Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Out of the confusion of the defeat of Napoleon III the previous year, the siege of Paris by the Prussian army, and the uncertainty about the future of government of the country, sections of the population of Paris had created their own city government, the Commune de Paris, on March 28. Harking back to the revolutions of 1792 and 1845, with their Jacobin, socialist, and anarchist origins, the commune made a new kind of government, introducing women's suffrage and the separation of church and state. . . . After the surrender the authorities took revenge. Some 25,000 communards were executed; many were deported. Such bloodshed, unprecedented in modern French history, polarized the left and right in French politics for several generations." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "The Paris Commune was, like so much of the revolutionary history of our period, important not so much for what it achieved as for what it forecast; it was more formidable as a symbol than as a fact. Its actual history is overlaid by the enormously powerful myth it generated, both in France itself and (through Karl Marx) in the international socialist movement; a myth which reverberates to this day, notably in the Chinese People's Republic." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 167-8]