In Memory of the Paris Commune

In Memory of the Paris Commune by Walter Crane, 1891

Walter Crane (1845 – 1915) was an internationally renowned illustrator and artist in the late 19th Century and early 20th with a clearly recognisable style.

He was an associate of William Morris, and part of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Much of Walter Crane's work was illustrating children’s books but he was an active radical socialist, a member of the Socialist League, and produced many pictures supporting the international socialist and anarchist movements, notably cartoons printed in Justice, Commonweal and The Clarion.

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In July 1896 there was an International Socialist Workers and Trade Unionist Congress held in London. The list of attendees is like a who's who of the European revolutionary movement - including Tom Mann, Keir Hardie, Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, Frank Kitz and many others. The Congress was a landmark event in history, with heated arguments that sealed the split between the anarchists and the Marxists.

Walter Crane produced a set of his socialist drawings and writings, compiled over the previous ten years, and made them into a presentation pack which he called Cartoons for the Cause. They were tied together with a red ribbon and given out to attendees as a souvenir. This picture was included in the set.

We've recreated the pack, added a reproduction of the poster that advertised a mass meeting during the Congress (also available as an A3 colour poster); and added the front cover of the Report of the Congress, which Crane also decorated with his artwork.

We have produced these as 'print on demand' and have a small number in stock which we take to bookfairs and events, but you can also order them online.

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After the defeat of Napoleon III's army in the Franco Prussian War, the workers of Paris, completely surrounded by the Prussians, refused to accept the authority of the new Third Republic government.

While under seige, Parisians starved and froze to death. Some managed to save themselves by eating cats, dogs and rats. In March 1871, they established the Paris Commune

After seizing power, the Communards set about creating a new society, influenced by the radical ideas of feminism, anarchism, and revolutionary social democracy. In their vision for a new society, they separated church and state, abolished child labour, and handed over abandoned businesses to workers' cooperatives. Marx and Engels later described the Commune as the first 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.

At its first meeting on 28 March 1871, the Commune enacted several radical decrees. It abolished the death penalty and military conscription, and sent delegates to other cities in the hope of inspiring similar uprisings across France. 

In May, the national French army brutally suppressed the Commune during a week of fierce street fighting known as the "Bloody Week" ("La Semaine Sanglante"). Between 10,000 and 20,000 Communards were killed. The army took over 43,000 prisoners; of those, 95 were immediately sentenced to death, while thousands more were imprisoned or deported to penal colonies.

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Walter Crane included a poem he had written about the Paris Commune in his Cartoons for the Cause:

IN MEMORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

BORN MARCH 18, 1871, AND DIED IN JUNE THE SAME YEAR

What winged shape, with waving torch aflame,
Wild with the winds of March, and streaming hair
Above the storm clouds, doth to men declare
Her message, and a memory doth claim?

A star through drifting smoke of praise and blame –
The toilers’ beacon, still to re-appear
With spring-tide hopes new quickening year by year
Since bright in Freedom’s dawn the COMMUNE came.

Maligned, betrayed, short-lived to act and teach,
Whose blood lies still upon the hands that slew;
E’en now, when Labour knocks upon the gate
That shuts on Privilege, he thinks of you,
And what men dared and suffered, and their fate
Who ruled a city, once, for all and each.

WALTER CRANE. MARCH, 1891.