"ALL I DID WAS ADD..."

"OTHERS COULD HAVE DONE THAT IF THEY HAD WANTED TO," 

Said Michèle Audin after consulting cemetery records. 

 -- Letter to Emmanuel Brandely, cited below, note on p.53

She concludes that the number will never be known, but that the 20.000-30.000 stated by survivors is realistic. 

Illustration, Internet

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

The Triumph of Order by Ernest Pichio, 1877 / zoom

The point of departure for right-wing accounts as a whole: The Convulsions of Paris, 1879, by the reactionary Maxime du Camp. 

• 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 current specialists on La Commune, though it is not his specialty.
  
  

The records Audin studied 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 the mass graves that construction workers came upon until the turn of the century.

An excerpt of her Table of Contents: 

 

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

 

# # #

My additions:

• 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 opaque and pretentious citations (e.g. The Commune is above all transitivity and suspension, "Communes," 2020, in French, p. 70) recall the neon phrases of an installation that masks the vestige of the Louvre's rampart. They appear in the same year (2020). x

• Images of the army's carnage published soon afterwards make the revision untenable: Three appear above. 

The turn to the right 

applies to historiography as a whole.

It dates from about 1980.

End of this section.

*     *    *  

The next section,

VI.3,

Fraternity that worked