In light of recent events – in particular, scenes from Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 – the Paris Commune of 1871 no longer feels quite as distant from our own historical moment. On the morning of March 18 of that year, in a protest at once social, political, economic, and spatial, a mass of men, women, and children “occupied” a major urban center. Their move to seize it as their own and to question the social order of their day immediately puzzled and inflamed the press on both sides of the Atlantic and prompted swift action by displaced city officials and government forces. A mere seventy-two days later, the uprising that Engels would famously dub “the dictatorship of the proletariat” was brutally put down by the French army, even as the events in Paris and the name that came to stand in for them – “the Commune” – went viral, provoking at once transatlantic anxiety, international leftist solidarity, and ongoing coverage across a variety of mass-cultural media.

That the Commune seems curiously new, when viewed from the rearview mirror of Occupy Wall Street, and that its legacy has come to feel tangibly vital can be evidenced not only by a spate of US and international newspaper articles that turned to the Commune's defeat to make sense of Occupy Wall Street, but also by David Harvey's recent account of Occupy in light of earlier urban uprisings, the Commune foremost among them, and by Occupy blogs from across the US that made readings of the Commune and its history more or less de rigueur for those who claimed they wanted to “occupy everything.” Put a little differently, in the fall of 2011, and in the immediate aftermath of the razing of the Zuccotti Park encampment, the Paris Commune seemed to arise out of nowhere as the new objet trouvé of choice for the US leftist imaginary wrestling with the pangs of defeat, the politics of occupation, and both the promises and the perils of collective action.