作者：Casey Harison

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THE?SHIFTING OF THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION

Lenin’s interpretation of the lessons of the Paris Commune would be transmitted to France through the French Communist Party, presenting the revolutionary tradition with the possibility of a new orientation. The PCF had its origins in September 1915, when the anti-war opposition in the Socialist Party came into contact with the “Leninist Left” at the Zimmerwald Conference.(102) By the end of the war, the pro Bolshevik element had gained the support of thousands of disaffected SFIO members.(103) In the summer of 1920, the Party sent representatives Marcel Cachin and L.-O. Frossard to Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern, which produced the 21 Conditions for membership. Cachin and Frossard brought the Conditions before the national congress of the Socialist Party at Tours in December 1920, and by a three to-one margin the delegates voted to accept.(104) In doing so, the majority ended their affiliation with the SFIO, since acceptance implied a clean break with the old leadership and the adoption of a Marxist-Leninist orientation.

These developments were immediately reflected in interpretations of 1871. On the third day of the Congress of Tours, Cachin spoke about the Paris Commune before the delegates. The Commune had fallen, he said to vigorous applause, because it had been too squeamish in using violence toward its enemies.(105) This viewpoint, so different from that of Jaurès or Vaillant, is emblematic of the shift that occurred in the French left between 1905 and 1921. Not surprisingly, the transformation also worked itself into the pages of L’Humanité and into coverage of annual commemorations. In March 1919, a portion of Marx’s The Civil War in France on the portentous beginning of the Commune in March 1871, rather than on the bloody dénouement of May, was for the first time reprinted in the newspaper. Alongside this there appeared a commemorative article on 1871 from L’Humanité’s new editor, Cachin.(106) In May of the same year, and for the first time in many years, L’Humanité’s coverage of the Bloody Week ceremonies did not include excerpts from Louis Dubreuilh’s idealized history. Instead, the newspaper printed more words from Marx. In an accompanying piece and in a clear allusion to the now seemingly misguided reformism of Jaurès, Frossard wrote that after 1871 the French proletariat had deviated from the course set by the Communards onto a path of “romanticism.” Now for the French left, Marx had, in a sense, been rediscovered so that the proletariat could be directed toward the real historical meaning of the Commune: “a solid doctrine, with a precise objective—the conquest of power through the establishment of a new order founded on the collective principle.”(107)

The year 1921 also brought the fiftieth anniversary of the Commune and the shock of the Kronstadt Rebellion in Russia which, symbolically, promised to be the opposite of 1871: a delegitimizing myth for the new Bolshevik state. Victor Serge, the anarchist writer who had spent years in France, but who in 1921 was in Petrograd, noted the terrible irony felt by all:

18 March [1921] was a sombre day. The morning papers had come out with flamboyant headlines commemorating a working-class anniversary, that of the Paris Commune. Meanwhile the muffled thunder of the guns over Kronstadt kept shaking the windows. A guilty unease settled over the offices in Smolny [the seat of Soviet government]. People avoided talking except with their closest friends, and among close friends, what was said was full of bitterness.(108)

At the same time in Paris the fiftieth-anniversary pilgrimage to Père-Lachaise organized by the PCF brought out a huge crowd, including a handful of remaining Old Communards. But Jaurès and Vaillant were dead and the elderly Dubreuilh and Guesde hardly appeared in the newspaper coverage. It was also the first year in which L’Humanité served as the official organ of the PCF, and its reporting on the March and May commemorations very much reflected the new shape of things. Alongside selections from Marx and a front-page article announcing the fall of Kronstadt—described as an attempted coup from the right—there were articles by Cachin and Frossard favorably comparing the Commune with the Soviet Union. The emphasis was now on the “l(fā)essons” of armed vigilance that the Commune provided to the Soviet Union and to all the other new states that would follow the path they had blazed. Cachin wrote that the crux of the matter for the Commune was that it should not have acted as “a constituent assembly, but as a council of war”—the course of action followed by the Bolsheviks after dismissing the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. In the end, the Commune had been “cruelly punished” because its leaders had hesitated between parliamentarism and dictatorship:?“The respect for bourgeois legality, the confusion of their programs, their indecision, the lack of military preparation—these were the causes of their fateful defeat.”(109) Even the advertisements hinted at an altered meaning for 1871. One listed Trotsky’s pamphlet on “The Paris Commune and Soviet Russia.” Another offered a new history: The Paris Commune: Acts and Documents (Paris: Clarté, 1921), with a preface by Grigorii Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern. The relationship between 1871 and 1917 was accented in Cachin’s article of 18 March, which asserted that the Bolsheviks “are the heirs of the Commune … their success is certain if they learn by [its] lessons.”(110) The historical relationship was made more explicit the following year in L’Humanité when, next to another excerpt from Marx’s The Civil War in France, Cachin wrote of “The Two Communes”—Paris and the new Soviet Union—each of which had been attacked by the “armies of the bourgeoisie.” But where the Commune had been tragically defeated, the Soviet Union, having learned the lessons of 1871, appeared, as of 1922, to have secured its own existence.(111)