fighting over the paris commune | the new yorker

B O O K S DECEMBER 22, 2014 ISSUE

THE FIRES OF PARISWhy do people still f ight about the Paris Commune?BY ADAM GOPNIK

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The Communards pulled down the statue ofNapoleon in the Place Vendme.PHOTOGRAPH FROM CORBIS

The Paris Commune of1871 was one of thefour great traumasthat shaped modern France.It stands alongside the 1789Revolution, the ascent ofVichy, in 1940, and (oddthough it seems, given hownonviolent and small-scale they were) the Events of May,1968. Other, more outward-bending crisesthe Napoleoniccampaigns, the two World Wars, the battle forAlgeriamade as much noise and cost far more lives, butthey now belong to the settled, archival past. That Napoleonwas a bad man but a big figure, that the Great War was avaliant folly, that the war in Algeria could have ended onlywith Algerian independence: these are easy to assent to now.The four civic crises belong to the available, still contestedpast, the one that hangs around and starts living arguments.People ask whether the Revolution, with a little luck andbetter leadership, could have avoided the Terror andBonapartes subsequent dictatorship, just as they argue overwhether May of 68 was a long-overdue assertion of libertyagainst hierarchy or the beginning of an infantile appeal to

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pleasure over value.

The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can besummed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperialgovernmentthe Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon,Napoleons posturing, dandyish nephewstupidly provoked awar with Bismarcks rising Prussia for the usual reasons thatdemagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: becausebashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boostthe bosss prestige, and because the governments generalsassured the government that they would win, no sweat. ThePrussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought,correctly, that it would help further unify the German states,while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him. The warstarted, and the German generals routed the French ones,capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris.What was left of the French government retreated toBordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians;the terms are always called humiliating, but all terms ofsurrender are humiliatingthats what makes it a surrender.(They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) ThePrussians eventually retreated with their war loot, havingreclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine asGerman territory.

Then, in February of 1871, new legislative elections wereheld throughout France, and a majority returned in favor ofan as yet ill-defined form of republican royalism. TheAssembly, led by the aging statesman Adolphe Thiersapolitician under the Second Republic, who had been dont-poke-the-bear wise about the war with the Germans before itstartedsoon declared itself the Third Republic. The peopleof Paris, always farther to the left than the rest of France,feared that the new republic would be republican in nameonly, and began organizing their own, alternative regime inthe capital. A confrontation between what remained of theregular French Army, the Versaillais, and Pariss popularmilitia, known as the National Guard, ended with the deathof two generals, and the royalist-minded government fled


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Paris for Versailles, the old seat of the French kings. In Paris,a left-wing Communard government, protected by theNational Guard, rose up and seized power, and for about twomonths that spring tried to rule on radical principles. It madevarious feints at self-organization, and offered statements ofpurpose that still seem prophetically advancedparticularlythe boldly feminist ones. It also insulted the clergy and thefew remaining rich people, and committed mostlydisorganized acts of looting and reprisal against its ancientpolitical enemies, including tearing down Thierss house andtoppling the Place Vendme column with its statue ofNapoleon. (Its back.)

The Versaillais then invaded Paris and, with minimal militarydifficulty, though at maximal human cost, reconquered thecity. The Communards, as they were crushed by theadvancing and brutal Versaillais, set fire to much of the city,including the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground,though whether all the fires were the result of a deliberatenihilistic policy set by sinister female ptroleuses, proto-suicide bombers, or a largely accidental result of the generalchaos and violence is one of the many things that are still,violently, debated.

Massacre (Basic) is the Yale historian John Merrimans vividaccount of all this, and its proof of just how passionatelypresent the trauma remains that this new book could beamong the most passionate accounts of a distant historicalepisode that the reader is likely to encounter from anAmerican academic. Merriman, whose earlier books includean eye-opening study of nineteenth-century anarchistviolence, The Dynamite Club, is pro-Communard,emphatically so, and this gives his book both its great virtuesand its real faults.

Its greatest virtue is the way Merriman particularizes thepeople of the Commune. For almost the first time in the vastscholarly literature on the topic, they are complicatedindividuals who come alive, rather than set-piece proletarian


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heroes or mere faces in the mob or rabble of right-wingimagination. Two figures especially stand out. There is theRed Virgin, Louise Michel, of the working-class EighteenthArrondissement, a militant Communard (I descended theButte, my rifle under my coat, shouting: Treason! . . . Ourdeaths would free Paris) and a staunch feminist, whowelcomed even prostitutes into the corps of women nursinginjured fighters (Who has more right than these women, themost pitiful of the old orders victims, to give their lives forthe new?). The feminist aspect of the CommuneMerrimans work here draws on Carolyn EichnersSurmounting the Barricades: Women in the ParisCommune (2004)is one of its most appealing features:women like Michel played a central role, building barricadesand chairing committees and generally raising hell. OneCitoyenne Destre declared, The social revolution will notbe realized until women are equal to men. Until then, youhave only the appearance of revolution.

If Louise Michel represents the forward-looking aspect of theCommune, Raoul Rigault represents the backward-lookingaspecthe is a kind of Danton reborn. A socialist polemicistof appetite and charm, he became, in effect, the head of theCommunes police force. In their free moments, theydowned food, wine, and eau-de-vie, having moved one oftheir favorite brasseries from the Boulevard Saint-Michel intothe prefecture of police, Merriman writes. One day in May,Rigault breakfasted on Chateaubriand aux truffes; a few dayslater, the fare included bottles of Pommard, Veuve Clicquot,and Nuits-Saint-Georges. His taste for Burgundy andchampagne was perhaps political in nature, Bordeauxpresumably being judged too reactionary, especially given thatthe retreating Imperial government had gone there to give up.(This general taste for the good life among the Communards,though the material of Versaillais propaganda, is one of thethings that make them so sympathetic.)

Merriman relates the story of the Communes brief rise andbrutal fall in tight detail, with hour-by-hour intensity, and


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Idraws all the drama out of the taleeven though the story isunavoidably sad, because the practical ambitions of theCommunards were so incoherent. There is something suicidalabout it, an Occupy Paris movement destined to become anurban Masada in the middle of the Belle poque. TheCommunards had no tactics for spreading the principles ofthe Commune, any more than members of the New Left inlate-sixties America had a plan for how, exactly, the workingclass would convert to their politics. The most theCommunards seemed to have was a vague hope thatcommunal-syndicalist organization would spread outwardfrom central Paris into the provinces. (The Francophile andradical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after theCommune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, aninfirmity of the French mindthat of being led away byphrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realitieswhich have a will and exert active power.) The Communardscould scarcely build a barricade in an organized militarymanner, and the barricades they did build were neatlycircumvented by the Versaillais, who climbed the stairs of thesurrounding buildings and fired down at the defenders.

What united the Communard front wasnt economic theory,or even socialism; it was anti-clericalism. Indeed, one has astrong sense that the deepest unifying element on both sidesinvolved attitudes toward religion. There were very few onthe Versailles side who would have been announced atheists.There were almost none on the Communard side who wentto church. The Communards hated the ideologicaldictatorship and royalist sympathies of the Catholic Church,and transformed one Paris church after another into acommunity club. The Commune banned all religiousteaching, and removed the crucifixes from classrooms. In theugliest episode of the Commune, Rigault and hisconfederates took the Archbishop of Paris hostage, held himin prison, and then killed him and his adjutants, even thoughthe fight by then was almost over.

f the chief virtue of Merrimans book is that, taking the


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Communards seriously as people, he humanizes theirresistance to power, its chief fault is its single-mindedadvocacy. Merriman treats all Communard atrocities as theresult of provocations and a misguided effort atself-defensethe Archbishop was taken hostage partly toprotect the life of the left-wing leader Blanqui, then in aVersaillais prisonwhile atrocities committed against theCommunards were, in his account, solely the consequence ofan evil campaign of reactionary terror. Any horror story aboutthe Versaillais is immediately credited; we are told that,during the defeat of the Commune, the well-dressed ladiesof Paris used their parasols to strip off the caps and clothsplaced over the eyes of the executed Communards. Wouldwell-dressed ladies really do this? But parallel stories abouta Communard ptroleuse being caught with fuse lines in herpocket are rejected, perhaps rightly, as incredible.

As much as Merriman humanizes his Communards, hesummarily dismisseswith an indifference surprising in anacademic historiantheir opponents as categorical types,using derisive expressions like fancy folk or elegantParisians or simply the bourgeoisie. And this despite SarahMazas demonstration, in one of the most revelatory books ofrecent French history, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie,that the term, pursued to its particulars, does not describeeven a roughly identifiable social grouping but is always asocial imaginary, some shifting, ugly Other, bourgeoisiebeing the mirror image of the mob and rabble beloved ofright-wing history. Merriman quotes with apparent approvalone lie Reclus, a Communard, who, walking through theSeventh Arrondissement as the Commune began to collapse,saw the secret jubilation of all the concierges, shop owners,merchants of holy articles, and the religious men and womenwho make up the base of the population there, and whoseeyes follow you so that they can denounce you. But thesepeoplesmall shopkeepers, the clergy, and the rest of themercantile and professional classeswere, after all, simplyother Parisians who valued their lives and their traditions.They were ordinary people, too, with the same right to


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political expression as the Communards who frightenedthem. At another moment, Merriman sneers at Thiersweeping when he learns that the Commune is about todestroy his home, along with his art collection: Thiers, onecould easily conclude, loved objects, not people. But is thereany man, of any political allegiance, who would not beheartsick to hear that his house and goods were about to bedestroyed by his enemies? And one may be as anti-clerical asVoltaire and still be nauseated by the pointless murder of theChurch hostages.

Its significant that Lon Gambetta, the greatest radicalparliamentary leader of the erawho escaped from thePrussian siege of Paris in a balloon (really) but remained inexile in Spain throughout the crucial period that followednever had a good word for the Commune, though itsapparent goals were close to his own. He thought of 1871 asa horrific adventure. But then Gambettas father had been agrocer, and he knew that the Communards perceived thesmall merchants as class enemies. When it comes to actualpeople in nineteenth-century France, social classes areslippery. Thierss father was a provincial locksmith; LouiseMichel was the illegitimate but acknowledged andwell-educated daughter of a serving girl and, probably, theson of the lord of the manor where she worked; and so on.Gambetta rejected the Commune for the same reason thatCamus rejected sentimental approbation of the Algerianindependence fighters, knowing that his French-Algerianmother, counted as an evil colonist, was simply a domestic, acleaning woman, with no more colonial privilege thanGambettas grocer dad had class privileges.

Merriman is certainly right to insist that the Versaillaismassacred far more people than the Communards did, but allthe evidence is that this is because they won, and had morepeople to massacre. When the Communards had helplesspeople at their mercy, they killed them, too. (The violencebegan with the lynching of a cop, thrown, hands tied, intothe Seine and watched as he drowned.) The hatred between


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the two sides was implacable as it can be only in a fraternaldispute. There are many instances in Merrimans account ofpeople being saved by accident or by the act of a charitableand decent individual. But there is scarcely an incident of aprincipled humanity, where one side or the other refused tomassacre captured civilian prisoners or hostages on theground that it was the wrong thing to do, rather thanimpolitic at that moment.

A peoples revolution the Commune may have beenbutnever a popular one. For if one thing is certain it is that theCommune did not claim the allegiance of anything like amajority of Frenchmen. The previous legislative elections hadbeen overwhelmingly monarchist, and there is no reason todoubt that they represented what the majority of the Frenchthought, just as the mini-Commune of 68 was followed by aright-wing electoral victory. The Commune was a putsch inthe capital, but there was no chance of winning a larger civilwar with the right wing, because the right wing was not asmall concentration of fancy folk but the majority of Francespeasants and merchants and country people. This did notmake the Parisians (as the disgusting, and often implicitlyanti-Semitic, propaganda had it later) less French than theothers. But it did not make the others less French than theCommunards.

Historians from the right can sometimes write as though thenineteenth century did not take place; historians from the leftcan often write as though the twentieth century neverhappened. The abuses, the mass immiseration, theever-present threat of renewed monarchical absolutismallthese things were very real in France in 1870, and so the greatradical and revolutionary socialist movements were moved byreal suffering and oppression, not utopian schemes. ButMerriman writes as if what happened later on the planet,when violent left-wing Communards did take power, withresults that we know, would somehow magically not havehappened in some other, earlier luckier moment. This time isdifferent, or else that time would have beenwe convince


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Tourselves that the Commune would not have become anotherTerror or another Bolshevik October coup, brutal, intolerant,and absolutist in itself. There seems little evidence for thisconfidence: the Communard leader Rigault, to take one smallinstance, may be a life-affirming man of appetite, but he wasas bloodthirsty as his predecessors, stopping, even as theVersaillais invaded Paris, to personally arrange the executionof a fellow-Communardan old friend with whom he wasfeudinglong after it could possibly have any political point.(Lenin is said to have danced with delight the day his couplasted longer than the Commune.)

here had to be a better way, and the French found it.It was called the Third Republic. The defeat of theCommune was the last victory of the royalists, but the

first battle toward a real republic. The right in France learned,in the eighteen-seventies, that it could rule only by abdicatingroyalism completelyeven though the Thiers governmenthad been elected on a royalist cast.

What the Communards fought and died for was, fifty yearslater, achieved, as France moved toward a modern welfarestate, and firmly separated Church and nation. What theroyalists killed forand died for, toowas over, and forgood. The real winner was the republic as it would become.The path from the death of the Commune to truerepublicanism was extremely knotty, but, by the end of theeighteen-seventies, France was on it. (Even Louise Michelwas amnestied, and came home, to resume her career as anunapologetic provocateur.) The responsible left came toembrace legislative Republicanism single-mindedly, not outof fear but out of wisdomknowing that the only way tomaintain the real revolution was to accept in permanence thetruth that rejecting the legitimacy of the opposition could endonly in violence, real liberal republicanism being no morethan the understanding that there are legitimate ideas aboutshaping the future of the nation other than your own.

Jean Jaursa founder of the social democrats, and the


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Pgreatest left-wing populist hero France has producedembraced the Republic, and all its exhaustingparliamentary maneuverings, because he understood theunimaginable costs that renewed civic warfare would bring.The right had to be opposed, not eliminated. The experienceof the Commune became one more warningthe Terror hadalready supplied a good oneof what a movement for socialjustice and liberty without an accompanying sense of politicalpluralism could cost. Jaurs, like his fellow-radical Gambetta,grasped that a social revolution without popular legitimacywas not a social revolution at all but yet another coup, sure toinsure the next in the opposite direction. (That a coup couldseize the government and then enforce its will by terror, if itwas willing to conduct terror on an unimaginably large scale,was a Leninist possibility not yet revealed to them.) Thepractical radical Gambetta eventually came to captain apolitical grouping that called itself Opportunist Republicans.Surely no political movement in history has ever borne a lessinspiring name. But its central insight was sound: that thefuture lay with coalitions of different estates, petty bourgeoisand peasantry and proletariat mixed up, not with a Communecommitted to one.

erhaps the Commune continues to resonate as wellbecause of its place in the smaller world of canvas andframes. Against all normal historical logic, the rise

and fall of the Commune presaged not a period of repressionand misery but one of the brightest and most pleasure-celebrating periods in the long history of culture: theblossoming of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintingin Paris in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, an explosionof light that continues to illuminate our lives today. The firstImpressionist exhibition was held in 1874, on one of thebarricaded boulevards of the Commune, while the ruins ofthe Tuileries Palace lay smoldering next to the Louvre. Evenif the imagery of that pleasure is partly a myth, it is hard tosquare with the repressive brutality that was its forerunner.And all the more because, as Merriman shows, some of theleading painters of the group, including Manet, were broadly


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sympathetic to the Communards; Manet made twodevastating graphic images of the massacre of Communardsby the regular Army, all the more painful for their cooldetachment.

The art historian Kirk Varnedoe used to give a lecture on theruins of the Tuileries and their absence from advancedpaintingmost unforgettably, he gave it in the months after9/11and asked why the avant-garde painters, hardlylacking in courage or originality, almost entirely ignored themas a subject. Why did they turn their backs on the visibleruins, right in the traditional heart of Paris, to paint the newboulevards? (One can just see a piece of the ruins, near wherethe Pyramide of the Louvre now stands, on the left-handedge of a single Monet.) It wasnt because they were afraid ofenraging conventional opinion. The Impressionists, withpainters from the left, like Manet and Pissarro, and paintersfrom the right, like Degas, broke later, over the Dreyfusaffair, but at the beginning they were a model ofopportunistic Republicanism in paint: they hung together,because they knew that the pursuit of artistic liberty evadedthe usual ideological paths. They wanted to escape the cycleof violence between right and left that had disfigured thehistory of their city. It was better to build on the ruins than tomake another.

This was not escapist or apolitical the insight that one isnot obliged to enroll in a perpetual cycle of violence andreprisal is not apolitical or escapist. When Renoir paintedeven a seeming chocolate-box cover such as the Moulin de laGalette, of 1876, a scene from a working-class Sundayevening in Montmartre, he was painting young peopledancing whose families must have been around during theCommune. (Galettes are pancakes, cheap fast food, populareats.) He paints them not as victims or ideological puppetsbut as resilient, active participants in pleasure-seeking. Thepeculiarly punitive kind of Puritanism favored by Americanart historians sometimes sees this as putting a smiley face on ahorrible reality, again for the benefit of those bad bourgeois.


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Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.

But Renoir, who was a son of the working classes, thoughartisanal rather than industrial, wasnt avoiding the politicalreality. If a vote could have been taken, the young men andwomen in his pictures would probably all have voted socialist,as their parents did. Renoir looks apolitical, but he graspedinstinctively that the same kids whose families supported theCommune werent going to have their lives or pleasuresdefined by other peoples hatreds. Dancing, they were voting,in every sense, with their feet.

The Impressionists were witnessing the reconstruction of acivil society, canvas by canvas and frame by frame, capturing,and so creating, values that were better than what was onoffer. They were showing a reality that ideology evades.There is always another way to envision modernity, a waythat the violent categories of the political moment deny.Envisioning the other way is one of the things that artists arethere to do. The fires of Paris gave rise to Paris light, just asthe Commune eventually gave rise to the Third Republic,which fell only when the Nazis invaded. The postwar Fourthand Fifth Republics, though formally different, wereessentially a continuation of it. Out of the ruins of theCommune, a very precarious kind of pluralism bloomed. Itblooms, precariously, still.


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