Today the Wall of the Fédérés remains a sombre, bracing monument to those massacred by the forces of ‘the men of order’. Demonstrations there grew in size and intensity during the confrontations of May 1968 and again three years later on the centenary of the Commune. In 1983, the wall was classified as an historical monument, commemorating the ultimate victory of the French Republic for which the Communards fought.43
The former Communard Jules Vallès dedicated his L’Insurgé, an autobiographical novel,
To all those,
Victims of social injustice,
Who take up arms against the evil in the world
And who formed,
Under the flag of the Commune,
A great federation of those who suffer.44
Jean-Baptiste Clément, who managed to escape to Belgium and then London and was condemned to death by Versailles, had written Le temps de cérises in 1866. Parisians had sung it during both the Prussian and the Versaillais sieges. He now dedicated it ‘to valiant Citizen Louise, the volunteer doctor’s assistant of rue Fontaine-au-Roi, Sunday, 28 May 1871’:
I will always love the time of the cherries.
I will keep this time, in my heart,
An open wound.45
Le temps de cérises was now the good old days, when Parisians were free.46
When I go up to the Wall of the Fédérés, as nightfall approaches, the leaves are falling, and all is still, I can almost hear the words of Thomas Wolfe: ‘Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.’47
Notes
Prologue
1.Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 511; Roger Price, ‘Napoleon III’, in John Merriman and Jay Winter, eds., Europe 1789 to 1914, vol. 3 (Detroit, 2006), p. 1590.
2.Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, NJ, 1979); John M. Merriman, Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–51 (New Haven, CT, 1978).
3.Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (New York, 1958).
4.Geoffrey Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71 (New York, 2003), p. 25; David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995), p. 255; Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville 1852–1871 (1997), pp. 12–14, 135. Unless otherwise noted, all books cited were published in Paris.
5.Gaillard, Paris, p. 14.
6.Ibid., p. 191; Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 180–1; Dominique Kalifa, Les Bas-fonds: Histoire d’un imaginaire (2013), p. 27, quoting Jules Janin, L’Été à Paris (1843) and Mémoires de M. Claude (1881–85), pp. 47, 52ff. See Louis Chevalier, Dangerous Classes and Laboring Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973).
7.Jordan, Transforming Paris, pp. 7, 224, 259–60.
8.See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA, 1999).
9.Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 109.
10.Ibid., pp. 109–10, 188–9; Gaillard, Paris, pp. 537–53, 568–71.
11.Higonnet, Paris, pp. 174, 353.
12.Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995), pp. 71–2; see Jordan, Transforming Paris, Chapter 10 (‘Money’), pp. 227–45.
13.John Merriman, Aux marges de la ville: faubourgs et banlieues en France 1815–1870 (1994), p. 292; Éric Fournier, Paris en ruines: du Paris haussmannien au Paris communard (2008), pp. 22–6; John Merriman, Police Stories (New York, 2005); Gaillard, Paris, pp. 204–5, 568–71. Between 1852 and 1859, 4,349 houses were destroyed, 13 per cent of old Paris. Families forced from their apartments received little more than the equivalent of a few pounds by virtue of a law in 1841 and an imperial decree in 1852.
14.Higonnet, Paris, pp. 196–7, 250–52, 268; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
15.Jacques Hillairet, ed., Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979).
16.Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (New York, 1970), p. 59.
17.Gaillard, Paris, pp. 41–4, 61, 393–9; Jordan, Transforming Paris, pp. 206–7; Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (New York, 1999), p. 24.
18.Georges Duveau, La Vie ouvrière sous le Second Empire (1946), p. 203; Gaillard, Paris, p. 47; Merriman, Aux marges de la ville, p. 280.
19.John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (New York, 1991), p. 76.
20.Jacques Rougerie, Paris Libre 1871 (1971), p. 19; Merriman, Aux marges de la ville, pp. 301–3.
21.Louis Lazare, Les Quartiers de l’est de Paris et les Communes suburbaines (1870), pp. 102, 243.
22.Higonnet, Paris, p. 91.
23.Olivier Marion, ‘La vie religieuse pendant la Commune de 1871’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Paris-X Nanterre, 1981), pp. 20–2; Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Monseigneur Darboy (1813–1871) (2011), pp. 77–80; Charles Chauvin, Mgr Darboy, archêveque de Paris, otage de la Commune (1813–1871) (2011), p. 86. The Church would later classify as a ‘missionary’ area any place in which less than 20 per cent of the population fulfilled their Easter obligations.
24.Boudon, Monseigneur Darboy, p. 82; S. Sakharov, Lettres au Père Duchêne pendant la Commune de Paris (1934), p. 18; Marion, ‘La vie religieuse’, pp. 23–6; S. Froumov, La Commune de Paris et la démocratisation de l’école (Moscow, 1964), pp. 30–1, 86–90; Carolyn Eichner, ‘“We Must Shoot the Priests”: Revolutionary Women and Anti-Clericalism in the Paris Commune of 1871’, in Lucia Carle and Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, Cities Under Siege/Situazioni d’Assedio/États de Siège (Florence, 2002), pp. 267–8.
25.Jacques Rougerie, Procès des Communards (1964), p. 33; Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 12–13. See Duveau, La vie ouvrière.
26.Eichner, ‘“We Must Shoot the Priests”’, p. 269.
27.Laure Godineau, La Commune de Paris par ceux qui l’ont vécue (2010), pp. 16–18.
28.Luc Willette, Raoul Rigault, 25 ans, Communard, chef de police (1984), p. 121; Gaston Da Costa, Mémoires d’un Communard: la Commune vécue (2009), p. 256; Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 38.
29.Maxime Vuillaume, Mes Cahiers rouges au temps de la Commune (1971), pp. 219–22; Auguste Lepage, Les cafés artistiques et littéraires de Paris (1882), p. 79; Pierre Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1948), p. 249.
30.Robert Boudry, ‘Courbet et la fédération des artistes’, Europe 29: 64–5 (April–May 1951), p. 122; Ernest A. Vizetelly, My Adventures in the Commune (n.p., 2009 [1914]), p. 55; Denis Arthur Bingham, Recollections of Paris, vol. 2 (London, 1896), p. 117.
31.Boudry, ‘Courbet et la fédération des artistes’, pp. 122–3.
32.Archives of the Prefecture of Police (hereafter APP), Ba 1020, reports of 27 June and 4 July 1870; Jean Péridier, La Commune et les artistes: Pottier, Courbet, Vallès, J.B. Clément (1980), pp. 59–61.
33.Frederic Harrison, ‘The Revolution and the Commune’, Fortnightly Review 53:9 (May 1871), p. 563; Alain Dalotel, Alain Faure and Jean-Claude Freiermuth, Aux origines de la Commune: le mouvement des réunions publics à Paris, 1868–70 (1980), pp. 295–6; S. Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870–71) (Chicago, 2002), p. 190; Gould, Insurgent Identities, pp. 123–31. Legitimists, who wanted a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, shared republican and socialist rejection of imperial centralised authoritarianism.
34.Vuillaume, Mes Cahiers rouges, pp. 189–90.
35.Archives de la Défense, 8J 3e conseil de guerre 3 dossier 554 (all subsequent 8J dossiers are from these archives in Vincennes); APP, Ba 892. Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 13–16, 21–8, 32–6; Charles Prolès, Raoul Rigault: La préfecture de police sous La Commune, les otages (1898), pp. 11–15; Jules Forni, Raoul Rigault, procureur de la Commune (1871), pp. 3–13; Auguste Lepage, Les cafés artistiques et littérai
res de Paris (1882), pp. 61–4, 78–9, 155; Robert Courtine, La vie parisienne: Cafés et restaurants des boulevards, 1814–1914 (1984), p. 267.
36.Forni, Raoul Rigault, pp. 41–51; Henry Bauer, Mémoires d’un jeune homme (1895), pp. 89–92.
37.Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 33–5; Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–1892 (Berkeley, CA, 1981), p. 33.
38.Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 33–48; Maurice Choury, Les damnés de la terre, 1871 (1970), p. 80; Forni, Raoul Rigault, pp. 20, 77; Prolès, Raoul Rigault, pp. 18–22, 28.
39.Jean Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père (1981), pp. 143–4.
40.Forni, Raoul Rigault, pp. 16–17; Prolès, Raoul Rigault, pp. 25–6; Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 42–8.
41.Dalotel, Alain, Alain Faure and Jean-Claude Freiermuth, Aux origines de la Commune: le mouvement des réunions publics à Paris, 1868–70 (1980).
42.Edwards, Stewart, p. 30; Sutter-Laumann, Histoire d’un trente sous (1870–1871) (1891), pp. 14–15.
43.Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 36.
1 War and the Collapse of the Empire
1.Geoffrey Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71 (New York, 2003), p. 23.
2.Ibid., p. 32.
3.Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (New York, 1965), p. 62.
4.Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 13–14.
5.Horne, The Fall of Paris, p. 66; Tombs, The War Against Paris, pp. 13–15.
6.Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London, 1961), pp. 40–71; Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 46–64, 74–80.
7.Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 67–8, 85–91.
8.Horne, The Fall of Paris, p. 72. Trochu’s warning came on August 10.
9.Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 47–8; Horne, The Fall of Paris, pp. 71–4. Eudes was subsequently condemned to death for his part, but was instead sent to prison.
10.Horne, The Fall of Paris, pp. 67–70; Tombs, The War Against Paris, pp. 15–21.
11.Pascal Chambon, ‘1871, la fin de la Garde nationale’, in Claude Latta, ed., La Commune de 1871: L’événement les hommes et la mémoire (Saint-Etienne, 2004), p. 79; Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (London 1997), p. 46.
12.Stéphane Rials, Nouvelle histoire de Paris de Trochu à Thiers 1870–1873 (1985), p. 55.
13.Carolyn Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington, IN, 2004), pp. 19–21.
14.Sutter-Laumann, Histoire d’un trente sous (1870–1871) (1891), pp. 27–30, 33, 45–9.
15.This account draws on Rials, Nouvelle histoire, pp. 56–69.
16.Ibid., p. 69. The republic had already been proclaimed in Lyon and Marseille.
17.Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 59–60.
18.Horne, The Fall of Paris, p. 84; Rials, Nouvelle histoire, p. 73. Napoleon III died in exile in England in January 1873.
19.Luc Willette, Raoul Rigault, 25 ans, Communard, chef de police (1984), pp. 52–8; Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–1892 (Berkeley, CA, 1981), pp. 33–4.
20.Gérard Dittmar, Belleville de l’Annexation à la Commune (2007), p. 57; Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 87; Odile Krakovitch, ‘Les femmes de Montmartre et Clemenceau durant le siège de Paris: de l’action sociale à l’action politique’, in Latta, ed., La Commune de 1871, pp. 43–58.
21.Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre 1871 (1971), p. 74; Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition, pp. 55, 64.
22.See Robert Tombs’s excellent analysis in The Paris Commune, pp. 73–7.
23.Willette, Raoul Rigault, p. 54; Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 56.
24.Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 286–8; Horne, The Fall of Paris, pp. 140–6.
25.Villiers du Terrage, Baron Marc de, Histoire des clubs de femmes et des Légions d’Amazones 1793–1848–1871 (1910), pp. 383–6.
26.Sutter-Laumann, Histoire, pp. 75–7, 201–9.
27.Ibid.; Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organisations in the Paris Commune of 1871 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), pp. 29–34; Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 60–4. Louis Blanc and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, important personages in 1848, were also there.
28.Tombs, The Paris Commune, pp. 52, 73; Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 75–6.
29.Horne, The Fall of Paris (New York, 2007 edition), pp. 131–4.
30.Ibid., pp. 220–4.
31.Jean Dubois, À travers les oeuvres des écrivains, les revues et les journaux: Vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 à 1872 (1962), pp. 179–80.
32.Maurice Choury, Les damnés de la terre, 1871 (1970), p. 36; Dittmar, Belleville, pp. 188–9, 199–200, 206; Dubois, À travers les oeuvres, p. 265; Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 73.
33.Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 59; Willette, Raoul Rigault, pp. 68–70.
34.Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 60. The commanders of thirty-five National Guard battalions attempted to generate resistance to German armies, but to no avail.
35.Johnson, The Paradise of Association, pp. 55–64.
36.Pierre Lévêque, ‘Les courants politiques de la Commune de Paris’, in Latta, ed., La Commune de 1871, p. 33; Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 62.
37.Maurice Reclus, Monsieur Thiers (1929), pp. 12–25, 53; Camille de Meaux, Souvenirs politiques, 1871–1877 (1905), p. 48.
38.Joseph-Alfred Foulon, Histoire de la vie et des oeuvres de Mgr Darboy, archevêque de Paris (1889), p. 509; Joseph Abel Guillermin, Vie de Mgr Darboy, archevêque de Paris, mis à mort en haine de la foi le 24 mai 1871 (1888), p. 313.
39.Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, p. 21; Johnson, The Paradise of Association, pp. 68–70.
40.Robert Tombs, ‘L’année terrible, 1870–71’, Historical Journal 35:3 (1992), p. 717–18; Bernard Accoyer, ed., De l’Empire à la République: les comités secrets au Parlement, 1870–1871 (2011), pp. 33–8.
41.Élie Reclus, La Commune de Paris au jour le jour (2001), pp. 174–5. Thiers famously said that the republic ‘will be conservative or it will not be’.
42.Quentin Deluermoz, Policiers dans la Ville: La Construction d’un ordre public à Paris 1854–1914 (2012), pp. 151–3; Denis Arthur Bingham, Recollections of Paris, vol. 2 (London, 1896), p. 19.
43.Dale Lothrop Clifford, ‘Aux armes citoyens! The National Guard in the Paris Commune of 1871’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tennessee, 1975), p. 116.
44.Clifford, ‘Aux armes citoyens!’, p. 125 ; Pierre Guiral, Adolphe Thiers (1986), pp. 376, 393; Jules Simon, The Government of M. Thiers, vol. 1 (New York, 1879), p. 291.
45.Jean-François Lecaillon, ed., La Commune de Paris racontée par les Parisiens (2009), p. 19; Tombs, ‘L’année terrible’, pp. 719–21.
46.Maxime Vuillaume, Mes Cahiers rouges au temps de la Commune (1971) p. 158.
47.Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 118–19.
48.Tombs, The Paris Commune, p. 66.
49.Adolphe Thiers, Memoirs of M. Thiers 1870–1873 (New York, 1973), pp. 121, 136.
50.Jules Simon, The Government of M. Thiers, vol. 1 (New York, 1879), pp. 286–90.
51.De Meaux, Souvenirs politiques, pp. 43–5; Léonce Dupont, Souvenirs de Versailles pendant la Commune (1881), p. 21; Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 166; Maurice Garçon, ‘Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris’, Revue de Paris 12 (December 1955), p. 26.
52.Dupont, Souvenirs de Versailles, pp. 85–90, 110–11; Hector Pessard, Mes petits papiers, 1871–73 (1887), pp. 11, 40–2.
2 The Birth of the Commune
1.Dale Lothrop Clifford, ‘Aux armes citoyens! The National Guard in the Paris Commune of 1871’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tennessee, 1975), p. 125; Pierre Guiral, Adolphe Thiers (1986), pp. 376, 393; Jules Simon, The Government of M. Thiers, vol. 1 (New York, 1879), p. 291.
2.Jean-Claude Freiermuth,
‘L’armée et l’ordre en 1870–71: le cas Vinoy’, in Philippe Vigier et al., eds., Maintien de l’ordre et police en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle (1987), pp. 42–7; Elihu Benjamin Washburne, Franco-German War and Insurrection of the Commune: Correspondence of E. B. Washburne (Washington, DC, 1878).
3.Clifford, ‘Aux armes citoyens!’, pp. 119–127; Phillip Martin Johnson, The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organisations in the Paris Commune of 1871 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), pp. 2–3, 277–9; Jean Baronnet, ed., Enquête sur la Commune de Paris (La Revue Blanche) (2011), p. 93; Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 129; Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris 1871 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 39–43.
4.Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 137–40; Stéphane Rials, Nouvelle histoire de Paris de Trochu à Thiers 1870–1873 (1985), pp. 251–2.
5.Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris (Ithaca, 1996), p. 25.
6.Tombs, The War Against Paris, pp. 43–4.
7.François du Barail (Général), Mes souvenirs, vol. 3 (1898), pp. 246–7.
8.Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca, NY, 1973), pp. 56–62.
9.Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 140.
10.Carolyn Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington, IN, 2004), p. 22; Gullickson, Unruly Women, pp. 25–8; Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 137–9.
11.Edith Thomas, Louise Michel (1980), pp. 21, 77–8, 87–8; Louise Michel, Lowry Bullitt and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel (Alabama, 1981); William Serman, La Commune de Paris (1986), p. 290; Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, pp. 2–3, 22, 48–9.
12.Edwards, The Communards, pp. 62–3; Sutter-Laumann, Histoire d’un trente sous (1891), p. 225.
13.Gullickson, Unruly Women, pp. 35–6; Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards, pp. 63–5.
14.Gullickson, Unruly Women, p. 43; Tombs, The War Against Paris, pp. 46–7.
15.Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 137–42.
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