6.3.3. "ALL I DID WAS ADD"

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

 -- Letter to Emmanuel Brandely, note p.53

Right-wing accounts of the time and current, are based on The Convulsions of Paris by the reactionary Maxime du Camp, 1879: 

• He declares 6500 Communards 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. The British conservative is considered one of the foremost historians of 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 opinion...

A view of Paris on May 24, 1871

   Illustration

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

Le Triomphe de l'ordre by Ernest Pichio, 1877 / zoom

"The Triumph of Order"

...as do the records that Audin studied.

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 mass graves. Construction workers came upon corpses until the turn of the century.

An excerpt from her Table of Contents: 

 

Emmanuel Brandely examines the current revisionism in Historiens contre la Commune (2024). 

Echoes of the Marseillaise: two centuries of the French Revolution, by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparable critique of the French Revolution (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 the installation that hides the rampart vestige at the Louvre. Is the opaque, pretentious language meant to conceal the conservatism that French historians used to reject?  

The turn to the right applies to historiography as a whole. It coincides with multinationals' rise, from about 1980.

But things may be changing.

*     *    * 

Next,

6.3.4.

Resistance emerges

 

6.3.4. RESISTANCE EMERGES

UNDER THE OLD REGIME HIERARCHY BY BIRTH WAS REINFORCED IN SO MANY WAYS THAT AN INSULT AMONG THE HUMBLE WAS, "YOUR FATHER WAS A VALET"

Mentalities changed when the economy did. "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born," was the key line of a play to which Parisians flocked a few years before the Revolution, when capitalism had became impossible to contain.

Is something comparable happening now? Check the huge number of  protests Global Protest Tracker. Some are reactionary because anti-immigrant. But most are progressive.

*     *

In Paris, recent changes suggest an evolution. This mural made in 2024, which covers a third of a métro platform, defies social conflict's usual deletion, demonstrations are worldwide, and once-apolitical Americans rally at symbolic place de la Bastille... 

 Saint-Denis is the working-class suburb where crowds come for soccer games. 

Dark hues refer to the struggle for the eight-hour day.

Bright ones show the effect of that struggle now. 

    March 28, 2026 / Democrats Abroad

        

An hour after that event a massive demonstration for Gaza took place steps away, on the crossroad where workers built a barricade during their first great revolt:  

La Barricade du Faubourg Saint-Antoine by Gaspard Gobaut, 1848

                -- Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited

*     *

Today the conflict is between the globalized capitalists that the far-right backs and democratic socialists who provide solutions to problems that face us all.

Robert Reich

History that reveals 

the conservative way of seeing the past

and suggests a progressive alternative

is part of that fight.

End of this section.

*    *    * 

The next section,

VI.4.

Fraternity that worked

VI.5. AN OMEN AND A TURNING POINT

MENU: 6.5. OMEN & TURNING POINT

SEQUELS

The Cry of the People, graphic novel by Jacques Tardi (Castermann, 2001-4), after the novel by Jean Vautrin, 2001

In brief

• A foretaste of genocide

• Toward the 20th century

*     *     * 

Next,
A foretaste of genocide

A FORETASTE OF GENOCIDE

A QUASI-LEGAL VIOLENCE 

Improvised courts and firing squads, wherever fighting takes place: an estimated 20, plus the important ones at Châtelet and the Luxembourg.

Internet, no source named

The family head stands quietly, arms folded, a posture that many take up and that Versaillais mention with grudging admiration.

Firing Squad, the Mur des Fédérés, May 28 1871, Les Amis de la  Commune / zoom

"We shot about 40 of those creeps ["canaille," bold in the text]. They all died as soldiers. Some folded their arms and held their heads high. Others opened their tunics and cried, 'Fire!' " 

-- Lissagary citing 

"One of the most violent journals of the Belgian bourgeois against the Commune, l'Etoile,"

and other eye-witness accounts from that and similar sources.: Appendix XXVIII

Dehumanized victims

"All great cities have cages for lions [...] when they are opened the hyenas of '93* and the gorillas of the Commune burst out."

-- Théophile Gautier, a point of view interminably repeated.

*The leaders of the Revolution who sent 2000 people to the guillotine.

Individual responsibility weakened

Killings are organized in phases — arrest, escort to prison, judgement, firing squad. Soldiers may not know the outcome, or tell themselves they don't.

Stoicism 

Victims wait in line to be shot.

  

Merry music as background

When the shootings move toward the eastern frontier, soldiers and victims hear polkas played by Prussian orchestras.

-- Vuillaume, My Red Notebooks: the Hostages of rue Haxo (in French)

Nazi death squads in Eastern Europe make local accordionists play as they shoot.

--  The Einsatzgruppen, documentary on RML (French television), October 2, 2017

Denunciations 

Rewards of 500 francs are given for information that leads to the capture of a member of the Central Committee or the Commune. Ordinary people are also denounced by innumerable letters for one's own goals.

-- Louise Michel

"Solid citizens [...] formed purification tribunals in their districts and had their rivals, their creditors, arrested as Communards [...]. The Commune had rejected denunciations, while the police now kept an open register. The avalanche of letters came to 399 823, the official figure, of which 20 at most were signed."

-- Lissagary.
In occupied France the Gestapo also received more denunciations than it could follow
(commentary on the The Crow by Henri Clouzot, 1943, Arte, October 18 2019.
A "crow" was a person who denounced anonymously.)

Transport to prisons in cattle trains, so crowded that prisoners die.  

-- Lissagary citing a letter from the geographer Elysée Reclus
Appendix XLVII

The first concentration camp

(At Satory, next to Versailles)

Claretie

"The Prisoners at Versailles — the Roll Call"

Striped pajamas are all that's missing.

*    *    *

Next,
Toward the 20th century

TOWARD THE 20TH CENTURY

UNIONS AND STRIKES REPLACE REVOLT

In France, the terrible repression of La Commune brought

the end of insurrections and the start of a struggle between

capital and labor that was deeper and more bitter than elsewhere.

It brought:

• The Popular Front of 1936-1939.

• The Vichy regime, the only collaborationist government to be legally elected in Europe.

• The largely left-wing Resistance.

• Because right-wing leaders were in hiding, in prison or shot, the generous social safety net that largely remains.

End of this chapter.

*      *     * 

Next chapter,

VlI.

A Communard bastion erased and transformed: 

The overlooked 13th 

VI.4. FRATERNITY THAT WORKED

MENU: 6.4. FRATERNITY THAT WORKED

BY MOBILIZING THE POOR AND SURMOUNTING EXTRAORDINARY HANDICAPS, COMMUNARDS LEAVE AN EXAMPLE TO PONDER 

They had flaws and made mistakes, but defeat came from the 100,000 p.o.w.s that Bismarck released.

The Barricade at rue Blanche Defended by Women, unsigned, no date / zoom

          -- Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited.

In brief

• Parias take charge of their lives

• Leaders we wish we had

• Victories of La Commune

• Rooted

• "Friends of the Paris Commune"

*     *     *

Next,

6.4.1.

Parias take charge of their lives

VI.4.1. PARIAS TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR LIVES

PEOPLE WHO USUALLY STAY ON THE SIDELINES 

MOBILIZE FOR LA COMMUNE 

 Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, 1844

Those tipplers don't organize. For former peasants the city seems

incomprehensible.

• They feel powerless, dependent and inferior. 

• Palliatives are sociability and living in the present, especially at the tavern.

•  A sense of honor can replace the lack of material goods, and demanding reparation for slights satisfy the ego.

-- The Culture of Poverty by Jeffrey Kaplow, in "The Names of Kings," 1972: 

Eighteenth-century factors that stay relevant.

• Memories of peasant revolts lead to participating in short-term revolts, not long-term organization.

• But:

• Notorious barflies fight on the barricades: "There's hardly time for a drink at the bar."

-- Vallès

• Women of modest origin join in. Here an underclass woman contests a middle-class orator. Another exhorts a baby-holding mom:

Une séance du Club des femmes dans l'église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerois by F. Lix  (" Le Monde illustré," May 20, 1871), zoom 

--  Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited. 

 

• When Belleville's last barricade falls Jules Vallès flees, but no one dares hide him. He comes upon "a canteen lady, in full uniform, a superb creature of 25 with an hourglass figure in her bodice of dark blue. 'I have 15 wounded. You will pass as their doctor.'" She makes him an omelet, wraps white apron around him, gives him her cart and he escapes.

For more of that story, please click.

Excellent series of Guard photos

 

• A father enrolls the last of his sons: "I offer him wholeheartedly to the republican fatherland [...] place him in the battalion of your choice and you will make me extremely happy." 

-- Lissagary, citing a letter of a guard of the 13th district,
whose four older sons are fighting already: Appendice IV
Other sources show similar statements.

An irrefutable sign of engagement: Though half the police leave for Versailles and streets are less lighted, there is very little crime.*

-- As remarked by the Reverend William Gibson of the Methodist Mission

and as other American witness confirm (though most oppose the Commune),

 Paris Babylon and the Story of the Paris Commune by Rupert Christiansen, 1994

* To be sure, there would be fewer pickpockets when many of the wealthy leave after the siege. But one would expect burglaries and violent crime to increase, and the opposite happens. 

Twenty years later, workers learn to strike back through discipline, camaraderie and confronting the boss, that is, with industrialization.

But the disinherited of La Commune
organized spontaneously a generation before

tangible conditions favored it.

*     *     * 

Next,

6.4.2. 

Leaders we wish we had 

VI.4.2. LEADERS WE WISH WE HAD

THE GUARDS' CENTRAL COMMITTEE* VOLUNTARILY CEDED POWER

*Their Central Committee filled the vacuum when the government fled on March 18.

It said "Our mission is over" and explain what a deputy should be:

"CITIZENS,

Our mission is over; we will hand over your City Hall to your newly elected representatives.

Helped by your patience and support, we have correctly finished the difficult work taken up in your name. Thank you; solidarity is a vain word no longer: The Republic is assured.  

If our counsel can influence your decisions, let your most zealous servants express what they await from today's vote. 

CITIZENS,

Do not forget that the men who will serve you best are those you choose among yourselves, living your life, suffering from the same difficulties.

Be as aware of the ambitious as of the parvenus; both will think only of their own interest and will always think themselves indispensable.  

Watch out also for those who like to talk and are incapable of action; they will sacrifice everything to an oratorical effect or a smart phrase. — Avoid as well those whom fortune has favored too much, for he who possesses a fortune is rarely ready to view the worker as a brother.

Finally, seek men who are sincere, men of the People, resolute, active, who go straight and whose honesty is recognized. — Favor those who are not looking for your vote; genuine merit is modest, and it is up to the voters to choose their men, not to them to present themselves. 

"We are sure that if you heed these observations you will finally inaugurate genuine popular representation, you will find representatives who will never think themselves your masters."   

-- The National Guard Central Committee, City Hall, March 25 1871  

# # #

Though many who sign run for office,

they are so averse to personal interest

 that one can hardly read their names. 

*     *     *

Next,

6.4.3.

Victories of La Commune