The Paris Commune

For John, BLUF:  We should all embrace "that there are legitimate ideas about shaping the future of the nation other than your own."  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From The New Yorker, 22 December edition, we have the review of another book on the Paris Commune, under the headline "The Fires of Paris".  The subheadline is "Why do people still fight about the Paris Commune?"  The Review author is Mr Adam Gopnik.

The Paris Commune is one of those obscure artifacts from the Franco-Prussion War (1870-1871) that most people either don't know about, or if they do, chose to ignore.  However, for a small group of people it is a big thing.

The book being reviewed is Massacre:  The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.  The author is Professor John Merriman, from Yale.  From the review we are led to believe that Professor Merriman is pro Commune.

The review is a quick look at French history and the history of the Commune.  The most interest item, in the first paragraph, is "That Napoleon was a bad man but a big figure…", which I had come to believe, but was not sure anyone else saw it that way.  Not mentioned was that France tried to conquer Mexico while we were involved in our Civil War.  Yes, there were a lot of follies in France, from the French Revolution up through Charles de Gaulle.

I think the key paragraph in the Review is this one:

What the Communards fought and died for was, fifty years later, achieved, as France moved toward a modern welfare state, and firmly separated Church and nation.  What the royalists killed for—and died for, too—was over, and for good.  The real winner was the republic as it would become.  The path from the death of the Commune to true republicanism was extremely knotty, but, by the end of the eighteen-seventies, France was on it.  (Even Louise Michel was amnestied, and came home, to resume her career as an unapologetic provocateur.)  The responsible left came to embrace legislative Republicanism single-mindedly, not out of fear but out of wisdom—knowing that the only way to maintain the real revolution was to accept in permanence the truth that rejecting the legitimacy of the opposition could end only in violence, real liberal republicanism being no more than the understanding that there are legitimate ideas about shaping the future of the nation other than your own.

And the key sentence:

The responsible left came to embrace legislative Republicanism single-mindedly, not out of fear but out of wisdom—knowing that the only way to maintain the real revolution was to accept in permanence the truth that rejecting the legitimacy of the opposition could end only in violence, real liberal republicanism being no more than the understanding that there are legitimate ideas about shaping the future of the nation other than your own.

Of course we should understand that left, right, up, down and sideways may well mean different things in France than they do in Ottomwa, Iowa.  And we should understand that France still had a long ways to go.  For instance, it had to get past the Dreyfus Affair.  And then World War I, followed by the 1930s and the debacle known as World War II, and then decolonization.  Life has not been easy for those who are French.

Regards  —  Cliff