Tuttle on Eichner (2022)

Historian Carolyn Eichner’s The Paris Commune: A Brief History opens with the communard’s “last hurrah,” a benefit concert for battlefield hospitals boasting over ten thousand attendees: “The Commune had flung open the Tuileries Palace doors to the people of Paris. In this once-elite space, the formerly excluded citizens basked in the art, music, abundance, and liberty long denied them” (2). As Parisians luxuriated in these hard-fought freedoms, the French National Army quietly entered a breech in the city’s wall, “aiming not only for military conquest but also mass slaughter of Parisians” (2). The opposition between the Commune’s joyous atmosphere and its gruesome demise immediately engages readers in this richly documented and gripping historical narrative. In the subsequent chronological account, the author examines the Commune from multiple perspectives: leaders, opponents, historians, and a variety of nineteenth-century artists and writers including Gustave Courbet and Émile Zola. In doing so, Eichner has produced a complex overview of the Paris Commune driven by key scholarly arguments including the centrality of both women and feminism to the Commune’s broad goals and day-to-day operations. With an innovative structure and engaging prose, this book is a welcome addition to the existing field of general histories of the Commune and will appeal to academics, an educated public, and university students alike.

The book is aptly organized around images of fire, which represent an evocative red thread for readers to follow and highlight the violence of the Commune’s emergence and demise over the book's three total chapters. In the first chapter, entitled “Illumination,” Eichner dives into the Second Empire, offering a robust overview that teases out the ways in which the politics of the period led to the birth of the Commune. A series of sub-sections called “the city,” “politics,” “public meetings,” and “the International,” each preceded with the title “Sparks,” demonstrate the ways in which social, economic, political, and cultural realities overlapped, creating the volatile conditions into which first the Third Republic and then the Commune were “Born in Fire” (17). Within this complicated contextualization, the author introduces us to several individuals whose stories guide our understanding including André Léo, Louise Michel, and Eugène Varlin. Extensive quotes from their memoirs and journals sweep the reader into the exhilarating atmosphere of the Commune’s beginning on March 18 when the National Guard disobeyed orders to fire on a Montmartre crowd that refused to surrender two cannons to President Adolph Thiers’ army. “Suddenly, improbably, Parisians controlled Paris” (28).

In the book’s second chapter, “Fluorescence,” the stories of Léo, Michel, and Varlin are joined by others. Tracing individuals’ arcs and comparing their evolving, and often conflicting, political positions allows the author to underscore the ways in which the Commune “developed as more than one revolution” (30). For instance, on the morning of March 19, the communards faced crucial decisions. The radical revolutionary Auguste Blanqui and his supporters argued for military action against Thiers’ troops in Versailles whereas the comparatively moderate Varlin prioritized the establishment of political legitimacy. The author investigates these competing visions for liberation, their impact on contemporaneous events, and how they shaped not only nineteenth-century France’s political landscape but also the lives of individual communards. Despite differences, opposing factions of the Commune were united by their commitment to radical change: sociocultural, gendered, political, economic. In this book, debates over how to implement such changes come alive, reminding us that history is formed by people and the choices they make.

It is in this second chapter that we meet Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a Russian socialist feminist who founded the Union de femmes, a highly structured organization that worked closely with the Commune government to dismantle gendered inequities, amounting to a “fundamental, sweeping reconceptualization and reorganization in the midst of a civil war” (54). Indeed, feminist communardes succeeded in enacting ambitious reforms including equal wages for male and female teachers and National Guard pensions for widows in unions libres. The book skillfully demonstrates that whether in the form of top-down groups like the Union or more grassroots political clubs, feminism, alongside socialism and internationalism, belonged to the very fabric of the Commune. Author of the recent Feminism’s Empire (Cornell UP, 2022), Eichner’s feminist approach to scholarship shines here as she recounts the parisiennes who debated, wrote about, and in the end, quite literally fought for their rights as working women. Despite their unwavering engagement, in the final weeks of the Commune, the Committee of Public Safety banned women on the battlefield. “Mere rules, however, did not stop devoted communardes” (71). As cooks, nurses, drivers, and soldiers, women including Léo and Michel continued to defend the revolutionary fire they had helped ignite.

The final chapter, “Explosion,” details the violence Thiers’ army unleashed from 21 to 28 May during what is known as “Bloody Week.” The image of fire continues to serve as a guide through that hellish and chaotic time: “During Bloody Week, Paris burned” as Versailles troops launched mortars into the city and communards set streets ablaze to block enemy advances (81). By the week’s end, the last barricades had fallen, several revolutionary leaders had escaped, and between seventeen and twenty-five thousand communards lay slain (a figure of continued debate). This account of Bloody Week rightly emphasizes the gendered repression of communardes including a nuanced investigation of the pétroleuses, the allegedly crazed working-class women accused of setting fires in the homes of Parisian conservatives. Although women certainly joined men in “battlefield incendiarism,” the pétroleuse trope­­—a “sexist, classist, and ultimately deadly fabrication”—distorted this reality, leading to the arrest and execution of many women (85). The author also crucially includes a brief discussion of how Versailles troops committed sexual violence against female revolutionaries as an act of war, a subject so far unexplored by historians. She convincingly demonstrates that this violence represented a brutal backlash against women who had defied not only normative gender roles but also political hierarchies. 

Finally, despite its cruel end and the subsequent execution or deportation of communards by the thousands, the book concludes that the Paris Commune did not fail, asserting instead that it “persists as a guide to multiple radically democratic goals” (103). Throughout the book, Eichner’s admiration for women and men who risk, and sometimes sacrifice, their lives in pursuit of these goals remains palpable. The book’s final words thus express what is perhaps its central argument: “the Commune still lives” (105).  At several points, Eichner explains that the communards looked to France’s revolutionary past as they imagined a radically different future. Similarly, the author engages extensively with existing secondary literature while also illuminating potential avenues for future exploration; an approach ensuring, in a sense, that the Commune really will live on.