[ The life and afterlife of the Paris Commune.]
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THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF THE PARIS COMMUNE.  
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David A. Bell
November 15, 2022
The Nation [[link removed]]

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_ The life and afterlife of the Paris Commune. _

Paris Commune, 1871., Getty Images

 

We generally don’t see Paris as a city scarred by war. It is not
like London and Berlin, where the drab modern architecture of the
urban centers offers silent reminders of past aerial bombardment. It
is not like Warsaw and Frankfurt, where the “old towns” are modern
re-creations, erected over cleared fields of corpse-filled rubble.
Despite revolutions, sieges, World War I shelling, and World War II
bombings, Paris still possesses a remarkable architectural unity. The
city’s center looks much as it did in the late 19th century. But
while the scars are not immediately visible, they are there, and the
worst of them are self-inflicted: the product of a single hideous week
in May 1871. This was the week that the Paris Commune died.

BOOKS IN REVIEW: THE PARIS COMMUNE: A BRIEF HISTORY 

By Carolyn J. Eichner 

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The Commune was one of the most radical political experiments in
European history, but it was also tragically short-lived. At the start
of 1871, France’s fledgling conservative republican government
signed an armistice with Prussia, which had defeated the armies of
Emperor Napoleon III (leading to the collapse of his regime) and
subjected the French capital to a grueling siege. In mid-March, the
city’s radical National Guard challenged the government’s
authority and set up a revolutionary municipal administration that
called itself, echoing French Revolutionary terminology, the Commune.
With thousands of rank-and-file soldiers supporting this new body, the
national government withdrew to the nearby town of Versailles, the
residence of France’s monarchs under the pre-1789 ancien régime.
There followed two extraordinary months in which the Commune passed a
host of egalitarian and anti-clerical measures, including a
postponement of debt and rent obligations, a curtailment of child
labor, the expropriation of church property, and the secularization of
schools. Although it did not grant women the right to vote, women took
on important political roles and militated for expanded rights. The
socialist red flag flew over city hall (the Hôtel de Ville).

But the experiment lasted just two months. The national government,
led by the veteran centrist politician Adolphe Thiers, declared the
Commune illegal and planned a counterattack. On May 21, its armed
forces entered Paris, and there followed a week of slaughter and fire.
The “Versaillais” carried out large-scale summary executions,
while the “Communards” desperately tried to stop them. In a final
attempt to block the enemy advance, they even torched major monuments,
including the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries Palace (which stood
between the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre). As fires burned out of
control throughout the city, the Commune’s defenders made a hopeless
last stand in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. In the end, 147 were
lined up against the cemetery wall by the national government’s
forces and shot—part of a death toll that probably exceeded 20,000.

The Paris Commune received more worldwide media attention than
probably any other event of the period except the American Civil War.
A city that had served as a glittering showcase for modern consumer
capitalism after its reconstruction by Napoleon III had been taken
over by radical revolutionaries and then, horrifically, became a
battlefield. Conservatives around the globe denounced the Communards
as bloodthirsty savages and saved their worst venom for the
so-called _pétroleuses_—women arsonists supposedly armed with
watering cans full of kerosene. (They were mostly a propaganda
invention.) The worldwide left, meanwhile, hailed the Commune as a
beacon of hope and mourned its slain supporters as martyrs. Karl Marx
called it “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” One of its
flags later accompanied Lenin to his final resting place in Red
Square.

Few things generate more powerful legends than martyrdom and massacre,
and for historians, it has sometimes been hard to crawl out from under
the legends of the Commune. Up until its 150th anniversary last year,
which saw a profusion of innovative new studies (notably one by
Quentin Deluermoz on the global resonance of the Commune), the
temptation to refight it on paper has often ended up obscuring its
complexity and ambiguities. It took a very long time to recognize
that, despite the red flag, the social reforms, and Marx’s paean to
a “working men’s government,” the Commune was in no simple sense
either socialist or proletarian. A majority of its governing council
came from the lower bourgeoisie, and the best indicator of whether
Parisians supported it was not their social class but their
neighborhood. The recent rebuilding of the city had driven poorer
Parisians from the center into peripheral areas like the former
village of Belleville, and in doing so had nurtured strong local
solidarities and resentment of the central administration. But the
Commune could never count on the support of all Parisians, and by the
end, much of the exhausted and anxious city population actually
welcomed the arrival of the Versaillais.

Finally, the Commune government itself was uncomfortably divided among
several distinct factions: followers of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who
prioritized establishing dictatorial rule by a tight-knit
revolutionary socialist party; socialist internationalists, who wanted
to implement broad egalitarian reforms as soon as possible; and
Jacobin republicans, who believed in at least a limited right to
private property. As a result, the Commune’s social policies
remained limited in scope. If a single political cause united the
factions, it was anti-clericalism, not socialism.

It is all the harder to know what to make of the Commune because it
changed so much over the course of its brief life. In its last,
desperate days, its governing council shut down opposition newspapers
and created a Committee of Public Safety—a name deliberately
resonant of the French revolutionary Reign of Terror. On May 15, 1871,
representatives of the socialist internationalist group charged that
“the Paris Commune has abdicated its power into the hands of a
dictatorship.” Nine days later, over the opposition of many of the
same figures, the council ordered the execution by firing squad of
clerical hostages, including the archbishop of Paris. Was the Commune,
under the influence of the hard-line “Blanquists,” moving toward
the sort of government by terror that would characterize too many
self-proclaimed socialist regimes in the 20th century? Or might the
moderate internationalists have prevailed? (Indeed, in one of the
Commune’s tragic ironies, a prominent leader of the moderates, the
bookbinder Eugène Varlin, was lynched on May 28, partly in revenge
for the archbishop’s death.)

In light of these ambiguities, it would be easy to consign the history
of the Paris Commune to the same gray limbo of memory in which so many
left-wing revolutions now reside: honored for their ideals but damned
for their sometimes monstrous betrayals of them. Yet in our own
increasingly unequal age, there is a reason to look back to the
Commune that does not involve its internal quarrels, its uncertain
trajectory, or its dreadful conclusion. This is the sense of equality,
of humane treatment of all people, that it briefly but powerfully
summoned up. It is precisely this quality that Carolyn J. Eichner
emphasizes in _The Paris Commune_, her short but informative and
moving new history. In the book’s opening vignette, she describes a
concert given in the Commune’s last days in the Tuileries Palace,
where Napoleon I and Napoleon III had both lived. The Commune opened
it up to some 10,000 ordinary Parisians, who crammed in to partake of
free food and drink and to hear some of the most famous musical
performers of the day. A member of the Commune government commented
that the people “seemed to say, ‘Finally we are in our house, in
our palace! We have driven out the tyrant, and now can use this place
as we please.’”

Eichner previously wrote the influential study _Surmounting the
Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune_, and in her new book she pays
particular attention to the extraordinary and innovative roles played
by feminists in the event. Women spoke out forcefully in political
clubs, often chiding male Communards for political timidity.
“Men,” charged one, “are like monarchs softened by possessing
too much authority…it is time for woman to replace man in directing
public affairs.” The Commune government refused to grant women many
formal rights, but it worked closely with the Union des Femmes,
founded by a young Russian emigrée named Elisabeth Dmitrieff, which
fought against the marginalization of women’s labor.

The journalist and novelist known as André Léo (a pseudonym created
from the names of her two sons), who had cofounded the Society for
Women’s Rights and written its most important manifesto, became one
of the Commune’s most eloquent radical and militant voices. A
similar trajectory was followed by Louise Michel, the so-called “Red
Virgin” of the Commune, who consistently argued for aggressive
action against the Versaillais and threatened personally to
assassinate Thiers. Both of them argued that women should serve as
soldiers, although the Committee of Public Safety refused to go along.

Eichner also expertly summarizes the Commune’s attempts to end
economic exploitation and to transform education and culture in the
city. In terms of the first, many of the Commune’s far-reaching
plans never had a chance to come to fruition. A women’s labor
organization, for instance, called for limits on repetitive manual
labor and on working hours, as well as equal pay for women and men and
the confiscation of property abandoned by bourgeois who had fled the
city. Other radicals proposed taking over the national bank and
abolishing the hated pawnshop network, which was filled with items
sold by the desperate poor. The Commune government did not take these
steps, but it did allow Parisians to retrieve low-cost items from the
pawnshops, passed a decree taking over abandoned workshops and
factories, and issued its measures on debt and rent relief and child
labor. The council never abrogated private property rights in general,
although that did not stop conservative journalists from asserting
that it had. As one of them wrote: “The government is passing from
those who have a material interest in the conservation of society, to
those completely disinterested in order, stability, or
conservation.”

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Meanwhile, under the leadership of the realist painter Gustave
Courbet, a new Federation of Artists began to develop ambitious plans
for freeing the art world from government control, opening museums to
the public free of charge, subsidizing theaters, and breaking down
barriers between artists and workers through free classes and free
library access. Along with proclaiming the formal separation of church
and state at the start of April and the confiscation of church
property, the Commune charged a new Education Commission with
developing “a plan to render instruction free, mandatory, and
entirely secular.” On May 16, the Commune demolished the 145-foot
column in the Place Vendôme that had been erected by Napoleon I (and
topped by his statue) to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz. Two
years later, the legislature of the Third Republic voted to rebuild it
at Courbet’s expense and seized all his property. (Courbet fled to
Switzerland, where he died, a ruined man, in 1877.)

Eichner does not disguise her sympathy for the Commune and her horror
at its bloody suppression. That sympathy and horror are
understandable, but as a result she does not fully acknowledge how
greatly the Commune’s popular support had ebbed by May 1871, thanks
to its own internal divisions, the increasingly repressive tactics of
the Blanquists, and the sheer exhaustion of the Parisian population
after eight months of war, siege, and civil war. She also
characterizes the Commune’s opponents a little too quickly and
broadly as social elites greedily defending their privileged status.
At the time, even many liberal republicans had a sincere and
principled opposition to a number of the Commune’s policies. They
recognized the awkward fact that Paris in 1871 was a political island
in a much more conservative country where a majority of the population
still worked the land and where the Catholic Church retained
considerable popularity. Did not democracy require coming to terms
with the will of the majority—even a supposedly unenlightened one?
This is one reason why a prominent liberal republican like Léon
Gambetta, a man deeply committed to the French revolutionary
tradition, abhorred and denounced the Commune. Similar ambivalences,
of course, have continued to plague Western democracies—very much
including our own—down to the present day.

Eichner concludes her history with the observation that the Commune
“persists as a guide to multiple radically democratic goals” and
mentions commemorations that have stretched down to the Occupy
movement and beyond. For my part, I would also mention one of the
greatest ironies of the event, namely that the Third Republic, which
so brutally destroyed the Commune, ended up realizing many of its
goals. In the 1880s, it took public education out of the hands of the
Catholic Church and created a mandatory system of free primary
education. In 1905, it decreed a formal separation of church and
state. Despite the violent repression that accompanied its birth, the
Third Republic soon evolved into a moderate democracy with substantial
freedom of speech and other protections for individual
rights—although far less for women, who, for instance, could not
publish without their husband’s consent, a restriction that stayed
in place until the 1960s. French society remained anything but
egalitarian, and socialists railed against the “two hundred
families” who were said to control the commanding heights of the
economy. Still, left-wing parties increasingly agreed to play the
political game, entered into government, and eventually helped pass
important social welfare measures, including paid vacations, a minimum
wage, old-age pensions, the right to strike, and public works
programs. Despite a merry-go-round of unstable government coalitions,
the Third Republic became the longest-lasting French regime since the
Revolution of 1789 (70 years, as opposed to the current Fifth
Republic’s 64), and it fell only as a result of military defeat in
1940.

But would these progressive reforms have come about without the
example of the Commune and the threat to an overly rigid social order
that it continued to symbolize, even in defeat? I suspect the answer
is no. The ghost of the Commune continued to haunt the regime that had
killed it and helped to push the Third Republic and future regimes in
the more progressive direction they eventually took. For all of the
contradictions that accompanied its short life, the Commune, as
Eichner insists, played a key historical role.

The events of 1871 had, in fact, not yet slipped below the horizon of
living memory when another European city underwent a strikingly
similar experience: republican Barcelona, at the start of the Spanish
Civil War of 1936-39. There, too, different political factions jostled
for control, including the anarchists of the POUM and the hard-line
Communists, the Blanquists of their day. There, too, the experiment
was constantly under dire threat from better-armed enemies: the
soldiers of Francisco Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. But
there, too, for a brief moment, an extraordinary spirit of equality
and revolutionary energy prevailed, as brilliantly described by George
Orwell in _Homage to Catalonia_. Seemingly every building was
festooned with flags and posters; all traces of servility disappeared
from social relations, indeed from the very language; strangers
treated each other as brother and sister. There, too, the experiment
was achingly brief and ended tragically. But the moment itself gleams
as a sign of hope and possibility. As Orwell wrote: “All this was
queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in
some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a
state of affairs worth fighting for.”

DAVID A. BELL is the Lapidus professor in the department of history at
Princeton and the author, most recently, of _Men on Horseback: The
Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution_.

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