This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

This chapter demonstrates activists’ continued commitment to the concept of revolutionary action after the Commune, and locates it in discussions of religion and nature. The first part of the chapter examines revolutionary activists’ attempts and ultimate failure to expand their appeal outwards from Paris and regional cities to the French countryside by characterising revolution as a religious experience. The willingness of increasingly atheistic revolutionaries to resurrect religious rhetoric both demonstrated their commitment to acquiring new support and also exposed fatal limitations. The second part discusses a new definition of revolution as resulting from natural evolution rather than subjective will, focusing primarily on the work of Elisée Reclus. By presenting revolution in these terms, activists minimised the importance of their own recent failures and redefined revolution as the practice of everyday life. In the changed circumstances of the Third Republic, this broader revolution was more accessible and appealing than traditional forms of action; however, it also stripped revolution of specific meaning. The chapter also links these two definitions of revolution and rhetoric around the 1848 Revolution. The chapter ultimately argues that revolution was and always had been a process of constant adaptation rather than a tradition.

This chapter suggests that, rather than deportees, it was the revolutionaries who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international questions. It contrasts two post-Communard newspapers embodying two divergent attitudes, La Bataille and Le Travailleur. Both newspapers condemned imperial conquest in principle, but the more nationalist La Bataille approved of efforts to spread French civilisation on a global scale, while the more universalist Le Travailleur enjoined its readers to empathise with Europe’s new colonial subjects. These two approaches had radically different implications for revolutionaries’ wider thought. La Bataille’s protectionism exposed limits to its supposedly universalist thought that had not been visible in purely Western contexts, while Le Travailleur’s stance was both consistent with its universalist claims and broadened the scope for revolutionary action, highlighting practical ways in which small groups of revolutionaries could bring about meaningful social change. The chapter concludes by using the example of revolutionary thought to rethink the value of ‘empire’ as a category of historical analysis.

The final part of the book considers the reactions of ex-Communards to the ‘imperial turn’ of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter appraises the thought of some of the 4,500 ex-Communards who were deported to the French penal colony of New Caledonia during the 1870s. Historians have often sought to discover a stance on imperialism in their work, but even after many years in a colony most deportees remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and colonial questions. Their focus was instead the French Republic, and they primarily used their experiences of deportation to criticise the established order and legitimise their renewed participation in political discussions after the 1880 Communard amnesty allowed them to return to France. The chapter also draws attention to the similarities between the deportees’ ideas in the 1870s and 1880s and socialist critiques of protectionism and free trade from the 1840s, reinforcing earlier chapters’ claims that there was much more continuity in revolutionary thought before the mid-1880s than previously suspected.