Feet on the ground and eyes on the stars, Edward Carpenter : Utopian, Gay Actvist and Socialist

 

Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis were pioneers of their day – though their legacy has been overshadowed by the Irish playwright

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Oscar Wilde always imposed. Meeting him in 1892, the French writer Jules Renard reported: “He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way … He is enormous, and carries an enormous cane.” The affectations of dress and manner; the extraordinary, magnetic talk; the flourished epigrams; the startling, needling essays, stories and plays – all these were impositions. They were how Wilde forced himself on the attention of the world, made himself notorious, and then famous. And in the ugliness and despair of his downfall – in 1895 he was found guilty of homosexual offences (acts of “gross indecency”) and sentenced to two years of hard labour – he imposed himself again: on the contemporary and historical imagination. But also on the lives of gay men, for 128 years and counting.

There is a well-known passage in EM Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913 but not published until 1971, after Forster’s death. Maurice, who has “failed to kill lust single-handed”, resolves to consult a doctor about his problem. “I am an unspeakable,” he confesses, “of the Oscar Wilde sort.” What is “unspeakable” is immediately revealed by the use of Wilde’s name: that Maurice is homosexual. To be an “Oscar Wilde sort” was to be gay – but was it to be anything like Oscar Wilde? This was the problem troubling men of Forster’s generation and after, at least until the legalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 (Scotland did not follow until 1981, Northern Ireland until 1982, Ireland until 1993). Wilde’s scandalous exposure created a set of public assumptions and prejudices that persisted for well over half a century, often twisting how gay people saw themselves. Among these was the belief that gay men, like Wilde, imposed themselves on the world by their difference: that they dressed differently, talked differently, were “theatrical”. That their relationships – as Wilde’s were alleged to have been – were crudely sexual, exploitative, mired in inequalities of age and class. That their susceptibility to blackmail brought them into contact with criminality, made them suspect. That they might always be one misstep away from tragedy. Maurice was an attempt to argue with these ideas, but the fact that Forster felt unable to publish it in his lifetime is a testament to their grip.
The grip has loosened. When the modern gay rights movement marched through the 1960s and 1970s, Wilde was celebrated as its founding martyr, the most notorious victim of homophobia in history. He was already being tentatively reclaimed for literature. Now he became a gay hero, and, ultimately, a pop icon. For new and happier reasons, Wilde imposed himself again. To be gay, still, is to reckon with him as a familiar ancestor: Oscar.
 
But does Wilde deserve all this? There is no doubt, of course, that he was a victim of homophobia. The Marquess of Queensberry, driven half mad by what he saw as Wilde’s corruption of his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde’s club, on which was scrawled (the misspelling has become notorious) “somdomite”. But the trouble only really began when Wilde decided to sue for libel. What both Wilde and his friends knew, of course, was that Queensberry, however distastefully, was telling the truth. Wilde lost his suit against Queensberry, and the police arrested him on the basis of the evidence that had been presented in court. On 25 May he was sentenced. A moral panic ensued. Several months later, when he was being moved between prisons, Wilde was recognised on the platform at Clapham Junction station and spat at by a crowd.

So great was the outpouring of venom, so horrible Wilde’s fate, that it has obscured for well over a century the fact that the early 1890s actually saw the birth of Britain’s first gay rights movement. After Wilde had been sent to prison another gay man, Edward Carpenter, wrote to a sympathetic friend: “There is [a] long campaign to fight.” That word “campaign” is revealing. Wilde was never involved in any campaign for what we would now call gay rights – he specialised in veiled references – but others were. A few years earlier, Carpenter had assisted with collecting the personal testimonies of more than 30 gay men for a book called Sexual Inversion, written by John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis (whose collaboration provides the historical inspiration for my novel, The New Life). Sexual Inversion was intended, partly by documenting the life experiences of so-called “inverts”, to demonstrate that homosexuality was not a sin or a degeneracy, but a harmless human quirk, and that the law under which Wilde was later sentenced was unsound, unjust and should be abolished. (It also included the testimonies of six gay women; though there was no law that affected lesbians, social prejudice was strong and the book recognised that women, too, needed to be rescued from stigma.) Carpenter had also written his own defence of homosexuality, titled Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, intending it to be published in 1894.

         
The commitments of Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis were rooted in their personal experiences. Carpenter had met the man who would be his partner for life, George Merrill, in 1891; Symonds had emerged from a self-torturing youth to embrace his sexuality in middle age; Ellis, though straight, was married to a lesbian, Edith Lees, and had his own kink (he was aroused by women urinating), which meant that he also knew what it was like to have a stigmatised sexual desire. The inspiration for these men’s pioneering work came partly from Europe. French and German researchers had begun to reconceptualise homosexuality as a medical rather than a social or legal issue. It was already legal to be gay in France and in Italy (where the relevant legislation had been passed in 1889) – making it seem not implausible that the same might be achieved in Britain.       

A different kind of inspiration came from the US: Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis were united by a love of Walt Whitman’s poetry (Wilde was also a fan). They understood Whitman to be valorising love between men as a world-improving good, epitomised by the ideal of democratic, cross-class “comradeship”. It’s not surprising that many socialists warmly endorsed Whitman – Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis would all have considered themselves socialists of a sort (again, so would Wilde). It should also not be a surprise – considering the links between the LGBTQ+ movement and feminism today – that if you were a supporter of the homosexual cause, you were also likely to support rights for women. So: the burgeoning gay rights movement in Britain was connected to wider late-Victorian movements for reform, part of a larger impulse to find new and better ways of living in the modern world.
 
This was the intellectual nexus that was smashed by the Wilde trials. Carpenter’s pamphlet, Homogenic Love, was rejected by his publisher, who also removed Carpenter’s Whitmanesque poem Towards Democracy from his list for good measure. Symonds had died aged only 52 in 1893; Ellis dithered over the publication of Sexual Inversion, and only dared bring it forward in 1897. The first edition was destroyed after Symonds’s literary executor intervened on behalf of his family. Ellis persisted, bringing the book out solely under his own name – only for it to be swept up by the police and prosecuted as obscene. A judge agreed, and the book was destroyed all over again.

And yet it was not the end. Wilde may have become a cultural bogeyman, but subterranean streams of influence extended into the 20th century. Carpenter lived until 1929 and befriended the young Forster – it was a pat on the backside from Carpenter’s partner Merrill that inspired Maurice. “It seemed to go straight through the small of my back,” Forster remembered, “into my ideas.” Carpenter also inspired that rather noisier sexual radical, DH Lawrence. Ellis lived until 1939 and became a world-famous sexologist, a byword for the illicit knowledge that could be gained by curious young people if they took down one of the volumes of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (published in the US to avoid censorship) from a high shelf in the library. Sexual Inversion took its place as the first of these. Even Symonds had an energetic afterlife. He, too, inspired Forster, who read his sexually frank autobiography in the London Library, where it was locked up until 1984. Symonds’s homosexuality was finally made public in 1964 by a young biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, whose book was widely reviewed. It was a contribution to the changing mood that finally led to legalisation three years later.

When we celebrate the progress of gay rights, these stories should be given a brighter spot in history, alongside Oscar Wilde. There is not only tragedy and injustice in the past. There is also inspiration and glimpses of a world to come.

 The New Life by Tom Crewe is published by Vintage.

Beyond Oscar Wilde: the unsung literary heroes of the early gay rights movement. By Tom Crewe. The Guardian, February 10, 2024.

Chalk it up to perversity: In the midst of a horrifying anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, amid a wave of state legislative violence against trans people specifically and our self-expression broadly, all I can think about is queer utopia. If that phrase brings to mind something like the meme of a glassy, futuristic cityscape dotted with pristine green spaces and flying cars—maybe with more rainbow decals—it’s more abstract than that. These days, when I wax utopian, I’m picturing the flourishing of a certain outsider perspective that tests, reimagines, and improves the received normal for everyone. I’m looking ahead to a world that values our difference, that recognizes, grudgingly or enthusiastically, that it’s better off with us than without us.

A decade ago, it was the other way around. During the relatively summery Obama years, as we rode wins for marriage equality from Iowa to New York to the U.S. Supreme Court, as we secured unprecedented federal backing for workplace protections, housing, and health care, I didn’t trust the optimism. I volunteered with the New York City Anti-Violence Project, a nonprofit tracking violence against LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected communities, and we were the gay killjoys braced for the counter-swing. It’s well documented how bias-motivated violence increases alongside advancements in LGBTQ+ rights. Our teeth-gritting may not have fit the moment, but triumphalism spooked me. Love demonstrably doesn’t always win.

Now, after the Pulse and Club Q shootings in 2016 and 2022, in the midst of a concerted anti-trans panic from the right and the cowardly ambivalence of center-left institutions, with armed posses marshalling to intimidate drag queens reading storybooks, and state governments siding against the queens and the books, pessimism is in. And yet it is at this moment that I am most persuaded that LGBTQ+ people are poised to bring about a better world. That it is our perversity exactly, our ill-fittedness within a society that can’t quite accept us, that holds the most value.

That conviction drives my new book Uranians, a collection of short speculative fiction about queer difference. I started writing these stories after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and Brazil’s election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, when it was clear things were going to get much worse—for the gays, for the planet, for everything. And naturally, there are plenty of contemporary anxieties running around the stories, from climate change to hypercapitalist artificial intelligence. But there’s also a weird, unnerving optimism building over the course of them—I didn’t know where it came from—that culminates in the title story, a piece of full-throated, operatic queer utopianism.

That title comes from Edward Carpenter, a pioneer of gay rights in Victorian England. In his remarkable 1908 book, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women, he proposes the “Uranian”—his term for gay men and women—as not only worthy of compassion and tolerance, but also full of radical, utopian potential, even “the natural leaders of mankind.” It was an audacious thesis for the time, and of course not all of it holds up. But even so, it is precisely now that Carpenter’s earnest, almost cringey utopianism strikes me as utterly compelling. However dangerous, exhausting, and evil the current anti-LGBTQ+ wave is, it clarifies why such powerful interests mark us as a threat: because, as Carpenter saw, we really can change the world.

 

Carpenter’s queer journey catalyzed in the spring of 1891, when the distinguished lecturer, poet, and socialist got cruised at a Derbyshire train station. He had noticed the 24-year-old George Merrill in the train car and clocked his “somewhat free style of dress”; the two men exchanged a look of recognition. When he descended from the train in rural Sheffield, Carpenter greeted some friends on the platform who had come to visit him and set off walking toward his cottage in Millthorpe, about four miles over low pastureland. Merrill, ditching his own friends, followed at a distance. After a mile, Carpenter improvised to fall behind his guests and talk to Merrill, who suggested they turn back to town “and so forth.”

At 46, Edward Carpenter cut a strikingly handsome figure, with dark, high-arched brows, a full, silver beard, and an intensity to his features belied by the sheer earnestness of his idealism. An early British socialist, Carpenter organized and wrote polemics advocating for unions, animal welfare, vegetarianism, and anti-pollution measures. He was an early adopter of a certain rural, “simplified” lifestyle movement that George Orwell would later deride as “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Orwell here definitely had Carpenter in mind, and only the fourth charge (“sex-maniac”) was unfair. Carpenter was, if anything, too careful, a bit hopeless even, his enthusiasm for men more often unconsummated and unrequited, directed at younger, working-class socialists with at best ambivalent sexualities. Carpenter did not take up Merrill’s invitation and abandon his guests. But he did get the young man’s name and address.

George Merrill came from the slums of Sheffield, with the proletarian bona fides Carpenter romanticized in his pamphlets and pined after privately; he was sexually confident, experienced, foul-mouthed, flirtatious. In drifting between industrial and service jobs around England, Merrill had racked up several affairs with upper-class men, whose gifts he’d sent home to his father to be pawned. Nothing went unconsummated between him and Carpenter.

Merrill’s sexual audacity had a famous galvanizing effect on others. When E.M. Forster first visited the couple at the cottage in Millthorpe, in 1913—more than 30 years after their first encounter—the novelist was self-conscious and too much in awe of Carpenter, until Merrill came up beside Forster and gently palmed the crest of his ass. “The sensation,” Forster wrote, “was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.”

Forster went home and wrote his great gay novel Maurice, its cross-class lovers modeled on Carpenter and Merrill. He sent it to Carpenter the next August, though it would not see publication until 1971, after Forster’s death.

For Carpenter, the influence of his happy affair with Merrill showed in his invigorated interest in liberal sexual politics, and, in particular, his criticism of Britain’s “gross indecency” laws, which had recently expanded the criminalization of homosexual acts. From 1893 to 1894, he wrote four progressive tracts on sexuality: Woman and her Place in a Free Society, Marriage in a Free Society, Sex-Love and its Place in a Free Society, and finally, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society.

 Homogenic Love kicks off with erudite citations of same-sex “Comradeship” in works of Homer, Sappho, Hafiz, Tennyson, and Whitman—as well as an inexpert, though well-meaning, argument that similar bonds appear across African, Polynesian, and other non-Western cultures. It then insists that this form of love, though not to be reduced to “a sexual act of the crudest and grossest kind,” still “demands some kind of physical expression.” Summarizing still-untranslated work by early sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Homogenic Love places homosexuality and heterosexuality on equal footing spiritually, sociologically, and scientifically, with either liable to descend into “morbid,” neurotic forms or inspire great virtue in lovers. Carpenter’s argument is scholarly, reasonable, inescapably defensive—a polite polemic meant to win persuadable allies from out of a skeptical public.

In 1895, just as the four pamphlets were set to be printed, the disaster of Oscar Wilde’s three trials hit London. The trials are remembered now for Wilde’s eloquence and occasional courage in the witness box but, at the time, were dominated by lurid sensationalism, speculation, and open vilification of homosexuality. Public discourse revolved around Wilde’s decadence, his glib amorality, his retinue of teenage sex workers and blackmailers. Wilde’s scandal—and his sentence of two years’ hard labor—engendered a poisonous moral panic and a corresponding timidity by institutions that might have been receptive to Homogenic Love. Wilde’s diabolical example also gave the lie to Carpenter’s high-minded defenses of comradeship—and threw his own tastes for younger, working-class men into sordid relief. The pamphlet’s printer pulled the contract, Carpenter’s socialist friends condemned Wilde, and public opinion on homosexuality entered a dark and diffident period.

Still, Carpenter continued to write cultural surveys and defenses of homosexuality through the decade after the Wilde trials, growing ever bolder in his optimism. In 1908’s The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter comes out swinging. Here, not only is homosexual love not worse than its more familiar counterparts—maybe it’s better. Maybe the increased public attention to homosexuals indicates a “new type of humankind may be emerging,” for whom an “immense capacity of emotional love represents … a great driving force.”

This “Uranian”—taking up a term from Ulrichs, inspired by Plato—“puts Love before everything else … postponing to it the other motives like money-making, business success, fame, which occupy so much space in most people’s careers.” These new, “intermediate” sexes pursue their relationships “beneath the surface of society,” at the risk of disgrace, prosecution, and ruin. (Here, Carpenter’s early stabs at gender theory are limited, but still interesting, invoking a stereotypical binary to position queer people as healthy, helpful intermediaries.) Though copping to Uranians’ fair share of “a poor and frivolous sort,” generally, Carpenter says, “the experience of the Uranian world forming itself freely and not subject to outside laws and institutions comes as a guide—and really a hopeful guide—towards the future.” In short, if we’re trying to create a socialist utopia, one driven by open, democratic principles instead of greed and narrow thinking, who better to lead this transformation than the Uranians?

The idea is painfully beautiful, especially with the Wilde trials and the kiboshing of Homogenic Love in mind—that it is precisely because of our exclusion from polite society that we are able to better it. In 1923, an 11-year-old Harry Hay, a future founder of the Mattachine Society and Radical Faeries, discovered a copy of The Intermediate Sex in a library and was inspired.

At almost the same time, the Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen came across Carpenter’s books, which, he wrote, “threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural. I loved myself in it.”

Now, in another historically bleak moment for queer acceptance, it’s vital to remember that optimism of Carpenter’s, that our friction with majorities isn’t the problem: It’s our singular gift.

Carpenter’s argument in The Intermediate Sex reminds me—and here I’m being truly perverse—of the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton’s argument in his book Orthodoxy, which positions the Christian as a kind of utopian fanatic, “who hates [the world] enough to change it, and yet loves it enough to think it worth changing,” struggling for a vision of the world that should be over more rational appeals to incremental progress. Both Chesterton’s Christianity and Carpenter’s Uranian Love stand ready to overthrow systems of reasonableness (class, capital, polite religiosity) for an ideal experienced pre-rationally, even libidinally. Both accommodate a broken world, however; neither conditions one’s happiness on any final victory over injustice. Rather, they equip their utopians with ways to conceptualize lives of personal integrity within a hostile environment.

It’s a risky, thrilling political position, rooted in a self-assured zeal that’s hard to nurture, impossible to justify. My collection Uranians is in many ways a set of experiments testing this politic against our massive systemic challenges like climate change and inequality. And, to be honest, I’m not sure it works all that consistently. For every Marsha P. Johnson, a George Santos. In the era of Pride parades brought to you by J.P. Morgan Chase, queerness’s anti-capitalist potential often seems more conspicuous in its failure than its fruition. But success is hardly a fair measure for utopias—they all bomb at scale, that’s their whole vibe. It may be that Carpenter’s queer utopianism works best as one more lifestyle movement, inhabited instead of evangelized.

Take climate change. Fossil fuel interests may have abused the notion of individual carbon footprints, but it’s still important to confront how mass consumption drives demand. And in the U.S., at least, when we look at the sectors responsible for most of our emissions, it’s hard not to see the connection between, on the one hand, emissions from transportation, power generation, land use, agriculture and the meat industry, etc., and on the other hand, a pattern of consumption tied up with a certain image of American middle-class prosperity. You know the one: single-family suburban home, the crowded commute, college funds for the kids, and the high-earning jobs that pay for this lifestyle—which tend to be jobs aligned, indirectly or not, with our fossil-fueled status quo. As one of my characters in Uranians puts it, “Maybe feeling like you have to have two kids, two cars, a grass lawn all winter, and a steak dinner every night to be happy is what got Earth into such a bad state.” And, more than unsustainable, the dream is precarious, so that any attempt to swap out its props and set dressings gets treated as a threat to happiness itself.

Queer people aren’t exempt from this way of thinking—oh my God, we are not—though for a long time, this particular American dream was actively hostile to us. More fundamentally, we are all equipped with some experience of breaking out of vigorously defended social narratives, of letting go of precarious, unhealthy self-conceptions, of doing the painful work of figuring out our own thriving in an adverse environment. That’s real strength, and it’s strength the rest of our country needs to see—especially in the rough times ahead. Happiness doesn’t have to look like whatever you’ve been sold. Trust us. This is the “experience of the Uranian world forming itself freely” that Carpenter proposed as a “hopeful guide” for the future, and I think he’s still right—at least, he could be.

 If that’s optimism, then I admit, it’s a more sobered, wind-bitten kind than what we usually like that word to mean. Not an assurance that things will turn out all right, but an opportunity to make a breaking world a little more livable. Not that gleaming futuristic city on a hill, but a home that only we can build.

Times Are Dark for LGBTQ+ People. But Edward Carpenter’s Queer Utopianism Offers a Glimmer of Hope. By Theodore McCombs. Slate , May 24, 2023. 

Edward Carpenter was one of the early socialists in Britain. In 1883, Henry Hyndman, the founder of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) took him to a basement meeting of revolutionaries on Westminster Bridge Road, where he met William Morris. They were one of several fervent clusters. Things had been moving fast — according to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, only two years before, when Hyndman had called a “Socialist Congress,” it had been so tiny that most of the delegates could assemble in the Hyndmans’ home.

 Edward Carpenter was not an obvious recruit to the class struggle. Born in 1844, he had been brought up in an upper-class Brighton family and graduated from Cambridge, becoming first an Anglican curate and then a lecturer in University Extension, an adult education movement. His lectures took Carpenter to the North of England where he met both middle-class feminists like Isabella Ford and working-class students. Uncomfortably alienated from his own background, he settled in a gray stone house, Millthorpe, in the Cordwell Valley outside Sheffield. His new friends were local people, farmers, laborers, and a razor grinder called George Hukin, with whom Carpenter fell in love.

In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916), Carpenter expresses his loathing of commercialism in public life, class division, the subordination of women, “the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs.” Opposed to capitalism, he adopted a do-it-yourself alternative, the simple life, and with this went an early critique of the devastation of the environment by industrialization. He helped to build the independent Sheffield Socialist Society, propagandizing around Britain.

Through the 1890s, Carpenter sat in a wooden shed in his Millthorpe garden writing away about his visions for a better society. In his account of a long trip to India and Sri Lanka, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892), he poked fun at the portentous representatives of the Raj and described how, guided by Ponnambalam Arunachalam, his friend from Cambridge, he learned from the Gnani Ramaswamy.

Between 1893 and 1895, he produced three pamphlets on sex in which he contested both male supremacy and the prevailing secrecy about sexual relationships. The novelist Edith Ellis, who was married to the early sex psychologist Havelock Ellis but attracted to women, looked forward to his “sex-bombs.” They were indeed explosive, especially the third, Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, which was printed only for private circulation, because same-sex love was not just regarded as indecent — it was illegal.

In Love’s Coming of Age (1896), Carpenter hails the new women, intellectually restless and sexually rebellious, who he observed travelling unaccompanied on buses and trains or riding their bicycles. This forceful minority were strenuously resisting the confinement of the Victorian era, in contrast, Carpenter notes with amusement, to the upper-class “man, the ungrown,” blithely pelting along with his hobby or his career, until falling in love, whereupon he “struggles like a fly in treacle.”

Carpenter himself had fallen in love with a young man called George Merrill from a poor Sheffield family. Attracted from their first glance in 1891 on a train to Totley, the two men were to become lifelong companions. Sexual taboos were not boundaries to skirt for Merrill; he was simply oblivious of their existence. E. M. Forster would later relate how, on a visit to Millthorpe in 1914, Merrill had touched his “backside” and released in him the capacity to write his novel Maurice.

In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Carpenter’s home was visited by troupes of rebels and reformers, nature conservers, garden city designers, trade unionists, Clarion socialist cyclists, feminists, birth control advocates, vegetarians, and radical Christians like the young Fenner Brockway, who was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Brockway would later describe how ILP-ers like himself avidly read Carpenter’s long Whitmanite poem, Towards Democracy, “in those moments when we wanted to retire from the excitement of our socialist work, and in quietude seek the calm and power that alone gives sustaining strength.”

Carpenter’s Bristol socialist friend Robert Gilliard reflected that there was a “bread and cheese side of socialism and . . . a much deeper and broader side.” The latter assumed various manifestations, from Brockway’s humanitarian ethics to a fusion of spirituality and creative revolution around the avant-garde magazine New Age. When a shy Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson enquired of Carpenter how he fused his interest in human experience, mysticism, and socialism, he “replied that he liked to hang out his red flag from the ground floor and then go up above to see how it looked.”

Carpenter continued to write until the late 1920s, acquiring an international following and extending his range into anthropology, pagan religions, land reform, and industrial democracy. He advocated workers’ control not simply in the mines and railways but in the army and the police as well. After his death his influence waned, though he continued to be remembered by local people in the countryside near Millthorpe, by older socialists, and by some of the gay men who began organizing in the 1960s and ’70s.

I came across him when I was sixteen in a biography about Havelock Ellis. A few years later, through the historian E. P. Thompson, I learned that the Leeds New Unionist organizer and poet Tom Maguire had been influenced by Carpenter. In the mid-1960s, I read Carpenter’s papers in Sheffield Library and was hooked, writing about him in Socialism and the New Life with Jeffrey Weeks (1977) and eventually writing a biography of him. I was drawn to his dry humor and cautious courage and inspired by his version of utopianism — feet on the ground and eyes on the stars.

Remembering Edward Carpenter, a Victorian Socialist and Gay Rights Advocate. By Sheila Rowbotham. Jacobin, February 24,  2022. 

Dublin Pride is tomorrow, and for this Pride season we note the 90th anniversary of the death of Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), a man who in the most repressive of times against homosexuality in Britain was out and proud. As a small homage to one of Sheffield’s great socialist bohemians, below is a quick once-over of his life, followed by a beautiful obituary produced for Freedom.

A poet and philosopher, Carpenter was born into a wealthy household in Hove, Sussex, the son of a school governor who had made a mint on the stock market. Educated at his father’s school, the independent Brighton College, he went to university at Trinity College Cambridge, where he realised both that he was gay and that his family wealth was built on the immiseration of working people.

Initially he began a career with the Church of England as a curate, before turning against it and instead moving to first Leeds and later Sheffield to work as a lecturer. While there he was heavily involved in pushing socialism forward in the city, representing the Social Democratic Federation there in 1883 and later joining the Socialist League alongside William Morris.

In Sheffield he found both connections to working-class people and explored his sexuality through encounters with “railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers”. Over time he patched together a political philosophy mixing spiritualism and socialism in a Tolstoyan manner, which infuriated many especially when he opened the doors of his co-operative farm Millthorpe to a sexually liberated group of men.

Carpenter’s openness with his homosexuality, spiritual inclinations, proto-beatnik lifestyle and strident anti-imperialism led to repeated censure from elsewhere in the movement, with George Orwell memorably excoriating him as  “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light.” His philosophical and political writings were nevertheless among some of the most influential of his era, and Carpenter went on to become one of the founding figures of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

He was however a great ally to the anarchists, and quite clear about his inclinations towards anarchist-communism. He worked with Peter Kropotkin in his research on small industry and defended anarchism in the courts. Carpenter received the warmest of obituaries upon his death from his friend Bessie Ward in the Freedom Bulletin of that year, reproduced below:

With the death of Edward Carpenter there passes one of the finest spirits of the early days of the socialist movement, His work was, and, for those who care to read it, still is, a force and an inspiration. We who in our youth were influenced by his message must feel grateful that he never swerved from the goal of high attainment. Once having seen the truth, having realised the shams and ruthless brutalities of the terrible system of profit-making, Edward Carpenter devoted the rest of his life to the destruction of the Moloch called Capitalism.

His first step, after turning his back on his life of a university lecturer, was to get us close to nature as possible. Eventually he built his own cottage in a garden with a stream running at the foot. Here in his little stone house, wearing his soft tweeds, he seemed like a jewel in its proper setting. To this small home of the poet came a constant procession of admirers, Like pilgrims to a shrine, they came from all parts of the world. Those who were fortunate enough to be frequent visitors would meet travellers from the remotest and least expected corners of the globe, Men and women who had heard the “ voice singing the song of deliverance ” and were impelled to travel far in order to take him by the hand.

Though every one of Carpenter’s works is written with one object, the greater understanding and emancipation of mankind, the whole covers a wide field, Civilisation! Its Cause and Cure influenced very largely indeed the thought of the 1890s, while England’s Ideal was almost as great an intellectual force, Love’s Coming of Age,  that-beautiful and delicately written book on the relationship of the sexes, and The Intermediate Sex are two aspects of a subject which it took some considerable courage to oven admit existed in those late Victorian days. Angels’ Wings with its frank acceptance of a coming change in art standards and a belief that art would once again become a part of life itself, left its mark on the lover of beauty seeking a basis for his own standards.

But of all Carpenter’s works Towards Democracy is the most completely satisfying. In this the poet and prophet, the great lover of mankind, has poured himself. It contains all that Edward Carpenter ever was. In its pages “this man rises from his mould of dust, ranges his life and looks upon the Sun.” There are moments of pure ecstasy, prophetic pictures of the greater freedom coming to mankind, and a yearning pity for its present pain and repression.

In his teaching and in his life Carpenter was always the foe of authority and officialdom. Always. In fact, more anarchist than socialist, though he never cared to label himself. Feeling, as so many of us do, that labels restrict, he preferred to keep himself free to help all movements which made for that true liberty for which, in his. own words, “the heroes and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives; and nations like tigers have fought, knowing well that life was a mere empty blob without freedom.”

It was a dear privilege to know him. One of my most cherished memories is of weekends, after periods of sordid money-changing, spent in the little house removed just beyond the smoke and grime of Sheffield, with the man who still remains a source of inspiration to think upon. I met many choice spirits there, but none so gracious, so tender, so truly beautiful as our teacher-host,

“Do not hurry; have faith.” is one of his choicest messages. This attitude towards life gave him a quiet dignity that created a sense of rest to all who came under his spell.

He ate no animal food nor hurt any of Earth’s creatures for his clothing. He lived simply and beautifully, writing his books, lecturing on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a spell in towns, and towards the end, preparing to pass out in calm and happy trance “into that other land where the great voices sound and visions dwell.”

 

Pioneers of British anarchism: Edward Carpenter. Freedom, June 28, 2019.

 

 

This is the first full-length biography of the most rivetingly interesting figure in late 19th-century radical politics. Edward Carpenter, alias the Saint in Sandals, the Noble Savage and, more recently, "gay godfather of the British left", was a writer, philosopher and charismatic propagandist for a multitude of causes, including anti-pollution, women's liberation, naturism, vegetarianism, animal rights, smallholdings, recycling. You name it, Carpenter espoused it from the start.

His demands for more rational dress encompassed footwear, the freeing of the feet from "the tyranny of shoe leather". It was Carpenter who introduced the British to the Indian-style sandals that are still the sign and symbol of left-leaning politics. His most far-reaching campaign was for liberalising attitudes to homosexuality, at that time illegal. Carpenter the reformed gentleman lived with his working-class lover, George Merrill, in an early and controversial example of an openly gay relationship.

Like William Morris, his contemporary and fellow socialist, Carpenter came from a comfortable background. The Carpenters were a naval family with a substantial income from property and shares. Early on he rejected the stifling atmosphere of their lavish house in fashionable Brighton. He despised the socially divisive capitalist system that allowed the ruling classes to live off the labour of the poor, "consuming much, creating next to nothing". Things did not have to be so complex. Determinedly and bravely, he reached his own solution. Carpenter was the inventor of that fascinating late-Victorian phenomenon we call "the simple life".

Even as a child Carpenter had been aware of a strong attraction towards his own sex. Rowbotham makes links between Carpenter's sexual orientation and his visions for total social transformation, a new world in which men and women of all classes could live creatively together in love, beauty and freedom. Rejecting the emotional sterility of Cambridge, where Carpenter, by then ordained, held a clerical fellowship, he made his way north to live in Leeds and then in Sheffield.

He had had his St Paul moment, a lightning flash of revelation felt as "a vibration" through his whole body, that he had to go and make his life with "the mass of the people and the manual workers", swarthy northern railway men and coach-builders, muscular and grimy riveters and grinders. If this sounds Whitmanesque, we should not be surprised. Carpenter was a disciple of Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, with its eroticisation of young working men, had "filter'd and fibred" his blood. Carpenter travelled twice to visit Whitman in New Jersey. Did he, as has been suggested, sleep with "the old god"? Rowbotham's researches have not been conclusive but there were at least "erotic frissons", and a sometimes startlingly frank correspondence between Carpenter and Whitman went on for many years.

Sheffield in the 1870s was an "environmental disaster", as Rowbotham describes it, an industrial landscape of ugliness and squalor created by the rapid expansion of the steelworks and the cutlery trades. Carpenter countered this by retreating to the country, establishing small agricultural communities first at Bradway, then at Millthorpe in Derbyshire. He settled in a lovely tract of country - green fields, streams and wooded valleys beside the open moors.

It was an active, rugged life of self-sufficiency. Carpenter had absorbed John Ruskin's views on the damage done to society by separating brain work, the province of the gentleman, from manual labour, lowly activity of the so-called working classes. In the new simplified life there had to be a balance. On his seven-acre site in Derbyshire, Carpenter himself dug the drains and hoed the land, planted fruit trees, fed the fowls and grew the crops, taking his own produce to market, where his fellow stallholders were evidently puzzled by his still unmistakably patrician tones. In his little wooden writing hut beside the stream, he poured out the pamphlets and treatises which argued that the moneyed classes could opt out of the capitalist system by paring down their wants to basic necessities and supplying their own simple communal needs.

Most radically, Carpenter at Millthorpe lived alongside and had sex with local working-class men. He was crossing class barriers and sexual boundaries simultaneously. In researching this book Rowbotham has drawn on the Carpenter collection now in Sheffield city archive, a tremendously rich vein revealing a whole homosexual subculture in 19th-century industrial England. She uncovers an altogether different milieu from the more familiar metropolitan gay underworld of Oscar Wilde.

It was a period in which same-sex love was still "uncertain, tentative, experimental". Rowbotham's own origins in the floating world of 1960s communes, graphically described in her memoir of her youth, Promise of a Dream, gives her a special sympathy for the many emotional tensions in Carpenter's sexually experimental households. Some of his male lovers were married or about to be. When the love of his life, the razor grinder George Hukin, announced his engagement, Carpenter, somewhat provocatively, gave the couple a marriage bed. Hukin wrote back anxiously: "I do wish you could sleep with us sometimes Ted, but I don't know whether Fannie would quite like it yet." This book brings us tender insights into real human stories, poignant renegotiations of emotional and sexual territories played out against a background of Victorian political turmoil, bitter socialist infighting and anarchist trials.

Millthorpe became a mecca for progressives. Architects and writers, Norfolk-jacketed schoolmasters and eager young lady Fabians piled into the long, low, ivy-covered cottage to watch simple life in action. William Morris was delighted by the uncluttered interior, precursor of 20th-century minimalist decor. Once the volatile and humorous Merrill was installed as Carpenter's live-in lover in 1898, the menage at Millthorpe became a demonstration of what might be possible for homosexual men. It was Merrill who, in a famous episode, laid a gentle finger on EM Forster's backside, just above the buttocks, directly inspiring the writing of Maurice. Forster's explicitly homosexual novel went unpublished until 1971.

 

Carpenter was operating in a danger zone. His ceaseless propaganda for "that special attachment which we sometimes call by the name of comradeship" made him many enemies. Bernard Shaw accused him of "Carpenterings and illusions". Homogenic Love, his rationally argued pro-homosexual treatise, could only be privately circulated when it was completed in 1893. His Whitman-influenced long tone-poem "Towards Democracy" was passed from hand to hand by those who understood its hidden homosexual message. It was furtively referred to as "the little green book".

Carpenter became an Edwardian guru figure, famous for the strength of his handclasp and the penetration of his gaze. He reminds us that the British labour movement always had its mystic side. When asked how he reconciled mysticism with socialism, Carpenter replied that he liked to hang out his red flag from the ground floor and then go up above to see how it looked. In search of secret harmonies, as well as "good-looking chaps of the peasant class", he travelled to Ceylon and then India. Trust Carpenter to find there a mysterious English nudist colony known as "the Fellowship of the Naked Trust".

He retired to suburban Guildford, of all places. A heartbreaking photograph shows "the Complete Anarchist", the sage with all the answers, reduced to a baffled old man in a wheelchair. But by the time he died, in 1926, many of his ideas had been absorbed into the mainstream of our culture. Garden cities. Progressive schools such as Abbotsholme and Bedales. Craft communities including CR Ashbee's in the Cotswolds and Eric Gill's in Ditchling, living out the Carpenterian dream of making things by hand in idyllic rural settings. There were echoes of Carpenter in 1960s hippiedom and flower power, and in the memorable slogans of the period: "The personal is political"; "Make love not war".

Carpenter campaigned doggedly for a higher level of emotional awareness. He set himself to challenge conventions and taboos that led to "the starving of the human heart". He was an essential force in the relatively recent changing of our attitudes to sex, and especially to same-sex relationships. His great hopes for the decriminalisation of homosexuality were finally achieved in 1967 with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act.

Rowbotham has written a very good biography, exhaustively researched and resonant in detail. It is a splendid reassessment of a man who was both typical of his own time and light years ahead of it.

Edward Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham. By Fiona MacCarthy. The Guardian, November 1, 2008. 

Edward Carpenter was the Victorian Morrissey, the English Walt Whitman – and the original vegetarian, sandal-wearing socialist. So why is this gloriously eccentric figure almost forgotten today?

On his 80th birthday in 1924, five years before his death, the socialist Utopian poet, mystic, activist, homophile, feminist, nudist and environmentalist Edward Carpenter received an album signed by every member of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Cabinet. Glowing tributes appeared in the socialist papers as well as in the Manchester Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard and even the Egyptian Gazette.
 
In the early 20th century, Carpenter was a celebrity. Hordes of men and women – but mostly young men – had beaten a path to his rural retreat in Millthorpe, near Sheffield, to sit at his vegetarian, be-sandalled feet, or to take part in his morning sun-baths and sponge downs in his back garden.
 
After his death, however, his charismatic reputation faded faster than a Yorkshire tan. By the middle of the century he was regarded as a crank. When that Eton-educated proletarian George Orwell decried the left's habit of attracting "every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England", everyone knew who he was dissing.
 
Today, despite the brief renaissance of his works with the gay left after the emergence of gay lib in the 1960s and 1970s, and this worthy yet fascinating new biography by the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, it sometimes seems as though there's almost nothing left of Ted save his beard and sandals (he seems to have introduced sandal-wearing to these shores). He's become the Cheshire cat of fin-de-siècle English Utopianism. One could argue, and I will, that the main thing that connects most of us with Carpenter today is EM Forster's bottom.
 
George Merrill, Carpenter's uninhibited working-class partner, touched Forster's repressed Cambridge backside during a visit to Millthorpe in 1912, "... gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people's. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought."
 
Inspired, Forster went home, sat down on his probably still-tingling buttocks and wrote the first "gay" novel, Maurice. Though it wasn't to be published until after timid Forster's death, DH Lawrence saw the manuscript and was himself touched: Lady Chatterley's Lover is in many ways a heterosexualised Maurice. When Maurice was made into a film in the 1980s, its stars James Wilby and Rupert Graves made millions of rumps, male and female, tingle at a time when homosexuality, as a result of Section 28 and Aids, had become a cultural battleground.
 
Carpenter became a kind of English Whitman figure, though more outspoken on the subject of toleration of same-sex love than Whitman ever dared to be in the US. Alas, he was not nearly as fine a poet (another reason why his work hasn't endured).
 
Merrill and Edward Carpenter's relationship lasted nearly 40 years, and was an inspiration to many. Carpenter described Merrill as his "simple nature child", his "rose in winter", his "ruby embedded in marl and clay", and delighted in Merrill's lack of guilt about the "seamy side of life". Raised in the Sheffield slums and without any formal education, Merrill was almost untouched by Christianity. On hearing that Jesus had spent his last night on Gethsemane, Merrill's response was: "Who with?"
 
Carpenter was born into an upright upper- middle class family in Hove, Brighton (a sizeable inheritance financed his purchase of Millthorpe and his comradely life in the North). He was drawn to the working classes because he saw them as rescuing him from himself – as much as he was rescuing them.
 
"Eros is a great leveller," Carpenter wrote in The Intermediate Sex. "Perhaps the true democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society." He noted that many "Uranians" "of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way".
 
It's worth pointing out that Wilde and Bosie's relationship, which was to cause Forster and many other homosexuals at that time such grief, was based on their mutual enjoyment of rent boys. Carpenter disapproved of such exploitation, but you can imagine Wilde jesting that people like Carpenter were socialists only because they didn't want to pay for their trade.

 
Rowbotham, to her credit, doesn't shrink from pointing out the limits of Carpenter's socialism: "Carpenter never queried his own tacit presumption that the lower classes and subordinated races were to be defended when vulnerable and abject but treated with contempt when they sought individual advancement." To this, it could be added that if Carpenter succeeded in abolishing class, then with it would be abolished the interest in the working classes of men like Carpenter. Each man kills the thing he loves.
 
One young lover wrote of Carpenter: "You feel inclined to get hold of him as a boy would his mate" and talked of his "Handsome appearance – his erect, lithe body, trim and bearded face, penetrating eyes and beautiful voice". Carpenter was to continue attracting young working-class men to his door well into silver-haired old age.
 
Carpenter saw those exclusively attracted to their own sex as harbingers of a new age, the cultural advance guard of socialism in which a Utopian androgyny would be the norm. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for a future world of Carpenters. George Bernard Shaw was enraged by the idea that "intermediacy" should be recommended to "the normal" as the desired way to be.
 
EM Forster described Carpenter's mysticism as the usual contradiction of wanting to "merge with the cosmos and retain identity" at the same time. This described pretty much everything, from Ted's attitude towards comradeship and homosexuality, class and socialism, and even Millthorpe, where he would write standing in a sentry box in the garden while his "retreat" was overrun by guests.
 
His championing of androgyny and female emancipation held contradictions. Rowbotham describes his horror and disgust at the androgyny of a Siva statue he witnessed on a mystical visit to India as being "akin to the disgust he had felt at seeing the female nudes in a French art gallery". For Carpenter, "acceptable femininity consisted of lithe gay men and supportive, tom-boyish sister figures".
 
Perhaps the most lasting and pertinent thing about his life is a question: how on Earth did the old bugger get away with it? How did he avoid a huge scandal? How did he end up so lionised in his old age? Especially when you consider what happened to Wilde.
 
The answer is probably the same reason for his lack of appeal today. His prose now seems strangely precious and oblique, replete with coy, coded classical references. Worst of all for modern audiences, he necessarily downplayed the sexual aspect of same-sex love. Class helped too: even his live-in relationship with Merrill was often seen as one of master and servant (that's how Merrill, who was financially dependent on Carpenter, was legally described).
 
One contemporary suspected that Carpenter might not be as simple as he presented himself, that his mysticism "gave him a certain detachment which protected him against prosecution as a heretic". To which Rowbotham drily observes: "As for the non-mystical Merrill, he just tried out the idealistic admirers." (Or, as that Northern prophet Morrissey was to sing many years later: "I recognise that mystical air / It means I'd like to seize your underwear.")
 
Whatever Carpenter's survival secret, it's rather wonderful for us that he did. Although he fades in and mostly out of consciousness today, it's hard not to agree with Rowbotham's conclusion: "This complicated, confusing, contradictory yet courageous man is not going to vanish entirely from view."

"...Though after the Wilde trial, homosexual men began to be labelled as 'oscarwildes', men who did not fit the green carnation stereotype remained in the shadows, swathed in a cloak of ambiguity... In socialist circles, this opaqueness was compounded by the overlap between political and personal comradeship"

Edward Carpenter: A life of liberty and love, By Sheila Rowbotham (Verso £24.99)

The lost Utopian: Why have so few of us heard of Victorian poet and renowned socialist Edward Carpenter? By Mark Simpson. The Independent  , October 5, 2008.

Further information : 

The Friends of Edward Carpenter

The Edward Carpenter Community

The Paris Commune Still Resonates

 

In hiding and soon to be sentenced to death in absentia, Eugène Pottier completed a poem In June 1871 that still serves as the rallying cry for the Left worldwide: L’Internationale. Its themes of solidarity and universalism would enshrine the ambitions of the Paris Commune, a brief and extraordinary social experiment that unfolded during the spring of 1871 in what was then Europe’s second-largest city. However, between 21 and 28 May, central Paris was incinerated and approximately 25,000 people massacred when French soldiers annihilated the Commune, an atrocity remembered as the ‘Bloody Week’.

 
The Commune’s origins lay in France’s humiliation during the Franco-Prussian War. In September 1870 Napoleon III’s Second Empire gave way to the French Third Republic, which resolved to continue fighting. Paris was besieged by Prussia and privation soon ravaged the city’s poorest districts. In January 1871 France signed an armistice with the new, Prussian-dominated German Empire. The National Assembly held elections the following month and appointed Adolphe Thiers to lead the incoming government.
 
A steely political navigator of France’s tumultuous 19th century, Thiers was soon rubbing salt into Parisian wounds. The wartime moratorium on debt repayments was rescinded, now requiring repayment within 48 hours, while landlords could seek arrears. This was devastating to working-class Parisians, whose industry and commerce had stalled during the war.
 
The National Guard (the fédérés), a militia that had expanded significantly during the siege and whose officers were elected in working-class districts such as Belleville, now posed a direct threat to bourgeois order. The aristocratic officer corps of the professional army considered them a dangerous rabble, particularly as the fédérés were determined to keep their cannons in areas like Montmartre.

 
Matters came to a head on 18 March when the army attempted to confiscate them. Confronted by fédérés and local residents, many professional soldiers defected, while generals Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte were seized and summarily executed. As barricades went up across Paris, Thiers gave orders for the National Assembly and army to abandon the capital for Versailles. In their wake, fédérés occupied key buildings in the central arrondissements. The next day a red flag flew over the Hôtel de Ville.
 
On 26 March, elections established a new authority: the Paris Commune. Mandated to affirm the city’s autonomy, its delegates were comprised of Jacobins, devotees to the French Revolution’s most fanatical faction; Blanquists, followers of the veteran socialist, Auguste Blanqui; and members of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. Massing outside Paris, Thiers’s forces – the Versaillais – pointed to a foreign conspiracy.
 
For soldiers like Louis Rossel, however, disgusted at the armistice with Germany, the Commune offered a lifeline. He notified the Minister of War: ‘I do not hesitate to join the side which has not concluded peace, and which does not include in its ranks generals guilty of capitulation.’ In Versailles, mocked since the surrender as defeatists and also blamed for the cannons fiasco, the likes of General Joseph Vinoy spoiled for a reckoning.
 
While the Commune set about abolishing night work in bakeries and granting pensions to unmarried widows and children, the Versaillais plotted the reconquest of Paris. Troops were saturated with propaganda that depicted a city usurped by the dregs of society, ex-convicts, drunks and foreigners. Soldiers suspected of sympathy were deployed elsewhere in France. Newspapers such as Le Soir informed readers that property recaptured from the Communards would require ‘fumigation’.

 
In April, following the murder of its military commanders by Versaillais troops, the Commune adopted a Decree on Hostages. For every Communard killed, three hostages would be executed in retaliation. Raoul Rigault, the Commune’s chief of police, began abducting clerics, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. The Communards sought an exchange for Blanqui but Thiers refused, estimating that it would be equivalent to handing over a battalion. Instead, the Versaillais launched missiles on the affluent western arrondissements, pulverising their own side’s houses.
 
On 16 May the Commune toppled the Vendôme Column, a monument sculpted of melted Austrian and Russian cannons, crowned with a statue of Napoleon Bonaparte in the style of a Roman emperor. Its jingoistic symbolism was an affront to their internationalist values, while its demolition provoked outrage among the Versaillais. General MacMahon conjured its iconoclasm to rouse bloodlust in his troops: ‘Some so-called Frenchmen had the nerve, under the eyes of the Prussians, to destroy this witness to the victories of your fathers over the European coalition.’
 
On 21 May the Versaillais breached Paris’ defences and swept towards the Arc de Triomphe. The slaughter was already underway as Thiers crowed: ‘The punishment will be exemplary, but it will take place within the law.’ In the western districts, a journalist for Le Gaulois happened upon 30 bodies next to a ditch: they were fédérés strafed by the Versaillais with a mitrailleuse – a rapid-firing weapon similar to a Gatling gun. The Bloody Week had begun.
 
Barricades at the Place de la Concorde were soon overwhelmed. Bourgeois citizens in the prosperous districts cheered on the carnage as Versaillais troops rained down bullets from upper-storey windows. To impede the enemy’s advance, the Commune ordered that strategic buildings be torched.

 
Anti-Communards saw this as proof that the Commune was capable only of destruction. Yet there is strong evidence that Versaillais missiles were the primary cause of the inferno that would leave Paris in ruins. Nevertheless, Communards did incinerate landmarks such as the Tuileries Palace, reviled as a symbol of the Second Empire, and the Hôtel de Ville, as they retreated to the eastern arrondissements. From his bedroom in the Marais, the English merchant Edwin Child recorded that by 24 May ‘it seemed literally as if the whole town was on fire’.
 
Suddenly, rumours of female arsonists – pétroleuses – firebombing buildings became rife. Women caught carrying bottles, even chimneysweeps with blackened hands, were shot on the spot by the Versaillais. Killing was conducted in the open, with as many as 3,000 men and women dispatched in the Jardin du Luxembourg between 24 and 28 May. Children, too, fell victim to the bloodbath. Medical personnel who tended to the wounded or dying were, as the The Times reported, suspected of ‘sympathising with them and thus meriting the same fate’.
   
Many generals involved in the massacre had earned their stripes crushing indigenous rebellions in French colonies. The Versaillais was a highly disciplined force and the piles of corpses left strewn throughout Paris that week attests to a ruthless mentality that perceived anyone who challenged the ideals of the French state as alien and incorrigible.
 
Finally, after a rash decision to execute Archbishop Darboy and other hostages, the Commune made its last stand among the tombs of Père-Lachaise Cemetery. On 28 May Vinoy lined 147 fédérés up against its eastern wall and mowed them down. In Montmartre, Eugène Varlin, one of the Commune’s brightest leaders was beaten so savagely that his eyeball was left dangling from its socket before he was killed in the same location as the two generals on 18 March. According to the Journal des débats, the army had at last ‘avenged its incalculable disasters by a victory’.
 
Around 35-40,000 prisoners were marched on foot to Versailles. Upon reviewing one convoy, General Galliffet had all grey-haired men executed, suspected of having participated in the 1848 Revolution. Bourgeois women lining the route struck prisoners with their umbrellas. Crammed into filthy, open-air prison camps, disease and exposure claimed many lives. In the years that followed, survivors would face firing squads, destitution and banishment to remote penal colonies.

 
Subsequently, the Third Republic consolidated its grip on France’s national memory. School textbooks highlighted Darboy’s death while trivialising the slaughter of tens of thousands of Parisians and precluded any mention of the military’s eliminationist policy. Within years, a Catholic basilica, the Sacré-Cœur, soared over Montmartre in expiation for the Commune’s ‘sins’. The basilica was financed by the National Assembly, even as it fought against efforts to have ‘Member of the Commune’ inscribed on Communards’ tombstones.
 
The recent iconoclasm of national idols throughout some parts of the world has prompted fierce debate about the ‘cancelling’ of history, triggering prophylactic jeering among conservative commentators, as it did in 1871. It bears emphasising that the Communards’ plan to tear down contested monuments was no less political than their construction in the first place. According to the Communard Antoine Demay, when Thiers’s mansion was razed in May 1871 the Commune was keen to preserve his many books and artefacts, in order to ‘conserve the intelligence of the past for the edification of the future’, which rather debunks the barbarian caricature pushed by the Versaillais.
 
In the spring of 2021, two letters addressed to the French government and anonymously written by members of the military warned darkly of national disintegration and civil war because of anti-racist activism and Islamic extremism. In an image that evokes the radical reputation of working-class districts such as Belleville during 1871, the first letter spoke of ‘hordes from the banlieue’ threatening ‘our civilisational values’. The second referenced La Marseillaise, specifically the French national anthem’s seventh verse about avenging the military’s elders. The events of the Paris Commune and the Bloody Week still cast a long shadow over France.
 
The Paris Commune’s Bloody Week. By Danny Bird. History Today, May 25, 2021.

To be a communist is to be, often, on the defensive. Faced with countless historical precedents, from the initially brutal and later stagnant Soviet Union to the now successful but undeniably capitalist People’s Republic of China, the communist generally defends themself by claiming their ideology was misapplied and corrupted; that the cause was betrayed. 
 
The Paris Commune, which began 150 years ago today, is different. The short-lived government – 72 days from start to bloody finish – proclaimed any number of progressive causes. Equality between men and women; citizenship for foreigners; the requisitioning of empty housing stock for the homeless; separation of church and state. A century and a half later, many of the values of the Commune, radical for the time, are standard across the democratic world.
 
Crucially, the socialist Commune did not have enough time to compromise on its socialism or its democratic character as its government matured. It was brutally repressed by the national government of Adolphe Thiers, which had by then retreated to Versailles. Between 8,000 and 10,000 communards were killed by government forces, according to some estimates, and thousands more were exiled to New Caledonia, a territory in the South Pacific annexed by France not long before. 
 
“In general, the process which occurred after other revolutions, which fell back on liberalism or conservatism – that is something that the Commune cannot be accused of,” Mathilde Larrère, a historian of revolutions, told me. “The members of the Commune did not betray it. It was not lost to the bourgeois republic, nor to a dictatorship. It has an [ideological] purity to it that means that it can more easily be cited in retrospect.”
 
The Commune’s resonance is still felt across France today. A series of events to mark its anniversary began in Paris this Thursday with the opening of an exhibition about the events. The city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo will plant an araucaria tree, native to New Caledonia, in Montmartre, the site of the beginning of the revolt. (Mass events will be limited because of coronavirus restrictions.)
 
But debates about how exactly the anniversary should be marked also reveal how uneasily the Commune still sits outside of the country’s national narrative. One of the most contentious episodes in French political history, it has long been mythologised in far-left circles. Yet other groups are increasingly finding new relevance in it, raising the question: 150 years later, what remains of the Commune?
 
******
 
The social conditions of 19th-century Paris made the city fertile ground for revolutionary ideas. Its working-class population – more than half of the total – was crammed into its central and north-eastern arrondissements. Population density in the central district of the Marais reached 15,000 people per square kilometre – about four times more than Paris today – in squalid, unhygienic conditions. Baron Haussmann, known for giving the city its distinctive wide boulevards and ornate buildings under Napoleon III, noted that more than half of Parisians lived in “poverty adjacent to indigence” even if they worked 11-hour days.

 
Socialist and anarchist ideas spread rapidly within the working-class neighbourhoods. “Skilled workers’ strong sense of their own worth as citizens… caused them to sympathise with democratic and, particularly from 1848 onwards, with anti-clerical and radical republican politics,” the historian Robert Tombs argued in The Paris Commune.
 
A short war with Prussia, which broke out in 1870, ended disastrously for France, with the government of the recently declared Third Republic capitulating to the Prussians early the following year after a four-month siege of Paris. 
 
Elections held in February 1871 returned a large monarchist majority of some 400 of 638 deputies. The political chasm between the capital and the rest of the country, however, was obvious, as Paris returned 37 republican representatives of 43 in total. The election of Thiers, a republican but remembered by the working classes for his role in violently suppressing an 1834 workers’ revolt, to head the government was the final straw. 
 
On 18 March 1871 the National Guard of Paris, drawn largely from the working people of Paris, expelled the forces of Thiers’s government. For the next 72 days, the self-declared Paris Commune would capture imaginations around the globe. As the historian Quentin Deluermoz wrote in his book Commune(s), for the short span of its existence, “Paris was at the centre of the media world”. 
 
The government swiftly announced a raft of progressive policies. War widows were given pensions and women the right to equal divorce. Foreigners were granted citizenship. Workers rights were advanced, with night-time work banned. The separation of church and state was declared. 
 
Representatives to the Commune Council were elected to fulfil “imperative mandates”, which the political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau had advocated in his Social Contract, published a century earlier. Members of the Commune Council were to follow a defined role, with no right to vote according to their own beliefs and values.
 
Many of the policies remained largely theoretical and were never applied during the Commune’s short existence. The Versailles government fought to recapture Paris throughout April and May, and on 21 May 1871, its troops entered the Porte de Saint-Cloud, marking the beginning of the “bloody week”, in which thousands of communards were executed by the Versailles army. 
 
Gaston de Galliffet, one army official charged with rooting out former insurgents, was nicknamed “the Executioner of the Commune” for his unsparing brutality. A historian has estimated that De Galliffet alone was responsible for some 3,000 deaths. Thousands more were deported to New Caledonia.

 ******
 
The question of how to remember the Commune has vexed France virtually since its collapse. “The national narrative does not have much space for the Commune. The republic is almost remorseful about the repression, even though responsibility lies mostly with a monarchist parliament and army,” Larrère told me. The uneasiness explains why the government amnestied most convicted communards less than a decade later, she added. 
 
Most historians today agree that though there was violence on the communard side, with hostage-taking and summary executions, the lion’s share of the killing was committed by the Versailles government during bloody week. (The Commune’s fédérés did set fire to several buildings, including the Louvre and Palais Royal, as the Versailles government’s army advanced.) 
 
Yet virtually as soon as the Commune had been defeated, the victorious Versailles government began crafting a narrative to justify their violence, Larrère says. “Take the idea that the Commune destroyed swathes of Paris. Almost immediately, the Versaillais began disseminating books of photographs taken by the Appert brothers… of Paris in ruins. But almost half of the album shows destruction which has nothing to do with the Commune.”
 
The 19th-century building of the marble-domed Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre, where some of the most significant opening and closing events of the Commune played out, is widely viewed by the left as an insult to the memory of the communards. “The basilica was built by Catholic ultra-reactionaries to expiate, in their view, the sins of the Commune and all the revolutions since 1789,” Eric Fournier, a historian of the Commune, told me. 
 
A decision on whether to list the basilica as a historical monument was initially intended to be taken this summer, but has been pushed back to avoid coinciding with this year’s anniversary after some Green politicians bemoaned “the link between this edifice and repression of the Commune”. 
 
“[The government] built this monstrosity right on the place where they had beaten to death and tortured people in the Commune,” says John Merriman, the author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.
 
The debates within the Paris municipal council over how to commemorate this year’s anniversary have been tense. A series of events – limited because of Covid-19 – planned by Hidalgo’s administration were met with ferocious opposition by conservatives such as Rudolph Granier, a councillor. “The Commune was an episode of brutal violence and destruction. It should be commemorated but not celebrated,” Granier told me. 
 
Whereas other episodes of French history have by now been absorbed into the national story, the task of remembering the Commune was mostly taken up by the far left. This reading of events was largely shaped by Karl Marx’s assessment of the uprising as the first instance of the working class holding political power anywhere in the world. The French Communist Party, for example, participates in annual May Day marches to the Communards’ Wall, a section of the Père Lachaise cemetery where 147 fédérés were executed and thrown into mass graves during bloody week. 
 
“The Commune, for us, represents progressive values. The subjects raised – such as the rights of migrants, wage equality between men and women, the requisitioning of empty housing – are still relevant today,” Raphaelle Primet, a communist councillor, told me. 
 
******
 
In 1911, on the 40th anniversary of the Commune and six years before he overthrew the Tsar, Vladimir Lenin wrote admiringly of the uprising. Though he criticised it as badly organised, he still saw in it a model for Russia and the world. “The cause of the Commune did not die. It lives to the present day in every one of us,” he wrote.
 

Yet the ideological legacy of the Commune is also increasingly found in more unexpected places. Placards referencing 1871 appeared during the anti-government gilets jaunes protests of 2018, which did not grow out of the traditional left. The functioning of the movement’s proposed citizens’ assemblies would have drawn from the Commune’s model of Rousseauist imperative mandates, explicitly banned under the French constitution. 
 
The historians I spoke to were mostly sceptical about the relevance of the Commune to contemporary politics, beyond the broad general themes. Discussions of women’s rights, for instance, are vastly different today. At the time, “women were treated as minors, deprived of the right to vote and paid half of what men were,” Larrère said. 
 
But this relatively little known event in French history still resonates. “The Commune remains a conflictual topic. It offers no possibility for reconciliation,” said Fournier. “This utopian revolution, mostly remembered by the far left and hated by the Catholic right, cannot easily be integrated into a consensual national story behind which the French people could unite.”  
 
After 150 years, the legacy of the Paris Commune continues to divide France. By Ido Vock. New Statesman, March 18, 2021. 

There is a paradoxical discrepancy between the meteoric rise and fall of the Paris Commune, whose life did not exceed seventy-two days, and its lasting presence as a central experience in the Left’s historical consciousness.

 
Viewed through the lens of what some scholars call “world history,” what happened in Paris between March 18 and May 28, 1871, is almost insignificant. Most recent historians of the nineteenth century — think of the acclaimed works of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel — just mention it as a minor detail of the Franco-Prussian War. From the point of view of the takeoff of industrial and financial capitalism, urbanization and modernization, the consolidation of colonial empires, and the persistence of the Old Regime in an already bourgeois continent, the Paris Commune means nothing.
 
Indeed, the Commune was even marginal in the Franco-Prussian War, since it happened seven months after Napoleon III’s capitulation and the proclamation of the Republic, and two months after signing the armistice that transferred Alsace-Lorraine to German sovereignty. At the beginning of March, the victorious Prussian army had already paraded down the Champs-Élysées.
 
How to explain, then, the longevity and freshness of the memory of such a fleeting event? The answer lies in that which, from the beginning, everybody realized: the Commune’s extraordinary symbolic dimension. They defended or stigmatized its legacy, but no one could ignore or diminish its impact. Many radical thinkers commemorated its martyrdom and welcomed it as both a sunset and a dawn: the end of the sequence of nineteenth-century democratic upheavals and the beginning of a new era of proletarian revolutions.
 
Carrying the Torch

Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin depicted the Commune as the announcement of the future, and Karl Marx emphasized the communist potentialities of the Paris experiment: “It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”
 
As a nuanced historian like Georges Haupt pointed out, the Paris Commune quickly became both a symbol and an example: a symbol of socialism as a possible and desirable future, and an example to be integrated into socialist memory and to be critically meditated upon in view of the forthcoming struggles.
 
In the twentieth century, the legacy of the Paris Commune was largely appropriated and reinterpreted in the light of the Russian Revolution. During the crucial year 1917, and later, during the Russian Civil War, the Paris Commune haunted the Bolsheviks’ mind as — alternatively — a warning and a model. October 1917 had reinforced the symbol: the announcement of a new socialist age was no illusion. But it had also assimilated the lessons of the tragic defeat of 1871: the Bolsheviks should not repeat the delays, hesitations, and weaknesses of the Communards. In Russia, the White Army had been defeated by a stronger and pitiless revolutionary Terror.
 
In 1891, Friedrich Engels had defined the Paris Commune as a paradigm: it had showed what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would look like. After 1917, the Commune became a prefiguration of the Bolshevik Revolution — it was relocated into a sequence representing the ascending march of socialism from its infancy in 1789 to its triumph in 1917, passing through 1830, 1848, and, precisely, 1871.
 
After the Second World War, this image was further reinforced by adding new steps on the irresistible advance toward socialism: China in 1949, Cuba in 1958, etc. The Commune ––a sudden, unexpected and creative break of the historical continuum — had become a landmark in a new linear evolution theorized with the categories of Marxist historicism. The Communards had become heroic precursors.
 
The Bolshevik attempt at inscribing the Paris Commune into a communist Pantheon is certainly debatable, but it should be critically understood rather than contemptuously rejected. No doubt, the Bolsheviks were obsessed with “the laws of history,” which they believed to have mastered and in which they located the supreme legitimacy of their political choices.
 
When Leon Trotsky wrote Terrorism and Communism (1920) from his armored train, in the middle of a bloody civil war, Soviet power was struggling for its survival. In his mind, the ghosts of the Paris Commune were not rhetorical figures; they strongly resonated with the present as dramatic warnings. This was neither propaganda nor mythology: it was rather an extraordinary moment of empathy with the vanquished, when the past resurfaced into the present and cried out to be rescued. But it remained a revisitation of the Commune through a purely military prism.
 
72 Days of Utopia
 
The Communards, however, did not consider themselves as the actors or forerunners of a communist revolution. It was the Versailles propaganda that, emphasizing the significant presence of the disciples of Louis Auguste Blanqui among its leaders, denounced the Commune as a dangerous form of atheistic, vandalic, and barbarous communism. In its journals and its public debates, as well as in many testimonies of its protagonists, the Commune was usually described as a model of the “universal Republic” or, more pragmatically, as an experience of the “democratic and social Republic.” In fact, with very few exceptions, its actors did not wish to apply ideologies or preestablished measures; they invented a new form of social and political power, maybe even new “forms of life,” in the extraordinary circumstances of war and civil war, in a besieged and impoverished city.
 
In a retrospective reflection, Élisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer who was one of its actors, described the Commune as:
 
“a new society in which there are no masters by birth, title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary. Everywhere the word “commune” was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other.”
 
Initially, the Commune was a new levée en masse, inspired by the example of 1792, against the German enemy that had invaded the country and against the French government that wished to dismantle the defense of the city: the cannons of Belleville and Montmartre controlled by the National Guard. In other words, this revolutionary patriotism was directed against both an external enemy and the internal threat embodied by Adolphe Thiers and his executive of a conservative and monarchist majority in the newly proclaimed Republic.
 

The insurgents wished to establish a popular power based on principles of freedom, horizontal democracy, self-government, social justice, and equality, without knowing very well how these goals could be concretely realized. Moreover, they claimed the restoration of municipal liberties and prerogatives confiscated by an authoritarian regime. They called “communalism” this federalist conception of democracy and self-management, a conception to which they were strongly attached (and which will become one of their major weaknesses in the eyes of Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky). Thus, their experience did not consist in applying preexisting models, according to the tradition of French utopian socialism; rather, they sought to invent a new utopia. They created something that did not exist before, brought forward by what Ernst Bloch called the “hot currents” of utopianism.
 
The Paris Commune did not put into question the principle of property but submitted it to the priorities of collective needs. Instead of being a source of inequalities, property had to be “just and equitable.” It abolished debts at the pawn shops, fixed decent salaries, and established the self-management of the factories abandoned by their owners, when a significant part of the bourgeois class left the insurgent city. It abolished night shifts in the bakeries and introduced everywhere the election of labor representatives. It suspended the payment of rentals and requisitioned vacant housing. It did not take over the Bank of France, which belonged to the entire nation, thus leaving to its enemies a powerful weapon (another symptom of weakness, according to Marx and the Bolsheviks). Paris was as a city — the third-largest city in the world at the time — in which the power had been conquered by the laboring classes.
 
Among its juridical and political conquests, the Paris Commune established complete separation between the state and the Catholic Church, which had been a pillar of conservatism and Napoleon III’s regime. Secularism was extended to education, where female teachers obtained the same wages as their male colleagues. A reactionary conception of family was laid down by recognizing cohabiting couples and giving equal rights to their members; prostitution was assimilated to a form of slavery and abolished. The Commune did not extend voting rights to women — it is significant that neither Marx nor Lenin mentioned this as one of its limits or mistakes — but it gave them a new position in society.
 
The presence of women in the Commune was remarkable to the point that it became an obsessive target of Versailles propaganda, which depicted them as the pétroleuses: witches, harpies, nymphomaniacs, hysterical bodies, degenerated females who destroyed their families and all traditional values, abandoned their children and enjoyed the spectacle of fire in rapturous rituals. For decades, this negative myth would haunt conservative imaginaries around the world.
 
For the seventy-two days the Commune existed, such emancipatory measures were proclaimed and had begun to be applied, but, beyond these formal policy reforms, the entire city seemed captured by an extraordinary effervescence and engaged in a process of social transformation from below. Artists and intellectuals — Paris was then the capital of European literary bohemia — created their own federations. Popular newspapers and graphic arts flourished for two months in a country whose official culture was radically hostile to the lower classes, usually depicting them as a despicable “mob.”
 
Anti-clericalism and revolutionary iconoclasm frightened the ruling classes of the entire continent. The demolition of the Vendôme Column, described by the Communards as a symbol of militarism, imperialism, “false glory,” and “an insult by the victors to the vanquished,” became evidence of the Commune’s “vandalism,” which Gustave Courbet, the famous painter who led the Federation of Artists, paid for with imprisonment and exile.
 
Born as an expression of revolutionary patriotism, the Commune was deeply internationalist. It proclaimed that “any city should be authorized to confer citizenship to the foreigners who serve it,” and gave a concrete meaning to its principle of “universal Republic” by integrating thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees who lived in the French capital. The archives record 1,725 foreign Communards, and in many cases, they took on important responsibilities: two out of three Commune armies were led by Polish commanders in chief, and the National Guard included an Italian legion. Many foreigners belonged to its board, like Léo Frankel, a Hungarian Jewish member of the International Working Men’s Association, who was appointed minister of labor.

 
The most indisputable evidence that the Commune had destroyed the bourgeois order lies in its replacement of the state military force with the National Guard, which had been rebuilt during the war as a popular militia. Writing on the spot, just after its final annihilation during the “bloody week” of May, Marx pointed out two distinctive features of the Paris Commune: its rupture with the state repressive machinery and its radical democracy. After conquering power, the working class quickly realized that it could not “simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” The old state military force had to be replaced with “the armed people.”
 
Similarly, the working class created its own organs of power:
 
 “The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.”
 
Nobody knows if such a form of radical, direct democracy could work in the long term. In the USSR, it never really worked, except for a few months, because of the breakout of the civil war and the establishment of a party dictatorship. The horizontal character of democracy under the Commune was probably reinforced by the lack of charismatic leaders dominating its assemblies and institutions. There was a plurality of remarkable personalities but no overwhelming figures such as Maximilien Robespierre, Lenin, or Trotsky.
 
This also depended on a curious coincidence: Bakunin was in Lyon and could not join Paris under siege; Auguste Blanqui had been arrested in southern France one day before the uprising of March 18. Therefore, radical democrats, social republicans, anarchists, Proudhonists, Blanquists, and even Marxists (a few Communards had a regular correspondence with the author of The Communist Manifesto living in London) worked together without struggling for a partisan leadership. In many cases, as during the crucial ballot for creating the Committee of Public Safety, the Blanquists and the members of the International Working Men’s Association did not vote unanimously. This plurality of views was fruitful.
 
The Commune was simultaneously a “destituent” power that destroyed the old state machinery, and a “constituent” power that established a new sovereignty opposed to the Versailles government. Thus, it was shaped by the tensions and ruptures that characterize any revolutionary process: on the one hand, the enthusiasm for a conquered freedom and the emotional élan of building the future; on the other hand, the necessity of creating new organs of coercion able to resist the inevitable reaction of the old rulers. Democratic communalism coexisted with a latent dictatorship in the middle of a civil war. The authoritarian measures claimed by Raoul Rigault, the Blanquist head of the Commune’s security, echoed the Jacobin Terror and foreshadowed the Soviet Cheka. In the most dramatic moments of its ephemeral existence, the Commune executed its hostages.
 
Enemies of the Commune
 

Between the bloody week of May 1871 and the Russian Revolution, the memory of the Commune was censured and exorcised. For a decade, it was silently preserved by the vanquished and critically transmitted by the exiled. In France, the Commune became an unnamable event, always evoked by frightening allegories as a natural catastrophe. Its actors and accomplishments became the objects of a damnatio memoriae that simply erased them from the public sphere. At the top of Montmartre hill, where the uprising had started, the Sacré-Cœur basilica was built “to expiate the crimes of the Commune,” which had executed the archbishop of Paris. Just after the repression, photogravures showing the Communards’ deeds — from the execution of priests and the burning of churches to the destruction of property — inundated the entire country, gathered under the title The Red Sabbat. In the following years, the adjective “red” was banned from official documents.
 
While attracting socialist, anarchist, bohemian, and nonconformist writers and artists — think of painters such as Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Édouard Manet, or writers like Jules Vallès and the young poet Arthur Rimbaud — the Commune was condemned by the overwhelming majority of French intellectuals. Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, George Sand, and Émile Zola viewed the Commune as an outburst of blind violence, even if some of them pleaded for amnesty after the bloody week.
 
For the French intellectual elite, the Commune did not result from a civil war; it was the awful expression of a collective disease, of a pandemic that threatened the national body and had to be crushed. As Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, the most significant feature of anti-Commune literature was its “social biologism,” which consisted in associating class conflicts with natural pathologies. In his novel devoted to the Franco-Prussian War, La Débâcle (1892), Zola described the Commune as “a growing epidemic” and a “chronic befuddlement” provoked by hunger, alcohol, and syphilis under the conditions of a besieged city. In The Origins of Contemporary France (1878), historian Hippolyte Taine analyzed it as “a pathological germ which, having penetrated the blood of a suffering and seriously sick society, produced fever, delirium, and revolutionary convulsions.”

 
According to Maxime Du Camp, “virtually all those unfortunates who fought for the Commune were what alienism terms ‘sick.’” Cesare Lombroso, the Italian founder of criminal anthropology, submitted the Commune to the indisputable “scientific” test of anthropometry and, after analyzing the skulls of dozens of Communards, concluded that most of them revealed the typical traits of the “born criminal.” Many commentators privileged the language of zoology, grasping among the Communards the symptoms of bestiality and lycanthropy, a form of “barbaric regression” within a civilized world. In October 1871, Théophile Gautier compared the Communards to zoo animals that had suddenly escaped from their cages and terrorized in the city:
 
“wild beasts, stinking animals, venomous creatures, all the refractory perversities that civilization has been unable to tame, those who love blood, those who are as amused by arson as by fireworks, those for whom theft is a delight, those for whom rape represents love, all those with the hearts of monsters, all those with deformed souls.”

Such a demonic portrait was not exclusively French. In the United States, the Chicago Tribune compared the Paris Commune to an uprising of Comanche Indians. In Buenos Aires, La Nación deplored the Communards’ crimes and denounced the inspirer behind their attacks against civilization: Marx, “a true Lucifer,” whose letters from London had been found in the files of the Blanquist Raoul Rigault, the leader of the Committee of Public Safety. The myth of a “cosmopolitan” conspiracy behind the deeds of the Parisian workers focused on the International Workingmen’s Association, which became a sort of Satanic nightmare for European reaction and, in parallel, according to Friedrich Engels, a “moral force” for the labor movement throughout the world.
 
The colorful rhetoric of the Commune’s enemies belongs to a rich counterrevolutionary tradition. After the Russian Revolution, the language of reaction did not change significantly. Think of the White Guards’ posters portraying Trotsky as a Jewish ogre, or even of Winston Churchill, who depicted the Bolsheviks as a horde of baboons jumping on a hill made of the skulls of their victims.
 
The bloody week of May 1871 was, at the same time, the sunset of the old counterrevolutions and the dawn of modern state repression. Fought on the barricades, it appeared at first glance as a repetition of June 1848, but this was a misleading facade. Most of the fallen Communards were not killed in the street combats but were executed, after summary trials, through methodic and serialized massacres. The Versailles army was composed neither of fanatic Bonapartists nor of provincial obscurantists who wished to punish a detested capital.
 

As historian Robert Tombs has convincingly explained, the soldiers who performed this planned, disciplined, organized, and impersonal slaughter did not carry the awareness that they were crushing a political uprising; they rather thought that they were extinguishing a criminal fire and cleansing the city of a dangerous disease. They acted without emotion, accomplishing a biopolitical task in order to sanitize a national body. Whereas General Patrice de MacMahon repeated in May 1871 the gestures of General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac in June 1848, his soldiers perpetrated a massacre that, revisited in the twenty-first century, brings to mind the systematic murder perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in 1943.
 
The magnitude of the repression was considerable. Historians are still investigating the number of the dead, with estimates varying from 5,400 to 20,000. This significant discrepancy results from the difficulty of accounting for the dead in the streets, the victims of military executions and the thousands who perished in the following days of untreated wounds. The report established in 1875 by General Raymond Appert of the Versailles army mentioned 38,614 arrests and 50,000 sentences issued by the war council, which resulted in more than 10,000 convictions. A further 3,800 Communards were deported to New Caledonia (where many of them supported the Kanak rebellion in 1878).
 
Almost 6,000 among those who escaped from capture spent the following decade in exile. Most of them fled to England, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, but also to the United States and several Latin American countries. We know the names of many exiled intellectuals (Gustave Courbet, Leó Frankel, Paul Lafargue, Louise Michel, Élie and Élisée Reclus, Jules Vallès), but the great majority of the exiles were craftsmen and manual workers.
 
Twenty-First-Century Communes
 
The ghosts of the Commune have resurfaced in the twenty-first century. We heard their echoes in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, then in 2011, first in Tunisia and Egypt, then in New York, with Occupy Wall Street, and in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, with the 15M. A few years later they came back to France, with the Nuit debout of spring 2017 in Paris and the ZAD (“zones to defend”) of Brittany. The Kurdish fighters of Rojava claimed the Commune’s legacy by creating an incredible experience of armed, egalitarian, feminist, direct democracy in a Middle East devastated by neocolonial, fascist, and fundamentalist wars. To all of them, the Commune was meaningful, the opposite of a dead realm of memory.
 
Once again, the Commune’s legacy has experienced an unexpected metamorphosis. An eloquent mirror of this change is the afterlife of Louise Michel, one of the most popular figures of the Paris uprising, whose virtuous and sacrificial image of the “red virgin” has been replaced by that of a queer feminist. And a similar shift has occurred with the social dimension of the Commune. Its actors are increasingly recognized as craftsmen, workers, teachers, militiamen of the National Guard, employees, bohemian artists and writers; a minority of them were factory workers, while a great number were seasonal or daily laborers.
 
The social profile of the average Communard was much closer to that of many contemporary young people — precarious workers, students, and intellectuals — than to that of twentieth-century industrial workers. The heterogeneous internal composition of this largely preindustrial working class is now seen to bear many affinities, despite their different historical contexts, with the postindustrial proletarian layers of neoliberal capitalism. They did and do not believe in linear and gradual progress, but rather express a certain proclivity for radical breaks, as profound as they are ephemeral. Whereas its social and political conquests were quickly destroyed — some of them would be achieved decades later — the Commune has survived throughout a century and a half as, above all, the interruption of the homogeneous and linear time of capitalism and the irruption of a new, qualitative time of self-emancipation. From this point of view, it has not become a “future past” — a bygone nineteenth-century utopia — but remains the representation of a possible future that still reverberates in the present.
 
Liberated from the historical teleology of twentieth-century communism, the Commune has been extracted from the sequence of defeated twentieth-century revolutions and rediscovered as a moment of singular and irreducible collective freedom. No longer viewed as an immature and ephemeral prefiguration of Bolshevism, its relevance and actuality are grasped precisely in what was usually considered its main limits: its lack of centralism, hierarchies, or hegemonic leadership; its federalism; and its search for new forms of horizontal democracy rather than building an effective dictatorship.
 
In short, what is rediscovered in the Commune is its communalism, which powerfully resonates with current debates about the “commons”: a collective reappropriation of nature, knowledge, and wealth against the neoliberal process of global privatization. Like the Commune, the recent experiences mentioned above did not aim at applying abstract models; they were creative moments of the invention of the future.
 
In this way, they fit remarkably the definition of the Commune given by Engels in 1875 in a letter to August Bebel whose relevance has been pertinently pointed out by Kristin Ross. The word “Commune,” Engels explained, does not correspond with “community” or “municipality.” He saw it as the equivalent of the “excellent old German word Gemeinwesen,” which did not designate a “state” but rather “what exists in common.” In a letter to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann, written in April 1871, Marx defined the Paris Commune with a lyric image, a metaphor borrowed from Homer: “storming heaven.”
 
Like Titans assaulting Olympus, they had overthrown their own rulers. This is, perhaps, the key to understanding the incredible longevity of those seventy-two Parisian spring days in 1871.
 
Why the Paris Commune Still Resonates, 150 Years Later. By Enzo Traverso. Jacobin, May 28, 2021.

 

In the final weeks of May 1871, French president Adolphe Thiers ordered soldiers to lay waste to the Paris Commune, resulting in massacres across the city. Seven days of repression by the bourgeois government culminated with the Versailles army executing the remaining Communards against a stone wall of Père Lachaise Cemetery. More than 20,000 Parisians were killed during La semaine sanglante (or Bloody Week), and 45,000 were imprisoned, with many later executed or exiled. Thus ended the first fully formed proletarian state in modern history.
 
Louise Michel, leader of the Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee, wrote that “blood flowed in rivers in every arrondissement taken by Versailles. In each place, the soldiers stopped their carnage only when satiated, like wild beasts.” Artists living in Paris documented the bloodshed they witnessed. Paintings, drawings, and photos from the time tell a story of revolution, counterinsurgency, and mass destruction in just 72 days.
 

Unlike the bourgeois revolution of 1789, the Commune started as an uprising of workers who had lost faith in the National Assembly of landlords and capitalists. The Franco-Prussian War, fought over royal alliances and territory, had resulted in the Prussians routing the French army and laying siege to Paris. Food shortages and massive inflation resulted, exacerbating poor living conditions. When a new wave of protests chased Thiers and the bourgeoisie out of Paris, workers’ associations seized the means of production and resumed operations at factories shut down by their owners. From March to May 1871, the Commune swiftly deconstructed what remained of the Second French Empire by redistributing resources, separating church and state, promoting free and accessible education, lowering government wages, setting term limits, and severing police from political power.

 
A photograph by Ernest Charles Appert shows Communards standing in front of the downed Colonne Vendôme, a monument to the First French Empire under Napoleon. This highly symbolic gesture accompanied the burning of the guillotine, marking a departure from the 18th century’s indiscriminate violence. The Commune transferred economic and military power away from wealthy elites and made positions of authority revocable for politicians, soldiers, and police officers alike. The flight of private property owners reduced violence and petty crime in the city, as Karl Marx described in The Civil War in France.
 
Artists questioned what gave property owners the right to control and privatize art, laying out plans for decentralized practices divorced from bourgeois nationalism. In mid-April, a coalition of artists including Gustave Courbet and Eugène Pottier — the lyricist of the worker anthem “L’Internationale” — published a series of proposals for a new paradigm of public art. The Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists called for entrusting artists with the management of their own interests, establishing communal methods of empowering them, and promoting the public’s right to culture, all maintained by a committee elected through universal suffrage.
 
Women of the Commune advocated against the heteropatriarchal imperial order, taking up arms alongside men and agitating for better labor conditions. Socialist illustrator B. Moloch depicted French women defending a barricade at Place Blanche during Bloody Week. It was the women workers of Paris who first seized the National Guard’s cannons in March and prevented them from firing. They sewed and stacked barricades and fought Versailles troops while nursing the wounded, leading to a new public image based on autonomy and leadership. A lithograph by W. Aléxis exemplifies this: A woman wields a red flag and casts a disdainful glance at hideous caricatures of Thiers and German Emperor Wilhelm I.

 
The rise of socialist feminism also provoked reactionary portrayals in some political cartoons. Images of the pétroleuse spread among anti-Commune propaganda, which accused peasant women of setting fire to major government buildings like the Hôtel de Ville and Tuileries Palace. These buildings were in fact more likely incinerated by male Commune soldiers, revealing how women’s empowerment inspired political misogyny. Some artists depicted the pétroleuses admiringly, while others were more lewd and debased. Many adapted their likeness to the mythical Marianne of the 1789 Revolution. This stereotype no doubt aided in the demonization and mass execution of Communard women.

 
Indecisiveness led to stagnation and infighting among the Blanquists and Proudhonists — who roughly represented socialist and anarchist tendencies in the Commune, as respective followers of Louis-Auguste Blanqui and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — ultimately allowing the French bourgeoisie to recapture the city by force. German leader Otto von Bismarck agreed to assist the Versailles government, releasing more than 100,000 imprisoned French soldiers to aid in the counterrevolution. Together the German and French armies encircled Paris, laying siege to the Commune.

 
Anarchist artist Maximilien Luce painted massacred Communards in shades of deep blue. Édouard Manet, André Devambez, and Gustave Boulanger each created visceral battle scenes. Manet’s brother Gustave worked in the Ligue d’union républicaine des droits de Paris (the Republican League of the Rights of Paris), which attempted in vain to forge a peaceful resolution. Édouard, who also identified as a Republican, was not in Paris during March or April, but arrived in time to witness the Commune’s destruction and the corpses strewn about the city. Two of his lithographs from this time, The Barricade and Civil War, use sparse linework and shadowing to convey their gravity. While Manet was not a vocal supporter of the Commune, these drawings reveal his own conciliationism and sympathies with the victims.

 
Since its demise, the Commune has remained an influence to artists and revolutionaries worldwide. In 1883, Russian artist Ilya Repin painted a memorial near the Communards’ Wall, with a large crowd stretching out of frame. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party proposed implementing a democratic electorate with open discussions in the style of the Commune. Vladimir Lenin drew comparisons between Napoleonic France and pre-revolution Russia in 1908. Lenin later danced in the snow after the Bolshevik Revolution surpassed 72 days — the length of the Commune’s existence.
 

The Paris Commune remains a hot topic of political debate, yet art criticism is sorely lacking. Left-wing media tends to channel its analysis into party/state politics, but as philosopher Alain Badiou articulates, its real lessons lie in its application to the ongoing revolutionary experience: “In the space of 40 years, young Republicans and armed workers brought about the downfall of two monarchies and an empire.” These artworks may not receive as much attention as the widely known Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements that followed, but the liberal pleasantries of the Third Republic would have never materialized without the radical putsch that introduced new ways of thinking.
 
The Iconography of the Paris Commune, 150 Years Later. By Billy Anania. Hyperallergic, May 27, 2021.

Kristin Ross is professor of comparative literature at New York University. Her recent book, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015), is a masterful study of the ideas and aspirations driving the historic revolt. Roar editor Jerome Roos spoke to her about the Commune’s legacy, its impact on 19th-century radical thought and the revival of the communal imaginary in our times.
 
Jerome Roos: The Paris Commune has been studied and debated for almost a century and a half. How does your book add to our understanding of this world-historical event, and why did you decide to write it now?
 
Kristin Ross: Like many people after 2011, I was struck by the return – from Oakland to Istanbul, Montreal to Madrid – of a political strategy based on seizing space, taking up space, rendering public places that the state considered private. Militants across the world had reopened and were experiencing the space-time of occupation, with all the fundamental changes in daily life this implies. They experienced their own neighbourhoods transformed into theatres for strategic operations and lived a profound modification of their own affective relation to urban space.
 
My books are always interventions into specific situations. Contemporary events drew me to a new reflection on the Paris Commune, which for many remains a kind of paradigm for the insurgent city. I decided to restage what took place in Paris in the spring of 1871 when artisans and communists, workers and anarchists took over the city and organised their lives according to principles of association and federation.
 
While much has been written about the military manoeuvres and legislative disputes of the Communards, I wanted to revisit the inventions of the insurgents in such a way that some of today’s most pressing problems and goals might emerge most vividly. The need, for example, to refashion an internationalist conjuncture, or the status of art and artists, the future of labour and education, the commune-form and its relation to ecological theory and practice: these were my preoccupations.
 
The Paris Commune has always been an important point of reference for the Left but what is new about today is in part the entire post-1989 political context and the collapse of state socialism, which took to the grave a whole political imaginary. In my book, the Paris Commune re-emerges freed from that historiography, and offering a clear alternative to the centralism of the socialist state. At the same time the Commune has never, in my opinion, fit easily into the role that French national history tries to make it play as a kind of radical sequence in the establishment of the Republic. By liberating it from the two histories that have instrumentalised it, I was certain we would be able to perceive the Commune anew as a laboratory of political invention.
 
Communal Luxury is neither a history of the Paris Commune nor a work of political theory in the ordinary sense of the term. Historians and political theorists have been responsible for most of the massive literature generated by the Commune, and in the case of the latter – whether communists, anarchists, or even philosophers like Alain Badiou – this means approaching the event from the perspective of an already-formulated theory. Communard actions become the empirical data marshalled in support of verifying the given theory, as if the material world were a sort of local manifestation of the abstract rather than the other way around.
 
To my mind this amounts to summoning up the poor Communards from their graves only in order to lend gravitas to philosophising. What I did instead was to immerse myself for several years in the narratives produced by the Communards themselves and a few of their fellow travellers of the period. I looked closely not only at what they did but at what they thought and said about what they were doing, the words they used, fought over, imported from the past or from distant regions, the words they discarded.
 
These narratives about their struggle – and we are fortunate that so many of the literate Communards chose to write something about their experience – are already highly theoretical documents. But they tend not to be treated as such by political theorists. This is why I had very little use for the existing political theory about the Commune and why, in the end, I find political theorists to be the bane of our existence to the extent that they approach instances of political insurrection from the perspective of an overarching view that tries to unify them under a single concept, theory, or narrative of historical progression. I don’t think it is wise to consider historical events from an omniscient perspective, nor from the vantage point provided by our present, fat and complacent with all the wisdom of the “back-seat driver”, correcting the errors of the past.
 

I ignored all the innumerable commentaries and analyses of the Commune, many of which – even those written by people sympathetic to the memory of the Commune – consist of nothing but this kind of second-guessing or listing of errors. I had to perform a massive clearing of the terrain in order to construct the distinct phenomenology of the event and visualise it outside of the multiple projections placed on it by historians. It is the event and its excesses which teach you how to consider it, how to think and talk about it.
 
And once you have paid this kind of attention to workers as thinkers – an attention I learned when I encountered and translated some of the early work of Jacques Rancière – you can’t tell the story the same old way: the way, for example it has been told by the two traditions that controlled its narration for so long: official state-Communist historiography on the one hand and the French national fiction on the other. You have to reframe and reconfigure those past experiences in order to render them significant on their own terms and to make them visible to us now, in the present.
 
By focusing on the words and agency of concrete individuals acting in common to dismantle, little by little and step by step, the social hierarchies that make up a state’s bureaucracy, I’ve tried to think the Commune historically – as belonging to the past, as dead and gone – and, at the same time, as the figuration of a possible future. I tried to stage it as very much a part of its historical era, yet in a way that exceeds its own history and suggests to us, perhaps, the deepest and most durable demands for worldwide democracy and revolution.
 
The book is my way of reopening, in other words, from the midst of our current struggles, the possibility of a different historiography, one that allows us to think and do politics differently. The Commune offers a distinct alternative to the course taken by capitalist modernisation on the one hand, and the one taken by utilitarian state socialism on the other. This is a project that I think more and more of us share and it’s why I wrote the book.
 
 
Roos:
 By choosing to focus on the afterlife of the Commune more than on the 72 days of “its own working existence”, you manage to unearth the myriad ways in which the Commune’s political imaginary actually survived the massacre and lived on in the struggles and thought of ex-Communards and their contemporaries. What do you consider to be the most important legacy of the Commune in this respect?
 
Ross:
I did not so much focus on the “afterlife” of the Commune as I did on its survival. In one of my earlier books, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, my subject was indeed, as the title suggests, something more like a memory study: how the 1968 insurrections were represented and discussed 10, 20, 30 years later. And today very interesting work is being written by what some choose to see as the “afterlives” or “reactivations” of the Paris Commune: studies of the Shanghai Commune, for example, or other aspects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or studies that look to the Zapatistas as a kind of reactivation of some of the gestures of 1871.
 
Communal Luxury, however, is limited to the life-span of the Communards and is centrifugal or geographic in its reach. I examine the shockwaves of the event as they reach Kropotkin in Finland or William Morris in Iceland, or as they propel the hard-pressed Communard exiles and refugees themselves into far-reaching new political networks and ways of living in Switzerland, London and elsewhere in the aftermath of the massacre that brought the Commune to an end. The extremity and gore of that end, the Bloody Week of state violence that brought thousands of people to their deaths, has all too often proved to be an uncontrollable lure, making invisible the networks and pathways of survival, reinvention and political transmission that came in the years immediately after, and that concern me in the latter part of the book.

 
There’s almost a wish on the part of historians to lock the whole event up into a neat 72-day episode that ends in tragedy. In that sense I wanted to examine the prolongation of Communard thought beyond the bloody carnage in the streets of Paris, its elaboration when the exiles met up with their supporters in England and the mountains of Switzerland. In so doing, of course, I am very much in agreement with Henri Lefebvre who tells us that the thought and theory of a movement is generated only with and after the movement itself. Struggles create new political forms and ways of doing as well as new theoretical understandings of these practices and forms.
 
On one level you could argue that it is the forms taken by that survival – a “life beyond life” as in the French word “survie” – that constitute the Commune’s most important legacy: the very fact that its own “working existence” continued, the refusal on the part of the survivors and their supporters to allow the catastrophe of the massacre to bring everything to an end.
 
At a more symbolic level, though, the legacy left by the thought generated by the Commune emerges in my book in the cluster of meanings that attach to the phrase I chose for the book’s title: “communal luxury”. I discovered the phrase tucked away in the final sentence of the Manifesto Eugène Pottier, Courbet and other artists wrote when they were organising during the Commune. For them the phrase expressed a demand for something like public beauty – the idea that everyone has the right to live and work in pleasing circumstances, the demand that art and beauty should not be reserved for the enjoyment of the elite, but that they be fully integrated into daily public life.
 
This may seem a merely “decorative” demand on the part of decorative artists and artisans, but it is a demand that in fact calls for nothing short of the total reinvention of what counts as wealth, what a society values. It is a call for the reinvention of wealth beyond exchange-value. And in the work of Commune refugees like Elisée Reclus and Paul Lafargue and fellow travellers like Peter Kropotkin and William Morris, what I am calling “communal luxury” was expanded into the vision of an ecologically viable human society. It’s striking that the work of Reclus, Lafargue and their friends is now at the centre of the attention of ecological theorists who find there a level of environmental thought that died with that generation in the late 19th century and was not resuscitated again until the 1970s with figures like Murray Bookchin.
 
This is all exciting work, but it often fails to take into account how the experience of the Commune was part and parcel of the ecological perspective they developed. The experience of the Commune and its ruthless suppression made their analysis even more uncompromising. In their view, capitalism was a system of reckless waste that was causing the ecological degradation of the planet. The roots of ecological crisis were to be found in the centralised nation-state and the capitalist economic system. And they believed a systemic problem demands a systemic solution.
 
Roos:
Following up on the previous question, you particularly emphasise the profound impact of the Commune on Marx’s thinking at the time. Could you briefly discuss how the events of 1871 informed, changed or deepened Marx’s understanding of capitalist development and the transition to a post-capitalist society?
 
Ross:
Marx knew about as much as it was possible for someone to know about what was transpiring in Paris streets that spring given his distance and the veritable wall of censorship – “a Chinese wall of lies” in his terms – mounted by the Versaillais to prevent accurate information from reaching French people in the countryside and foreigners alike. He looked at the Commune and was astonished to see for the first time in his life a living example of unscripted non-capitalist life in the flesh – the inverse of dailiness lived under state domination. For the very first time he saw people actually behaving as if they were the owners of their lives and not wage slaves.
 
In Communal Luxury I chart the profound changes the Commune’s existence brought to Marx’s thinking, and, more importantly, to his path: the new attention he paid in the decade following the Commune to peasant questions, to the world outside Europe, to pre-capitalist societies, and to the possibility of multiple routes to socialism. Seeing for the first time what non-alienated labour actually looked like had the paradoxical effect of strengthening Marx’s theory and causing a break with the very concept of theory.
 
But it must be said that I am less concerned with relating the Commune to the intellectual trajectories of Marx or some of the other well-known fellow travellers I discuss in the book, than I am in weaving together the thought, practices and trajectories of contemporaries like Kropotkin, Marx, Reclus and Morris, shoemaker Gaillard and other lesser known figures into the relational web the event produced – a kind of “globalisation from below.”
 
The socialist imaginary in the immediate wake of the Commune was fuelled not only by the recent insurrection, but by elements that include medieval Iceland, the communist potential of ancient rural peasant communes in Russia and elsewhere, the beginnings of something called anarchist communism, and a profound rethinking of solidarity from what we would call today an ecological perspective.
 
Roos:
 You note how the Commune was really a shared project that “melted divergences between Left factions”. Likewise, you yourself have little patience for sectarian squabbles that overemphasise the split between Marx and Bakunin, or between communism and anarchism, in the wake of the insurrection. What was it about the Commune that allowed these various tendencies to find common cause, and what – if anything – should the Left take from this experience today?
 
Ross:
Life is too short for sectarianism. It is not that sectarianism didn’t exist under the Commune and in its wake. In fact, the Left in the years immediately after the Commune is usually seen to be fiercely riven by the quarrel between Marx and Bakunin – a quarrel between Marxists and anarchists that is said to be responsible for the end of the First International, and a quarrel that is often tiresomely rehearsed today between those who believe economic exploitation is the root of all evil and those who believe that it’s political oppression.

 
What I chose to do in my book was to push Marx and Bakunin, those two old greybeards whose quarrel has been for so long all any of us could see or hear from that era, off the stage or at least to the sidelines for the moment in order to see what else there was to be seen. And what I discovered was a whole host of very interesting people who were neither slavishly loyal to Marxism nor to anarchism, but who made adroit use of both sets of ideas.
 
This seems to me to resemble very closely the way militants today go about their political lives, perhaps because some of the most sectarian types from both sides have left the scene. Even so, my book has had its share of sectarian attack – for insufficient towing of the Marxist line and of the anarchist line, in about equal numbers!
 
Roos:
Many contemporary movements seem to harken back to the spirit of the Commune in their own struggles. Do you believe we are experiencing a revival of the communal imaginary in our times? How would you account for the return of occupation-based political strategies and this renewed interest in the politics of urban space?
 
Ross:
 I think there is clearly a revival of the communal imaginary today, but I don’t agree with you that it is centred in the politics of urban space. The city today all too often presents young people with three choices: no work, badly paid work, or meaningless work. Many have chosen to move to the countryside to lead lives that interweave struggle and social cooperation. When I think about the various struggles today, particularly in France which is the context I know best, they are often in rural areas, and are concerned with defending a way of life deemed “archaic” under capitalist modernisation. Occupiers seek to create a form of regional self-sufficiency that does not entail retreating into a self-enclosed world, or eddying in isolated pools of self-referentiality.
 

This is a desire that emerged very strongly, by the way, in the period following the Commune, and I discuss at some length the many interesting debates on this subject that took place in the Jura mountains in Switzerland between refugees and their supporters all too aware of the dangers of isolation. From what I know of the current communal occupations of territories and terrains, occupiers and Zadistes claim a certain lineage not only with the Paris Commune but with more recent struggles like the Larzac in the 1970s and important figures from that era like Bernard Lambert. It was Lambert, after all, who stood upon the Larzac plateau in 1973 and proclaimed to the thousands of people who had travelled there from all over France and beyond to support local farmers in their fight against being expelled from their land by the French Army, that “Never again will peasants be on the side of Versailles”.
 
When Lambert in his classic text, Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes, situated urban workers and peasants in the same place vis-à-vis capitalist modernity, he was mobilising exactly the same rhetorical strategy that one of the main characters in my book, Communard Elisée Reclus, does in his 1899 pamphlet, “A mon frère, le paysan”. And it’s the identical strategy underlying an even earlier pamphlet addressed to (but never received by) French in the countryside by besieged Communards in April 1871, “Au Travailleur des campagnes”. To quote Lambert: “Paysans, travailleurs, même combat.”

                               Anarchist organizing villages in the Free Territory, Ukraine, 1919

 
Today, the existence of ZADs – zones à defendre, or “zones to be defended” – and communes like Nôtre-Dame-des-Landes in France or No TAV outside of Turin, settlements that occupy spaces given over by the state to large infrastructural projects judged to be useless and imposed, mark the emergence of something like a distinctly alternative and combative rural life. This is a rural life opposed to agribusiness, to the destruction of farmland, to the privatisation of water and other resources, and to the construction by the state of infrastructural projects on a Pharaonic scale. We see here a real defiance with regard to the state. And at the same time the rural world is being defended as a space whose physical as well as cultural realities oppose the homogenising logic of capital. By refusing to move they are placing themselves at the centre of combat.
 
The current remobilisation of the commune-form, as I understand it, seeks in part to block the ongoing creation of a territorial network of privileged financial metropolitan centres whose development comes at a price: the destruction of the links that tie those centres to their immediate outskirts and surroundings. It is those outskirts, rural or semi-rural in nature, that are then destined to decline in a kind of prolonged desertification, as finance capital sucks more and more personnel and resources into the work of transporting at higher and higher speed, and on a larger and larger scale, communication, goods and services between the designated loci of wealth.
 
Militants today often see themselves as fighting a distinctly new and neoliberal reality, but I don’t think it matters much whether we view neoliberalism as a distinctly novel phase of capitalism or not – the capitalist world they oppose was already substantially analysed by Henri Lefebvre in his Production of Space, a book that came out, I believe, in the early 1970s. There he showed how the increasing “planification” of space under capitalism was a movement in three parts: homogeneity, fragmentation and hierarchy.
 
The production of homogeneity is guaranteed by the unification of a global system with centres or points of metropolitan strength that dominate peripheral weaker points. Simultaneously, though, space becomes fragmented the better to be instrumentalised and appropriated: it comes to be divided up like graph paper into autonomous, Taylorised parcels with distinct localised functions. And an increasingly conscious and treacherous strategy divides all the rural and suburban zones, the satellites made up of small and medium cities, the banlieues and the bleak spaces left behind by the decomposition of agrarian life – all these semi-colonies to the metropolis – into more or less favoured zones with most, of course, being destined for controlled, closely supervised, often precipitous decline.

Such contemporary struggles and occupations are, like the Paris Commune – of necessity – locally based. They are bound to a particular space and as such demand a specific political choice. They share all the concerns and aspirations that are place-specific in kind. But they are not localist or localising in their aims. Communards, we should recall, were fiercely anti-state and largely indifferent to the nation. Under the Commune Paris wanted to be an autonomous unit in an international federation of communes.
 
In this regard the Commune anticipated in act all kinds of possibilities such that even the projects it could not undertake and that remain at the level of a wish or an intention, like the federating project, retain a profound meaning. Site-specific struggles like Nôtre-Dame-des-Landes and No TAV are much better placed today to achieve the kind of international federation that Paris under the Commune had no time to achieve.
 
The Survival of the Paris Commune. By Jerome Roos and Kristin Ross. Roar, Spring 2016.

 

       Street art in Montmartre, Paris, by an anonymous artist depicting Louise Michel, the elected head of the Montmartre                   Women’s Vigilance Committee.