Representations of the Paris Commune by Louis David Abram
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Representations of the Paris Commune By Louis David Abram Zatzman A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in History in conformity with the requirements for a Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada May 2017 Copyright © Louis David Abram Zatzman, 2017 Louis Zatzman Abstract: This thesis analyzes and compares representations of the 1871 Paris Commune in literature, socialist theory, and historiography, prioritizing where possible the voices and opinions of participants of the event itself. Almost every observer of the Commune, including professional historians, has used the Paris Commune to confirm their pre-existing narratives of history. ii Louis Zatzman Table of Contents Elements Page Number Abstract ii Introduction: Representation of the Commune 1 Chapter 1: Voices of the Communards and their 14 Opponents: Themes of the Commune in Literature and Non-fiction Chapter 2: “We are Standing on the Shoulders of the Commune”: Socialist Theory and the Paris 49 Commune Chapter 3: Historiography of the Commune: 83 Dawn, Dusk, and the Narratives Invested in the Commune Conclusion: The Limit and Value of Diverse 116 Historical Narratives about the Paris Commune Bibliography 120 iii Louis Zatzman Introduction: Representation of the Commune Historical narratives written on the Commune place the event as foundational in the origin of ideologies as varied as Marxism, democracy, and feminism. While Marxists and other ideologues have used the Commune to help form their theories, many thinkers who wrote about the Commune – including professional historians – flattened the voices of the actual Communards in their perspectives of the event. Despite this weakness, Commune historiography in its totality offers a strong understanding of not just what occurred in Paris between March and May of 1871, but also how those events affected future ones in Russia, Europe, and elsewhere. However, traditional historiography misinterprets the relationship between the Paris Commune and the narrative closest in time and place to the Commune itself: the Third Republic in France. A standard historiographical view of the Third Republic, which was founded in 1870 after the fall of the Second French Empire, is that it eliminated the radical French left in its response to the Commune; therefore, the remaining political factions were able to find common ground without French socialists, unions, syndicalists, anarchists, and other ideologues who had been dedicated to instability in France and would profit by disrupting government. In their work on the Third Republic, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Reberioux distinctly separate the Commune from ideological republicanism: “The most extreme republicans, even when they attempted to secure a reconciliation between Paris and Versailles, saw the Commune as an aberration or a utopia… [T]he Commune and its failure allowed the republicans to separate themselves from the revolutionaries.”1 The Communards were not republicans, and their defeat allowed republicans to operate without a unified opponent on the left. Philip Nord’s institutional 1 Mayeur and Reberioux, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, trans. J.R (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6. 1 Louis Zatzman history of the Second Empire, The Republican Moment, offers another version of this argument. He paints the Second Empire as more fertile for the growth of republicanism than previously imagined; the election of the Third Republic in 1870 wasn’t a lightning strike moment, but the culmination of a long process of growth for republican institutions across France during the Empire. The understanding of the Second Empire as a relatively linear antecedent of the Third Republic imagines the Commune as a blip in history, or a mistake marring the first year of republicanism in France since mid-century, the overcoming of which allowed the success of the Third Republic. However, the Commune was a republican institution, or at least it imagined itself that way. Even socialists and Blanquists within the Commune governed according to republican norms, refusing to attack private property or the French capitalist structure for fear of destabilizing the French economic system. The Commune intentionally defended republicanism in France, even while at war with the Republic; it is incorrect to assert the Commune was an opponent of republicanism. Furthermore, critical portrayals of the Commune would condition the post-Commune Third Republic’s understanding of the working class and its attempts at politicization. Suzanna Barrows in Distorting Mirrors acknowledges that the intellectual climate of France in the late-19th century was a “complex refraction on late nineteenth-century French culture”; however, she fails to explicate the extent of the role of the Commune in establishing this culture.2 If French philosophy and governance was afraid of the working class, that fear was a result of conditioned assumptions about workers, instead of those workers’ actual actions. Both the French political and cultural climates in the late-19th century were horrified of strikes. The sociologist Gustave le Bon criticized working-class crowds as primitive, bestial, and violent, whether gathered for passive events or engulfed in the rage of a strike.3 At the 2 Suzanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), vii. 3 Gustave le Bon, The Crowd (London: Ernest Benn, 1896), 105. 2 Louis Zatzman same time, the naturalist author Émile Zola described a strike in La Germinal in which a shopkeeper was castrated by a mob of hysterical women – a clear representation derived from the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune.4 If in all strikes between 1870 and 1890 in France, only one person died at the hands of strikers, then why were strikes so frequently represented as criminally violent? French culture understood the crowd – particularly female members – as violent because of literary representations of the Paris Commune. How the Commune was understood following its defeat was more a result of representations of the event by authors, poets, diplomats, ideologues, historians, and others than a result of the actual events that happened between March 18th and May 28th, 1871. The representations of the Commune by participants and opponents have until now not been compiled and analyzed. Those representations were variously adopted, modified, and ignored by future socialist and anarchist theorists in the writing of their political theories. Some professional historiography of the Commune has latched onto the relationship between the Commune and following socialist revolutions, while both simplifying that relationship and missing its connection to original representations of the Commune in literature and non- fiction. That being said, some historians have understood the Commune both in its portrayal as well as objective reality. Writing in a relatively obscure compilation edited by James Leith, Sanford Elwitt acknowledges that the National Assembly and the Paris Commune – opponents during the civil war of 1871 – were ideologically different only in terms of nuance.5 Elwitt describes how representations of the Commune, instead of its reality, determined the reactions of other Frenchmen who were not inherently the Commune’s opponents: “I stated at the beginning that the Commune was isolated politically and 4 Émile Zola, Germinal, trans. Havelock Ellis and Peter Collier (France: G. Charpentier, 1894), 366-7. 5 Sanford Elwitt, “Solidarity and Social Reaction: The Republic against the Commune,” in Images of the Commune, ed. James Leith (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978), 188. 3 Louis Zatzman ideologically within France. This happened because the republicans pre-empted the revolution, organized it, and set its limits.”6 The Third Republic was able to maintain support in France because the Communards were presented as radicals, over whose graves a rational political compromise could be forged. The destroyer of the Commune, General MacMahon, was even elected as the leader of the National Assembly in 1875, succeeding Adolphe Thiers. Robert Tombs, another historian, also explicitly understood the importance of the depiction of the Commune, writing in The Paris Commune, 1871, that it came to represent “various viewpoints…[as] a turning point, or more precisely a number of turning points.”7 The Paris Commune acted as an historical mirror, reflecting images of whatever the viewer wished to see. To elite observers terrified of the lower classes and their ability to overthrow civilization and return to bestial savagery, such as Maxime du Camp, Émile Zola, or E.B. Washburne, the Commune was evidently a communist plot. It required destruction for the salvation of France. To socialist observers desiring to appropriate the symbol of the Commune for future proletarian revolutions, such as Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, the Commune was inspired by socialist principles, though lacking in several ideological or geopolitical resources required for success; Lenin vowed to solve those issues in his own revolution. To professional observers fitting the Commune into categories of late twentieth- century history, the Commune simply confirmed metanarratives of historians. Gender historians concluded that the Commune represented the social, political, and economic empowerment of women, and liberal historians that it was a trend towards increasing democratic participation so integral for a linear progression