The Isle of Pines, the War of German Unification, and the rise of communism

VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Wed 16 Oct 2013 21:09
In the 1860s Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia, was determined to unify the numerous German states. Through an ingenious forged document he managed to dupe the French Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war on Prussia thus activating mutual defence treaties and forcing the other main German states to ally themselves with Prussia against the common enemy, France. France suffered a crushing defeat at Sedan on 1 September 1870 during which an entire French army was captured, including Napoleon himself. This triggered a coup in France and the creation of the Third French Republic. However the citizenry of Paris, discontented since the 1830s (an earlier uprising in 1832 is central to the plot of Les Miserables), rose in revolt against the new French regime and its capitulation to Prussia; thus was born the famous Paris Commune of 1871.
The Commune was shortlived, being put down with great brutality and much bloodshed after only a few months, but its effects reverberated throughout Europe for the next 100 years. Karl Marx saw it as "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat, while Lenin saw it with great favour as the "dictatorship of the proletariat", later quoted often by Mao - although both saw it as weak and incomplete, mistakes which they sought not to emulate when communism was born in the 20th century. And we all know how that went.
 
The connection with the Isle of Pines arises from the suppression of the Commune. The new French state deported for life between 4-7000 alleged Communards to New Caledonia, most of whom were allocated to the Isle of Pines. Here is what is left of one of their prisons, now rotting away in the countryside:
 
   
 
The regime here was not especially brutal by contemporary French standards but hundreds of these political prisoners died here before the remainder were amnestied in 1879. French transportation here ended in 1897 and the prisons closed in 1922. The jungle has already claimed most of the remains but the impact on the colony and its inhabitants was and remains substantial.
 
And Bismarck? He got his way. Having engineered a resounding victory a unified German Empire was declared at Versailles on 18 January 1871 with Kaiser Wilhelm as its Emperor - the Second Reich, and hence eventually Hitler's Third Reich and the Anschluss with Austria which the Fuhrer saw as Bismarck's unfinished business.