Abstract
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”1 With this famous restatement of Hegel, Marx opens The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to preface his interpretation of the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the establishment of the Second Empire. Although, in Marx’s theatrical paradigm, the bourgeoisie of the Republic of 1793 sought their ideals and their art forms (and self deceptions) in the Roman Republic, it took heroism, terror and civil war to bring about the Revolution which was played out on the level of high tragedy. The events of 1848–1851, on the contrary, were a farcical parody of 1793–1795, and the society presided over by Louis Bonaparte a factitious transformation of social relationships into what Marx describes as a play of shadows that have lost their bodies. In contrast to his critique of the failed revolution of 1848, Marx praises the Commune of 1871, in The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, as a heroic people’s revolution. And, in his introduction to this work, Engels characterizes the Commune as a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, the Commune established a prototype for transformative communal action.
What good were dramas? The true drama was in the streets, so what good were orchestras? We had cannon.
Louise Michel, Les Mémoires
You ’d think she was Sarah Bernhardt playing Doña Sol, surrounded by a troupe of unemployed wandering players .... She is far and away the most interesting figure in the Third Republic.
Albert Wolff, Le Figaro
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Notes
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), J. Wedermeyer trans., p. 15. Hayden White in his Metahistory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) similarly describes the history of the nineteenth century in terms of literary genres, including tragedy and comedy. He includes the Marxist paradigm for the unfolding of history—from primitive communism to a higher level of communism mediated by capitalism and the technological mastery of nature-within the category of comedy.
Karl Marx, Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York: International Publishers, 1968) p. 69.
Ibid., p.68.
Ibid., p.76.
Even Michelet, so sensitive to the persecution of women in his La Sorcière, for example, repeats the conventional nineteenth century wisdom in his, The Women of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: H. C. Baird, 1855), Meta Roberts Pennington trans., by maintaining that the disorder of society arises from women not knowing their place as maternal and self sacrificial nurturers of husbands and sons.
Maxime du camp, Les convulsions de Paris 111 (Paris: Hachette, 1878–80) pp. 113–11. My translation. It is perhaps more surprising to find that the socialist Zola shared Du Camp’s negative view of the Commune as a mayhem in which women/prostitute incendiaries engaged in an orgy of destruction. See in particular the last chapter of his novel on the Franco-Prussian war, La Débâcle (1892).
Marie Marmo Mullaney, “Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel,” Signs (1990), vol.15, no.21, pp.300–322.
Louise Michel, Mémoires (Paris: E. Roy, 1886) i. My translation.
Louise Michel, Le Claque-Dents (Paris: E.Dentu). The date of the publication is unspecified but belongs to the period after Michel’s return from New Caledonia in 1880.
Roy’s illustration incorporates many of the details of Delacroix’ famous “Liberty on the Barricades.” Although a celebration of the 1830 revolution and a paeon to liberty, the painting embodies male anxiety as Marianne, a militant, bare-breasted woman of the people, strides over emasculated male bodies lying impotent at her feet. For a detailed analysis of Delacroix’ painting see Marcia Pointon’s “Liberty on the Barricades” in Sian Reynolds, ed., Women State and Revolution (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), pp. 25–43.
For a more recent example of this strategy, see Ulrika Hanna Meinhofs “Revolting Women: Subversion and its Media representation in West Germany and Britain,” in Women, State and Revolution.
Edith Thomas, Les pétroleuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
Marx remarks on the irony in the fact that whereas the forces of Versailles, under the orders of Thiers, engaged in a massacre in Paris in which at least 35,000 (some estimates go as high as 100,000) people were killed, they subsequently represented the victims as monsters.
Louise Michel, La Commune (Paris: Stock, 1898), p. 316.
See Thomas, p. 205.
Michel became enraged when she realized that other imprisoned anarchists would not be pardoned and smashed her cell. A psychiatrist was called in who declared her mad, temporarily resolving a difficult situation for the government. In her Mémoires (p.402), Michel writes that women, confronted by critical situations, have to be a thousand times calmer than men. Any unusual manifestation of pain can serve as an excuse for sending them to an asylum where they may very well remain buried and actually become mad. For an analysis of the collaboration between the government and the medical establishment in the repression of women dissidents see Yannick Ripa, Women and Madness, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Catherine du Peloux Menagé trans., pp. 9–31.
I borrow this useful neologism from Ellen Moers’ Literary Women, Part II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.)
Alexandre Hepp, Paris Patraque, (Paris: Dentu, 1884), p. 194.
“Louise Michel,” by Gilbert Martin in Raoul Deberdt, La Caricature et l’humour français au XlXme siècle, (Paris: Larousse, circa 1890, undated).
For translations of quotations from the Mémoires—unless otherwise indicated—I refer to Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter, editors and translators of Les Mémoires as The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1981). See p. 26.
Ibid., p. 16.
M. M. Bakhtin’s analysis of such mediaeval reversals of hierarchy in the introduction to his, Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1968), H. Iswolsky trans., is relevant to Michel’s fascination with the Daibleries. Bakhtin interprets such carnivals as both a release and containment of revolutionary energies. Later, in Paris, Michel was critical of the bohemians’ version of carnival which she interpreted as self indulgent and irrelevant to any social transformation. Her own practical jokes could be impish as when she and a friend painted ears in red chalk on the houses of “horrible people”—she was a teacher in her own private school at Audeloncourt at the time. Or they could be risky. Years later, during the first days of the Commune, she accepted a challenge to go to Versailles without being found out. She did, and, in the very grounds of the chateau, converted one of the Versailles soldiers to the cause of the Commune. See Penelope Williams, Louise Michel (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), Edith Thomas trans., pp. 83–84. My own reading of Louise Michel is very much indebted to the scrupulous scholarship of Thomas.
The Red Virgin, p. 18.
Ibid., pp. 40–41.
Ibid., pp. 42–43.
Ibid., pp. 65–66.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p.67.
Ibid., p. 66.
Thus he writes of Napoleon: “An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus, on his expedition to Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture had played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne, he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army. In his Society of December 10, he assembles 10,000 rascally fellows, who are to play the part of the people, as Nick Bottom that of the lion....Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.” The Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 75–76.
The Red Virgin, p.70.
Ibid., p.73.
For a pertinent discussion of this issue, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), Harry Zohn trans., pp. 217–253.
The Red Virgin, p. 112.
Thus she writes: “When they sent the head of Ataï to Paris. I wandered who the real headhunters were; As Henri Rochefort had once written to me, ‘the Versailles government could give the natives lessons in cannibalism.’” The Red Virgin, p. 116. Michel’s solidarity with the Melanesians represents a serious questioning of her own sense of the superiority of Western civilization. Indeed, in her novel Le Claque-Dents, which she wrote on her return to Paris, she despairs of Europe and imagines an ideal community in Africa.
Quoted by Thomas in Louise Michel, p. 175.
Le Figaro, January 27, 1886.
See Edith Thomas, Louise Michel, p. 256.
Ibid., p. 273.
See A. Faure, Paris Carême-prenant (Paris:Hachette, 1978). In his Theatre and Revolution (New York: Viking, 1980, pp 1–2) Frederick Brown shows how the patriotic pageants on the Champ de Mars of 1793/4 were transformed by Napoleon III into huge commercial ventures. By 1867, the Universal Exposition was an enormous spectacle structured in concentric circles, at the centre of which was the bank, The Money Pavilion, the new Supreme Being. For a fascinating analysis of contemporary carnival and politics see Abner Cohen, Masquerade Politics (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993). Cohen’s focus is on the contemporary London Notting Hill carnival.
See A. Sidro, Le Carnaval de Nice et ses fous (Nice: Editions Serre, 1979).
During the Terror, executions (which had previously been performed away from the public) functioned as a kind of grotesque street theatre. The guillotine, the essential prop, was brought to the place de la Révolution which enabled the condemned to be paraded through the streets before the carefully staged and well attended decapitations. According to Brown in his Theatre and Revolution (pp. 75–82), the fêtes of 1793 and 1794 promoted by Robespierre and designed as tableaux vivants by David were the culmination of theatre in the service of the state, while functioning as a kind of existential model for the revolution itself. Whereas the closed stage of the court theatre had separated actors from audience, “the Terrorist festival laid low that barrier, sanctifying the mass of its celebrants, the collective body, or the universal presence that had no need to look beyond itself.... such antinomies as appearance versus reality, mask versus face, role versus actor, became obsolete.” (Brown, p. 77.) Brown rightly associates these massive pageants with such collective demonstrations glorified, for example, in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. They enact the absorption of a collectivized people into the state and a totalitarian aestheticization of power. See also Mona Azouf, La fête révolutionnaire 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
See P.A. Kropotkin, “Letter to Nettlau” in Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press), pp. 293–299.
Quoted by Henri Arvon in Marxist Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), Helen Lane trans., p. 26.
Les Mémoires, p. 347. My translation.
In the Mémoires, pp. 416–417, she reproduces conversations of prostitutes she heard in the prison. They reveal a life of the most extreme poverty, violence and suffering. See The Red Virgin, pp. 173–175.
Charles J. Stivale, “Louise Michel’s Poetry of Existence and Revolt,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1986 Spring, vol. 5, no. 1, pp.41–61.
Michel was a competent mathematician and an expert botanist. During her deportation to New Caledonia she successfully engaged in immunizing trees against disease. However, her scientific skills were not isomorphic with the mind/body dualism implicit in theories of scientific progress. And she considered animals and humans one being in their common capacity for feeling and understanding, and vivisection an insane barbaric practice.
Hayden White’s description of history, in his Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978) p. 82, as “a set of verbal fictions, the content of which is as much invented as found, and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” is particularly relevant to a reading of both the Mémoires and La Commune.
See, for example, Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, pp. 264. Rejecting historicist causality, Benjamin’s notion of constellating history—a conception of the present as the time of the “now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time—illuminates the historical reconstructions of Michel. Benjamin also made critical use of quotations and montages in his historical reconstructions.
Flaubert’s portrayal of the Second Empire in the Education Sentimentale is remarkably reflective of Marx’s perception in The Second Brumaire that social life has become an imaginary shadow play of vicarious experience and generalized commodification. The great difference between Flaubert and Marx and Michel, of course, is that Flaubert’s nihilism precludes any explicit possibility of social critique or transformation.
See B. Lowry and E. Ellington Gunter, The Red Virgin, xvii.
Ibid., xviii.
Edith Tomas, Louise Michel, p. 361.
Ibid.
Michel shares with Benjamin both a materialist and mystical sense of history. Completely focused on the material conditions of the exploited, her sense of revolutionary time is that of the necessary interruption of history as constituted by the ruling classes. Her lingering positivistic faith in scientific progress is incorporated into this apocalyptic vision of revolution. A more elaborated reading of Michel through Benjamin would further elucidate the intersections of these two daring social thinkers whose destinies began and ended, respectively, with an occupation of Paris.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
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Diamond, M.J. (1998). Louise Michel and the Paris Commune of 1871: The Performance of Revolution. In: Diamond, M.J. (eds) Women and Revolution: Global Expressions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9072-3_2
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