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French Radicals, Foreign Expatriates, and Political Exiles in the Paris Commune

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French Radicals, Foreign Expatriates, and Political Exiles in the Paris Commune A Revolutionary Crucible: French Radicals, Foreign Expatriates, and Political Exiles in the Paris Commune A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Christopher John Marshall IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY M.J. Maynes, Advisor September, 2014 © Christopher John Marshall 2014 i Acknowledgements Like any undertaking, this dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many great people. This project would have never been realized without the wisdom, encouragement, and patience of my advisor M.J. Maynes. Gary Cohen, through both his scholarly example and kindness, contributed greatly to this dissertation’s completion. While numerous faculty members at the University of Minnesota aided me in my scholarly journey, I want to give particular thanks to Patricia Lorcin, August Nimtz, Ron Aminzade, Theo Stavrou, and Tom Wolfe for their help over the years. I would also be remiss if I did not recognize my great colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Stout for their support. Dick Tyson, Bob Zeidel, Nels Paulson, Kim Zagorski, the amazing Chris Freeman, and the much-missed Alec Kirby (everyone at Stout really) all assisted me in different but vital ways in completing this phase of my academic career. I would never have undertaken an academic career in History without the intercession of Tamara Whited, my advisor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her mentorship, and her faith in my capacities, despite my doubts, proved a turning point in my professional life, for which I am immensely grateful. Every task in life requires a little help from one’s friends, and this dissertation was no different. I have been very fortunate to have a great band of comrades that provided advice, criticism and everything in between; thus a big thank to Adam Blackler, Will Cremer, Greg Halfond, Eric Otremba, Mollie Madden, Eric Roubinek, and Tim Smit for tolerating me for so long. A special thank you goes to Peter Hayward and Edward ii Snyder, who served as intellectual sounding boards, measured critics, and crisis managers over my years of writing. I also wish to thank the archivists and staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives Nationales for their assistance in my research. Further, compiling the necessary material for this dissertation would have been impossible without the terrific people at the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library, particularly the Interlibrary Loan staff. I have come to believe that love and support are just as necessary to any academic project as archives and monographs. My sister Beth and her husband Rob did much with the constant question “when will you be done again?” to get me to this point. Nina and Viktor, my soon to be parents-in-law, have opened their home to me, providing me with a family here in Minnesota. My Mom and Dad, whom I consider the best at these respective roles in history, have been a constant source of support in every possible way and I love them very much. Finally, I am truly fortunate to have had my great love Valerie with me during this entire process. Critic, supporter, editor, translator, friend, partner, it is by no means understatement when I say that I could never have done this (nor would have wanted to) without her. My love for her transcends the infinite. iii To my soul mate Valeriya In your face space coyote! iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Promethean City: 22 Paris’s Revolutionary Émigrés (1789–1870) Chapter 2: Walking the Ideological Tightrope: 90 Leo Frankel, the Commune, and the République Universelle Chapter 3: A Russian de Gouges: 163 Elisabeth Dmitrieff and the Citoyennes of Paris Chapter 4: A Son of Poland: 232 Jaroslav Dombrowski, Revolutionary Paris, and Polish Liberation Conclusion A Parisian Sunset 298 Bibliography 312 1 Introduction The struggle to define the Paris Commune’s place in history began only two days after the last barricades fell at a small gathering in London. On May 30, 1871, Karl Marx stood before the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association and read an address that combined in equal parts analysis, critique, indictment, and memorial. This stirring polemic, published soon after as The Civil War in France, rapidly established itself (and remains) the starting point for all inquiry into the Commune’s significance. Perhaps most poignant is its rhetorical crescendo, which serves both as the Commune epitaph and a celebration of its achievement: Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators’ history has already been nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.1 This marked the beginning of the Paris Commune’s elevation to the sacred for the Left. Only nine years after the Commune’s defeat, Parisian radicals held their first annual pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery. Friedrich Engels, in his 1891 preface to The Civil War in France, asserted that the Paris Commune constituted the prototype for the dictatorship of the proletariat, thus establishing the Commune as a central element in the Marxist ideological canon. Lenin, building upon this, employed the Commune as both a model and cautionary tale in planning and 1Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, ed. Nikita Fedorovsky, (New York: International, 1993): 9-85, at 81–82. 2 realizing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.2 This so firmly established the Commune’s place in the Soviet/Communist mythos that when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in April 1961 he carried aboard Vostok 1 one of the red flags of the Commune, thus bringing Marx’s analogy of the Communards “storming the heavens” to fruition. From Marx’s initial intervention onward, radicals framed the Commune within a discourse focused upon the future. Thus, 1871 marked a departure point toward realizing the political and social vision articulated but not achieved by the Communards. While this discourse continued well into the twentieth century, the decades immediately following the Commune saw several surviving participants contribute their reflections and conclusions. Among those writing of their experiences was the Hungarian Leo Frankel. During the Commune, despite his foreign origins, Frankel participated actively within the highest circles of leadership and served as the Commune’s Commissioner of Labor and Exchange until its violent demise at the hands of the French Army. Writing in 1877 while serving as the editor of the Hungarian workers’ journal Munkas Heti-Kronika, Frankel characterized the Commune in terms very similar to Marx, asserting that “the revolution whose birth was commemorated in Montmartre on March 18th, 1871 was not just one more revolution coming after so many others; it was a new kind of revolution.” Continuing in a similar vein, Frankel proclaimed “the great ideal that animated the defenders of Paris will continue to spread 2So great was Lenin’s emphasis on learning from the failures of the Paris Commune that a popular tale, almost certainly apocryphal, developed that describes him dancing in the Moscow snow when the Bolshevik government outlasted the Commune’s duration. 3 until the day when it will lead the oppressed to final victory…for us, March 18th signals the dawn of a new world, a new society.”3 While Frankel’s words aimed at furthering the discourse on the Commune’s significance to the international socialist movement’s future trajectory, the prominence of his participation serves to highlight a transitional moment in Paris’s history as the “revolutionary capital” of Europe. The Paris Commune of 1871, viewed by Marx and subsequent generations of revolutionary socialists as the prototype for the dictatorship of the proletariat, also marked the apex of Paris’s tenure as the revolutionary center for international radicals. While inaugurating “a new dawn” for the transnational radical/socialist movement, May 1871 also served as a fini for those movements’ active ties to Paris. Frankel’s participation in the Commune, alongside Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Jaroslav Dombrowski, and other non-French radicals, represented the culmination of a process of ideological evolution, exchange, and formulation that began with the Great Revolution in 1789 and continued throughout all of Paris’s nineteenth-century revolutionary manifestations prior to 1871. By focusing on these three non-French radicals as case studies, this dissertation demonstrates how the Paris Commune, by building on ideological, political, and social developments within Paris since the French Revolution, marked a pivotal moment in Europe’s transnational radical discourse, particularly for foreign radicals operating within the French capital. While the cosmopolitan and universalistic language that characterized the French Revolution initially drew international adherents to Paris, the realities of the 3Reproduced in Tibor Ereny, “La Commune de Paris et le Mouvement Ouvrier Hongrois,” Europe 29 (Apr. 1, 1951): 180. 4 Revolution, particularly after the nationalist shift in 1792, undercut the promise of a true transnational discourse. However, Paris’s nineteenth-century revolutionary cycle, beginning in 1830, once again drew international radicals with the promise of providing a site capable of fostering their own ideological goals. The ensuing period between 1830 and 1848 saw émigré radicals, drawn at first by Paris’s revolutionary legacy, engage in a process of interaction and negotiation that began fusing Paris’s revolutionary potency with new transnational discourses, particularly that of socialism. Thus, when Paris’s February uprising inaugurated the Revolutions of 1848, non-French radicals viewed the city’s revolution as transnational, adaptable to particular national conditions and aspirations, and thus exportable, either ideologically or by means of direct military action.
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