作者：Casey Harison

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Almost thirty years later and with the Soviet Union well established, a history of the era by an author sympathetic to the Bolsheviks put it this way: “The revolution of 1905, just as the Commune of Paris, left invaluable lessons to the world proletariat, without which the great world revolution would be impossible.”(112) From the perspective of a post-Soviet world, this statement seems wildly overstated. Still, if the revolution of 1905 had more direct impact in Russia than anywhere else, it did mark a genuine rupture that helps to pinpoint and explain why, after the nineteenth century, Paris was no longer the “capital of revolution.” Lenin’s resurrection of the practical lessons of 1871, and then the revolution of 1917 and the founding of the PCF in 1920, signaled the start of an era for the French left in which the Commune was given new life, not as the model for revolutionary change in France, but as precursor of the fledgling Soviet Union. Thereafter, the Soviet system was celebrated quite as much as the Commune at the annual marches to Père-Lachaise.(113) Over the years, the leadership of the PCF (drawn in large measure from the working class) passed on the Marxist-Leninist perspective to party members via L’Humanité and commemorative acts that included the march to Père-Lachaise.(114) The PCF’s interpretation of 1871 moved away from the romanticized versions of Jaurès and Vaillant toward the functionalist interpretations of Marx and Lenin. No longer was the Commune’s legacy just that of a tragic struggle inevitably punctuated by its crushing defeat. The new emphasis in L’Humanité retained the ingredient of workingclass martyrdom, though this was now cast in didactic and internationalist terms. Given the blessing of Marx and of Lenin, the Commune had been resurrected as the genuine prototype of twentieth-century revolution.

The inroads that Marxism-Leninism achieved in France after 1917 nevertheless did not mean that the entirety of the revolutionary tradition had been bent to the Soviet model. Indeed, most French workers did not belong to the PCF.(115) Eventually the early combativeness of the Marxist-Leninist reading was toned down. The new perspective on the Commune had breached the sometimes parochial walls of France’s revolutionary tradition so that the focus after 1920 became as much internationalist as nationalist. But while the rhetoric of the PCF could be inflammatory, its actions had to conform to policies set by the Comintern in Moscow. The situation in France and Europe after 1921 was not conducive to revolution and so the Comintern set a course of stabilization rather than confrontation.(116) With victory secured in Russia and the PCF content for the time being to organize, the symbolic importance of the Commune once again came to the fore—in Paris, as in Moscow. “The French revolutionary tradition ceased to inspire revolutionary action in a practical way after the fall of the Commune,” writes Patrick Hutton, though the history of the Commune via the interpretation of Marx played a real role in guiding the course of events in 1917.(117) Still, by the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 the memory of 1871 was becoming, even in the Soviet Union, little more than a “l(fā)egitimizing myth.”(118) This development was set concretely in the Soviet revolutionary tradition when upon his death Lenin’s body was draped with a Communard flag.

The winding down of the French revolutionary tradition had structural roots in the nation’s economy, society and politics, especially dating from the Second Empire, but the end of the story also may be found in the attitudes and perceptions that the Parisian left brought to the revolutionary moment of 1905.(119) Arno J. Mayer writes that “The French Revolution [of 1789] was constantly present at the creation of the Russian Revolution [of 1917].”(120) Though this was certainly the case, it was really the revolution of 1905 that signaled an end to the pattern of rebellion and revolution that had helped to define nineteenth-century France and Europe. The turmoil that erupted in Russia following Bloody Sunday in January 1905 had offered an opportunity for the lessons of 1871 to be reassessed and, perhaps, applied. By the 1920s, the French revolutionary tradition had been recast. Louise Michel remained an icon of the left, but Leningrad or Moscow, not Paris, clearly was now the capital of (world) revolution. The annual marches to Père-Lachaise celebrated the Soviet Union equally with the Paris Commune, even as they continued the decades-old form of solemn, nonconfrontational commemoration. If the practical “l(fā)essons” of the Commune could still be evoked for a contemporary meaning—as Lenin did for Russia in 1905 and 1917—it was rather the symbolic value of 1871 that proved, over time, the more durable in the revolutionary tradition and in its shift from France to Russia.