On Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune

This is an interesting book that will mostly be of value to those interested in the French Left and the Paris Commune as a historical event.

Traditionally studies treat the period from the 1840s to 1871 as a cohesive whole that only came to an end when the revolutionary Commune was violently repressed by the nascent Third Republic. These events concluded with the semaine sanglante the execution of a handful of Communards, deportation of another 4,500, and other penalties to even more. With that, according to traditional narratives, the French Left died for a period of time. The Third Republic was born in strife between Opportunists and conservatives (especially conservative monarchists), with little space for revolutionary leftists. However, Nicholls contests this perspective and argues that what we might call the revolutionary 19th century never really came to an end. Rather, the precise shape of French revolutionary thought shifted, but it maintained its outline until around 1885.

To start the text, Nicholls spends some time examining the way the Paris Commune was remembered in the decade and a half after 1871. While the perspective we remember most often is what Nicholls calls the “commemorative” event (essentially, the mythologization of it), commentators who lived the Paris Commune often offered a “realist” perspective, framing it as a totally normal event without dramatizing it to great heights. People still lived their daily lives, but they sought to steer Parisian French society in a new direction. Then, she looks at the maintenance of the French revolutionary tradition in broader terms, especially with regard to its connections to France’s 1789 Revolution. These connections were maintained by individuals, and there was effectively an unbroken chain of experiences connecting the two revolutions.

In the third section, Nicholls devotes her analysis to French people’s reception of Karl Marx during and immediately after the Paris Commune. The most common narrative is that French Marxism before the 1880s-90s was a janky thing that wasn’t Marxism at all, but something amateurish and uniquely French. Nicholls contests this perspective, arguing that French ways of seeing Marxism had a great deal to do with the translations of Marx that made their way into the French language. However, this process was exacerbated by Marx himself, who actually changed some of his work to fit the ways that he thought French people would accept it most willingly. As a result, the “French Marx” appears incredibly flexible and almost more like an community organizer than as a political economist and social critical.

That said, the construction of the Paris Commune was not necessarily a Marxist event. Although we see Marxism today as something that is almost fundamentally divisive or schismatic, 19th century French revolutionaries did not see it this way. Instead, they were more than willing to syncretize him with other thinkers like Jules Guesde (who saw himself as a Marxist although Marx did not), Paul Lafargue (also heavily criticized by Marx even though Marx was his father-in-law), Louis Auguste Blanqui, various anarchists, and other revolutionaries. Some Communards saw themselves as Marxists, while others did not, but the Communard tradition did not die in 1871.

Finally, Nicholls discusses the relationship of the French Left with the French Empire and internationalist politics in the late nineteenth century. This is especially important, as four and a half thousand Communards were deported to New Caledonia, which was then a penal colony, giving them direct experience with the recently (re)forming French colonial empire.

When the Opportunists fell from power in late 1885, the French revolutionary tradition transformed further. While the Commundard and post-Communard movement cobbled together a hodge-podge of different ideologies to put together something uniquely French, a new generation of French thinkers like Jean Jaurès developed more sophisticated and cohesive variants of Leftist thought. Notably, this occurred against the backdrop of Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, further crystallizing what it meant to be part of what could have then been called the “New Left” (although we today use this term to refer to the generation of the 1960s—maybe they were a “New New Left?” Would that make today’s Leftists a “New New New Left?”).

My major criticism of Nicholls’s book is that she dwells on historiography a bit too much. As a work of history, it’s absolutely necessary that historiography is discussed in some way, but winding discussions of the way the literature has develop could have (and probably should have) been footnotes. Moreover, there was a bit more repetition—which can be good when accompanied with new ideas each time—than there needed to be. Yet, this is an excellent study of the development of French revolutionary thought (and Leftism) in a period that had traditionally been viewed as a sleepy time for French revolutionaries.