The Paris Commune

Moving away from the order and structure of the Haussmanization of Paris, this week we confront the chaos of the Commune and the city under siege. However, we are also confronting three attempts to make sense of the disorder of the period, whether it be political, social, or cultural. Here we have three very different attempts at doing just that. The Communards of Paris is a neutral political narrative in which the reader is given the completed puzzle first, and then shown the jigsaw pieces that we can arrange in any manner we choose. Civil War in France is a Marxist (can you call Marx’s writings Marxist?) interpretation of the historical class-warfare dialectic that had already doomed the commune before it began. Finally, Paris in Despair is an ambitious if not entirely successful attempt to gauge the importance of this crisis point in the world of art. The Marx piece is well written and powerfully argues as usual, but as full of problems as any base-superstructure interpretation can be. The Communards of Paris is a reasonable attempt to show the contingent nature of Commune period, but falls short in just about every category save that of politics. Paris in Despair is a schizophrenic rendering of cultural changes that could benefit from better organization.

Without wasting too much time on The Communards of Paris, I would like to question the reliance upon documents that illustrate the political history that was rather thoroughly described in the historical introduction. Wouldn’t it have been much more fruitful to include several chapters along the line of chapter 10 (The Commune –‘Festival of the Oppressed’). Perhaps this is just a belated recognition on my part that there weren’t nearly as many “cultural” historians around in 1973 when this book was put together as part of the larger series Documents of Revolution. It is interesting though, that this editor overloads the reader with political documents after having spent most of the historical introduction stressing the relative anarchy of the Paris Commune; the contradiction is heightened when compared to the narratives of order and planning that one gets when confronting the literature of the Second Empire.

Moving back towards order, the next book we confront is Karl Marx, Civil War in France. I have to admit that enjoying a good Marx piece is one of my guilty academic pleasures. For a polemic that is so utterly convincing, yet enraging at the same time, there are none better. Take, for instance, his predictions on foreign policy that both Engels, in 1891 and Lenin post-WWI couldn’t help but highlight. His arrogant and self-assured vision that Alsace-Lorraine would be the spark plug for another war between France and the Prussian state, as well as the wedge that would drive France away from diplomatic cooperation with Bismarck and into the arms of Russia, possibly initiating a war of unprecedented carnage between the Germans and the “Slavonian and Roman races,” is all the more prophetic in the twenty-first century than it was in Lenin’s or Engels’ time. Of course one need only look at initial enthusiasm for war in 1914 on everyone’s part to realize that his peaceful workers’ opposition to war didn’t materialize quite the way he wanted to. Another reason Marx is so convincing is his unparalleled ability to turn elder statesmen like Adolphe Thiers or Jules Favre into spineless bourgeois conspirators hardly more honorable than a jackal and hardly more intelligent than an eggplant. It’s a trope that I imagine many contemporary historians wish was acceptable in the field today.

Of course Marx is equally as aggravating as he is entertaining and insightful. His willingness to simplify world history to dialectic of class conflict clearly ignores the extent to which the lines were not nearly so well defined as he would have them. The Paris Commune was no exception. First of all, his definition of the proletarian ambiguously implies that the Paris Commune was run by wageworkers, but as we saw last week in the Harvey and the Pinckney, a sizable portion of Parisian workers were actually worker-proprietors of their own establishments, and probably more Proudhonist than Blanquist...how to deal with their involvement in the Paris Commune? The National Guard is another ambiguous case. Although numbers were inflated to approximately 300,000 due to the war, a large majority of whom were probably what Marx would define as proletarian, the National Guard is still a bourgeois institution at it’s core...how to define the involvement of bourgeois who defended the commune from Thiers’ forces?

This indeed begs the larger question, of who exactly was participating in the Commune; who was a worker, who was bourgeois, who was a bohême? Marx’s concentration on the base-superstructure of the conflict in Paris leaves out the question of contingency, the acts of the men and women of the commune, personality and policy of the Commune “government.” However, is what Marx so admired about the Commune, is it’s effectiveness given the lack of any central government. In doing this, Marx rather brushes aside the failures of the Commune government to stave off defeat, mostly, because the commune was doomed to defeat in the first place; thus, his heroic “folly.” The most evident absurdities of Civil War in France, however, rest in the idealized portrait of everyday life under the Commune. Take his assertion that, without any law-enforcing power whatsoever, the streets of Paris were safer than ever before. Could it be that anyone with any criminal tendency was involved in fighting the republican army at the Paris front? Or could it be that in the proletarian Commune, Marx saw a brief realization of his “end of history”?

Finally, my own personal pet peeve with Marx is the amount of time he devotes to retrospective military strategizing, especially in suggesting that the Communards should have marched to Versailles to crush Thiers’ forces instead of retreating and consolidating the commune. If the Commune was such a “folly” doomed to failure before the start, what is the point of launching a coordinated military operation? Finally, for a man who rejected war as a solution to problems, he sure envisions himself as a proletarian military genius.

Now we take a giant leap, from the longue durée of Marx to the psychology of artists under siege. Hollis Clayson’s Paris in Despair isn’t one unified study, it is actually three separate studies masquerading as one, one Certeau-ian, one Freudian, and one that Pierre Nora would look upon favorably. The first study, roughly corresponding to the first two sections of the book and in selected passages thereafter treats the changing scene in Paris through the artist’s depiction of changing rituals and routines, such as adapting to the loss of ubiquitous street lighting or making rat consumption a haute bourgeois phenomenon. The second study analyzes the impact of the siege upon the art of a select few during and after the siege. Finally, the third study is a half-hearted attempt on Clayson’s part to give some significance to the lieux de mémoire created in Paris after the memories of the siege had grown cold and more distant.

The first study was by far the most effective of the three. At one point in time, Clayson attempts to explain the significance of a painting depicting a crowd heralding their newly elected leaders simply by implying that this is something that normally wouldn’t happen. Simple, but accurate. Indeed the focus of this study is immediately apparent in the analysis of the Binant series, where one immediately gets the sense that the siege powerfully disrupted normalized ritual behavior and in its stead set up a whole new series of behavioral norms. He is also very clear (indeed, repetitively clear) that the causes of the behavioral change was not the physical presence of the enemy in occupation, but the distance of an enemy that resembles an absentee landlord...invisible, but very real and debatably hegemonic. “Claustrophobia, boredom, restlessness, disrupted routine, thwarted agency, new social roles, and patriotism,” are the most important themes altering the behavior of Parisians. He is also effective at moving away from any class based representation, other than identifying the ubiquity of the bourgeoisie despite their remove from any siege related events, as well as his effective reading of gender divides and the importance of homosocial behavior on the front.

After reading the first study (as well as the title of the book, with the emphasis being on Paris) I was all ready for individualized studies into the effects of the siege upon these six artists’ ordering of Parisian life. What we got instead was a series of abstracted psychological profiles that, most of the time, have little to do with Paris or the siege. I recognize that my reading of this section is significantly jaded; this, in fact, was Clayson’s main preoccupation, namely, the effects of this period on the personal agency of the artist. I do have problems with projecting contemporary psychological evaluations upon historical figures in an attempt to better understand their agency, and in this section is an egregious attempt to do just that.

I cannot reconcile it, however, with the preceding section which was so effective at recognizing a social order in flux in siege-afflicted Paris. Clayson recognized the discontinuity; he expressly advises the reader to avoid seeing this section as a series of case studies, and although he doesn’t want to generalize about common trends, he feels the need to do just that in his conclusion. It would seem that he was unsuccessful at answering the gigantic paragraph of questions he set out for himself in his introduction, and consequently felt the need to tie it all together for his reader. It may seem like I am scrutinizing the purpose of a formal conclusion, but I find that it represents a break from the rest of this section. Furthermore, for his avowal to avoid art that dealt directly with combat, he does spend a lot of time analyzing the homosocial bonds created by the soldiers in their ramparts or their stations, which begs the question as to what Clayson considers to be “combat”; was it strictly the exchange of gunfire and artillery, or doesn’t combat also imply the experience on the front lines during periods where lead balls don’t fill the sky?

I don’t wish to spend too much time dwelling on the final study, an analysis of lieux de mémoire, because once again I feel that it bears little resemblance to either of the two previous studies, and in general, is not convincing. There are one thousand and one different ways of talking about collective memory or collective amnesia, and the events of 1870-1 are prime candidates for such a study, but Clayson’s own study reads like a brief epilogue that doesn’t discuss in any great detail the artist’s agency or the representation of ritual behavior that he had discussed in such detail throughout the rest of the book. Aside from his discussion of Degas’ Place de La Concorde, the reader has very little to link the lieux de mémoire erected to remember 1870-1 with the events of this same period.

My issues with the book stem mostly from the thematic structure of the book. The most effective recurring themes were the gendering of social relations and roles that were ordered differently before the siege, as well as the new ordering of space that took place amidst the claustrophobia in Paris as well as in the proverbial trenches. Unfortunately, the overload of information that fills approximately 375 pages of print detracts from the most effective message Clayson has to offer. When all is said and done, Karl Marx offers a clear, concise, structured and important version of the Paris Commune. Clayson’s account appears to me to be one in a long series of cultural histories in which the author himself/herself reduces the work to relative meaninglessness. At several points, one can sense that Clayson is loathe to draw any wide-ranging or far-reaching conclusions about the significance of his work. Take, for example, his treatment of the significance of the entire siege upon his artists. At various times it is a crisis point or a radical break, where at others it is a bracket or it is non-existent. Ultimately, I can’t discern any larger message other than that everyone’s experience must have been different.

In the end, I liked the Communards of Paris and Civil War in France for their one-sided approach to their problem, and Paris in Despair drove me up a wall for its multi-faceted yet ultimately hollow analysis of culture during the Commune.