Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune and Feminism’s Empire.
Eichner applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Paris Commune: A Brief History examines the vilification, dehumanization, and ultimate slaughter of insurgents in France’s 1871 revolutionary civil war known as The Paris Commune. It quotes critics Théophile Gautier, who termed the Communards “wild beasts, stinking beasts, venomous beasts…monsters of the heart, with deformed souls,” and Augustine-Malvina Blanchecotte, who rendered them “monsters who should be classified under zoology. They are not men.” The page explains how such debasing language reflected the propaganda proffered by the French state as it struggled to suppress the radically democratic uprising. It then analyzes the logic behind such attacks: “Constructing one’s enemy as devoid of humanity, civilization, and morals, as ‘ferocious’ and ‘monsters,’ makes slaughtering them not only palatable, but also righteous. A method typically used in class-, race-, ethnicity-, and religious-based violent oppressions or population “cleansings,” Thiers and French conservatives did this with Communards.”Follow Carolyn Eichner on Twitter.
The second half of the page outlines the ongoing debate regarding the number of Parisians killed when the French national army swept into the capital and brutally crushed the 72-day insurgency. Asserting the politicized nature of these disputes, page 99 clarifies thatThe French military records named and identified almost all of their soldiers killed [approximately 750]. But they were unsystematic in tracking the number of Communard deaths, in part to conceal their own culpability. Thus, the extent of revolutionary casualties remains contested even now. Sixty-six years after the fall of the Commune, left-wing scholars such as Frank Jellinek estimated deaths as high as 30,000. More recently, conservative historian Robert Tombs has argued for a revised number between 6500 and 7500 official deaths, relying on documentary evidence from official government and military sources. In recent decades, most historians have agreed on a range between 17,000 and 25,000, based on a broad array of sources including government reports, qualitative and quantitative population analyses, and firsthand accounts.Page 99 gives a reader a partial, but important, idea of the overall book. Focusing on the repression of the revolution, and the persistent debates over the extent of that repression, page 99 does not address the uprising itself, its causes, participants, or legacies. As the title indicates, The Paris Commune: A Brief History presents a concise analytical narrative of this short-lived revolution with an enormous legacy. Considered a shining, optimistic moment by the left, and a horrific distortion of order by the right, the Paris Commune emerged as an experiment in radical democracy replete with inversions of class and gender hierarchies. Page 99 focuses on the intensity and persistence of anti-Communard rhetoric and opposition. The book is only 105 pages long (as a brief history). Page 99 thus falls six pages before the book’s end.
I divide the text into three parts: “Illumination” examines the period during which multiple radical politics developed; “Fluorescence” engages the enactment of those socialist, feminist, anarchist, and anti-clerical politics by revolutionary women and men attempting to re-shape their world; and “Explosion” explores the Commune’s brutal repression and its subsequent broad, long, and contentious legacies. Analyzing the extent to which the Commune upended the status quo and threatened dominant hierarchies, the book builds to provide the reader a comprehension of what page 99 shows: the ferocious hostility enacted by anti-Communards, and the ongoing political potency of this world-shaking event.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
