In the spring of 1871, socialism briefly ruled Paris.

After months of siege, starvation, and humiliation, the French capital turned inward—away from Versailles, away from empire, away from the promises of liberal republics—and toward a radical experiment in working-class self-government. In this episode, we trace how the trauma of war and betrayal gave birth to the Paris Commune, the most audacious socialist uprising of the nineteenth century.

Through the life and memory of Louise Michel—the “Red Virgin of Montmartre”—we follow Paris from exile and repression back to the cold dawn of March 18, when working-class women confronted government troops sent to seize the people’s cannons…and the rifles refused to fire. What began as an act of defiance became a collapse of state authority.

As the government fled to Versailles, Paris improvised a new political order from below. Neighborhood vigilance committees fed the hungry and punished profiteers. The National Guard radicalized into a people’s army. Socialists, anarchists, Jacobins, feminists, and internationalists debated what a “social republic” might look like—not in theory, but in the streets, clubs, and workplaces of a starving city.

The Commune would last only weeks. But in that brief opening, it transformed socialism forever. It showed what working people could build when the state fell away—and what forces would ultimately rise to destroy them.

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1871: The Death of the Commune

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

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Contact: [email protected]

Socialism didn’t begin as a national project; it began as a wager that workers could unite across borders.

In this episode, we trace the birth of internationalism: the idea that the working class, wherever it lives, shares a common struggle and a common enemy.

We open in London, September 28, 1864, inside St. Martin’s Hall, where English trade unionists and French artisans gathered for what was supposed to be a simple gesture of solidarity. By nightfall, it had become something else entirely: the founding moment of the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International. A quiet Karl Marx sat in the pews, soon to draft the documents that would give this new movement its voice.

From there, we follow internationalism’s roots back through the aftershocks of 1848 and the age of exile, through Garibaldi’s “liberty without borders,” the multinational currents of romantic nationalism, and the growing disillusionment with bourgeois betrayal. Then we step into the First International itself: a messy, pluralistic federation of reformers and revolutionaries, trade unionists and mutualists, Marxists and anarchists, united only by the shared conviction that solidarity must cross frontiers.

As the organization surges in the late 1860s, its promise collides with its contradictions. Marx and Bakunin, surprisingly aligned on collectivism, began to diverge on the question that would fracture the socialist movement for generations: do you seize the state or abolish it? And in the coalfields of Belgium, theory meets gunfire, as strikes and massacres reveal both the power and peril of international working-class coordination.

By 1870, “the International” had become a symbol feared by rulers and cherished by workers. But then history would accelerate when war, siege, and hunger gripped Paris, launching a revolution that would become socialism’s most enduring myth and most contested proof.

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1871: The Birth of the Commune

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

In the spring of 1848, Paris became the center of the socialist imagination.

After the fall of the July Monarchy, a new republic promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, but what would those words actually mean for workers, women, and the poor? In this episode, we follow the rise—and violent suppression—of socialism’s first mass political experiment.

Through the lives and ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jeanne Deroin, Louis Blanc, Eugénie Niboyet, Auguste Blanqui, and a young Karl Marx, we explore how competing visions of socialism collided inside the revolutionary republic. Reformers sought to harness the state. Anarchists rejected it outright. Feminists demanded a social republic that extended equality into the home as well as the workshop.

These debates would not remain theoretical for long.

By June, the promises of February were answered with barricades, artillery, and mass repression in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. The June Days Uprising would mark the first open class war of modern Europe—and leave an entire generation of socialists politically transformed.

Paris 1848 was not a story of triumph. It was a story of fracture, betrayal, and awakening. But from its ashes emerged a new conviction: that socialism could not survive within a single nation alone.

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: What is Internationalism? The Dream of a Global Working Class

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

Europe in the 1840s was sleeping on a volcano.

In this episode, we trace the long buildup to the Revolutions of 1848 through hunger, repression, and the slow accumulation of social pressure beneath the surface of liberal order.

We begin not in Paris, but in the silk workshops of Lyon, where workers first rose as a class against industrial capitalism. From there, we follow the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, when a popular uprising brought down a king—only to deliver power into the hands of bourgeois liberals like Adolphe Thiers. As working-class revolt was crushed again and again, a new kind of revolutionary politics took shape in the shadows.

Enter Auguste Blanqui: professional conspirator, indefatigable insurrectionist, and prophet of a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Through secret societies, failed uprisings, and years of prison, Blanqui embodied a growing rift within the French left between reformers in parliament and revolutionaries in the streets.

As famine spread across Europe and the “Hungry Forties” set in, that rift widened into something far more dangerous. When revolution finally erupted in Paris in February 1848, it did so not as a planned conspiracy, but as a spontaneous explosion—three days that toppled the “Bourgeois King” and opened the door to a new republic.

But what kind of republic would it be?

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1848: The Red Flag in Spring pt. II—The Fire

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

Jacobinism promised equality, enforced virtue, and left a legacy the left has wrestled with ever since.

Emerging from the French Revolution, Jacobinism was the first modern attempt to make politics absolute, reshaping society in the name of equality, virtue, and popular sovereignty itself. Under leaders like Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins fused Enlightenment ideals with mass politics, revolutionary discipline, and terror, leaving behind one of the most contested legacies in history.

This episode explores the Jacobins as both a political movement and an ideology: their roots in Rousseau’s philosophy, their obsession with civic virtue and the general will, and their belief that corruption had to be eliminated for freedom to survive. From the Jacobin Club and the sans-culottes to the Reign of Terror and Thermidor, we trace how revolutionary ideals hardened into coercive power.

Because this season examines the birth of socialism in revolutionary Paris, we also follow the Jacobin afterlife through Babeuf’s egalitarian conspiracies, Marx’s reading of the French Revolution, Lenin’s admiration for Jacobin resolve, and modern debates about revolutionary violence and emancipation.

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1848: The Red Flag in Spring (Part I: The Volcano)

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

The first furnace of modern socialism.

A woman enters a sick man’s room, and a knife turns a revolutionary into a secular saint.

In 1793 Paris — the furnace of modern politics — the French Revolution reaches its most radical phase. From the sans-culottes and the first Paris Commune to the Constitution of 1793 and the Enragés’ demand for bread, this episode traces the earliest roots of socialist politics: liberty colliding with equality, rights colliding with hunger, and popular democracy colliding with centralized power.

Through immersive storytelling and historical analysis — from Marat’s bathtub to Jacques Roux’s “phantoms of ’93” and Babeuf’s dream of real equality — we explore why revolutionary Paris became the seedbed for socialism, and why its legacy remained both inspiration and warning for every revolution that followed.

This is Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: What Is Jacobinism? Virtue, Terror, and the Birth of the Radical Left.

Written and Produced by Matt Payne

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

Socialism is one of the most argued-over ideas in modern history, praised as a path to equality, condemned as a road to tyranny, and declared dead more than once.

So what is socialism... really?

In this opening episode of ISM: Ideas Meet Power, we trace socialism from its origins in the industrial revolutions of the 19th century to its global transformations in the 20th century and beyond.

Through immersive historical storytelling — from Paris in 1871 and Barcelona in 1937 to Chile in 1973 — this episode explores socialism as a living tradition: a diverse, contested critique of capitalism shaped by workers, revolutionaries, intellectuals, and states.

Along the way, we examine socialism’s shared principles, its internal debates over democracy and power, and why the question of socialism continues to return in moments of crisis.

This is Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1793: The Radical City.

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

ISM is a narrative history podcast about political ideologies and social movements—socialism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, and beyond.

Each season explores a major ideology through immersive storytelling and historical analysis, tracing how ideas move from theory into the real world, shaping revolutions, states, and everyday life.

Ideas Meet Power.

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]