"ALL I DID WAS ADD"

"OTHERS COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME IF THEY HAD WANTED TO," WROTE MICHÈLE AUDIN AFTER CONSULTING CEMETERY RECORDS 

 -- Letter to Emmanuel Brandely, note p.53

The point of departure for right-wing accounts in the past and now: The Convulsions of Paris by the reactionary Maxime du Camp, 1879: 

• He declares 6500 Communard dead during Bloody Week, an estimate based on burial records at the Père Lachaise cemetery.

• Robert Tombs follows du Camp's count by estimating 5,700 -7,400 dead. A British conservative who backs Brexit and British imperialism, he is considered one of the foremost specialists on La Commune, though it is not his specialty.

Audin concludes that the number will never be known, but that the 20.000-30.000 stated by survivors is realistic. Images of the time fit that view...

A view of Paris on May 24, 1871

   Illustration

 Passers-by remove the corpses, as required after an action.

Le Triomphe de l'ordre by Ernest Pichio, 1877 / zoom

The records Audin studied confirm it.

They show 10,000 official burials in Parisian cemeteries during Bloody Week, which leaves out the multitude of cadavers that were not officially registered, were buried in suburban graveyards or in Versailles, or burned or buried in mass graves. Construction workers came upon corpses until the turn of the century.

An excerpt from her Table of Contents: 

 

Emmanuel Brandely examines the current revisionism in Historians against the Commune (in French, 2024). 

 

# # #

As well:

• Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries of the French Revolution, by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparable critique of the French Revolution,  (French edition 1989). 

• Quentin Deluermoz's citations (e.g. The Commune is above all transitivity and suspension, in "Communes," 2020, p. 70) recall the neon phrases of an installation that masks the vestige of the Louvre's rampart, which appear at the same time. Does opaque, pretentious language decorate a conservatism that French intellectuals used to reject? 

The turn to the right 

applies to historiography as a whole.

It dates from about 1980,

coinciding with multinationals' rise.

End of this section.

*     *    *  

The next section,

VI.4.

Fraternity that worked