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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
