"The Paris Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this dictatorship was weak and incomplete. The Communards lacked the fundamentals—a Marxist proletarian party, discipline, organization, a clear understanding of the aims of their struggle, and an alliance with the peasantry. The Commune committed a number of serious errors. It did not venture to confiscate the tremendous assets of the French bank and showed hesitance in dealing with counter-revolutionary agents and accessories, saboteurs, spies and the slanderous campaign in the bourgeoise press. The Commune paid too little attention to military training."
Marx Engels Lenin
About 23,000 Communards died and 877 French army forces died while 6,500 were wounded. Many communist leaders including Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, and Zedong have looked at the Paris Commune as a model for, or a configuration of, a "liberated" society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grass roots up .Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, praised the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat. Marx wrote that: "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators' history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.". Lenin criticized the Communards for having "stopped half way ... led astray by dreams of ... establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country ... such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over"; he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy.