In June 1848 he and other revolutionaries made a failed attempt to overthrow the government of the new Republic, which was swiftly and violently repressed by the army under General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.

In 1859, he and other political prisoners were granted amnesty by Emperor Napoleon III and in November 1860 he returned to France, weakened by illness.

His next venture was the publication of the Réveil, a radical newspaper supporting the new socialist International Workingmen's Association, which was founded in 1864.

On 28 January 1871, after the city had suffered thousands of deaths from starvation and disease, the Government of National Defense signed an armistice with the Germans.

[1] On 18 March, the French army attempted to remove a large number of cannons stored in a depot on the heights of Montmartre but they were blocked by soldiers of the Paris National Guard.

The soldiers seized and killed two French Army generals, Claude Lecomte and Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas.

Half of Parisians, mostly those in the more wealthy neighborhoods in the west of the city, abstained, but those in the working-class east voted in large numbers.

French explorer Théodore Ber, who had come back from Peru to support the Commune, became Delescluze’s personal secretary.

Opposition newspapers were closed down and, beginning on 5 April, the Commune arrested the Archbishop of Paris and two hundred priests and other religious figures, proposing to trade them for Auguste Blanqui, a radical revolutionary leader held by the French government.

As the army approached, Delescluze and the Commune voted to destroy symbols of the old government; the Vendôme Column was pulled down on 16 May; the home of Adolphe Thiers was emptied of his art collection and demolished on 16 May.

The People don't know anything about clever maneuvers, but when they have a rifle in their hand, and pavement under their feet, they have nothing to fear from all the strategists of the royal military school.

It is a question, as you know, of conquering or falling into the merciless hands of the reactionaries and clerics of Versailles, of those miserable ones who have, by their actions, delivered France to the Prussians, and who want to make us pay the ransom for their treason!

If you desire that the generous amount of blood which has flowed like water for the last six weeks, shall not have been in vain; if you want to live in a France that is free and where all are equal; if you want to spare your children from your pain and misery; you will rise up like one man- and because of your formidable resistance, the enemy, who proudly imagines he will put you back into your yoke, will find himself shamed for his useless crimes by which he has been stained for the last two months.

Citizens, your representatives will fight and die with you if needed; but, in the name of this glorious France, the mother of all popular revolutions, permanent home of the ideas of justice and solidarity which must be and will be the laws of the world, march at the enemy, and let your revolutionary energy show him that traitors can try to sell Paris, but that no one can surrender it or conquer it.

[5] Delescluze and the remaining Communard leaders moved their headquarters to the city hall of the 13th arrondissement on rue Voltaire, but this neighborhood also was soon under attack by the army.