For the development of his alternative he took inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871 (the source of the word 'communism')

France's government army was entering the French capital to commence a pitiless battle against the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune

The old state was to be smashed, but the new one put in its place would wither away with the fulfilment of its transitional tasks. This break with Jacobin statism was reactivated in his later portrait of the Paris Commune, and would become a tenet of a later revolutionary Marxism.

Space separates as much as it unites: the Paris Commune was not able to draw the essentially agricultural lands of Versailles into its revolutionary orbit.

As the first moments of the Paris Commune showed, redemption might arrive not when the revolutionary messiah appears but when the pawn shops are closed and the back rents are cancelled.

in desperation Napoleon III went to war against Bismarck's Germany and lost, and in the vacuum that followed arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history