"Vive la Commune!": Feminism, Socialism, and Revolutionary Revival in the Aftermath of the 1871 Paris Commune

In a week of street battles in 1871, the French army slaughtered approximately 25,000 participants of the revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. Two prominent feminist and socialist activists, Paule Mink and André Léo, managed to escape to safety, each subsequently working to reassert her individual ideological position. Prior to the Commune, both women wrote and spoke publicly, challenging gender and class hierarchies and the power of the Church. In the revolutionary aftermath, Léo continued to champion democratic socialism, whereas Mink began advocating radical, authoritarian revolutionism, abandoning her moderate socialist roots. Léo published literary and theoretical works and participated in internal socialist politics, maintaining such a low public profile that, although she lived and wrote until 1900, the Paris police ceased monitoring her by 1880. In contrast, Mink traveled ceaselessly, speaking publicly, advocating violent revolution. Considering Mink a greater threat, police spies monitored her until her 1901 death. Through different strategies in the aftermath of the Commune, each woman exemplified a strand of the multiple and complex feminist socialisms in the late nineteenth century.