Calendar March 18, 2026

1871 – Revolt of the Communards in Paris. On the morning of March 18, the government stationed in Versailles sent military forces to Paris to collect cannons and reserve weapons. The detachment was still collecting ammunition when Parisians took to the streets, and the soldiers soon found themselves surrounded. In the chaos that followed, the soldiers sided with the insurgents, who now controlled the city, and proclaimed a new government called the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871. In the end, the Commune was suppressed, thousands fled abroad, some 20,000 Communards were executed, and 7,500 were imprisoned or exiled; this situation lasted until a general amnesty in the 1880s, and paved the way for the proto-communist movement in the French Third Republic (1871-

1900 – AFC Ajax Amsterdam, the largest and most successful football club in the Netherlands, is founded. Ajax has been the most successful club in the Netherlands, with 34 Eredivisie titles and 19 KNVB Cups. It has played in the Eredivisie continuously since the league’s inception in 1956 and, along with Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven, is one of the country’s “big three” clubs that have dominated that competition.

1913 – King George I of Greece is assassinated at the age of 67 in the liberated city of Thessaloniki. His assassin was Alexandros Schinas, a left-wing revolutionary. The true reasons for the assassination of King George I remain unknown. Schinas himself would die in prison a few days later. George is considered one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the country’s history.

1921 – The Second Peace of Riga is signed between Poland and the Soviet Union. This treaty was signed after a first one was signed in Riga. The treaty ended the Polish-Soviet War. The Soviet-Polish borders established by the treaty remained in force until World War II. They were later redrawn by the Allies during the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference.

1965 – Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space. He carried a white metal bag containing artificial respiration and pressurized oxygen for 45 minutes. The spacewalk would be one of the most successful attempts in space science worldwide. Other astronauts would practice it after Leonov.

1980 – A Vostok-2M rocket at Plesetsk Cosmodrome 43 exploded during a refueling operation, killing 48 people. The disaster was not reported in the Soviet media at the time and only reached Western media in 1989 after the declassification of documents about the tragedy. Pravda reported that the rocket launch was a success and made no mention of the explosion.

1990 – The German Democratic Republic holds its first democratic elections since the communist dictatorship. At the end of the elections, the CDU candidate Lothar de Maize was declared the winner, followed by the SPD candidate Ibrahim Bohme and the PDS candidate Hans Modrow. Four hundred deputies, with the CDU winning a majority, were elected to the Volkskammer.

1994 – Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats sign the Washington Agreement, ending the war between the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and creating the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This agreement was signed by the respective leaders of the two states, Alija Izetbegović and Franjo Tuđman, with the mediation of Bill Clinton.