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作者：Casey Harison

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Personality, place and memory in 1905

The ambiguous meanings of the Commune for the French left at the turn of the century are plain to see with the death of the Communard Louise Michel (1830–1905), who was buried with great emotion in Paris on the same day as revolution began in Russia. Michel, one of the “unruly women of Paris” described by Gay Gullickson, had long been cast as the virtual embodiment of revolution in France, though less for her self-consciously imprecise anarchist sentiments than for other qualities: her striking physical appearance, her intense empathy for the poor and for animals (after her death, one newspaper described her as a genuine “chrétienne sans dieu”), but especially for the indefatigable passion she brought to the “cause of Revolution,” which had earned her the nickname of “the Red Virgin.”(45)

Michel’s funeral in Paris on 22 January—Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg— became the occasion for an enormous demonstration of almost 100,000 persons, which may have been the largest in the capital since the burial of Victor Hugo twenty years earlier.(46) Michel was interred next to her mother’s grave at Levallois-Perret cemetery on the western side of the city rather than at Père-Lachaise cemetery, which (as described below) had a special connection with the Commune. L’Humanité’s reporting on the funeral revealed the ambiguous meaning of the Commune, describing Michel as “symbolizing the revolutionary generation of 1871, which in the history of human progress stood for a period of transition between the era of traditional and classic revolution and the current era of social transformation.”(47) In words that would be echoed in numerous eulogies, the newspaper labeled Michel “a noble and curious figure … an ardent revolutionary [and] tireless propagandist.”(48) The funeral, in conjunction with the turmoil in Russia, provided an obvious opportunity for comrades to tie together the international threads of revolution. Speakers at the gravesite and at the numerous banquets that followed her burial included Jaurès, Vaillant, Guesde and Dubreuilh. Their words reflected the view that with Michel’s passing an era of revolution was also at an end. According to L’Humanité, the more than 200 Russian “revolutionaries” at the grave were in an agitated state because of the news from St. Petersburg which was being given full coverage in the newspapers that very day. Friends noted that Michel had always been “fascinated” by Russia.(49) A “comrade” who had been with her at the end recalled that among Michel’s last words were: “Let us destroy war! The goal, the ideal is always the Revolution. I feel it coming … the Revolution is in Russia.”(50) Another friend “[spoke] to the events occurring in Russia … comparing the admirable demonstration that socialist Paris had made for the ‘Red Virgin’ with the terrible repression that the tsar was, at that very moment, launching on his own people.”(51) Reporting more than twenty years later on the continuing anniversary celebrations of her death, a Parisian newspaper wrote: “There is a Louise Michel ‘legend,’ and like all legends it is long-lived.”(52) For devotees, Michel embodied “la mystique de la Révolution,” and particularly the heroism of the Commune, as much in death as in life.

Though Michel had been buried next to her mother’s grave at Levallois-Perret cemetery, her supporters all knew that her spirit resided with her fellow Communards at Père-Lachaise. Michel’s death, the annual commemoration of 1871 and the persistence of the French revolutionary tradition merged at the physical location of Père-Lachaise cemetery in the northeast of the city, and particularly at the Mur des Fédérés—the wall at its eastern end where the remaining Communards had made their famous last stand during Bloody Week of May 1871. For the political left in France at the start of the twentieth century, ambiguous perceptions of Michel were a sign of the challenge of reconciling the heroic side of the revolutionary tradition with the broader, mostly evolutionary developments of the Third Republic. On the one hand, Michel, the Commune, as well as the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, seemed the products of an earlier era. On the other hand, the fact that 1871 had offered a perhaps prescient example of working-class society could not be ignored in an era when workers had political representatives and political parties.  For the political right, the Commune stood as an example of class warfare and hostility to the Catholic Church, and therefore as a model that could not go unchallenged.

The apparent divergences in the meaning of 1871 had not been resolved by 1905. Even so, very soon after its suppression, the memory of the Commune was being put to symbolic use by politicians, working class leaders and writers. This in itself was not unusual, as nearly all Parisian rebellions had produced legacies of anniversary remembrance. Still the commemoration of the Commune became, by far, the largest and most significant of such events.(53) Patrick Hutton has described these memorials as part of the Third Republic’s evolving “politics of anniversary remembrance.”(54) This is a fitting phrase for the ritual processions that helped mythologize the Commune.(55) As an example of heroic proletarian struggle and self-governance, and of bourgeois duplicity, the Commune provided workers with an unrivaled rallying cry. By the mid-1870s, marches involving thousands of sympathizers (later, it would be tens of thousands) were made to Père-Lachaise and the virtually sacred ground of the Mur des Fédérés, which became a de facto Panthéon for France’s revolutionary class. In fact, there were two annual commemorations: one in May denoting the Bloody Week suppression and a smaller event on 18 March, signifying the beginning of the Commune. The mindset of the French left in the first decades of the Third Republic may be glimpsed in the fact that the more important of the two was that of May memorializing the agony and defeat of 1871 rather than its carnivalesque beginning an approach, as Robert Gildea has written, that had the effect of “project[ing] accusations of violence normally leveled against the workers onto the bourgeoisie.”(56) As we shall see, the relative importance of the two would be reversed after 1917.

By the 1880s a tradition surrounding the Commune and Père-Lachaise had taken root. On the day of the May trek to the cemetery the schedule of events and a map of the route was printed in newspapers. At the cemetery, crowds walked respectfully to the Mur des Fédérés and then listened to speakers who inevitably emphasized the heroism of the Communards in the hope that, as a speaker put it in 1913, “the blood of the martyrs of 1871 would unite [the listeners] in a strong and fertile bond.”(57) The day was punctuated with the singing of revolutionary songs, banquet suppers and more speeches. Though solidarity was a goal, disputes among Socialists, Blanquists, Guesdists, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and other groups sometimes marred the affair.(58) The crowds attending the pilgrimages could be large and boisterous, but despite the often belligerent words of the speakers, violence was not common. Still, police were almost always present—a sign of the apprehension of the authorities during an era when class consciousness and habits of contention had been hardened by repeated, sometimes violent strikes and when (by the turn of the century) the doctrine of syndicalism professed open confrontation. The turn of the century also saw the emergence of strident right-wing groups prepared to engage over any number of “affaires”—whether Dreyfus, the viability of France’s republican form of government or the challenge posed by socialist and redistributive theories to the status quo. In 1914 and after, the rightist group Action Française directly challenged the commemorations at Père-Lachaise by scheduling a simultaneous celebration of their own nationalist icon, Jeanne d’Arc.(59) While the words of speakers at Père-Lachaise could strike an uncompromising chord, they were not really intended to incite direct action against the state. Newspapers and political leaders did not advise modern-day workers to seize Paris as their predecessors had done. Rather, the march to Père-Lachaise was a festive occasion used by socialist and labor leaders to recall 1871 as a tragedy, and not as a spur or model for collective action.(60)

The revolution in Russia and the funeral of Louise Michel were the background against which the commemorations at Père-Lachaise took place in March and May 1905. In December 1905, what Leon Trotsky called the “half-defeated revolution” would conclude with a failed insurrection in Moscow and with the tsarist regime, though severely shaken, still standing.(61) Because autocracy survived and because by contrast the revolution of 1917 was so obviously triumphant, it is easy to overlook how much shock the events of 1905 initially produced, not only in Russia and France but for the rest of the world. Revolution in Russia in 1905 had deep roots in decades of opposition from the intelligentsia and in the strains faced by an old-fashioned empire struggling through bouts of modernization. Like France in 1871 (and Russia again in 1917), the immediate catalyst for revolt was inadequate performance in war, in this case that of 1904–5 against Japan. The signal event that kicked off the revolution was the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, which garnered front-page newspaper coverage across Europe, including Paris.

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