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London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 13 · 2 July 2015
Globalisation before Globalisation
by Philippe Marlière
Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 by John Merriman
Yale, 324 pp, £20.00, October 2014, ISBN 978 0 300 17452 6
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin
Ross
Verso, 148 pp, £16.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78168 839 7
Lenin, it’s said, danced in the snow once the Bolshevik government had
lasted a day longer than the Paris Commune. He was in awe of the
Communards, and his tomb is still decorated with red banners from the
Commune, brought for his funeral by French communists. Though it lasted
only 72 days, the Commune was a defining moment for the European left,
though not an uncontroversial one. Marx praised it in The Civil War in
France (1871) – ‘Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the
working class’ – but in 1872 in a new preface to The Communist Manifesto
he wrote: ‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made
state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.’ The Communards, he
believed, had made a crucial error by seeking to reform, rather than
abolish, the state. Engels agreed, calling the Commune the first
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a state run by workers in their own
interest. The argument about its political nature still hasn’t been
settled 144 years after the Commune itself was crushed. Some see it as
the first self-consciously socialist uprising: a popular rebellion,
unlike the liberal and nationalist Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Others
describe it as one among many manifestations of French republicanism.
The Yale historian John Merriman’s new book concentrates on the chain of
events that created the Commune, and the main players behind its
formation. He opens with a description of Paris in 1870: its western
side a playground for the rich, the east an overpopulated slum. The
class divide was deep and class consciousness entrenched. In July that
year, Napoleon III, desperate for military glory, declared war on
Prussia, his generals having assured him that France would win easily.
They were wrong. As soon as the fighting started, Prussian troops routed
the French and on 2 September captured the emperor together with 100,000
troops in Sedan. There were mass demonstrations on the streets of Paris
demanding the overthrow of the empire, and its replacement with a
democratic republic. Moderate republicans were terrified and on 4
September established a new republic. The s0-called Government of
National Defence promised not to cede an inch of territory to the
Prussians; but it feared the radicalised working class in the capital
even more, and decided that it would be wise to surrender to Bismarck as
soon as possible. Secret negotiations were opened soon after the
Prussians laid siege to Paris on 19 September.
As the weeks went by, hostility to the new government grew. On 28
October, news reached Paris that the 160,000 soldiers at Metz had
surrendered. On 31 October, 15,000 demonstrators gathered at the Hôtel
de Ville in Paris calling for the resignation of the government and the
establishment of a Commune and a Committee of Public Safety, such as
there had been in 1792. Food was running out and so was money; on 29
January the government surrendered, as it had been planning to do since
the beginning of the siege.
The right-wing député Adolphe Thiers was appointed president by the
National Assembly and given a mandate to accept and implement the harsh
terms imposed, which included ceding Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia. In
March, the Prussians paraded through Paris. They occupied part of the
city for two days, then withdrew. The surrender to the Prussians and the
threat of monarchist restoration led to a transformation of the National
Guard. A Central Committee of the Federation of National Guards was
elected, comprising 215 battalions, equipped with 2000 cannons and
450,000 firearms.
Thiers’s new government embodied a conservative brand of republicanism.
He had been prime minister under Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy in 1836,
1840 and 1848, and was later a fierce opponent of Napoleon III. He was
far from being the kind of leader the Parisian militants wanted in
power. Thiers had promised the conservative députés in the National
Assembly that the monarchy would be restored. His first task was to
undermine the newly empowered National Guard, which had the militants’
support and controlled the city’s 2000 cannons. For Thiers and the
national army amassing in Versailles, this represented a grave threat to
the new order. On 18 March Thiers ordered his troops to seize a large
number of the cannons, but the Parisians were determined to keep them
and dragged them to the top of the Butte Montmartre in the northern part
of the city. A confrontation between the troops and the crowd ensued,
and the mob captured and shot two generals. The troops retreated without
the cannons and the Commune was proclaimed the same day.
On 19 April 1871, the Commune authorities published a declaration. The
short text outlined the aims of the new government, which were to assure
‘to each one his full rights, and to every Frenchman the full exercise
of his faculties and abilities as man, citizen and producer’. The
authorities were to take charge of the communal budgets, receipts and
expenses, the fixing and collection of taxes, the direction of public
services, the organisation of the magistracy, internal police, the
National Guard and education. ‘Individual freedom and freedom of
conscience’ would be guaranteed and ‘a new era of experimental,
positive, scientific politics’ would bring about ‘the modern revolution,
the most fecund’ in the history of humanity.
Merriman doesn’t spend long on the Commune’s decrees. His account is,
broadly speaking, sympathetic to the Communards, pointing out that the
Commune had a strong – though ill-organised – social justice agenda. He
describes in detail the active role played by local authorities in
distributing food and fuel to the poor, and in promoting equality
between the sexes. But his focus is on the battle between the
Versaillais, under the leadership of Thiers, and the people of Paris.
Half of his 300 pages are devoted to the ‘semaine sanglante’ of 21-28
May during which the national army retook control of the capital after
slaughtering as many as 25,000 civilians and combatants. He gives a
vivid and grisly account of the street fighting, including the army’s
use of machine guns to perform mass executions. Hatred of the
proletariat, and a determination to avenge their humiliation at the
hands of the Prussians, prevailed among the army’s officers. The
Versaillais regarded the Communards as common criminals or worse –
‘vermin’, ‘beasts’, ‘wild animals’ – and were bent on ‘purifying’ the
streets of Paris.
The greatest merit of Merriman’s book is the attention he gives to the
crimes perpetrated by the new ‘republican’ regime. But his focus on the
fighting is also limiting. The Commune was one of only a few collective
attempts to construct an egalitarian society: it has influenced every
socialist movement in the world. In Communal Luxury: The Political
Imaginary of the Paris Commune Kristin Ross argues that the spirit of
the Commune is alive today among, for instance, the Indignados in Spain
and inside the Occupy movement. Ross discusses the ‘political imaginary’
that both fuelled and outlived the Commune. She looks at encounters
between activists and intellectuals in Europe and how they led to the
consolidation of a socialist ideology and culture, paying close
attention to their approaches to education, work, the arts and the
environment. She examines the way the ‘Commune mindset’ came into
existence before 1871, and how it persisted through to the 1880s, when
Communards in exile met other revolutionaries, among them Marx,
Kropotkin and William Morris. The book’s title is taken from the
Artists’ Manifesto proclaimed by the Commune’s Artists’ Federation,
which promised a world in which ‘everyone would … have his or her share
of the best.’
Ross sets out to define ‘Communard thought’ and the two interpretations
of it that have predominated – for the Soviet Communists and their
followers the Communards were martyrs of a failed socialist revolution;
for French republicans, the Commune facilitated the creation of a new
republican regime – and suggests that the essence of the Commune as a
political project lies beyond both interpretations. She points out the
differences between the Commune and the USSR, with its state-managed
economy and centralised, authoritarian organisation, while also doubting
that it constitutes a ‘heroic radical sequence’ in the forward march of
French republicanism. The Parisian insurgents didn’t fight to ‘save the
new Third Republic’, but to create a Universal Republic based on
solidarity and co-operation between men and women across the world,
whatever their nationality. Ross’s point – one that would be
controversial for large segments of today’s French left – is that ‘far
from implying a return to the principles of the bourgeois 1789
revolution, the slogan “Universal Republic”, when uttered by the
Communards, marks their break from the legacy of the French Revolution
in the direction of a real working-class internationalism.’ The
Communards believed that the universal rights proclaimed by the
revolutionaries in 1789 would be meaningless if they couldn’t be
translated into economic and cultural provision for more than just the
bourgeoisie.
Gustave Courbet captured the Commune’s universalist aspirations when he
declared: ‘Paris has renounced being the capital of France.’ Elisée
Reclus, an anarchist, summed up its ambition: ‘Everywhere the word
“Commune” was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new
humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the
existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of
the world to the other.’ The insurgents saw themselves as free people,
not just free French people, and were forming a genuine Internationale –
a federation of free men and women. In the words of one Communard it was
‘an audacious act of internationalism’.
Marx was aware of the Commune’s anti-authoritarian and individualistic
spirit: what mattered was not its ideals, or its policies, but its
‘working existence’. As Ross puts it, the Commune was a ‘working
laboratory of political inventions’, a largely improvised project. The
Communards had little time for ‘Jacobin posturing and rhetoric’,
reckoning they were all about ‘big talk and little action – the scene of
words, not deeds’. The French republican tradition – that is, in its
revolutionary left and reformist conceptions – has always been
ideologically ‘Jacobin’. Mainstream Jacobins hold a strong belief in
representative democracy as opposed to popular democracy; in a ‘unitary’
and ‘indivisible’ nation; in centralised institutions and a top-down
approach to power and politics. John Stuart Mill, who didn’t think much
of this ‘abstract republican mind’, described it as proceeding ‘from an
infirmity of the French mind, which has been one main cause of the
miscarriages of the French nation in its pursuit of liberty and
progress; that of being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions
as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.’
The experience of the Commune radically changed some of the Communards’
worldviews. Reclus ended up violently rejecting the Third Republic he
had initially defended. Following the downfall of the Commune, the
republic seemed to him to be ‘opportunistic’, a ‘hopeless mirage’, an
assembly made up of ‘Messieurs the gunmen’. He declared himself an
anarchist communist and totally renounced French nationalism. Gustave
Lefrançais, a revolutionary anarchist, who was elected to the Council of
the Commune for the fourth arrondissement, also bade farewell to the
French republic in the most unambiguous manner: ‘The proletariat will
never be truly emancipated unless it gets rid of the Republic – the last
form, and not the least malevolent – of the authoritarian governments’.
Eugène Pottier – the author of ‘The Internationale’ – dedicated the song
to Lefrançais in 1871.
*
Three important symbolic acts marked the way to the universal republic:
the burning of the guillotine on 10 April, the establishment of the
Women’s Union on 11 April, and the destruction of the Vendôme Column
(built to glorify Napoleon I’s conquests) on 16 May. Women were very
active during the Commune. Louise Michel, a schoolteacher, medical
worker and anarchist, treated those injured on the barricades and joined
the National Guard. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, the daughter of a tsarist
official, was a co-founder of the Women’s Union. She was also
representative of the Commune’s internationalism: she established a kind
of ‘transversal’ relationship between Marx – with whom she had been in
almost daily contact in London for three months before the Commune – and
the Russian socialist thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Dmitrieff is said
to have drawn Marx’s attention to some of Chernyshevsky’s ideas, notably
the creation of a socialist society based on the old peasant commune.
‘The social revolution,’ Citizen Destrée declared, ‘will not be realised
until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance
of revolution.’
The Communards were devoted to free, compulsory and secular education.
Free education meant schools accessible to all children, whatever their
social background, and free from religious interference. In April 1871,
a commission headed by Edouard Vaillant and including the songwriter
Jean-Baptiste Clément (composer of ‘Le Temps des cerises’, the greatest
of the songs associated with the Commune), the writer Jules Vallès and
Courbet set about closing down all Catholic schools and removing
religious symbols from the premises. The idea was to undo the
stranglehold the Church had over schooling in Paris, where a third of
children went to religious schools and another third didn’t go to school
at all. Joseph Jacotot’s ‘pedagogical vision of politics’ set the
agenda. Teaching was seen as forming the society of the future:
education was a pre-condition for the formation of political judgment,
and therefore crucial to becoming a citizen.
Artists also played an active role. The Artists’ Federation was set up
with the stated aim of ‘free expression of art, released from all
government supervision and all privilege’. On 14 April, more than four
hundred people answered the ‘Call for Artists’. Eugène Pottier read out
the Artists’ Manifesto rallying all ‘artistic intelligences’ – that is,
non-professional as well as professional artists.
Marx felt that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more
harshly with its political opponents and centralised all powers and
institutions in the hands of a revolutionary organisation. After 1871,
this was the issue that divided Marxists and anarchists. Lenin’s
militarist conception of political action and the vanguard party was at
odds with the anarchist approach, which advocated a general strike
followed by the immediate dismantling of the state by decentralised
workers’ councils. In this respect the Commune was far more in tune with
anarchist culture than with orthodox Marxism. Marx, Engels and Lenin
criticised the Communards for failing to take over capitalist
institutions – for instance, the assets of the French banks were not
confiscated – and thought they showed ‘excessive magnanimity’ in dealing
with counter-revolutionary agents, saboteurs and spies. They also
believed the Commune paid too little attention to military training and
discipline.
The philosophy that prevailed among the Communards had more to do with
Rousseauian ideas of freedom and true democracy. Although the Commune
only lasted 72 days, it shouldn’t be regarded as a political failure but
as a time of intense solidarity – an aspect the Marxist interpretation
tends to underplay. In fact, the Communards were the first genuine
internationalists: Reclus, Lefrançais, Verlaine, Vermersch, Rimbaud,
Vaillant and Lafargue were exiled to London or Geneva and met with
like-minded supporters. Their influence spread via journals, theoretical
elaborations and debates. Ross contends that the movement constituted a
kind of ‘globalisation from below’ – a successful combination of local
democracy and open internationalism. It could also be argued that it
developed an original brand of ‘libertarian communism’ that tried to
free itself from the power and authority of a centralised or Jacobin
state. It was an experiment based on the principle of communal autonomy
and envisaged a loose association of communes established across France
in which the ide
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