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was rescinded, now requiring repayment within 48 hours, while landlords could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.
