Abstract
This is a study of the words spoken (and written), attitudes adopted and physical actions performed by the participants, fellow travellers and enemies of the Paris Commune from which Kristin Ross paints a vivid picture of Communard thought. She reports a conversation between an African from the Papal Guards and Louise Michel (now celebrated in a graphic novel (Talbot and Talbot, 2016)), both on sentry duty, on the effects of life in the Commune. Michel saw a shore that we have to reach, the black sentry saw reading a book with pictures. Both contribute to the political imaginary. Paris and its special places, traditionally symbolic and newly symbolic as the Commune ran its course, provide a powerful backdrop to this story. Ross’ polemical purpose is to challenge the two dominant historiographies of the Commune – official state-communist history and national French republican history: ‘The Communal imagination operated on the preferred scale of the local autonomous unit within an internationalist horizon. It had little room for the nation, or, for that matter, for the market or the state’ (p. 5). She also expands the orthodox chronology and geography of the Commune, usually circumscribed by what she calls the ‘seventy-two Parisian days’ from 18 March 1871 to the massacre at the end of May.
Ross locates the origins of the Commune in the popular reunions (associations) of the late 1860s from which sprang the revolutionary clubs that began to create what Marx termed the ‘working existence’ of the Commune. She takes us into a meeting in a Paris ballroom in 1868 of veterans of the June rising of 1848 with young workers from the International Workers’ Association, and political refugees from London, Brussels and Geneva. The topic was women’s wages (turn on the radio, this topic is still contentious). One speaker did not use the usual ‘Mesdames et Messieurs’ but ‘Citoyennes et citoyens’ – ‘the effect was immense and its reverberations spread outdoors’ (p. 16). This event leads Ross to theorise what she means by the political imaginary, with ‘citoyen’ evoking the class struggle of the present as a direct challenge to the spatialised classless time of the nation evoked by ‘Mesdames et Messieurs’. This is a theme that is driven home with many sharp examples, not least the facts that the Commune welcomed foreign comrades (notably the young Russian Elisabeth Dmitrieff), that the flag of the Commune was not of the French Republic but of the Universal Republic and that the Place Vendôme (whose despised Column was brought down) was renamed Place Internationale. Dmitrieff, who had spent time with Marx in London discussing the emancipatory potential of the traditional Russian peasant commune, was instrumental in the formation of the Women’s Union at the height of the Commune. Ross demonstrates that the idea of producer-owned cooperatives (for example sewing workshops) reverberated through the emerging political imaginary of the commune as a radical alternative to nationalist rhetoric and the bankrupt values of bourgeois society – in a striking phrase, Ross conceptualises the work of the Commune as ‘a set of dismantling acts directed at the state bureaucracy and performed by ordinary men and women’ (p. 38). Prime amongst these was a revolutionary move to ‘integral education’ designed to eliminate the divide between mental and manual labour, to prepare children for a life where everyone worked for the benefit of all. Allied with this was a new concept of art and creativity, characterised by the ‘Château Gaillard’ named for the barricade constructed and signed by an eccentric shoemaker/artist and philosopher of the foot. And this brings us to the enigmatic title of the book: communal luxury, future splendours, the Universal Republic, the reconstruction of cities and the remarkable anarchist geographer Élysée Reclus who, if there were to be one, might be the hero of the book. Reclus, who has the distinction of glowing obituaries from both Peter Kropotkin and Patrick Geddes, celebrated the destruction of the Vendôme Column, built to celebrate Napoleonic imperialism, as a riposte to the pretensions of the imperialist city. Later, William Morris (another sincere supporter of the Commune) called for the demolition of London’s Trafalgar Square and its replacement with an apricot orchard. Ross goes so far as to argue that ‘we might think of the demolition of the column as an initial clearing of the terrain for communal luxury’ (p. 59). Both Reclus and Morris distinguished between useless luxury goods for the rich and ‘shoddy, cheap, makeshift utilitarian goods overproduced for the rest of us’ (p. 62). Communal luxury extends art to all aspects of the life of the community which stretches all the way from the neighbourhoods of Paris to the Universal Republic. Though Ross does not elaborate on the term, this sounds very much like the idea of radical cosmopolitanism which is often seen as a hallmark of great cities, and against which reactionaries and racists rage.
These are only a few of the themes and characters brought to life in this exceptionally rich book – others include the journeys of Kropotkin and Morris to the North and what they found there, the importance of urban isolation and the absence of a worker-peasant alliance for the Commune, the influence of Marx’s ideas about freely associated labour and ‘the archaic societal type in a superior form’ (p. 89, n. 51). Connected with this are comments about the necessity of forging a new relationship with nature – making a link between Communard political imaginary and contemporary ecosocialism. Ross engages with ongoing battles between anarchist communism and collectivist anarchism and, like many before her, recommends non-alignment. This discussion would have been stronger with more attention to the presence of anarchist ideas, often unacknowledged, in a wider variety of writers (see Goodway, 2006). The final chapter revisits Morris, Reclus and Kropotkin and their continuing influence on what should and could replace capitalism and the hierarchic state, problems of scale, problems of federation, urban-rural alliances and world citizenship freed from the subversive powers of the state. It would have been interesting to discover what Ross thinks about the digital revolution.
One of the many strengths of this book is how it reveals echoes of the Commune rumbling through the historical record to the present day. Ross chronicles demonstrations of support for the Commune in London, where several prominent Communards hadsought refuge, and also, for example, in Edinburgh, Dundee, Nottingham, Birmin-gham, Norwich and Dublin, some of which became regular events. Switzerland also sheltered many Communards who strove to keep alive its memory, and Ross reports on some interesting research on the memory of the Commune in the USA. Running through these accounts is the conviction, best expressed by Reclus in 1900, that: ‘In our plan for existence and struggle, it isn’t a little côterie of companions that interests us. It’s the whole world’ (p. 119). Ross, however, draws attention to a certain ‘strategic ambivalence’ on the part of Reclus and, perhaps by implication, anarchists in general, ‘in defense of the small anarchist enclave’ (p. 119). This must be understood in the context of anti-Commune rhetoric and political repression in many jurisdictions. It would be interesting and politically instructive to have a comparative study of the role of foreign comrades in the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil War (the latter already the project of the International Brigade Memorial Trust in the UK, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive in the USA). Commenting on the xenophobia of the anti-Communards, she writes: ‘At issue, of course, for these observers, is not Paris in its customary role of cosmopolitan center for visitors from all over the world; the problem lay, rather, with exactly what sort of visitors could now be found in its streets’ (p. 30). Ross’ deliberate focus on political imaginary leaves little room in her slim volume for the built environment of the city. Not far from Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the Communards’ Wall is a stark monument to the murderous revenge of the state, is L’espace Louise Michel, a meeting place for those who still believe a new world is possible. This passionate and scholarly book keeps that hope alive.