The Paris Commune - 150 years on

A Barricade on the Chaussée Ménilmontant, 18 March 1871, the day Paris first fought for independence from the Versailles Government. The photographer is unknown. This is now the intersection of the Boulevard de Belleville and the rue Ménilmontant, … — A Barricade on the Chaussée Ménilmontant, 18 March 1871, the day Paris first fought for independence from the Versailles Government. The photographer is unknown. This is now the intersection of the Boulevard de Belleville and the rue Ménilmontant, looking East. The building on the right is now a KFC.

For Radio 3, I’ve written five essays marking 150 years since the Paris Commune was declared.

The siege of Paris by the Prussian army in the fiercely cold winter of 1870-71 led to terrible starvation and disease. Having survived that, though, Parisians were appalled by the armistice negotiated by the Government of National Defence which saw Prussian troops marching in triumph down the Champs Élysées. They were even more alienated from the Government by the elections of February 1871 which saw the country as a whole elect a right-wing, monarchist National Assembly, while Paris had elected overwhelmingly republican representatives. When the provisional head of government Adolphe Theirs sent French troops to seize the cannon of the National Guard (who had themselves been radicalised during the months of the Siege), the crowd resisted, insisting on their rights of self-defence and self-determination. Thiers’s forces withdrew and, almost inadvertently, Paris was under the control of radical republicans. What followed was a ten-week experiment in radical democracy, with new socialist, feminist, liberal and utopian policies and the red flag of the Commune flying above the Hôtel de Ville. The whole thing came to a brutal end in the semaine sanglante(bloody week) of 21-28 May when the Versailles army, having spent since 8 April shelling the city, invaded, indiscriminately shooting and killing many thousands of Communards.

The Commune very soon became a beacon for socialists and other leftists and has remained so ever since. It has been memorialised in song and story, document and photography. The Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg wrote a terrible play about it that Bertolt Brecht turned into a very good play. Photograph charted its rise and fall, maybe the first major world event to be so comprehensively documented in this way. In 2000, Peter Watkins made an extraordinary and brilliant six-hour docudrama, Le Commune (Paris 1871), with amateur performers, charting its remarkable history. Watkins was in part impelled by the discovery that the Commune was virtually absent from the French history taught in schools; nonetheless, it has been the subject of some remarkable historiography including important work by Ross, Eichner, Lidsky, Starr, Wilson and others (see below). The Commune is dead but it lives on in analysis, image and memory.

I don’t think anyone would claim it was an unqualified success; even before its brutal suppression, the Commune was sometimes directionless, riven with factions, and at key moments it failed to live up to its own principles. At its best, though, it was visionary, radical and, in many ways, extremely successful: many of the ideas that so horrified bourgeois France in 1871 are now mainstream; others still have the power to shock, challenge, and inspire. Its debates are our debates. The days of the Commune are our days.

The five essays are thematic, looking at different aspects of the Commune and thinking about how we might still learn from it today. I’ll put links to the programmes - sound and scripts - once they’ve gone out.

I’ve not gone too much into the archives apart from a few contemporary newspapers so I’ve leant heavily on some of the brilliant cultural and historical scholarship on the Commune. A good selection of the books and articles I consulted is at the bottom of this page.

I’ll put the scripts up once the essays are broadcast. They are due to go out at 10.45pm 3-7 May 2021 in BBC Radio 3, and will be available thereafter online and via the BBC Sounds app. The producer, as ever, is the brilliant Polly Thomas.

Vive la Commune!

Bibliography

Abidor, Mitchell, ed. Voices of the Paris Commune. PM, 2015.

Baronnet, Jean et al. Le temps de cerises: La Commune de Paris en photographies. Musée de la Photographie, 2011.

Boime, Albert. Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1995.

-----. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848-1871. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Burton, Richard D. E. Blood in the City: Violence & Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945. Cornell University Press, 2001.

Cooper, Barbara T and Mary Donaldson-Evans, eds. Modernity and Revolution in Late Nineteenth Century France. Associated University Presses, 1993.

Edwards, Stewart, ed. The Communards of Paris, 1871. Cornell University Press, 1973.

Eichner, Carolyn J. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune. Indiana University Press, 2004.

Fowlie, Wallace. ‘Rimbaud and the Commune.’ The Massachusetts Review, vol. 12, no. 3, 1971, pp. 517-520.

Gluckstein, Donny. The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy. Haymarket, 2011.

Goncourt, Edmond de and Jules de Goncourt. Journal: Memories De La Vie Littérature 1866-1886. Laffont, 2014.

-----. Pages from the Goncourt Journal. edited by Robert Baldick, translated by Robert Baldick, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Gullickson, Gay L. Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Cornell University Press, 1996.

Henriot, Gabriel and Georges Bourgin, eds. Procès-Verbaux de la Commune De 1871. Leroux, 1924.

Horne, Alistair. The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71. Revised edition, Macmillan, 1990.

Jones, Kathleen B. and Françoise Vergès. ‘Women of the Paris Commune.’ Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 14, no. 5, 1991, pp. 491-503,.

Lidsky, Paul. Les Écrivains contre La Commune. 3rd edition, La Découverte, 2010.

Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier. History of the Paris Commune of 1871. translated by Eleanor Marx, Verso, 2012.

Merriman, John. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune. Yale University Press, 2014.

Mordey, Delphine. ‘Moments Musicaux: High Culture in the Paris Commune.’ Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-31.

Reclus, Élie. La Commune de Paris: au jour le jour, 19 Mars - 28 Mai 1871. Schleicher Frères, 1908.

La Revue Blanche. Enquête sur la Commune de Paris 1871. edited by Jean Barronet, Amateur, 2011.

Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. Verso, 2015.

Schulkind, Eugene. ‘Socialist Women During the 1871 Paris Commune.’ Past & Present, no. 106, 1985, pp. 124-163.

Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Shafer, David A. The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Starr, Peter. Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath. Fordham University Press, 2006.

Tillier, Bertrand. La Commune De Paris: Révolution Sans Images? Champ Vallon, 2004.

Tombs, Robert. The War against Paris 1871. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

-----. The Paris Commune 1871. Routledge, 2013.

Wilson, Colette E. Paris and the Commune 1871-78. Manchester University Press, 2007.

The Paris Commune - 150 years on

Dan Rebellato