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 stays the same.
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Versions of the 2019 program, which in 2025 had not changed: 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, isolated figures.
La Commune, a civil war fought for exclusively political reasons:
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.
- Nothing is said of :
2. Communards vs. "Versaillais"
In contrast to the provinces, Paris voted massively of republican candidates and for the pursuit of the war and against Thiers. Most of the Guard battalions refuse to accept the authority of Versailles.
Nothing about the generals' incompetence, the widespread suspicion of treason, the suicidal Buzenval attack, the shooting of January 23 and the belief that Versailles preferred peace with the Prussians than accepting Parisian social demands.
[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.
Industrialization would have brought those changes in any case (except for the free museums): Transformative measures, notably women's cooperatives and worker-run enterprises whose owners had left, are omitted.
- Louise Michel is not only singled out but given a picture (more about that emphasis below):
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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 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.
# # #
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.
The Departure of Deportees on the Virginia, anonymous, end 19th century
-- Musée d'art et d'histoire de Saint-Denis (exhibited)
Michel was one Communard among thousands of foot soldiers, not important enough to be included here though she was on the boat. She became well-known for her speeches and writings, but much later.
# # #
Emphasis on individuals
echoes the omnipresent ads:
They are almost never set in a wider context
or as part of a group of more than a few.
Corner, rues de Tolbiac and Nationale, 13th
Downplaying La Commune resembles
inattention to left-wing rallies in the United States,
leading to a growing challenge of independent media.
Close to a thousand demonstrators at Grand Central Station, April 8, 2025, in a demonstration that only a small Turkish and small American station, Status Coup, covered.
A similar awareness for history
is what these pages promote.
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