This chapter suggests that, rather than deportees, it was the revolutionaries who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international questions. It contrasts two post-Communard newspapers embodying two divergent attitudes, La Bataille and Le Travailleur. Both newspapers condemned imperial conquest in principle, but the more nationalist La Bataille approved of efforts to spread French civilisation on a global scale, while the more universalist Le Travailleur enjoined its readers to empathise with Europe’s new colonial subjects. These two approaches had radically different implications for revolutionaries’ wider thought. La Bataille’s protectionism exposed limits to its supposedly universalist thought that had not been visible in purely Western contexts, while Le Travailleur’s stance was both consistent with its universalist claims and broadened the scope for revolutionary action, highlighting practical ways in which small groups of revolutionaries could bring about meaningful social change. The chapter concludes by using the example of revolutionary thought to rethink the value of ‘empire’ as a category of historical analysis.

The final part of the book considers the reactions of ex-Communards to the ‘imperial turn’ of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter appraises the thought of some of the 4,500 ex-Communards who were deported to the French penal colony of New Caledonia during the 1870s. Historians have often sought to discover a stance on imperialism in their work, but even after many years in a colony most deportees remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and colonial questions. Their focus was instead the French Republic, and they primarily used their experiences of deportation to criticise the established order and legitimise their renewed participation in political discussions after the 1880 Communard amnesty allowed them to return to France. The chapter also draws attention to the similarities between the deportees’ ideas in the 1870s and 1880s and socialist critiques of protectionism and free trade from the 1840s, reinforcing earlier chapters’ claims that there was much more continuity in revolutionary thought before the mid-1880s than previously suspected.