This chapter examines Marx’s involvement in French socialist thought and action. Contrary to the standard view, Marx’s ideas were widely available in France at this time through a series of translations that appeared from 1872. These translations presented a ‘French Marx’ that was subtly, but noticeably, different from the German original and other versions, and whose ideas were more finely attuned to French circumstances. The construction of this French Marx was overseen and encouraged by Marx himself, who in translation was often willing to sacrifice the ‘purity’ of his ideas in order to broaden their appeal. The chapter contrasts this with his rigidity in the First International – where most French socialists met Marx for the first time, and which forms the basis for most studies of French Marxism – and argues that historians must combine the two. In order to fully understand why ideas such as Marxism spread, we must supplement the social and organisational histories of international socialism with attentive studies of its ideas, its texts, and their dissemination.

This chapter explores the second of two contemporary revolutionary interpretations of the Commune: the ‘violent’, which was mainly upheld by adherents of Louis Auguste Blanqui. These activists had held power during the Commune, and were more inclined to promote violent insurrection and state interventionism. This interpretation ignored the Commune’s ideas and its duration, focusing instead upon the shared experience of its violent end as part of an effort to turn Commune into a lasting revolutionary symbol and obscure the mistakes the Blanquists had made in power. Although this interpretation proved more enduring, it was not as beneficial as its ‘realist’ counterpart during the 1870s, because it was unable to characterise the Commune as anything more than a tragic event. I conclude by noting that while both readings were aimed at promoting unity, such competing interpretations also reflected the continuation of divisions that emerged during the Commune and continued to fracture the French revolutionary movement well into the early 1880s.

This chapter reappraises the impact of Marx’s ideas in France before the mid-1880s; the years to which historians have traditionally dated the beginning of a potent Marxist influence on French socialism. A wider range of French socialists than the Guesdists (to whom the introduction to Marxism is traditionally attributed) made frequent use of Marxist concepts, while Marx was consistently evoked provocatively by French socialists to maintain their revolutionary credentials. Socialists in particular made use of the French Marx, building upon the translational differences to advance their own theories on matters like the right to work and the role of the state. French socialists saw Marx’s ideas as a useful language for working through pressing social problems rather than a fixed doctrine: in fact, ‘orthodox Marxism’ did not exist during this period. These more complicated interactions also reflected the complex and shifting structures of the revolutionary movement as a whole, and revolutionary thought cannot simply be folded into the social and organisational history of French socialism.

The first part of this book explores how French revolutionaries narrated, interpreted, and debated the Commune in the decade following its suppression during the Semaine Sanglante in May 1871. I delineate this output into two clear interpretations of the Commune: the ‘realist’ and the ‘violent’. Chapter 1 examines the ‘realist’ interpretation of the Commune, whose chief advocates were proponents of a ‘federal’ socialism. These accounts were highly detailed and focused on the practical dimensions of the Commune, heavily contextualising its inception and acknowledging the organisational flaws that contributed to its defeat. Exponents of this interpretation aimed to reverse the prevailing narrative of the Commune, which cast revolutionaries as dangerous criminals and the army as agents of order. They also celebrated the Commune’s concrete achievements and drew attention to its progressive ideas, which they claimed offered a genuine alternative to contemporary French society. The chapter further suggests that this interpretation’s emphasis on the value of personal experience and eyewitness testimony represented an attempt to wrest back control of the Commune narrative from Karl Marx, whose influential work Civil War in France appeared just days after its fall in May 1871.