Paris from fresh perspectives: WHOSE VIOLENCE? THE COMEBACK OF THE VERSAILLAIS MYTH

Thursday, January 22, 2015

WHOSE VIOLENCE? THE COMEBACK OF THE VERSAILLAIS MYTH

UNTIL THE 1980's, THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE ARMY'S BARBARISM AND LA COMMUNE'S PACIFISM WAS CONSIDERED SELF-EVIDENT

Since then, La Commune has been "demystified" by emphasizing its rare executions and downplaying the repression's carnage, to imply that the violence was almost the same.

That revisionism is contested.

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Real Communard violence:

La Commune did arrest 70 guards and clergymen at the start of the conflict, in reprisal for Versailles killings, as bargaining chips and to slow down shootings,* that is, in self-defense.

The Arrest of Monseigneur Darboy, newspaper illustration / zoom

*During her deportation Louise Michel met 31 Communards whom the brief cessation of shootings after those arrests had saved.

Except for the shootings of the Archbishop and five other hostages — inexcusable but due to Ferré alone — it ordered only nine executions, for reasons that are considered legitimate in wartime:

1. A man who sold plans of a fort to Versailles, the only execution before Bloody Week.

-- Lissagary, Annex XVI

2. A man who tried to corrupt a Commune member.

-- Vuillaume, The Shooting on Pont Neuf, "Mes Cahiers Rouges ", p.355

3.4.5. Three spies.

6.7.8.9. The commander accused of firing on the crowd at City Hall on January 22 and three policemen, also due to Ferré. Vuillaume thinks that shooting due to Breton fanatics but since the commander said only that he "did his duty," the mistake is understandable.

-- Vuillaume, Gustave Chaudey, "My Red Notebooks," pp. 435-484

The killings by mobs described above were due to panic. Commune members tried to stop them.

A decree ordering shootings in reprisal was not applied. For the general absence of coercion, please click and scroll down.

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Current revisionism emphasizes those few executions to claim "an evolution of the revolutionary movement toward violence..."

-- Citation from the schoolbook on the next page.

...and downplays army carnage.

The point of departure for right-wing accounts generally: The Convulsions of Paris, 1879, by the reactionary Maxime du Camp. He declares 6500 Communard dead during Bloody Wake, 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.* is a Considered with Quentin Deluermoz the leading authority on La Commune though it is not his specialty, he is a conservative who backs Brexit and British imperialism.

French academia has shown him great respect.

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Michèle Audin and Braudely, the writers introduced at the start of this section, challenge that view: "All I did was add..." says Audin, a well-known mathematician, of her consultation of cemetery records. "Others could have done that if they had wanted to."

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

The records she 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 were found until the turn of the century.

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

An excerpt of her Table of Contents:

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

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My grains of salt:

Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries of the French Revolution, by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparable critique of the French Revolution, also in a year of commemoration (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).