Development of the history of the 1871 Paris Commune
In the history of labor, socialism, and revolutions, thehistoriography of the Paris Commune connectsits 1871 events with therevolutions of 1848 and1917. Historical interpretation of the Commune influenced subsequent revolutionary ideology and sociopolitical events. As of the late 20th century, there were two mainhistoriographical schools of thought: the political interpretation, that the Commune was a patriotic eruption of fury in response to circumstantial hardship following theSiege of Paris;[1] and the social interpretation, that the Commune was the result of macro socioeconomic forces boiling over, e.g., that it was a war ofclass struggle. Histories in the latter interpretation have used the Commune's events to make ideological points on behalf of their authors, either that the Commune was an illegitimate, criminal aggression, or that the Commune was the consummation of revolutionary momentum.[2] Similarly, historians within both the political and social interpretations have disagreed as to whether the Commune was inevitable or accidental (though there is agreement that the uprising was unplanned), a harbinger of the future or a sunset for revolutionary zeal.[3]
Shortly after the brutal end of the Commune, which killed, imprisoned, or exiled 100,000 Parisians, the Commune quickly became subject to polarizing legend.[4] Conservative contemporaries of the Commune attributed the insurrection to revolutionary conspiracy by the First International and its affiliates. Partly in response, revolutionary socialists did not acknowledge organizations as contributing to the Commune. Their sense of the revolution's legitimacy rested in its popular spontaneity, as compared to the deliberate planning of a coup.[5] Scholarship of the Commune began withGeorges Bourgin'sHistoire de la Commune just prior toWorld War I, and thus became viewed through the lens of 1917.[4] It received treatments from preeminent scholars includingC.L.R. James andHenri Lefebvre, and was the subject of most ofJacques Rougerie's career.[6] Communist historiography fell out of favor by the end of the 20th century. Where there had previously been debate over whether the Commune was a revolutionary socialist movement or a movement of artisans, Rougerie'sLa Commune: 1871 (1988) attributed the Commune to an amalgam of both.[7]Roger Gould's 1995Insurgent Identities challenged Marxist (David Harvey) and humanisturban theory (Lefebvre andManuel Castells) narratives of the Commune.[8]
^Adcock, Michael; Chester, Emily; Whiteman, Jeremy, eds. (1997).Revolution, Society and the Politics of Memory: The Proceedings of the Tenth George Rudé Seminar on French History and Civilisation, Melbourne 1996. University of Melbourne, Department of History. p. 279.ISBN978-0-7325-1260-6.
Gould, Roger V. (1995). "Collective Identities and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France".Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. University of Chicago Press.ISBN0-226-30560-0.
Johnson, Martin Phillip (1996)."Introduction".The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.ISBN978-0-472-10724-7.
Martin, Dorothea A. L. (2019)."The Experience of the Paris Commune".The Making of a Sino-Marxist World View: Perceptions and Interpretations of World History in the People's Republic of China. Routledge. pp. 68–.ISBN978-1-315-49039-7.
Bruhat, Jean; Dautry, Jean; Tersen, Emile (1970). "Bibliographie de la Commune".La Commune de 1871 (in French) (2nd ed.). Paris: Éditions sociales. pp. 391–410.OCLC567909369.
Jones, Emily (2018). "Historiography of the Paris Commune".The Political Nature of the Paris Commune of 1871 and Manifestations of Marxist Ideology in the Official Publications of the Central Committee (B.A.). Virginia Commonwealth University.doi:10.25772/XPZ5-XV09.
Le Quillec, Robert (2006).Bibliographie critique de la Commune de Paris: 1871 (in French). Paris: Boutique de l'histoire.ISBN978-2-910828-35-6.OCLC68706463.
Lefebvre, Henri (1965). "[Bibliographic essay]".La proclamation de la commune, 26 mars 1871. Trente journées qui ont fait la France. Paris: Gallimard.
