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2. France Since 1871: The Paris Commune and Its Legacy
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Professor John Merriman:
Okay, today I want to talk
about the Paris Commune.
This is how I end the previous
course, but it's the most
appropriate place to start this
one,
because the Paris Commune hung
over Europe for the next twenty
or thirty years.
And, in my view,
the Paris Commune and the
massacre that followed the Paris
Commune,
the massacre of thousands and
thousands of people,
anticipated the twentieth
century,
when you became guilty for just
being who you were.
"À
Paris tout le monde
était coupable,"--"in
Paris everybody was guilty,"
shouted out one of the
prosecutors as they shot men and
women down.
It would be,
and I'll conclude with this,
the largest massacre that would
take place until the massacre of
Armenians by Turks in the latter
years of the nineteenth century,
and in World War One,
as well, in 1915,
and it sadly anticipates the
horror shows of the twentieth
century.
"À
Paris tout le monde
était coupable."
You were guilty because you
were left in Paris,
because you were too poor to
get out.
So, what was the Paris Commune?
Some of you already know this,
but let me talk about that and
then give you my view on it.
The Paris Commune has to be
placed in the context of two
things going on.
One is that during the Second
Empire, which was that regime of
Napoleon III that lasted from
1852 to till he was really
rounded up by the Prussians in
1870.
There was in the late 1860s a
revival of republican and
socialist organization,
and of anarchist
disorganization,
if you will.
In June of 1868 the Emperor
legalizes public meetings,
which had been illegal,
and in Paris and in very many
places, particularly on the edge
of Paris, on the margins of
urban life,
you had meetings in large
warehouses, and in big
cafés where people
discussed politics and imagined
reforms that they wanted in the
Empire,
or many of them wanted a
republic, or some sort of
democratic, socialist republic.
So, there's a political
mobilization in the late 1860s,
and in the beginning of 1870
there's a wave of strikes.
Strikes had been illegal in
France until 1864.
Unions would be illegal in
France until 1881;
but, so, you had a wave of
strikes.
So, that's really the first
context and the mobilization of
many ordinary people living in
Paris.
The second context is the
Franco-Prussian War,
which you can read about in
Chip Sowerwine's book.
But, basically what happens is
that Louis Napoleon,
Napoleon III,
gets suckered into a war
without any allies at all
because of various dumb things
that he'd done against the very
clever,
extremely aggressive Otto von
Bismarck, the Prussian
chancellor.
It involved one of those
obscure things that one had to
learn in Western Civ.,
the way it was taught a long
time ago--well I suppose it's
worth remembering anyway--it
involved the candidacy of a
Royal Family member,
a rather obscure one,
for the throne of France,
which would have left France
surrounded by the Royal Family
of Prussia,
Hollenzollerns,
a name that in this course you
need not retain unless it's in
some extraordinarily complicated
crossword puzzle.
But Napoleon protests
vigorously, and then,
trying to add insult to injury,
his ambassador literally chases
the German emperor around his
garden and is fairly abusive in
a verbal way,
and Bismarck seizes on this to
stoke up anger against France
and then reveals to the European
world,
or those people who cared,
that Napoleon III had earlier
tried to make a deal which in
exchange for supporting Prussia
against Austria he would receive
Belgium and Luxemburg,
which of course the British
could never tolerate.
And so, what happens is that he
goes to war in the summer of
1870, without any allies,
against Prussia and its South
German allies,
and he thinks he's going to
win.
But--as my team was in the
Michigan State game last
Saturday, with me present,
a very sad person you're
looking at--he was blown out,
and on September 4th,
1870, there is yet another
insurrection in Paris.
A crowd storms down to the town
hall, they seize power,
they proclaim a republic,
they name streets different
names, and they want to prolong
the resistance against the
Prussian Army,
which has through betrayal and
cleverly organized military
victories--is sweeping aside
French resistance.
And Napoleon III,
who's very sick,
he would die a couple of years
later, probably of stomach
cancer,
is captured in the Battle of
Sedan, s-e-d-a-n,
which is a textile town near
the Belgian border in the north
of France,
and he goes off to--is sent
packing off to Britain.
Now, what happens then is that
there are those who want to keep
fighting.
It's quite clear that one of
the demands of Prussia--;and,
as of late January,
a unified Germany--the German
Empire was proclaimed in the
Hall of Mirrors in the
Château of Versailles,
by coincidence--but one of the
demands is that there'll be a
huge indemnity,
which the French will have to
pay, and that Alsace and
Lorraine, those Eastern
provinces,
largely German speaking,
I remind you,
would be amputated and would be
annexed by Germany.
And, after the Paris region,
Alsace and Lorraine were the
two most industrialized and
prosperous parts of France.
And, so, in Paris people find
themselves surrounded.
They find themselves
surrounded, and Paris is--it's
nothing like- -it's one-third
the size of London at this same
time,
or at any other time,
but it has a huge
circumference.
There is a wall around Paris
and there are exterior forts,
but you've got an enormous
number of people besieged by
Prussian and other German
forces,
holding on.
At one point,
a French politician whom you'll
meet in the textbook,
at least,
called Gambetta,
who died very young,
flies away in a balloon,
flies down toward Tours on the
Loire Valley to try to raise up
resistance there,
but things get quickly very
grim indeed.
In October, a French general
capitulates rather scandalously
in the town of Metz,
in the east,
which would become a German
town--in fact you go to Metz,
maybe some of you have been
there,
Metz--you'll see this
huge sort of lugubrious railroad
station that was clearly built
in the Second Reich of the
Kaisers and of Bismarck.
And, so, Paris is surrounded in
this sort of glory that was
supposed to be,
the Empire has collapsed on the
head of France.
And, to be sure,
there were lots of crowds in
Paris.
There were the inevitable
crowds who shouted for war,
which was sort of odd because
Paris was increasingly a
leftwing city,
because the vast majority of
the population of Paris were
ordinary people,
were workers,
more about that another time
when I talk about Paris;
but, the siege goes on and on,
and Paris changes appearances.
Military dress or parts of
uniform become seen just about
everywhere.
The problem is feeding all of
these people,
how are you going to feed them?
You've got all sorts of animals.
You've got horses which you
need for the army but also which
they start slaughtering;
you've got cattle but you have
enough food to last for maybe a
month;
there's always a lot to drink
because of the caves,
that is, the wine cellars that
people had, but things get worse
and worse.
The last regular mail delivery
was on September 19th,
and thereafter they used
balloons.
The balloon was invented in the
Ardèche by Montgolfier in
the late eighteenth century,
and the balloon becomes a sort
of symbol of perhaps liberty.
The people in Paris are
awaiting some sort of military
help from the provinces,
but it simply goes on and on.
And during the siege there were
sixty-five balloon flights
carrying two and a half million
letters,
weighing a grand total of
10,000 kilograms,
so roughly about 20,000 pounds.
One astronomer actually left
Paris to go off and to observe
an eclipse.
They begin using pigeons in
order to fly messages out,
and then the Germans,
who were of course portrayed as
committing atrocities--and
they'd committed a few,
they'd shot some people up in
the northeast,
but nothing like would occur in
1914,
and, of course,
nothing at all like what would
occur in very different
circumstances in 1939,
1940.
The Germans bring in these
falcons and they go out and they
munch the pigeons;
and so this was another reason
for them, just like the Germans,
these poor little pigeons who
became the sort of sacred bird,
I guess a pigeon's a bird.
Pigeons--people,
including me,
eat pigeons;
pigeoneau is actually
quite good.
But, anyway,
it seemed like an awful thing
to do when they're bringing
these falcons and hawks who were
imported to intercept these
people.
Now, the Paris population
included national guardsman,
come from the outside to take
refuge inside.
So, it's rather like a medieval
siege, from that point of view.
You've got people from the
outskirts coming in for food and
safety;
but, the population is slightly
over two million people,
and that's a lot of mouths to
feed.
You've got 1,500 Americans,
several of whom leave accounts
of the whole thing,
40,000 Belgians,
30,000 Swiss and 5,000 English.
So, you're starting out with
about--please don't write these
down--24,000 cattle,
150,000 sheep,
6,000 hogs, and that is not
enough to eat,
and people become quite
obsessed with what they're going
to eat.
And you're looking at somebody
who basically does not like dogs
at all but who loves cats,
and canine butchers replaced
horse butchers.
The horses had mostly been
eaten up or had been
commandeered,
as I said before,
by the army.
You can still in France today
find not canine butchers,
you can find horse butchers,
and it's always a red front
with a gold head of a horse,
appropriately enough.
But people began to eat
first--not first,
but they ate the animals in the
zoo and what's his name,
Castorin Pollocks,
who many Parisian children,
generations,
had gone to visit the zoo,
find themselves eaten;
and they can't eat the tigers
because they're afraid to open
the cages, and,
unfortunately,
the tigers simply croaked
because they're not going to
waste food on them,
from their point of view;
but, they begin eating dogs and
cats.
And, so, you had this rather
odd situation where instead of
dogs guarding their masters or
mistresses,
you had the masters and
mistresses guarding the dogs
against people who would take
the dogs and,
unfortunately,
kill them and eat them.
And they eat cats as well,
and, of course,
rats.
And Paris had and still has
millions of rats.
Even if you come home about two
or 2:30 in the morning near our
apartment you can still see
rather large rats dashing across
the street;
some of them look so bloated
they look like sangliers,
or wild boar,
which you can see occasionally
in parts of rural France.
There were tales,
inevitable tales of--and with
French food, as you know,
presentation accounts for
something very much.
When food arrives you're likely
to say "c'est bien,
bien presentée";
it has all sorts of
meanings to it,
it's well presented,
but it's how it looks but how
it's served and of course how it
tastes,
where you would
have--unfortunately this pains
me when I think of my poor
little kitty--a cat with mice
artfully placed around the cat
carcass;
one has to call it that--what
do you have?--carcass of cat.
And people simply got by as
best they could.
And so they have this--and
Bismarck had predicted that the
siege would end if Parisians
went several weeks without their
café
au lait,
the whole thing would be over.
But, they create a Central
Commission of Hygiene and
Sobriety which tell
people--encourage people to eat
healthfully,
and don't just get wasted all
the time--which is what I would
have done, I'll tell you that.
No, I take that back,
do not film that.
Here's the proposed menu.
You don't have to know French
to know this,
but here's a menu that
they're--this is early in the
siege.
The word for French is
cheval,
and here's a menu;
but these people must have been
friqués, or
fairly wealthy to have been able
to eat like this.
You don't even have to know
French to get this.
It starts it with a
consumée de
cheval, cheval
braisé
au chou,
collet de cheval à
la mode,
côte de cheval
braisé,
fillet de cheval rôti,
boeuf et cheval salé
froid--you couldn't do much
with horse ice-cream,
so it sort of trailed by the
end.
And somebody once wrote many a
superb champion of Longchamps,
that is the racetrack,
met their end on the table of
some well-heeled person from the
western fancy districts of
Paris.
But, it ceased being funny,
and it was nothing like the
siege of Leningrad where
something like a million people
died in World War Two of
starvation;
but, there were all sorts of
little caskets being dragged
along to what passed then for
mortuaries.
Old people and young people,
the youngest died in droves;
and, of course,
sheer drunkenness becomes an
enormous problem,
and so did venereal disease
because of the--Paris at any one
time,
depending on who's counting,
but the number of prostitutes
was at least 10,000 and probably
about 25,000,
and so venereal disease becomes
rampant;
and there are also very strange
cases of mental illness that
were predictable.
There are people who are
brought into mental institutions
who literally think that they're
Joan of Arc,
who was burned au
Calvados--I shouldn't say
that--but, in Rouen in the
fifteenth century;
or there are people that
believe that they're God,
or that they're Saint Louis and
can somehow save France.
So, hunger sets in and it
becomes extremely sad and
tragic, and attempts to break
out simply don't work;
but, it had its light moments,
and I can never resist those.
They do a contest--those of you
who like to enter
contests--saying,
"how can we break out of this
awful mess, oh,
whatever can we do?"
And just three of the
suggestions that came in,
that I would have rewarded them
some sort of prize,
were the following,
or maybe just two of them.
One, somebody says that all of
these prostitutes are a valuable
resource for Paris--Berlin had
its own sad legions of
prostitutes as well--and that
they must be equipped with what
they called Prussic,
as in Prussian,
but Prussic needles that would
have a poison,
and then the prostitutes would
go out to encounter in some sort
of cash exchange Prussian
soldiers and,
at some key moment in the
exchange, would stab them in the
neck very gently with this pin;
that would be the end of their
eating sauerkraut and then Paris
would free itself.
Somebody else suggested that
because of the influence of
Wagner and because of the
traditional kind of om-pah
music that the Parisians
always associated with Germans
that you would take the
orchestras of Paris and teach
them how to play om-pah
music--this is what they called
it,
not the Prussians,
of course--and that one day
they simply would open up one of
the gates of Paris,
heavily defended,
and would march out playing
this music and then behind them
would become this huge Trojan
horse,
which they would call the
musical mitrailleuse,
or the musical machinegun,
which would then open up and
start blasting away the poor
Prussians, who were always
assumed to be,
by the sneaky Parisians,
to be very dumb,
but of course they weren't.
And the other,
somebody wrote in and said,
well let's just take this huge
tarp,
put it on the Place de la
Concorde, put bacon and other
things and use pigeon power,
and all the pigeons would come
to that place,
and then you engulf the pigeons
and you have this powerful
balloon that can carry all these
people in some sort of airborne
stagecoach,
or diligence,
out of Paris.
But, the thing,
it becomes less and less funny
and not at all.
And, at the very beginning
there was a train that went
around the Wall of Paris,
more about the walls of Paris
another time,
that's fun to talk about,
and Parisians would take picnic
lunches,
and they'd get on the train,
and then they'd hear these
large explosions and realize
that they could get killed by
these large explosions.
And, so, as things are going
downhill many people in Paris
said look, we must keep
fighting,
but we must imagine a different
world where--we have,
we're being betrayed by the
provinces that are not helping
us,
and we need to have help from
the provinces.
And, in January,
somebody puts up a sign,
a big red sign,
red being the color of the
Left--red was illegal,
the color red was illegal
between 1849 and 1851,
because it was believed to
excite one group of people
against another,
which is an exact quote from
the French Law--and it's a big
red poster that says,
"make way for the Commune,
that the people of Paris would
have the right to defend
themselves and to create a
better world in the future."
Now, let me scramble for my
implement here.
And this is a conservative
response to the mobilization of
French workers,
and this says the working class
population won't at all listen
to bad advice.
And, notice here,
this guy, this is your basic
Parisian urchin who in 1830 in a
Delacroix,
a famous Delacroix painting
called Liberty Leading the
People is sort of the hero,
but here he's sort of the bad
guy, he's sort of a Gavroche
gone totally wrong,
and here is temptation,
and here's this working class
family that will surely resist
all of this.
And this is--God,
I love this--one picture,
you first see the first picture
you can actually see of Paris,
this is what they call a
daguerréotype from
1837, the faubourg du
temple.
And you can actually,
instead of imagining what
things look like,
you can see them.
And here, this is from the
steps of Montmartre,
way before the god-awful
Sacré-Coeur was built,
the basilica--more about that
some other time,
when I'm in a real frenzy of
contempt for the destruction of
the Parisian skyline.
But, anyway,
this is looking down from
Montmartre, and here you've got
the image of-- the female image
of liberty,
Marianne, and she comes in as
the provisional government that
is going to capitulate France,
it's going to give up,
but not that it's going to make
a damn bit of difference.
And then Adolph Thiers,
who somebody once called a
miserable gnome--t-h-i-e-r-s,
Adolph Thiers is there and he's
cutting off the right arm of
France, which is Alsace and
Lorraine,
with Strasbourg and Colmar,
and la route des vins
and all these important things.
And here, this is Marianne
being martyred by the French
provisional government,
and in the back is the--is it
the dawning of the social
republic of the Left,
that is these ordinary people
who have fought so long and so
hard.
So, France capitulates,
not Paris, but France,
the provisional government
capitulates in the end of
January of the year 1871,
and the Prussian troops cavalry
march down--I guess horses don't
march, they trot--but they trot
down the Champs-Elysées,
and then the concierges
from that area go and
symbolically,
and for real intent also,
clean up the stones afterwards,
and there's a huge indemnity
that has to be paid off,
and France will lose
Alsace-Lorraine.
So, France has this provisional
government--you can read about
this stuff, it's not that
interesting;
well, it's passionately
interesting.
But, in February of 1871 there
are elections and the provinces,
particularly the conservative,
western provinces like Brittany
return this extremely monarchist
dominated National Assembly that
is going to determine the future
of France.
And the landlords come back to
Paris, because they had
somewhere to go during the
siege, and they say,
"you pay up,
you pay up money with
interest";
and the provisional government
says, "yes, you pay up money
with interest."
And people had no money,
and there's just incredible
anger.
And Thiers, who in 1848 had
advised another regime that fell
to revolution,
that is,
of the July Monarchy,
the plotting Louis-Philippe,
to withdraw the troops from
Paris,
in the account of--if there's
any trouble in Paris--he already
had this in mind.
On March 18th,
1871, he sends troops to
Montmartre, the hill of
Montmartre, the highest point in
Paris,
which had only been annexed in
1860, on January 1st;^(
)Montmartre which still had this
somewhat rural
atmosphere--there's still a wine
produced there,
the vineyard is about as big as
this room, it's just so they can
sell the label of wine from
there--because the National
Guard of Paris that had defended
Paris so heroically,
they've still got these guns,
and, so, they have these guns
and, so, they send the troops to
get the guns early in the
morning.
The women who are at the market
see the troops coming,
they call the men folk.
The men folk take two generals
of the provisional government,
they put them up against the
wall and they shoot them,
and Thiers says now we're going
to get these bastards,
and he pulls all the troops
out,
headquartered appropriately
enough in Versailles,
and Paris is surrounded again
by,
in this case,
somebody else's government,
that is, the provisional
government.
So, the Commune begins on the
18th of March,
1871, and it lasts until the
end of May, 1871.
Lenin once called it the
"Festival of the Oppressed";
and Lenin was wrong about many
things, he was right about a few
things but wrong about many,
but he got that one right.
And, so, for the first time
ordinary Parisians found
themselves masters of their own
lives.
The wealthy people mostly got
out again, and the commune holds
on.
The commune,
the numbers of the commune were
swollen by political refugees.
This is a woman called Elisbeth
Dmitrieff, who was a Russian
militant who was one of the
leaders of the commune.
And, as in the French
Revolution, that is 1789 and
following, and as in 1848,
clubs of women began to form
demanding rights.
And the commune,
despite the fact that there's
lots of--you could hear in the
distance the guns sometimes
getting closer and closer,
and attempts to break out fail
miserably, they pass all sorts
of impressive social
legislation.
They create nurseries for
working women;
they give contracts to make
National Guard uniforms to
women's unions;
they plan what will be a lay,
secularized education system;
they ban night baking because
it was not good for the health
of people working in bakeries in
the middle of the night.
And here's a woman's club
making demands.
Nobody is yet,
except these women,
thinking of female suffrage.
So, it's kind of an important
moment in the history of women,
and also it explains the
viciousness of the attempt--of
the massacre,
really, of ordinary working
class women when the whole thing
falls apart, because women were
conceived of as being uppity,
as putting forth claims that
they shouldn't be making,
by conservatives.
And a couple of the
communards--one is a
woman that you'll read about
later,
called Louise Michel,
who spends half her time in
exile in London,
who was an anarchist,
basically, was very important,
along with Elisabeth Dmitrieff.
And, so, you're surrounded--and
people, they don't agree on
everything.
You've got Jacobins,
Jacobins who are the sort of
centralized radical republicans
or socialists from the French
Revolution;
you've got anarchists who
wanted not to take over the
state but to destroy it,
I'm going to talk about
anarchists another time because
I'm writing a book about one of
them;
and you've got moderate
republicans who simply wanted
Paris to have more liberties
vis-à-vis the strongly
centralized state,
more about that next time.
You've got moderate socialists,
you've got this whole kind of
different people,
and they're meeting around
tables, and talking,
and arguing,
and debating,
and yelling,
and hugging,
long into the night,
as the guns draw nearer.
There were communes in other
cities, too, with a variety of
demands, in Limoges,
in Le Creusot,
in Saint-Étienne,
in Narbonne,
in Lyon and in Marseilles,
and even an attempt in Bordeaux.
And Paris keeps waiting for
these armies of citizens to
come--and citoyennes,
female citizens,
also to come and rescue them;
but, in the meantime you've got
people from the northern and
northeastern quarters of Paris,
the poor, living on the edge of
Paris who come down into the
fancy quarters,
for the very first time when
they're not working as someone's
maid, and they,
some--and the painter,
Gustav Courbet,
the naturalist painter from
near Besançon,
thus Burial at Ornans,
he says, "why don't we,
as a symbol,
get rid of this horrible statue
of Napoleon that's standing on
the Vendôme column in the
Place Vendôme?"
The Place Vendôme is near
Palais Royale,
very fancy.
It's known to Americans who
have visited,
there are many,
but others because that's the
Ritz Hotel where
what's-her-name,
Princess Diana left ten years
ago now and never made it,
unfortunately for her,
out of the Pont d'Alma,
the tunnel.
He says let's tear the whole
damn thing down.
And, so, this is an entry path
to see this, to see this thing
brought down as a symbol of
centralized oppression.
And this is the result,
this is the crashing.
And, so, people would come down
and they'd have their pictures
taken with a picture,
as if it was part of the true
cross of the crashed
Vendôme column;
because for once they had won,
for once they had won.
And, so, they have to defend
Paris.
And, so, you've got all these
cannons that you just saw
before, and you've got--they
still have their uniforms and
they build these huge
barricades.
The first barricades,
by the way, were built in Paris
in the late sixteenth century,
so there's a long tradition.
And you could build barricades
across smaller streets,
but not across big boulevards,
and that was part of the
rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s
and '60s, more about that in a
minute and much more about that
later,
because it's fascinating;
at least, I think it's
fascinating.
And here you go,
right down by the Seine,
there's some Monet and Manet
paintings, both,
that are further back,
from further back,
looking over.
Here, you've got your basic
barricade--and these things are
torn up, these are where trees
came out of, as in 1968;
and here's your sort of kiosk
of modernity,
somebody selling newspapers on
these boulevards,
or near these boulevards,
and here's some of these
people.
And most of them would be dead
within a month of this photo.
And there you are looking at
them, trying to protect their
city.
Now, who, first of all,
who were the communards,
who were the people that was
left?
Well, when revolutions are
victorious everybody rushes
forward and says "moi,
j'étais là,"
I was there, and they give their
name and their address and,
"why don't you reward me,
or at least pay attention to
the fact that I was there?"
In Paris, you got the Victory
Column of the Revolution of
1830, where the Bastille once
stood,
and it's got the names of all
the people that were killed in
three days of July 1830;
but, in something like this you
have a body count of more than
15,000 people.
So, we know who the
communards were,
they were ordinary people;
they were the ordinary workers,
men and women who simply
couldn't get out.
They weren't all socialists;
as I said, some were
anarchists, some were moderate
republicans, but they were who
were left.
They were--their very presence
there, that's where they lived,
but their defense of Paris
reflects tensions between urban
France and conservative rural
France.
The armies that they were
opposing, the French armies,
were largely staffed by
peasants from conservative
areas,
or from National Guards brought
in from towns like Vannes,
or Évreux,
or all sorts of places,
are brought in.
And, so, the commune--it's
somewhat semi-proletarian,
they're mostly working people.
They're particularly people
from the poorer quarters of the
north and the northeast,
more about that later.
They are who,
the people that were left.
They are artisans,
craftsmen, day laborers,
domestic servants;
they are the people who were
left.
And, what they were trying to
do was imagine a new world which
would be less centralized;
but, for the socialists,
they wanted more
centralization.
So, it was a very complex,
complex period indeed.
But it reflects the
artisinal base that was
still part of the French
economy,
for sure, with the emphasis on
skilled production of handbags,
and of gloves,
and of finely crafted tables.
The cabinet makers were always
terribly important in the French
Revolution, and they still are,
and there are still--all the
stores, or most of the stores on
one particular street in Paris
near the Bastille are still
furniture stores.
The kind of myth of the commune
was, of course,
that from the conservatives'
point of view--was that these
were the furies of hell,
the men and the women who rose
up to slay their social betters.
Well, of course,
that's not the case,
that's a sort of a myth for the
French Revolution as well.
And then you had you had your
basic republican interpretation
that said they were defending
the Republic against this sort
of monarchy to be restored,
and that certainly is part of
that as well;
but, it also had its socialist
component and Marx,
for Marx this was terribly
important and for Lenin it was
as well.
It seemed to be Armageddon for
the ruling classes,
but it seemed to be that here
was this proletariat--even
though Marx got that all wrong,
because these are not
industrial workers,
for the most part,
but these are the workers that
will one day break off their
chains.
And, so, you can see how this
would have an impact on every
country, on the United
States--those of you who've
taken American history,
this sort of view that
immigrants were increasingly
bringing socialism and anarchism
to the United States.
The commune is important in the
big Hay Market Affair,
the collective memory of the
commune in the Hay Market Affair
in Chicago and the people hung
there in--when was it--1886.
But, the most important,
really the most important
result of it was the massacre,
I think, itself,
because when finally the troops
of the provisional government
come pouring through the Western
gate,
a gate that had essentially
been left open,
in a place called Passy,
where there's some very nice
art nouveau buildings,
by the way, but which was very
collaborationist also in World
War Two, though not
everybody--what they do,
the troops do,
is they use the boulevards that
had built by Napoleon III as a
way of getting to those working
class neighborhoods that had
always risen up.
And Napoleon III and his
Prefect of the Seine--a name you
don't have to remember now,
but sometime it would be nice
to remember, called Hausmann,
a name so important that it
became a verb;
to hausmann something was to
bulldoze it;
a man dissed by my late friend
Richard Cobb as the "Alsatian
Attila"--he had plowed through
working class neighborhoods and
built the boulevards that--of
the modern Paris that one
celebrates and where one
celebrates.
He did it to bring more light,
he did it to bring more air,
he did it to free the flow for
capital, money;
that's why the department
stores are on the boulevards.
I'll do this again,
not this whole lecture but that
part again--and he did it
because you can't build
barricades across boulevards,
wide ones.
1944, August,
we jump ahead,
the boulevard,
the barricades are across the
same streets where they were in
many cases in 1792 and in 1789.
And the problem,
in 1968 it was very hard to
build a barricade across the
Boulevard St.
Michel, which was built by
Hausmann at this time.
So, the troops come pouring in.
This is down the Rue de Rivoli,
which was completed in the
1850s and '60s,
and the damage is staggering.
This is the Church of the
Madeleine, which is still there,
and this is the Rue Royale.
These streets do not matter,
it's just the visual images
with what is really going on
that counts.
The Hôtel de Ville,
which was destroyed.
Interestingly enough,
ten years ago somebody found
photos taken by this Parisian of
the siege in the Commune in the
back of the Hôtel de
Ville;
they were found ten years ago,
they had survived.
I just saw an exposition of
them at the Bibliothèque
Historique de la Ville de Paris
in January, of photos that had
never been seen before;
but, anyway,
this is the Hôtel de
Ville which is down by Notre
Dame, though it's not in the
cité.
Don't worry about these places.
And then, they put the women on
trial.
There had been a rumor that
female incendiaries,
in French les
pétroleuses,
had been setting fire to fancy
houses and had been burning down
the Bank of France.
And so this rumor was part of
the fear of "upitty women"
putting forth demands,
and they squished them like
grapes, and they hauled them off
and shot them.
Goncourt, one of the writers,
the Goncourts,
the one who hadn't died yet,
was no friend of ordinary
people, but there's an amazing
scene in his memoirs when he's
down by the Hôtel de Ville
and he sees these women chained
together,
being walked around,
and he says,
"Well what--where are they
going?"
And, so, the guy next to him
says, "Well they're going to
shoot them."
He said, "What do you--they're
going to shoot them?
You don't shoot women, do they?"
Well they did.
And he describes it and it's
terrifying.
I used to read it,
but I could never get through
it--terrifying.
And then he hears the coup
de grâce,
it's the shots,
one after another,
and then he sees a priest
staggering out,
overwhelmed by it all,
and then he moves onto
something else.
The Execution,
this is Manet,
who is horrified by the whole
thing.
Manet wasn't there.
Courbet also did an execution
scene.
And, in the end what there was
was this, "à
Paris tout le monde
était coupable,"
Paris, everybody was guilty.
Little coffins,
people were smaller then.
You can still see in the
Pantheon--the sort of secular
monument to some very wonderful
people like Émile Zola,
but also just Napoleonic
generals, one after another--you
can still see bullet holes
there,
from the Commune,
not just from World War Two,
from where people were
executed.
And lots of people who were
chimney sweeps were executed
because they had been cleaning
chimneys and they had gun--the
equivalent,
they had charcoal on their
cheeks and people,
they would rip off your shirt
to see if you had a bruise from
a recoiling rifle.
And it wasn't a neutral
massacre.
What is was,
they went to areas of Paris
like Belleville,
which is in the northeast,
which had long been assumed to
be a radical place,
and Montmartre,
and that's where their
collective memory of the "forces
of order,"
as they liked to call it,
was very, very precise,
and that's where they went in
and massacred them.
And that is the most chilling
probably legacy of the whole
thing.
Now, I know it's easy to look
at me and say,
"God, there's an old leftie,
why doesn't he grow up?"
That's what my wife says
sometimes, "why don't you grow
up?"
But, "why don't you get over
this?"
I remember when I was a student
in Paris I remember going up
to--there's a place at
Père Lachaise Cemetery,
and there's the Wall of the
Féd&ea
cute;rés,
it's called the Wall of the
Fédérés,
and that's where they massacred
lots of people.
And people used to go up there
on May Day, and sometimes on the
anniversary of the commune,
just to see where these people
fell, with enormous more dignity
than the people who shot them.
And this was the ultimate
lesson of the Commune that would
hang over Europe.
For the Left,
it was a sign that the state is
strong, powerful,
and can be vicious.
Don't let anyone ever tell you
that the victims of terrorism in
any century are anywhere
approximately near the victims
of state terrorism.
No matter how awful terrorism
was in the anarchist attacks at
the beginning of the 1890s,
and I'm going to talk to you
about it because I'm interested
in them;
but, this was the real lesson
of all of this,
as the state,
ever more stronger in Europe
since the consolidation of
territorial monarchies in the
fifteenth century,
the state growing in power with
absolutism, growing in power
with the revolution with
Napoleon,
growing in power with
unification of national states.
The state could strike back
with unparalleled savagery
against those people who got in
the way,
and that's what happened at the
commune, in the Paris Commune.
How many people died?
Minimum estimate 15,000,
probably closer to 25,000.
Yet, when they did the census
of 1872 in Paris alone there
were 10,000 less shoemakers than
there had been before.
Shoemakers were an
extraordinarily radical trade.
Were they all hiding in their
aunt's house in Orléans?
Where were they?
The flames engulfed the bodies,
they were gone,
and the amnesty for the
communards,
the people in the commune,
wouldn't come till 1879,
but it hung like a shadow over
European politics and French
politics for years and years.
And, you know,
when you go up there,
as you go up to Montmartre,
it's incredible--because I was
there once very,
very late in the afternoon,
and oddly enough I met this
woman who went there every day
and I said,
"why do you go there every day?"
And she said she had some sort
of lung disease and she couldn't
get out of Paris but she could
go into Père Lachaise,
and she knew where every tomb
was.
And she took us up to see the
Wall of the
Fédérés,
I was with some friends of my
mother long ago,
and I remember looking at that
and just thinking.
I remember when I was a kid,
I read this book by Thomas
Wolfe called Look Homeward
Angel,
and in the end he says--what
does he say?--he said,
"oh lost, and by the wind
grieved,
ghost, come back again."
That was the commune and we're
going to go on to the State next
time.
Have a good day.
