作者：Casey Harison

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What was the legacy of the 1871 Paris Commune at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905? Was it understood as part of an obsolete revolutionary tradition or as something new? The French left responded equivocally even as the 1905 revolution provided a comparison, and as Lenin identified the practical lessons of 1871. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, the Commune would be given new life as a legitimizing agent for the USSR. French Communists would also adopt the Leninist reading. This article examines the “rupture” of 1905 and the transformation of the revolutionary tradition from the perspective of the French left, Parisian workers and Russian émigrés, and in light of the funeral of the former Communard Louise Michel.

Can we confine the production of images, symbols and legends solely to the realm of ideology and see their controversies as no more than a deliberate and political mystification? Or should we enter into the sensibility and the collective mentalities of the activists in order to uncover the meaning and the power of the “l(fā)egend?”… But, which legend??

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ——Georges Haupt

Let us destroy war! The goal, the ideal is always the Revolution. I feel it coming … the Revolution is in Russia.?

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?——Louise Michel, 1905

The May 1905 anniversary commemoration of the Paris Commune’s “Bloody Week” was barely distinguishable from earlier such events. Summoned by the left-wing press, sympathetic workers, labor leaders and intellectuals made the annual march through Paris’s boulevards to Père-Lachaise cemetery, where in alternately somber and celebratory form they invoked the memory of those killed at the Mur des Fédérés on the final day of the Commune in May 1871. At the head of the procession of several thousand marchers were elderly veterans from 1871. Also present were most of the leaders of the French left, including Jean Jaurès, Jules Guesde and Edouard Vaillant. It was Vaillant, himself an “Old Communard”, who provided the keynote address, reminding his listeners as he had on many previous occasions not to forget the deaths of nearly 20,000 comrades. He added, perhaps unnecessarily, that the memory of the Commune “rests in the hearts of the workers”.(3)

Vaillant’s appeal was openly emotional, but this may not have been required to make his words compelling, since no other working-class movement of the day had so effective a device for arousing sentiment as did the French left in calling upon the legacy of the Commune. The Commune was the insurrectionary municipal movement that came to life in March 1871 following a rebellion by Parisian workers, and which during its short existence enacted a handful of progressive, collectivist programs before being suppressed with great loss of life in May 1871. The triumphs and tragedy of the Commune had, since the 1880s, been memorialized by the political left in solemn style each March and May.(4)

But the commemoration at Père-Lachaise in May 1905 had special significance because revolution had erupted in Russia earlier in the year, providing an impetus to “rethink” the Commune and signifying a broader shift in the “revolutionary tradition” from France to Russia.(5) This was accompanied by other developments that made the year 1905, if not a watershed to match 1789, 1848 or 1871, nonetheless a turning point in French and European history. In France, there was also passage of laws on separation of church and state that continue through today as a bedrock principle of society and government, as well as the first of the Moroccan Crises that was a prelude to the Great War. The year was memorable, too, because it saw the creation of the French Socialist Party (SFIO).(6)?In addition, labor strikes, which had been occurring for some time, persisted in Paris and elsewhere.(7)?The year also saw the deaths of the?famous anarchists Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel—the latter a former Communard and a genuine icon for radicals, whose burial in Paris would inspire a huge outpouring of sentiment.(8)?Finally, for the left, news of revolution in Russia that erupted following the “Bloody Sunday” massacre in St. Petersburg on 22 January 1905 could hardly help but arouse deep interest, especially in Paris, which for so many still retained the moniker of “Capital of Revolution.” Although the revolution of 1905 saw little direct impact in France, it was immediately viewed there as genuine “history in the making,” since it promised not only the end of the autocracy, but also the opportunity for French observers to reassess their own famous history of revolution, including the meaning and relevance of the most recent—the Paris Commune.?

Where did the legacy of the Commune stand in 1905? After all, the event had happened many years earlier and in the interim there had been important developments for the left, including the growth of potent trade unions and working-class political parties, the movement of a section of Marxism toward revisionism and now the revolution in Russia, which promised to be the most momentous in many decades. By 1905 it was undeniable that the Commune seemed a distant episode, and one whose practical “l(fā)essons,” if there were such things, were not of much interest to an ever more reformist or revisionist left. While the tragedy of 1871 invoked on solemn occasions like the pilgrimage to Père-Lachaise provided inspiration, did its history offer any practical lessons in France, Russia or elsewhere? Put more broadly, might the Commune best be understood as the last spasm of a now obsolete revolutionary tradition that began in 1789, or could its history be fitted into current developments and thinking?(9)

In the years before the Russian Revolution of 1917, the French left responded ambiguously at best and more often with an implicit “no” to the premise that the Commune offered a positive and realistic model upon which to build a revolution. It did so even as the revolution of 1905 provided the first real occasion to test the model of the Commune against a comparable event, and as a handful of Russian radicals—most famously among them Lenin—latched onto the practical applications of 1871 so little appreciated in France. Lenin, following the interpretations of Karl Marx, accepted both the representational and functional legacies of the Commune, identifying lessons to be drawn from its failures as well as a blueprint for a future revolutionary society. The hint of a proletarian state, in conjunction with the “revolutionary boldness of the Communards” that Marx described in 1871, were insights that Lenin would incorporate into his famous State and Revolution of 1917.(10)

For Lenin in 1905, the history of the Commune offered still timely rules for how workers might seize control of the state and then hold onto it. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, the Commune would be given new life as a legitimizing agent for the Soviet Union.(11)?After 1921, the French Communist Party (PCF) would adopt the Leninist reading, joining the Commune’s practical and inspirational history and reinvigorating the legacy of 1871. Lenin’s revival of its lessons contributed to a shift in thinking that turned France’s revolutionary tradition away from the emphasis upon defeat and exceptionalism toward a new triumphal and universal model, still inspired by the past, but now with the crucial difference that it was recentered on the successful Russian example of 1917.(12) This article examines the “revolutionary rupture” of 1905 and the shift in the revolutionary tradition from the perspective of the French left, in light of Louise Michel’s funeral (which occurred at the same time as “Bloody Sunday” in St. Petersburg), and on the basis of working-class newspapers and the writings of Russian émigrés in Paris.