On this very day, 150 years had passed since the end of the Paris Commune of 1871. With this international meeting, we aimed to festively commemorate the legacy of the Commune and start a conversation with experts and interested others on how the image of ‘The Commune’ has continued to inform political debates and practices between 1871 and 2021. We reflected on how ‘The Commune’ may be regarded as the signifier of a distinctive democratic repertoire, and engaged with some of its historical articulations.

The organisers have received generous funding from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung to study these questions from September 2021 – 2024, and this meeting served as the project launch. Because of the restrictions and uncertainties regarding the developments of the global pandemic, the event took place online and served as a first opening dance towards more expert meetings and a larger conference in the near (covid-free) future.

There were two presentations, each followed by an informal exchange of ideas. The recordings of the presentations can be found below.

About the speakers

• Julia Nicholls teaches French & European Studies at King’s College in London. Her research focusses on the history of French and European political thought, including Marxism and socialism. She wrote her PhD on the legacy of the revolutionary ideas of the Paris Commune.
• William Clare Roberts lectures in Political Theory at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of Marx’s Inferno. The Political Theory of Capital (2017) and is interested in Marxism, republicanism and political economy.