The Communards (French: [kɔmynaʁ]) were members and supporters of the short-lived 1871 Communes in France formed in the wake of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

After the suppression of the Paris Commune by the French Army in May 1871, 43,000 Communards were taken prisoner, and 6,500 to 7,500 fled abroad. The number of Communard soldiers killed in combat or executed afterwards during the week has long been disputed—Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray put the number at 20,000, while estimates by more recent historians put the probable number between 10,000 and 15,000. 7,500 were jailed or deported under arrangements which continued until a general amnesty during the 1880s; this action by Adolphe Thiers forestalled the proto-communist movement in the French Third Republic (1871–1940).

The working class of Paris were feeling ostracized after the decadence of the Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War. The Prussians besieged Paris in September 1870, causing suffering among Parisians. The poor ate cat or rat meat or went hungry. Out of resentment from this situation grew radical and socialist political clubs and newspapers. While Paris was occupied, socialist groups tried twice to overthrow the provisional government.

In January 1871, Otto von Bismarck and the French minister of foreign affairs, Jules Favre, decided that France would hold national elections. Adolphe Thiers, who had been loyal to the Second Empire, was elected head of the new republic. During the war, the capital had moved from Paris to Bordeaux. When the war ended, the government moved temporarily to Versailles. In the early morning of March 18, the government stationed in Versailles sent military forces into Paris to collect a reserve of cannons. The detachment was gathering the guns when units of the Paris national guard surrounded them, and killed two French army generals. By the end of the day, the insurgent soldiers of the national guard controlled the city. They declared a new government called the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871.

Thiers refused to bargain with the Communards, despite their attempts to do so. He taught newly released French soldiers the "evils" of the Communards as the government prepared for a battle. The Commune responded by building barricades in the Paris streets. Starting on May 21 and continuing through May 28, the French army entered Paris and gradually recaptured the city. Around eighteen thousand communards were killed in combat, more were executed afterwards. The violence of The "Bloody Week" became a rallying cry for the working classes; some politicians would later proudly brag about their participation with the Commune.

After Bloody Week, the government asked for an inquest into the causes of the uprising. The inquest concluded that the main cause of the insurrection was a lack of belief in God, and that this problem had to be corrected immediately. It was decided that a moral revival was needed, and a key part of this was deporting 4,500 Communards to New Caledonia, in Melanesia. There was a two-part goal in this, as the government also hoped that the Communards would "civilize" the native Kanak people on the island. The government hoped that being exposed to the order of nature would return the Communards to the side of "good."

New Caledonia had become a French colony in 1853, but just ten years later it still only had 350 European colonists. After 1863, New Caledonia became the principal destination of convicts transported from France after French Guiana was deemed too unhealthy for people of European descent. Thereafter, convicts from France made up the largest number of arriving residents. During the busiest time of deportation, there were estimated to be about 50,000 total people on the island. This included 30,000 Kanak, 2,750 civilian colonists, 3,030 military personnel, 4,000 déportés (political criminals, including the Communards), 6,000 transportés (criminal convicts under the regular civil law), and 1,280 criminal convicts who had served their sentences but were still living on the island. There were four main penitentiary sites on the island, one of which, Isle of Pines (1870–1880), was for the Communards deportees exclusively.

There were three sentences given out to the déportés: simple deportation, deportation to a fortified place, and deportation with forced labor. A simple deportation sentence was given to about two-thirds of the Communards. These people were sent to live in small villages on the Isle of Pines. Those sentenced to deportation to a fortified place were sent to the Ducos peninsula. About 300 Communards were sentenced to deportation with forced labor; these were the people convicted of crimes such as arson in addition to their political crimes. They were sent to be with the criminal convicts on the main island ('Grande Terre'). Some prisoners’ sentences were changed by the local penal administrators, and some were changed by the French government after petitions for leniency.