May 21, 1871 marked the beginning of Bloody Week — the seven days in which the French army crushed the Paris Commune. As many as twenty thousand Communards were killed and over forty-five thousand people were arrested, as the government troops unleashed their unbridled savagery against the revolutionary people of Paris.

From London, Karl Marx looked on with horror at the events in the French capital, as the first experience of working-class rule was drowned in blood. But in these same days he also finished writing his The Civil War in France, as he sought to counter the British press demonization of the Communards — and draw lessons from the revolutionaries’ defeat.

Stathis Kouvelakis recently edited a French-language volume of Marx and Engels’s writings on the Commune. His extensive introduction to this book, a study of the two men’s reflection on the events of 1871, has now been translated into English, for the Verso Books site (see parts 1, 2 and 3). Translator David Broder spoke to Kouvelakis about Marx and Engels’s correspondence with the Communards, the Commune’s status as a “model” of workers’ rule, and the signs of a “possible communism” in revolutionary Paris.