Paris Commune

The situationists had something very interesting opinions about the Commune and albeit stated early sixties they haven't still been consider as seriously as they should.
Some quotes:

The apparent successes of this workers are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future.

The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents' feeling that they had become the masters of their own history, not so much on the level of "governmental" politics as on the level of their everyday life.

The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to date -- attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some "lumpenproletarian nihilism," some "irresponsibility of the pétroleuses," should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything).

Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.

Whereas Marx said: "The most important social measure of the Commune was its own existence in acts."

And Engels: "Look at the Paris Commune -- that was the dictatorship of the proletariat."

For three months the "Communards" controlled Paris, attempting to remake the city into an idealized communal society in which all people were equal and all property was collectively owned. Meanwhile, smaller copycat uprisings developed in other French cities and the governments of Europe held their collective breath, fearing uprisings in their own territories.

But in May the National Assembly struck back brutally, invading Paris with an army of 130,000, utterly crushing the Commune in a week of bloody, block-by-block fighting. Almost 20,000 people were executed in the ensuing reprisals.

The Paris Commune cannot be considered a success, but it served as a powerful inspiration to the worldwide socialist movement. Its leaders were remembered as heroes and martyrs and its symbol - a plain red banner - became, via the bolsheviks, the enduring color of the communist movement that is still found in the present-day Chinese and North Korean flags.