SOCIAL FORCES ARE ABSENT AND A LONE INDIVIDUAL REPLACES THE MASSES
French school programs follow a national model. These textbook covers of 2025 differ, but the point of view is the same:
Top-hatted men behind the well-dressed woman underscore the privileged and dominate the figure with the cap. The soldiers in the trenches of World War I are classless and isolated. A woman's face indicates an individual story. An industrial scene shows chimneys, not a strike.
Isolated figures
# # #
La Commune, a civil war with no social content:
The Paris Commune:
A civil war (1871)
Legislative elections bring monarchists to power, who choose Adolphe Thiers as head of the government. Thiers allows the German army to have a march of triumph in Paris, chooses Versailles as the new capital and stops paying the National Guard. He is ready to sign peace with Germany.
Absent:
- Ending the moratorium on paying rents, reimbursing debt and pawnbroker sales: disastrous for the poor when unemployment remains high.
- Transferring the government to Versailles means that businesses on the verge of bankruptcy lose a clientele of over 600 deputies, their families and servants.
# # #
Parisian determination to pursue the war with Prussia:
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In contrast to the provinces, Paris voted massively of republican candidates and for the pursuit of the war and oppose Thiers. Most battalions of the garde refuse to accept the authority of Versailles.
Absent:
- The incompetence of many generals and the widespread suspicion of their treason.
- The suicidal Buzenval attack.
- The shooting of January 23.
- The belief that Versailles preferred peace with the Prussians to accepting Parisian social demands.
# # #
The conflict
Picture of Louise Michel: more below.
On March 18 1871, the drama explodes. Thiers orders the National Guard to take hold of the cannons on the Montmartre hillside. Furious, the Parisians oppose that, as does Louise Michel. Thiers orders his troops to leave the town, to besiege it. The whole city revolts and representatives of the Commune of Paris who adopt the red flag in replacement of the tricolor.
# # #
La Commune: one sentence, and transformative measures left out
[Paris wants to] be free, govern itself, invent a new society: separate Church and State, secularize schools, liberate the press, open museums to the public.
Omitted:
- That these changes inevitable with industrialization, the free museums excepted. The Republic adopts them a decade later.
- La Commune's transformative measures: Women's cooperatives, worker-run enterprises whose owners had left, public establishments run by employees (decree in préparation).
# # #
Violence: acknowledge that of the army*...
*Obligatory, given the appellation "Bloody Week:"
Wishing to get it over with,* Versaillais troops enter Paris [and engage in a violence] without limits during Bloody Week (May 21-28 1871), leading to at least 10,000 dead. Judicial sessions succeed military repression with condemnations to death, to prison or else — as for Louise Michel — to New-Caledonia (see chapter 8 p. 240).
*A suggestion that the unprecedented ferocity was rational.
Omitted:
- That officers encourage carnage with the government's tacit agreement.
- That they engage in extra-judicial killings.
...and put the six executions by a single Communard fanatic on par with it:
"The Communards too plunge into a revolutionary logic of violence [what?] , with the execution of several hostages."
How can "several" compare with "at least 10,000?" The writer does not care enough to think through his (or her) account.
# # #
A single figure, Louise Michel, replaces all the Communards:
Left, her arrest. Right, the fires associated with La Commune, with no mention of the army's equal responsibility.
Alternative:
Zoom (please scroll down)
"Construction workers' homage to our elders who died for la Commune."
Louise Michel (shown on the banner to the left) is one of many Communards.
Underscoring a single actor enlivens an account...
...that divorced from concrete interests is incomprehensible and reinforces the chimerical individualism that huge companies use ads to promote.
Corner of rues de Tolbiac and Nationale, 13th
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