"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
Right-wing accounts of the time and current, are based on The Convulsions of Paris by the reactionary Maxime du Camp, 1879:
- He declares 6500 Communards 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. The British conservative is considered one of the foremost historians of 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 opinion...
A view of Paris on May 24, 1871
 | ||
Passers-by remove the corpses, as required after an action. 
|
"The Triumph of Order"
...as do the records that Audin studied.
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 Historiens contre la Commune (2024).
Echoes of the Marseillaise: two centuries of the French Revolution, by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparable critique of the French Revolution (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 the installation that hides the rampart vestige at the Louvre. Is the opaque, pretentious language meant to conceal the conservatism that French historians used to reject?
The turn to the right
applies to historiography as a whole.
It coincides with multinationals' rise,
from about 1980.
End of this section.
* * *
The next section,
VI.4.
No comments:
Post a Comment