clement died. Clement was a socialist and Paris Communard, poet, singer and composer of the famous song, “The Time of Cherries.” He was one of the last on the barricades during the Commune. He escaped and fled to England. The French authorities condemned him to death, in absentia. They later granted him amnesty and he returned to France in 1879. He helped found the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party in 1890. Paris has since named schools and a street after him.
Today in Labor History February 10, 1898: Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht was born. Brecht was a doctor, poet and playwright. He fled the Nazis only to be persecuted in the U.S. by HUAC during the Cold War. He is most well-known for his play, “The Three Penny Opera.” He also wrote “Mother Courage and Her Children” and “The Days of the Commune,” about the Paris Commune. Additionally, he wrote poetry and composed the lyrics to many of the songs performed in his plays, like “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” (AKA Whiskey Bar).
Today in Labor History February 8, 1805: Louis-Auguste Blanqui was born. He was a French revolutionary and participant in the Paris Commune. Blanqui took an active role in most republican conspiracies of the early to mid-1800s, both in France, and in Italy with the Carbonari society, including the July Revolution of 1830. In 1840, the authorities condemned him to death for his role in a violent rebellion led by the Société des Saisons. However, they commuted it to life in prison and then ended up releasing him during the revolution of 1848. Needless to say, he promptly resumed his attacks. In 1849, they again imprisoned him, but he escaped and led two more armed uprisings. Just prior to the Paris Commune, they arrested him again. While in prison, the Communards elected him president of the commune. The Communards offered to release all of their prisoners if the government released Blanqui. In 1872, along with other leaders of the Commune, the authorities sentenced him to deportation. But because of poor health, they commuted his sentence to local imprisonment. He died in 1881.
Today in Labor History January 30, 1836: Gustave Lefrancaise (1826-1901) was born. Lefrancais was a French revolutionary member of the First International. He participated in the Paris Commune and cofounded the anarchist Jura Federation.
Today in Labor History January 14, 1895: The Knights of Labor (KOL) initiated the Brooklyn trolley strike over wages and safety (lasting until Feb. 28). It was the largest strike Brooklyn had ever seen. The bosses brought in scabs from Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The drivers cut the wires, surrounded trains and assaulted the scab drivers. 2 people died. On January 19, the mayor called out the National Guard and declared martial law. Militiamen, with fixed bayonets, battled workers in the streets. Sympathetic locals threw rocks and bottles at the militiamen. When a supporter tried to disarm a soldier and was subsequently stabbed, the crowds of supporters swelled into the thousands. One New York paper called it another Paris Commune. However, the KOL had been weakened by years of poor leadership, and by the witch hunt that followed the Haymarket Bombing, and its membership had dwindled to under 100,000. They hadn’t waged a successful strike in years. In the end, the militia effectively quashed the strike and things returned to business as usual without the workers winning any of their demands.
Today in Labor History October 21, 1894: French anarchists incited a revolt on the penal colony of Île Saint-Joseph, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, which included the infamous Devil’s Island. The revolt was a response to the guards killing an anarchist prisoner. The uprising was quickly put down, with the guards slaughtering several anarchists, and torturing many more, some of whom later died from their wounds. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held there (1895-98) after his wrongful, antisemitic conviction for treason. Charles Delescluze, libertarian socialist and future leader of the Paris Commune, was sent there in 1853. Clément Duval, a member of the Panther of Batignolles anarchist gang of robbers, spent 14 years on Devil’s Island, making 20 escape attempts. In 1901, he succeeded and fled to New York, where lived until his death at the age of 85. The first political prisoners brought to Guiana were Jacobins, in 1794. Numerous slave rebellions also occurred in the colony, until slavery was finally abolished, in the wake of the 1848 French Revolution. The novel and film “Papillon” takes place there, as does Joseph Conrad's short story “An Anarchist” (1906). Delescluze, who was killed on the barricades during the Commune, wrote an account of his imprisonment in Guiana, “De Paris à Cayenne, Journal d'un transporté.” And Duval wrote about it in his 1929 memoir, “Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony.” Guiana is the only continental South American territory to remain a European colony into the 21st century.
Today in Labor History October 20, 1895: Anarcho-syndicalist writer Gaston Leval, active in the Spanish Civil War, was born in France. He was the son of a French Communard. He escaped to Spain in 1915 to avoid conscription during WWI. Then left for Argentina during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera where he lived from 1923 to 1936. He returned to Spain and became a militant fighter, and where he documented the revolution and the urban and rural anarchist collectives.
Today in Labor History October 18, 1843: Italian anarchist Amilcare Cipriani was born. At age 15, he fought with Garabaldi in Italy’s second war of independence. 1867, he joined the First International. He also defended the barricades during the Paris Commune. He was re-elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies eight times, but never was permitted to serve because he refused to swear allegiance to the king. Cipriani was so well-respected in Italy that Mussolini’s parents gave him the middle name of Amilcare.
Today in Labor History October 5, 1839: Eugène Varlin was born. He was an internationalist anarchist and elected member of the Paris Commune of 1871. Born into a poor, peasant family, he went on to become a bookbinder and a union organizer. He helped lead the very first French bookbinders strike, in 1864. He participated in several insurrections prior to 1871, as well as the storming of the Vendôme place, at the beginning of the Paris Commune. When the Commune was finally suppressed, Varlin was captured and executed.
"More than 150 years later, the Paris Commune of 1871 continues to inspire critical thought and praxis on the Left. As one of the truly defining moments in the history of the struggle for socialism, the heroism, innovativeness, defiance, and sacrifices of the Communards have especially shaped the Marxist tradition."