THE 2019 VERSION EMPHASIZES ELITES, HAS INDIVIDUALS REPLACE THE MASSES AND OMITS SOCIAL FORCES
French school programs follow a national pattern. So while the presentation changes according to editor, the point of view remains the same.
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Left, top-hatted men behind the well-dressed woman underscore the privileged as a whole, while the soldiers in the trenches of World War I are alone. Right, a series of isolated figures. (Versions of the program of 2019, which in 2025 had not changed)
La Commune, a civil war without 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.
- Monarchists' return to power exasperates the Parisian population. Nothing is said of the economic issues: the end of the siege's moratorium on rents, debts and pawnbrokers' sales, which would devastate the already starving poor, and impact of transferring the government to Versailles on small businesses that the siege has greatly harmed and who now lose the clientele of over 600 deputies, with their families and servants.
- The widely-held belief that Versailles wishes to make peace with the Prussians out of fear of Parisian social demands is not mentioned either.
2. Communards vs. "Versaillais"
- Industrialization would have brought the changes mentioned in any case (except for the free museums): La Commune's transformative measures, notably women's cooperatives and having workers run factories whose owners have left, are omitted.
[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.
- Louise Michel is not only singled out but given a picture.
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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.
On violence
- Nothing is said of of the officers' encouraging carnage or presiding over extra-judicial shootings.
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).
- "The Communards too plunge into a revolutionary logic of violence, with the execution of several hostages." That is, the six unjustified shootings.
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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.
Corner, rues de Tolbiac and Nationale, 13th
That downplaying of a major insurrection
resembles the attitude to a rally
during which demonstrators peacefully shut down
the Grand Central railway station in New York...
Close to a thousand demonstrators at Grand Central Station, April 8, 2025
Only a Turkish and a small American*
tv station covered it.
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