"Like a Migratory Bird Floating above Villages". Global Readings and Uses of the Paris Commune in the 1870s and 1880s

Quentin Deluermoz, Paris 13 University / Laboratoire Pleiade

The Paris Commune is increasingly described by historians as a local and Parisian event. However, if the AIT did not have the role described for a long time in the Parisian movement, the Commune immediately found an important echo on a European, Atlantic and Mediterranean scale. By focusing not on dissemination but on relays (press, migration, exile) as well as on the appropriation of the communal event, the paper will show how the Commune was also a "global" event. Beyond the European social movements, Marxist or anarchist, it apperas to be mobilized within republican, socialist, democratic, radical, associationist, colonial and other groups. This international resonance has thus contributed, in unsuspected ways, to shaping its immediate and subsequent definition and understanding.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 204. Workers' Movements, Mass Migration, and the Globalization of Radical Ideas (1860s-1930s)