{"id":23993,"date":"2023-04-26T11:33:42","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T11:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=23993"},"modified":"2023-04-26T12:18:24","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T12:18:24","slug":"how-the-paris-commune-influenced-the-1916-rising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2023\/04\/26\/how-the-paris-commune-influenced-the-1916-rising\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Paris Commune influenced the 1916 Rising"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article, written by Donal Fallon, to commemorate the \u00a0the anniversary of the \u00a01916 Dublin Rising was first published by The Tribune<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
1st May 1916: A barricade made of carts, in Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, during the Easter Rising. (Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

HOW THE PARIS COMMUNE INFLUENCED THE 1916 DUBLIN RISING<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Paris Commune of 1871 was still fresh in the memory by the time of Ireland’s Easter Rising \u2013 and, for 1916 leader James Connolly, its radical politics and urban warfare offered an example to follow.<\/p>\n

1st May 1916: A barricade made of carts, in Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, during the Easter Rising. (Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

When Karl Marx looked at the revolutionary self-governance of the\u00a01871 Paris Commune<\/a>, he saw an embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.<\/p>\n

Decades later,\u00a0James Connolly, the leading Irish Marxist<\/a>, seized on that same ethos of worker democracy. Writing in\u00a0Workers\u2019 Republic<\/em>\u00a0in May 1899, Connolly\u00a0argued<\/a>, \u2018[T]he Commune, if it had been successful, would have inaugurated the reign of real freedom the world over \u2014 it would have meant the emancipation of the working class.\u2019<\/p>\n

The 1871 Paris Commune, an urban insurrection that lasted from March\u00a018 until its brutal suppression on May 28, has always retained an important place in radical history and memory, synonymous with workers\u2019 barricades in the streets and defiant red flags.<\/p>\n

Its similarities with the\u00a01916 Easter Rising<\/a>, a nationalist rebellion put down after less than a week, are less frequently noted. But viewed through the lens of Connolly, the Commune comes into focus as an important antecedent to the 1916 rebellion.<\/p>\n

A syndicalist who joined the Industrial Workers of the World\u00a0while in the United States<\/a>\u00a0and later led the Easter Rising, Connolly\u2019s \u2018co-operative commonwealth\u2019 shared much with the Paris Commune\u2019s manifesto. A student of history and leader of the Irish Citizen Army, Connolly also found much to learn from the urban warfare that marked the last days of the Commune.<\/p>\n

In the aftermaths of both the Paris Commune and the Easter Rising, the Irish establishment used the spectre of left-wing radicalism to bludgeon domestic leftists. These were early examples of anticommunist tropes that would persist for decades. But in at least one respect, they weren\u2019t wrong: the methods and politics seen in the Paris Commune did shape Irish revolutionaries, particularly Connolly.<\/p>\n

The Menace Abroad<\/strong><\/p>\n

Less than twenty years after the events of Paris, Irish socialist Jim Connell, inspired by the Commune,\u00a0wrote the now-iconic anthem\u00a0The Red Flag<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Connell\u2019s positive view of the Paris Commune was not widely shared in Ireland. Denunciations were heard from the pulpit and pressroom. Some of the most vocal condemnations of the Paris Commune came from the\u00a0Nation<\/em>, a newspaper with origins in the 1840s Young Ireland movement.<\/p>\n

The aspirations of the Commune, the\u00a0Nation<\/em>\u00a0declared, were<\/p>\n

utterly repugnant to the genius of the Irish race. Religion and Patriotism, the two most holy and glorious principles known to human nature, have ever been the guiding lights of the Irish people, the motive power of all their actions.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the\u00a0Freeman\u2019s Journal<\/em><\/a>\u00a0lamented how \u2018the women of Paris have been prominent in the streets, with a red flag, demanding arms [. . .] and conducting themselves like ugly fiendish sisters of the witches in Macbeth.\u2019<\/p>\n

Above all, it was the anticlericalism of Commune partisans that rankled many in Ireland. In the Commune, they saw a dangerous threat to the Catholic Church. And indeed, anti-church sentiment ran strong.<\/p>\n

One Parisian publication sympathetic to the Commune declared that \u2018as Jesus Christ was born in a stable, the only treasure that Notre-Dame ought to possess is a truss of straw.\u2019 During the Commune, churches were appropriated for communal purposes amid popular anger over their accumulated wealth and conservative politics.<\/p>\n

The history of the Catholic Church in Ireland engendered a drastically different view of the clergy. Subjected to enormous repression in the decades before\u00a01829 Catholic Emancipation<\/a>, the Church was popularly regarded not as an oppressor like in France, but as an institution that had itself been oppressed.<\/p>\n

With strong support among the populace, the Church\u2019s antipathy toward the Commune proved harmful to early socialist organising efforts. When part of the Socialist International\u2019s Dublin branch met in a small room above a Dublin shop less than a year after the suppression of the Commune, a contemporary newspaper reported that the speaker was interrupted and informed that \u2018the Internationalists had shot the Archbishop and priests of Paris.\u2019 A \u2018great uproar ensued.\u2019<\/p>\n

The landlord of the house was not keen on the gathering.<\/p>\n

[He] burst into the room in an excited state, and called those present a set of ruffians and blackguards. He said he had been led to the room on the pretence that the meeting was to be for a discussion of the labour and wages question, and that he would sooner burn the house over his head than hire it for the nefarious purposes of Internationalism.<\/p>\n

Connolly and the Commune<\/strong><\/p>\n

For radicals in the late nineteenth century Ireland was a barren environment, but the exception to this was\u00a0James Connolly\u2019s Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP)<\/a>. The party took a prominent role in the centenary celebrations of the\u00a01798 United Irish rebellion<\/a>, and participated in protests against the celebration of\u00a0Queen Victoria\u2019s Diamond Jubilee<\/a>\u00a0and in anti-Boer War agitation.<\/p>\n

Gaining its strength from its attempt to synthesise socialism with anti-imperial separatism, one British newspaper noted disapprovingly that the party was \u2018composed of a number of the most extreme and least reputable representatives of the nationalists of Dublin.\u2019<\/p>\n

Earlier socialist organisations in the city, such as the Socialist League, had organised commemorative meetings of the Commune in private, for fear of being broken up. But those hostile to the revolutionary politics of Paris had plenty of reason to reproach Connolly\u2019s party. The ISRP held annual commemorations, and Connolly himself gave a lecture on the Commune in Dublin in March 1898.<\/p>\n

Connolly\u2019s interest in the uprising was no doubt influenced by his contact with participants. For instance, Connolly met with Commune veteran Leo Meillet and even appeared to adopt some of his rhetoric. During one commemoration in Edinburgh, where Connolly was born, Meillet declared that \u2018without the shedding of blood there is no social salvation\u2019; in February 1916, Connolly\u00a0wrote in his newspaper<\/a>\u00a0that \u2018without the shedding of blood there is no redemption.\u2019<\/p>\n

But Connolly latched onto the Commune for reasons that were more political than personal. Like many other radicals, the democratic ideals of the Commune captured the Irish socialist\u2019s heart and mind.<\/p>\n

Connolly\u2019s commitment to popular sovereignty showed up repeatedly in his writings. In an 1897 article, \u2018Socialism and Irish Nationalism<\/a>\u2018, Connolly wrote that socialism should seek \u2018in the interest of the democracy to strengthen popular action on all public bodies.\u2019 And he argued repeatedly for a cooperative commonwealth, \u2018a society in which all productive property is owned in common and managed by democratic co-operatives, which in turn are organised along co-operative lines, industry-by-industry, region-by-region.\u2019<\/p>\n

Connolly also saw the Commune as an enormously instructive event. In his pamphlet\u00a0Labour, Nationality and Religion<\/em><\/a>, Connolly cited the Commune\u2019s suppression as a quintessential ruling-class response to revolutionary activity:<\/p>\n

It is a well-established fact that from the earliest revolutionary outbreak known down to the Commune of Paris, or Red Sunday in Russia, the first blood has been shed, the first blow struck, by the possessing conservative classes. And we are not so childish as to imagine that the capitalist class of the future will shrink from the shedding of the blood of the workers in order to retain their ill-gotten gains.<\/p>\n

Connolly\u2019s interest in history wasn\u2019t confined to the realm of the abstract. In its pages, he sought not just material for societal analysis, but lessons for immediate application.<\/p>\n

The Art of War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Connolly\u2019s use of historical example is perhaps most evident in the organisation of urban warfare during the revolutionary period.<\/p>\n

Amid a mass, protracted labour dispute in 1913\u2014remembered today as the\u00a0Dublin Lockout<\/a>\u2014trade unionists and radicals formed the\u00a0Irish Citizen Army<\/a>\u00a0(ICA). The ICA\u2019s original aim was to protect trade union demonstrations and the right of assembly from police assault.<\/p>\n

Within a year, however, it was reorganised along more formal lines, becoming an armed body of men and women that regularly drilled in Dublin\u2019s Croydon Park. An expressly internationalist militia, the ICA constitution pledged to \u2018support the rights and liberties of the democracies of all nations.\u2019<\/p>\n

Of those fighting in the year of the Easter Rising, the Irish Citizen Army was the only one that offered equal membership to men and women and trained them both in the use of arms. One of those members,\u00a0Constance Markievicz<\/a>, would later describe the women as \u2018on absolutely the same footing as the men\u2019, saying that Connolly made clear that the same gruelling training would be expected of them if they were to take part in the fight.<\/p>\n

Writing on the Easter Rising, historians Michael Foy and Brian Barton\u00a0describe<\/a>\u00a0the Irish Citizen Army as \u2018committed ideologically to the single, unambiguous goal of revolution, an objective dearly understood and supported by its membership [. . .] its training and lectures were both directed toward preparing for urban warfare.\u2019<\/p>\n

Connolly mined history for lessons to apply to the fight. Readers of the\u00a0Workers\u2019 Republic<\/em>were escorted back through the events of 1871, but to the 1848 insurrection in Paris. In that battle, Connolly\u00a0informed his readers<\/a>\u00a0that<\/p>\n

the streets were barricaded at tactical points not on the main streets but commanding them. The houses were broken through so that passages were made inside the houses along the whole length of the streets. The party walls were loop-holed, as were also the front walls, the windows were blocked by sandbags, boxes filled with stones and dirt, bricks, chests, and other pieces of furniture with all sorts of odds and ends piled up against them.<\/p>\n

Connolly also taught members of the Citizen Army and the\u00a0Irish Volunteers<\/a>\u00a0about urban warfare. James Barry, a young Volunteer in Cork, remembered that Connolly spoken to him and others in the southern city, and that \u2018the subject of his lecture was street fighting. He went into considerable detail in explaining the tactics to be employed in the seizure, occupation and defence of barricades in city streets.\u2019<\/p>\n

For Connolly, the past warranted study because \u2018the lessons are invaluable for all students of warfare who wish to understand the defence and attack of cities, towns, villages, or houses.\u2019 The Easter Rising was not to be a suicide mission, but an endeavour fought with the knowledge of past battles and tactics.<\/p>\n

Armed with that knowledge, volunteers knocked holes in walls to move between buildings. W. J. Brennan-Whitmore, a senior Irish Volunteer and member of the General Post Office garrison, recalled that \u2018the idea of boring from one premises to another was part of Connolly\u2019s plan for holding the city. It was intended that the whole block would be bored in this way.\u2019<\/p>\n

The barricades of the Paris Commune were also a point of reference. In Paris, Robert Toms writes, there were<\/p>\n

900 barricades built all over the city, including those prepared in advance, such as the useless defence lines in Western Paris and the huge, much-photographed, redoubts facing the Place de la Concorde, constructed laboriously and impressively by the Commune\u2019s Barricades Commission.<\/p>\n

In their manifesto to the citizens of Dublin issued on the insurrection\u2019s second day, the Provisional Government encouraged able-bodied citizens to assist them by building barricades in the streets. In the North King Street area, under the control of the Four Courts Garrison, British forces were only able to advance 150 yards over two days, losing forty-five men between fatalities and casualties in a highly barricaded and defended area of the city.<\/p>\n

When images of these urban redoubts were transmitted to the world, they quickly became part of the Easter Rising\u2019s iconography as well\u00a0\u2014 barricades for a brief time were as synonymous with Dublin as they were with Paris.<\/p>\n

Beyond aesthetic association, they represented another tactic gleaned from history that advantaged the rebels in battle. Despite being vastly outnumbered and saddled with inferior weaponry, the ultimately unsuccessful uprising sustained a casualty rate that was just 40 percent that of the British.<\/p>\n

The British also suffered some of their heaviest losses in areas where the rebels applied the lessons of their study. For example, British attempts to advance over Mount Street Bridge while under intense fire from occupied buildings proved deadly. The incident, historian Fearghal McGarry\u00a0notes<\/a>, appeared to demonstrate \u2018the advantages enjoyed by a defensive force in an urban environment.\u2019<\/p>\n

A Dream To Preserve<\/strong><\/p>\n

Press condemnation of the Easter Rising frequently focused on the radicalism of James Connolly and his followers. The\u00a0Daily Chronicle<\/em>\u00a0derided Connolly as an \u2018industrial anarchist of the most pronounced type\u2019, who advocated \u2018no trust with employers, violence if necessary, cynical repudiation of contracts and unceasing war by any and every means.\u2019<\/p>\n

Many media outlets rushed to compare the six-day rebellion to the Paris Commune. For the\u00a0Irish Examiner<\/em>\u00a0in Cork, it was little more than a \u2018squalid version\u2019 of the same, while the\u00a0Irish Catholic<\/em>\u00a0went as far as to state that \u2018to find anything like a parallel for what occurred it is necessary to have recourse to the bloodstained annals of the Paris Commune.\u2019 And the\u00a0Daily Sketch<\/em>\u00a0reached for the same historical parallel on May Day 1916, writing that \u2018the wild scenes of the past week recall the savage horrors of the Commune.\u2019<\/p>\n

Connolly would have smiled on the comparison\u00a0\u2014 just not for the reasons impugning journalists would suggest.<\/p>\n

As historian Nick Hewlett\u00a0has argued<\/a>, it was \u2018the direct participation of ordinary people that helps explain why the Commune has become such an important focus in labour movement mythology.\u2019 It was this vision, of a workers\u2019 republic, that led Connolly to rise one hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

Like many workers in the Paris Commune, he ultimately gave his life for that ideal when he was executed by firing squad.\u00a0But his vision did not die with him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

24.4.23<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

also see:<\/p>\n

From the GPO to the Winter Palace, Rayner Connor O\u2019Lysaght, Socialist Democracy (Ireland)<\/a><\/p>\n

First hand report of the 1916 Dublin Rising \u2013 Sylvia Pankhurst, Patricia Lynch<\/a><\/p>\n

The centenary of the Irish Rebellion of 2016 \u2013 Allan Armstrong, Marxist Internet Archive, Socialist Democracy (Ireland)<\/a><\/p>\n

The Easter Rising and the Soviet Union: An untold chapter in Ireland\u2019s great rebellion \u2013 Brendan McGeever<\/a><\/p>\n

Scotland and the Easter Rising \u2013 Willy Maley<\/a><\/p>\n

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The following article, written by Donal Fallon, to commemorate the \u00a0the anniversary of the \u00a01916 Dublin Rising was first published by The Tribune. HOW THE PARIS COMMUNE INFLUENCED THE 1916 DUBLIN RISING The Paris Commune of 1871 was still fresh in the memory by the time of Ireland’s Easter Rising \u2013 and, for 1916 leader…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1855,1858,1861,1867,1873,1846,1874,910,1868,1864,1876],"tags":[9193],"class_list":["post-23993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exploitation-and-emancipation","category-oppression-liberation","category-alienation-self-determination","category-emancipation-liberation-and-self-determination","category-against-unionism","category-british-imperialism","category-republicanism","category-trade-unionism","category-against-imperialism","category-our-history","category-ireland-against-unionism","tag-author-donal-fallon"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/mastodon.scot\/@rcfscotland\/110264898309576415","error":""},"views":1296,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23993"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24005,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23993\/revisions\/24005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}