VI.3.3. TWO HISTORIANS FIGHT BACK

Menu: 6.3.3. Two historians fight back

BUT THEY ARE OUTSIDE THE ACADEMIC CIRCUIT

Michèle Audin is a university professor, but as a mathematician.  Emmanuel Brandely is a high school teacher.

Discussion at a progressive bookstore on May 23 (2024), a date chosen to call up Bloody Week (May 22-28, 1871) in a neighborhood where desperate fighting took place.

Bloody Week (2021)

Historians against the Commune (2024)

The time has come "to consider the human beings that were these cadavers with respect, to not let them disappear again — which means looking at who they were and what they did."

-- Michèle Audin, Bloody Week, p.9.

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Next,

"All I did was add"

"ALL I DID WAS ADD"

"OTHERS COULD HAVE DONE THAT IF THEY HAD WANTED TO," WROTE MICHÈLE AUDIN AFTER CONSULTING CEMETERY RECORDS 

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

The point of departure for right-wing accounts in the past and now: The Convulsions of Paris by the reactionary Maxime du Camp, 1879 

• He declares 6500 Communard 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. A British conservative who backs Brexit and British imperialism, he is considered one of the current specialists on 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 view...

A view of Paris on May 24, 1871

   Illustration

 Passers-by remove the corpses, as required after an action.

The Triumph of Order by Ernest Pichio, 1877 / zoom

And the records Audin studied confirm it.

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 the mass graves. Construction workers would come upon until the turn of the century.

An excerpt from her Table of Contents: 

 

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

 

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My additions:

• Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries of the French Revolution, by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparable critique of the French Revolution,  (French edition 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 an installation that masks the vestige of the Louvre's rampart, which appears at the same time (2020). Is language that is opaque and pretentious a trend that disguises conservatism? 

The turn to the right 

applies to historiography as a whole.

It dates from about 1980.

If the political left grows

that will change.

End of this section.

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The next section,

VI.4,

Fraternity that worked