Paris for centuries had been run by merchants, who dominated the city council. On the eve of the French Revolution, the council was known as the Bureau de la Ville and had its headquarters in the Hôtel de Ville. The head of the council, the Prévôvot des Marchands, in the summer of 1789 was Jacques de Flesselles. When an armed group of protesters gathered at the council headquarters on July 14, 1789–the day that the Bastille was stormed–Flesselles appealed to the crowd for calm. He was killed, the rest of the council fled by the Hôel de Ville, and the crowd seized control of it.

The very next day, a large number of people gathered to set up a new municipal government, which they termed the Paris Commune. Elected the first mayor was Jean-Sylvain Bailly, a well-known scientist and member of the Estates-General. Elected to the Commune were deputies from all across the city.

King Louis XVI arrived in Paris on July 17. Bailly and other Commune officials met the king and gave him the keys to the city. In a gesture of conciliation, the king agreed to remove ministers that the Commune leaders deemed too obstructionist and also reappoint as finance minister the popular Jacques Necker, whom the king had dismissed for publishing an account of the royal finances.

The Paris Commune functioned in the same way that the previous municipal government had–distributing food, overseeing public works, and providing for the local police. This last was in the form of the National Guard and a small local police force. The Commune set up a special committee to oversee the removal of the Bastille and the parceling out of its parts; the plan was for proceeds from the resulting sales to go to feed and clothe the poor.

The national government from July 1789 was the National Constituent Assembly. On May 21, 1790, that body officially recognized the Commune and set up a General Council, which had 144 members who served two-year terms.

The words and actions of the members of the Commune reflected the times, as tempers flared more and more as the 1790s advanced. Bailly it was who ordered the National Guard to confront a mob that gathered in the Champ de Mars on July 17, 1791; the result was bloodshed, as soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd in order to get them to disperse. (Replacing Bailly as mayor was Pétion de Villeneuve.) A large crowd stormed the Tuileries Palace on Aug. 10, 1792; at the same time, a number of radicals–among them Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Jacques Hébert–seized control of the Commune and set it on a new direction. As the most powerful political body in the capital city of France, the Commune exerted great influence over the city's people and institutions. At times, the Commune's power rivaled that of the national governments, the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention.

The radical bent of the Commune and its leaders lent muscle to a handful of revolutionary activities, including an armed intervention into the proceedings of the National Convention that saw the Montagnards' takeover of that body by ousting the entirety of the membership of their rivals, the Girondins.

Rising to power also at this time was the Committee of Public Safety, led by the powerful radical Maximilien Robespierre. As this group rose in power and influence, the Commune found itself sidelined at last. The executions of a handful of Commune leaders–notably Danton, Hébert, and Jean-Paul Marat–accelerated the collapse of the Commune as a driving force.