8 Rue Atget, opposite the entrance to Square Brassaï.

The role of women

Although they cannot vote, women speak at meetings and put up posters calling for the struggle to be seen through to the end. Thousands of them take part in the fighting, either as canteen workers or ambulance attendants, or even as combatants. From 3 April, they attempt a march on Versailles. They will be on the barricades, like Victorine Brocher in the Bataillon des Turcos.

They were active in the struggle to open free, secular schools, such as Victoire Tinayre, who lived at 16 Rue Abel Hovelacque and taught in the 12th arrondissement. In this, they opposed the nuns and were therefore very anti-clerical. (The production of embroidered garments by the nuns constituted unfair commercial competition!!)

They fought for equal pay, the reopening of abandoned workshops, and aid for the widows and orphans of the National Guard, just like the Comité des Dames. They showed themselves to be particularly determined in the face of the enemy and opposed to any compromise with them.

Two women from the 13th arrondissement, Louise Leroy and Octavie Tardif, published a manifesto together with ‘the women citizens’ of the ‘Comité des Dames’, an extract of which follows:

“We, the undersigned women, mothers of families, whose husbands have gone to fight against Versailles and support the Commune... demand that the cowards and the faint-hearted be seized and publicly condemned.”

Or the Manifesto of the Women’s Union, which proclaims: “Today, any reconciliation would be a betrayal... The tree of Liberty grows, watered by the blood of its enemies...”

Foreigners and the Commune

At the end of the 19th century, Paris was the flagship city of the Revolution, a refuge for Europe’s outlaws: Russians, Poles, Italians. But it was also a major industrial city attracting workers from Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, and elsewhere. There were around 120,000 foreigners in Paris. Of the some 2,000 who took part in the fighting, 1,700 were arrested.

They held positions in the military, such as Generals Dombrowski and Wroblewski, but also in political leadership, such as Élisabeth Dmitrieff and Léo Frankel. Léo Frankel, a Hungarian émigré, a jeweller’s apprentice and a member of the IWA, was thus elected as a member of the Commune for the 13th arrondissement – a foreigner! The Versaillais ‘naturalised’ him as a Prussian to prove the Communards’ collusion with the enemy!!

But the Electoral Control Commission validated his election: “Considering that the flag of the Commune is that of the Universal Republic, the City has the right to grant citizenship to foreigners who serve it...”

Rue Léo Frankel in the 13th arrondissement

In 2017, at the request of the Association of Friends of the Paris Commune, the mayor of the 13th arrondissement, Jérôme Coumet, named a new street in the Chevaleret neighbourhood after Léo Frankel.