The fires of Paris (New Yorker, December 22, 2014)

 The past as the mirror of the present.

THE FIRES OF PARIS

Why do people still fight about the Paris Commune?

BY ADAM GOPNIK

 
 
 
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The Communards pulled down the statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was one of the four great traumas that shaped modern France. It stands alongside the 1789Revolution, the ascent of Vichy, in 1940, and (odd though it seems, given how nonviolent and small-scale they were) the Events of May, 1968. Other, more outward-bending crises—the Napoleonic campaigns, the two World Wars, the battle for Algeria—made as much noise and cost far more lives, but they now belong to the settled, archival past. That Napoleon was a bad man but a big figure, that the Great War was a valiant folly, that the war in Algeria could have ended only with Algerian independence: these are easy to assent to now. The four civic crises belong to the available, still contested past, the one that hangs around and starts living arguments. People ask whether the Revolution, with a little luck and better leadership, could have avoided the Terror and Bonaparte’s subsequent dictatorship, just as they argue over whether May of ’68 was a long-overdue assertion of liberty against hierarchy or the beginning of an infantile appeal to pleasure over value.

The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him. The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makesit a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him. The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makes it a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.

Then, in February of 1871, new legislative elections were held throughout France, and a majority returned in favor of an as yet ill-defined form of republican royalism. The Assembly, led by the aging statesman Adolphe Thiers—a politician under the Second Republic, who had been don’t-poke-the-bear wise about the war with the Germans before it started—soon declared itself the Third Republic. The people of Paris, always farther to the left than the rest of France, feared that the new republic would be republican in name only, and began organizing their own, alternative regime in the capital. A confrontation between what remained of the regular French Army, the Versaillais, and Paris’s popular militia, known as the National Guard, ended with the death of two generals, and the royalist-minded government fled Paris for Versailles, the old seat of the French kings. In Paris, a left-wing Communard government, protected by the National Guard, rose up and seized power, and for about two months that spring tried to rule on radical principles. It made various feints at self-organization, and offered statements of purpose that still seem prophetically advanced—particularly the boldly feminist ones. It also insulted the clergy and the few remaining rich people, and committed mostly disorganized acts of looting and reprisal against its ancient political enemies, including tearing down Thiers’s house and toppling the Place Vendôme column with its statue of Napoleon. (It’s back.)

The Versaillais then invaded Paris and, with minimal military difficulty, though at maximal human cost, reconquered the city. The Communards, as they were crushed by the advancing and brutal Versaillais, set fire to much of the city, including the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground, though whether all the fires were the result of a deliberate nihilistic policy set by sinister female “pétroleuses,” proto-suicide bombers, or a largely accidental result of the general chaos and violence is one of the many things that are still, violently, debated.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/fires-paris