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French
history A detailed
account of the wanton destruction of the Paris Commune Nov 29th
2014 | From the print edition Massacre:
The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. By John Merriman. Yale
University Press; 324 pages; $29.99 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk THE crushing
of the Paris Commune is still hard to comprehend. Over two days in May
1871,
130,000 troops from the regular French army entered Paris to suppress
an
improvised city government calling itself La Commune. Historians still
dispute
the figures, but seven days later the army had killed perhaps 10,000
defenders,
unarmed helpers and hapless bystanders. Prisoners were shot out of
hand. Of
36,000 people arrested, around 10,000 were executed, imprisoned or
deported. In
“Massacre”, John Merriman an historian at Yale University, combines two
narrative tasks with considerable art: an overview of the tangled
background
and vivid close shots from the street. The collapse of France’s armies
in an
ill-chosen war with Prussia a year earlier had finished off Napoleon
III’s
authoritarian Second Empire. Radical French cities vied with a
conservative
countryside for control of a fragile new republic. To seal victory, the
Germans
besieged the capital. As food supplies ran low in January 1871, the
French sued
for terms. War-weary voters chose a right-wing government under Adolphe
Thiers,
granting him a mandate in effect to accept a harsh German peace. The Commune
sprang from the sense among Parisians that they had been betrayed.
Radical
candidates had swept its parliamentary seats. Especially in the poorer
quartiers to the east, revulsion at the peace, dreams of fighting on
and anger
at the lifting of a wartime moratorium on debts mingled with hopes for
democratic rights and social reform. When, on
March 18th, Thiers fumbled an attempt to regain control in Paris from a
radicalised militia, units of the regular army sided with the militia.
In some
panic, Thiers recalled the army and the government to Versailles. State
authority having been withdrawn from the capital, Paris elected a
self-governing Commune of around 90 members, though about 20 from
wealthier
arrondissements refused their seats. What radical Paris saw as
autonomy,
conservative Versailles regarded as revolution. What to Versailles was
the
restoration of political order, the Commune took for class war by the
rich. The Commune
was neither socialist nor proletarian. Its members were mostly
self-employed
artisans or minor professionals. Anarchist and Utopian talk rang in
political
clubs. The Commune itself wanted civic autonomy and to remove
grievances that
hurt craftsmen and small businesses. It lasted 72 days, scant time to
achieve anything,
though long enough for Thiers to regroup and crush a spontaneous
insurgency his
government had done much to bring about. Mr Merriman
does a fine job of showing the Commune in close as well as wide shot.
Using the
words of those present, he tells the story from street level, day by
day, and,
in la semaine sanglante itself, almost hour by hour. Rumours fly,
decisions are
taken blind and countermanded after they have been carried out. Horrors
occur
on one street corner. Not far off a comfortable Parisian notes what he
ate for
lunch. As Mr
Merriman’s grim tale of the final week unfolds, the government’s
savagery looks
increasingly deranged. The military result was never in doubt. The
Communards
were outnumbered more than eight to one. Crushing the Commune did not
restore
the monarchy or derail the republic. Within a decade, those convicted
were
amnestied. From 1880 on the Commune’s liberal and democratic aims were
accepted
republican policy. The slaughter appears in that light almost
purposeless and, save
in partisan memory, without lasting effects. Fear and
anger, in short, seem to have taken charge. Right-wing voters,
government and
press painted themselves a lurid caricature of the common people and
then
believed their own invention. Troops were given newspapers vilifying
Parisians
as traitors and degenerates. Hysterical images lived on in books that
treated
the slaughter as due punishment for Communard crimes—shooting officers,
murdering clerical hostages, burning Paris landmarks. Though grievous,
those
excesses paled in comparison with the reprisals. Mr
Merriman’s tale grows tangled at times, leaving readers to find their
path
through the thickets. The great merit of “Massacre” is to focus
attention on
the enormity of the moral outrage perpetrated by a modern state and a
supposedly civilised society against its own citizens. In Mr Merriman’s
retelling, the Paris Commune is a reminder that the worst villainies
are
possible once you have dehumanised your opponent.
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