Historical interpretation of the Commune influenced subsequent revolutionary ideology and sociopolitical events.
As of the late 20th century, there were two main historiographical schools of thought: the political interpretation, that the Commune was a patriotic eruption of fury in response to circumstantial hardship following the Siege of Paris;[1] and the social interpretation, that the Commune was the result of macro socioeconomic forces boiling over, e.g., that it was a war of class struggle.
[2] Similarly, historians within both the political and social interpretations have disagreed as to whether the Commune was inevitable or accidental (though there is agreement that the uprising was unplanned), a harbinger of the future or a sunset for revolutionary zeal.
Their sense of the revolution's legitimacy rested in its popular spontaneity, as compared to the deliberate planning of a coup.
[7] Roger Gould's 1995 Insurgent Identities challenged Marxist (David Harvey) and humanist urban theory (Lefebvre and Manuel Castells) narratives of the Commune.