History has no like example of a like greatness to these Parisians storming heaven.

You're listening to Navarro FM here on Resonance104.4 FM London's finest radio station I am James Butler.

Those words of course belong to Karl Marx speaking of the Paris commune a radical experiment in popular democracy and socialist transformation brought about in the ruins of war 150 years ago this week.

The commune lasted only 72 days but every day was a political earthquake.

Its tremors were felt throughout the world and the commune inspired countless thousands of radicals for generations afterwards and it is the afterlife of the commune that we'll be talking about mostly today.

The commune as it was taken up especially by socialists here in Britain as well as what those communards who survived went and what they did.

I am Laura Foster I'm a lecturer in 19th century British history at Durham University and I'm a historian of the commune but specifically I'm quite interested in how the commune sort of influenced or kind of resonated in Britain and more broadly I'm interested in sort of transnational political exchanges and the way in which sort of socialist opposition politics in the 19th century how these kind of ideas were forged and exchanged and developed in various contexts.

Brilliant well we're going to be talking I think largely about the commune the commune's legacy and you know its reception in Britain I think especially but I think we should just chat a little bit about the context first because of course not everyone listening to this will know very much or maybe even anything at all about the Paris commune itself or maybe even what its significance might be so maybe is there a quick potty history of the commune so terribly tall order.

It's tricky I feel like it's been argued over so much that you know it's it feels sort of a nebulous thing but maybe that's part of it it's quality which I guess we'll talk about later but I think I mean you know most basically a commune is a form of local administration in France and you know various different points in French history we hear this term a commune we're thinking of the Paris commune of 1871 you know it's really sort of quite a radical experimenting government so you know the previous year you have a Franco-Prussian war.

The siege of Paris where the city of Paris and the siege for almost five months surrounded by the Prussian army and within that time the French government the national government leaves Paris and parts to tour.

So Paris in some ways sort of starts this kind of not quite self-government but at the time of like administrating this vessel of food rationing seeing to this sort of recruitment national guard etc during the siege that really kind of falls to the city administration.

So you get this real sense of Paris kind of self-groupening and sort of rehearsing all these ways in which kind of municipal self-government might work and that's quite a radical government because of the various sort of radical threads in Paris in the different clubs and sort of neighborhood associations that have grown up around that time.

So the commune sort of is it when we refer to the Paris commune we talk about these 72 days in the spring of 1871 in which Paris sort of ruled itself set up its own democratic elected government which passed you know a huge number considering its short time of quite radical measures.

And in May 1871 following a very bloody sort of week long civil war the commune was brutally put down and thousands of commune are killed.

So that's a super brief version I think.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's excellent that's really good.

I you mentioned there the sort of the sort of intellectual and political firm and these kind of radical traditions that the commune drew on within Paris.

Maybe you could just tell us is one of the things that when we talked about the commune on this show before many years ago now with with Chris and Ross.

It's remarkable the sheer diversity and I guess kind of intellectual for quantity of the commune so can you give us a sense just of of how broad and diverse the sort of the intellectual and political currents that ran into the commune were.

Yeah I mean as you say it's kind of hugely sort of I mean I think it's about Chris and Ross's ten is this sort of laboratory of all these different political traditions ideas experiments.

So you've got I suppose the sort of big names of kind of political philosophers or traditions that have drawn upon those have prudent yeah Joseph prudent so that's thinking more kind of an anarchist tradition.

You've got August Blonkey who is is is kind of thought was quite a more militant socialist in a sense interested in there in the often violent redistribution of wealth.

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