The Isle of Pines, the War of German Unification, and the rise of communism
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Wed 16 Oct 2013 21:09
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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.
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