It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of conflict and fight it out.
—MARX
How did people view each other, represent themselves and others to themselves and others? How did they picture the contours of Parisian society, comprehend their social and spatial position and the radical transformations then in progress? And how were these representations transposed, used, and shaped in the rhetoric of political discourse? These are easy and important questions to pose but tough ones to answer.
The experience of 1848 provides a benchmark against which much that followed has to be understood. “Order” and “disorder” were code words, but behind them lay some unforgettable experiences. De Tocqueville’s are illustrative. On May 15, when the National Assembly was invaded by the political clubs, “a man appeared at the rostrum whom I never saw save on that day, but whose memory has always filled me with disgust and horror. His cheeks were pale and faded, his lips white; he looked ill, evil, foul, with a dirty pallor and the appearance of a mouldering corpse; no linen as far as one could see, an old black frock-coat thrown about spindly and emaciated limbs; he might have lived in a sewer and have just emerged from it. I was told that this was Blanqui.” Again, on June 24, de Tocqueville encounters an old woman in the street with a vegetable cart that impedes his path. He orders her “sharply to make room.”
Instead of doing so, she left her cart and rushed at me with such sudden frenzy that I had trouble defending myself. I shuddered at the frightful and hideous expression on her face, which reflected demagogic passions and the fury of civil war…. It is as though these great public emotions create a burning atmosphere in which private feelings seethe and boil.1
Figure 94 Paris, so often represented as a woman, is here depicted as bound down and swarmed over by myriad construction workers.
The bourgeoisie feared not only the collapse of public order but also the horror of uncaged emotions, unbridled passions, prostitutes and libidinous women, the explosion of evil from the subterranean Paris of sewers, the haunt of the dangerous classes. The fear of disorder was inordinate. No wonder that the “party of order” took such a Draconian path to repression, creating first a Republic without republicans and then caving in to Empire as the only hope. Yet the Empire was anything but orderly, and had to be kept in shape by active surveillance and police repression. So who or what was to blame for the disorder? Workers pointed (if they were permitted to speak their mind at all) to the anarchy of free-market capitalism, with its periodic bouts of speculation, market collapse, and unemployment; its unbridled greed and money passion; its undermining of job security, skills, and worker dignity; and its fierce waging of class war in the name of the general good. But they also blamed immigrants and foreigners, unfair competition, heartless bureaucracy and an uncaring state that accorded them neither dignity or rights. The bourgeoisie blamed irresponsible and feckless government, subversives, bohemians, debauched women, freethinkers, socialists, cosmopolitan foreigners, and utopians who might incite the “vile multitude” to riot and revolution at the slightest provocation. Both sides might rally to the defense of order, but the “order” they had in mind varied from craft workers defending their skills through association to landlords and bankers defending their different kinds of property rights. An English visitor was surprised to find that the “society” his hosts proclaimed to be so threatened referred exclusively to the fashionable circles in which they moved.2 The same words evidently carried very different meanings; the challenge is to interpret those meanings correctly.
That task is made difficult by the political repression and censorship. All manner of hidden and allegorical meanings, of veiled references and subtle innuendos, entered into political discourse and appear to have been widely understood. Catholicism had left a legacy of appreciation for symbolism and allegory that could be put to political use (including by the church, once it moved into opposition to Empire after 1860). Corporatist traditions within the labor force and the Masonic movement (with all their rituals of initiation) provided all kinds of codes and languages. And the rewriting of history, particularly of the revolutionary period, was used to shape popular imagery. The censors were aware of such problems—they rejected a simple song that mentioned a bonnet, presumably because it might be taken as a reference to the republican cap of liberty.3 But what could the authorities do when critics of Empire turned funerals, fêtes, and other public events into occasions for spontaneous mass demonstrations? The problem was not simply that twenty-five thousand workers could turn up at twenty-four hours’ notice for the funeral of a republican leader’s wife, but that any burial with its tradition of graveside discourse could turn into a mass political meeting.
The means of representation and communication were multiplying rapidly. The explosion in newspaper circulation was accompanied by political diversification and the rise of skilled editors who knew how to skirt the censor. Others preferred to confront, make their point, and be closed down in a blaze of glory. By the late 1860s, newspapers and journals were opening up every month. When an influential newspaper like Le Rappel was controlled by no less fierce a critic than the exiled Victor Hugo, the government was surely in trouble. The penny press also exploded as the popular taste for education, romance, and travel came together with a commercial apparatus capable of exploiting it. Much of the material was innocuous enough to appear as pablum for the masses. But some of it, like the pamphlets on French history, had strong political overtones. By 1860, this penny literature was more numerous and popular than the daily press. Worse still, all such publications relied heavily on illustrations. Drawings and cartoons—Daumier’s work being just one example among many—were extraordinary vehicles for political satire and polemic. Nor could Courbet’s gallant thrust of 1848–1851 to create an art of and for the people easily be forgotten.4
The salons continued to be political events to which the popular classes were drawn as much as the bourgeoisie (who sought to raise the entry price one day a week so as not to have to rub shoulders with a riffraff of smelly and sweaty workers). And while the government could ban performances of Victor Hugo’s plays, they could not stop Les Misérables from being in almost everyone’s hands almost immediately after it was published in 1862, in Belgium. And herein lay another problem. The improved transport and communications systems and the flood of foreign visitors (a tenfold increase of visitors from England between 1855 and 1863) made the flow of foreign news and commentary much greater at the same time that it increased the capacity to smuggle in any number of political tracts produced by those in exile. The Emperor’s decision to offer amnesty to the exiles in 1859 hinged not so much on magnanimity as on the idea that it was easier to keep them under surveillance in France than it was abroad. Realizing this only too well, Proudhon for a while, and Louis Blanc and Hugo for the rest of the Empire, preferred to remain abroad.
Figure 95 The salons for new art drew huge crowds. They were so popular that the bourgeoisie insisted on payment for entry so they would not have to mix with the populace at large. On those days when entrance was free (as this Daumier cartoon illustrates), the crowds were overwhelming.
It is invidious, perhaps, to select any dominant themes out of the swirl and confusions of images, representations, and political rhetoric. Yet there are some that stand out, that cry out for further explication. Within each we shall see manifested that overriding concern for the tension between order and disorder, as well as between modernity and tradition.
The spreading tentacles of the rail net and the growing regularity and speed of maritime and telegraph connections shook perceptions of space and place to their very roots. Information, commodities, money, and people moved around the world with much greater facility in 1870 than in 1850. Increasing competition and dependence within the international division of labor liberated Paris from local constraints but rendered the city vulnerable to far-off events (the American Civil War, for example, which disrupted the inflow of raw cotton and the outflow of Paris-made goods to an important market). Foreign ventures (the consolidation of colonial power in North Africa, the Italian campaigns, the Crimean War, the abortive attempt to impose Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, the construction of the Suez Canal) had local reverberations. The changing mix of commodities in the market (from basic foods to exotic luxuries) gave daily testimony to shifts in space relations. A burgeoning press (fed news through the telegraph) placed information on people’s lunch tables about everything from foreign investment, price movements, and profit opportunities to geopolitical confrontations to bizarre stories of foreign habits. With the photograph, space and time seemed to collapse into one simple image. Every new conquest of space—the opening of rail links or of the Suez Canal—became an occasion for enormous celebration, as did the Universal Expositions, which highlighted new geographical connections as well as new technologies.
It was not necessary to leave Paris to experience the shock of transformed space relations. The geographies of the mind had therefore to adapt and learn to appreciate the world of geographical variation and of “otherness” that now constituted the global space of political-economic activity. This meant, inter alia, coming to terms with the social and spatial relations concealed by the market exchange of things (consider, for example, Flaubert’s description of the cosmopolitan range of objects in Rosanette’s room in Sentimental Education, quoted on p. 87). The mass of travelogues and popular geographies that swamped the penny press indicated plenty of public curiosity.5 But travel and travel literature can just as easily confirm prejudices and feed fears as broaden the mind. So how was “the other” broadly understood in the midst of such rapid transformations? The question is important because, as we shall see, the construction of “the other” in broadly racist and exclusionary terms was to have devastating effects upon internal politics as well as across the colonial empire that France was beginning to assemble overseas.
The French geographical imagination had long been encumbered with heavy doses of environmentalism and racism. Montesquieu and Rousseau had agreed that liberty was not the fruit of all climates, and therefore not within the reach of all peoples. “Despotism is suited to hot climates, barbarism, to cold, and good government, to temperate regions.”6 By 1870 this had been converted by writers like Gobineau, whose influential “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races” appeared in 1855, proclaiming the superiority of the Nordic races, into a simple grid of interpretation in which categories like “civilized,” “barbarian,” and “savage” were superimposed upon the map of the world.7 The savage could, on occasion, be depicted as noble, but popular imagination had long seen Rousseau’s ideal displaced by the tales of Fenimore Cooper (often referred to by Balzac) and depictions of savage practices that had peoples living in such a state of nature as to render them sub-human, and therefore ineligible for consideration in any regime of rights or citizenship. Barbarians, on the other hand, possessed sufficiently well-articulated forms of political organization to be a force to be reckoned with. But their values and practices (especially when non-Christian) were such as to make them antagonistic to civilization.
This interpretive grid could loosely be thrown over the whole world as well as over Paris itself. The bourgeoisie routinely depicted the workers living on the “frontiers” of Belleville as savages. Critics of Haussmann on occasion accused him of producing such a result by promoting social segregation. “A city whose neighborhoods would be divided between, on the one hand, those blessed with good fortune, wealth, and elegance, and on the other, the population condemned to work for its livelihood, such a city would no longer be a Christian city, it would become a city of barbarians.”8 If the workers were “savages,” a “vile multitude,” mere criminal and “dangerous classes,” as the bourgeoisie was wont to depict them, then 1848 had showed all too clearly the kind of danger they posed and the kind of savagery they had in mind. Victor Hugo, however, proudly proclaimed the workers, “the savages of civilization.” But the general drift of this association, in 1848 as well as in 1871, was that the forces of “civilization” and “order” assumed a moral right to shoot the revolutionaries down like the dogs and savages they were presumed to be. Representing “the other” of working-class Paris in such racialized terms explains how class war could be conducted with such extraordinary ferocity and violence. It was not uncommon for the aristocracy and monarchists to justify their right to rule in terms of the supposed racial superiority of the (Nordic) Franks over the (Celtic) Gauls (workers and peasants).9 And it was no accident that it was Cavaignac, a general who had learned his trade in the colonial wars against the “barbarians” in Algeria, who led the ruthlessly violent repression of 1848.
Michelet, one of the most influential historians of the time, saw civilization as the product of “the struggle of reason, spirit, the West, the male to separate themselves and establish their authority over their origins in nature, matter, the East, the female.” Eroticized racist and gendered imagery of this sort, reinforced by painters like Delacroix and many Romantic writers, produced what Said calls “orientalism.”10 The Orient was seen as the womb from which civilization had issued forth, but also as the locus of irrational and erotic femininity and the seat of barbaric practices. That imagery remained untouched by the increasing ease of human contact. When Flaubert journeyed up the Nile in 1849, he went, like many before him, with only one thing in mind: to “find another home” in the voluptuous sensuality of the Oriental woman. His subsequent writings confirmed the image. Hitzman interprets all this as “unconscious projections onto aspects of the ancient world of underlying anxieties about the mère terrible.”11 It could also be an expression of deep fears (similar to those which Hugo and De Tocqueville recorded in the difficult days of 1848 and which erupted again in 1871 around the Commune) of “destructive, castrating female sexuality.” It is hard to read Flaubert’s Salammbo (with its graphic scenes of awful cathartic violence) and his letters to his mother without giving such interpretations some credence.
But it is too simple to let matters rest there. For, as Said points out, the Orient posed threats other than imagined licentious sex, disturbing though that may have been to the bourgeois fantasy of family and its accompanying cult of domesticity. A European and very capitalistic “rationality of time, space, and personal identity” confronted “unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance.” Michelet and the Saint-Simonians thus justified the penetration (and the sexuality of the term was flagrant) of the Orient by railroads, canals, and commerce, and the domination of an irrational Orient in the name of a superior Enlightenment rationality. The submission of East to West was as necessary to the progress of civilization as the submission of female to male authority and control. In L’Argent (Money) Zola had a fictional Saccard (loosely based on the real-life Pereires) set out to transform the Orient according to Western standards and Western commercial and capitalistic ideals (see above, p. 122).12 Flaubert, however, did not take this tack. Critical of bourgeois values and culture, he used the myth of the Orient, as did the many avid readers of tales of harems, princes, and the Arabian Nights in the penny press, to explore the “other” in his own personality and the underside of bourgeois culture. Reflecting on his Egyptian journey, he wrote:
The thing we all lack is not style, nor the dexterity of finger and bow known as talent. We have a large orchestra, a rich palette, a variety of resources. We know more tricks and dodges, probably, than were ever known before. No, what we lack is the intrinsic principle, the soul of the thing, the very idea of the subject. We take notes, we make journeys; emptiness! emptiness! We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, people of taste. What is the good of all that? Where is the heart, the verve, the sap? Where to start out from? Where to go? We’re good at sucking, we play a lot of tongue games, we pet for hours: but—the real thing! To ejaculate, beget the child!13
So what, then, could “the very idea of the subject” be? “Travelling makes one modest,” Flaubert observed. Remarkably, he did not appropriate the idea of the Orient for himself. He saw through the myth of it as a peculiarly Western neurosis. In his novel Salammbo, with its Orientalist setting, he dramatically prophesied the searing rage of male hysteria that erupted in the violence of the 1871 Commune.
But such modes of interpretation were not universal. Elisée Reclus, for example, sought a very different kind of geographical understanding of the world than did Michelet or Flaubert. Reclus believed in the potential harmony not only of “man” with nature “but also of all the different cultures that populated the earth.” Behind that there lay a utopian vision. “Humanity, until now divided into distinct currents, will be no more than a single river, and, reunited into a single flow, we will descend together toward the great sea where all life will lose itself and be renovated.” Free of the psychodrama imposed by the “progressive” Michelet, this admirer of Proudhon, fellow conspirator with Bakunin, participant in the Commune, and future collaborator with Kropotkin, produced a geographical vision that had all the flavor of the Parisian craft workers’ optimistic mutualism. He supported the International Working Men’s Association’s project to unite workers of the world in common struggle. Reclus’s geographical thought, presented in voluminous writings from the 1860s (only now being recovered from the obscurity in which they have for too long languished), provides a different way of understanding and presenting “the other” in the full splendor of personal dignity and potential harmony.14 This was far more consistent with the view from the Paris workshop than the racially charged imperialism characteristic of the affluent salons of the Faubourg St. Germain.
The case of Orientalism illustrates, however, a general point. The same processes that increased knowledge of the world rendered its misrepresentation all the more likely. Images of the city-country and Paris-provinces relation within a changing national economy of space were confused by class interests and prejudices. While it had long been fashionable (as Balzac showed) to affect a certain denial of rural and provincial life in bourgeois circles, the country was the secure base for a lot of those unearned revenues that circulated into Paris. The country also appeared (sometimes wrongly) as a peaceful haven of submission and reaction, compared to the rebellious incoherence of Paris. That was where the threatened bourgeois (and even their artists and writers like Delacroix, Flaubert, and George Sand) fled when matters got out of hand, and it was from there that the army and National Guard were mobilized to crush Parisian revolts in 1848 and 1871. Provincial France was the secure if invisible rock upon which Parisian life and French politics were founded. Bucolic images of rurality in the novels of George Sand reassured. Even the worker poets (many from the provinces) whom she encouraged appeared naive enough in their socialism to be unthreatening.
Figure 96 Relations between the countryside and the city were changing rapidly as the new modes of communication came into being and as Haussmann set out to annex large tracts of the suburbs into Paris. In this Daumier cartoon, two peasants celebrate the fact that they have suddenly become Parisians.
The extensive rural resistance to the coup d’état of 1851 came, therefore, as a shock. It indicated class relations, discontent, and revolutionary sentiment in the countryside. And this was the sentiment that Courbet brought to the salon of 1851, particularly in his painting Burial at Ornans. The trouble was that he rendered explicit the class relations in rural and provincial France, and did so with a fierce realism that earned him the name of “the Proudhon of painting.”15 It was from that countryside, rich with the ambiguities of its own class experience, that new workers poured into Paris, carrying with them from Limousin, Creuse and Var, from Seine-et-Oise and Doubs, their own particular brands of revolutionary sentiment. Many a leader of the workers’ movement of 1868–1871 had, like Varlin, provincial and rural origins. But by the end of the Second Empire there was also a strange reversal: even the popular classes could take excursions to the countryside, a frontier where the commodification of access to nature as a consumption good was becoming as important as the search for open land for new industrial and housing development.16 It was in this environment that the impressionists did so much of their work.
The interior transformation of Paris and the beginnings of suburbanization were likewise perceived and understood through political lenses. Subsequent commentators have replicated the consequent ambiguities without always understanding them. On the one hand, Berman treats Baudelaire’s “The Eyes of the Poor” as an image of how Haussmann’s boulevards “inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermetically sealed world of traditional urban poverty,” thus making a fact of “the misery that was once a mystery.” On the other hand, many saw increasing spatial segregation due to Haussmannization as the crux of the problem. Both propositions may be true. The construction of an extroverted, public, and collectivized style of urbanism under the Second Empire altered the balance between public and private spaces in the city. Public investments were organized around private gain, and public spaces were appropriated for private use; exteriors became interiors for the bourgeoisie, while panoramas, dioramas, and photography brought the exterior into the interior.17 The boulevards lit by gas lights, dazzling shop window displays, and cafés open to the street (an innovation of the Second Empire) became, as we have seen, corridors of homage to the power of money and commodities, play spaces for the bourgeoisie. When Baudelaire’s lover in “The Eyes of the Poor” suggests the proprietor send the ragged man and his children packing, it is the sense of proprietorship over public space that is really significant, rather than the all-too-familiar encounter with poverty (see above, p. 133).
The irony, of course, was that the new means of communication (boulevards, streets, omnibuses) and illumination opened up the city to scrutiny in a way that had not been possible before. The urban space was experienced, therefore, in a radically different way. Frédéric Moreau, the hero of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, moves from space to space in Paris and its suburbs, collecting experiences of quite different qualities as he goes. The sensation of space is quite different from that in Balzac. The same disaggregations may be there, but what is special is the way that Frédéric moves so freely, even into and out of the spaces of the 1848 Revolution. He glides as easily from space to space and relationship to relationship as money and commodities change hands. And he does so with the same cynicism and lassitude. Yet there is a hidden bound in Frédéric’s wanderings, in much the same way that the circulation of money concentrates in certain zones rather than in others. Frédéric has no reason to be in Belleville or even in the parts of eastern Paris where artisanal industry holds sway. It is solely in bourgeois Paris and its environs that Frédéric moves. For Flaubert, the segregations were so naturalized as to be almost unnoticeable, and it would take the ethnographic inquiries of Zola to bring them back into the heart of literature.
The bourgeoisie did not welcome encounters with “the other” of the working or dangerous classes (like the lover in “The Eyes of the Poor”). And they had another fear: the crowd might hide subversive elements or suddenly become an unruly mob. The fears were well grounded. Prostitutes circulated easily within the crowds along the boulevards, in defiance of all police attempts to control and evict them. When Blanqui decided to review his secret army, the word went out, and two thousand troops, all unknown to each other and to him, paraded past him in the midst of a crowd on the Champ-de-Mars that did not even notice.18 Spaces and the crowd had to be controlled if the bourgeoisie was to maintain its class position and power. The dilemma in 1868–1871, as in 1848, was that the republican bourgeoisie had to open its space in order to achieve its own revolution. Weakened, it could not resist the rising pressure of the working-class and revolutionary movements. It was for this reason that the reoccupation of central Paris by the popular classes—the descent from Belleville—took on such symbolic importance. For it occurred in a context where the poor and the working class were being chased, in imagination as well as in fact, from the strategic spaces and even off the boulevards now viewed as bourgeois interiors. The more space was opened up physically, the more it had to be partitioned and closed off through social practices of forced ghettoization and racially charged exclusions. Zola, writing in retrospect, presents as closed those same Parisian spaces that Flaubert had seen as open. Thus did the geographical imagination of the bourgeoisie seek to impose sociospatial exclusions and order upon the spaces that Haussmann’s works had opened up.
The relations between a traditionally centralized state, civil society, and individual liberties had long been the fulcrum of French political debate. Monarchy and religion had made common cause around the idea of respect for authority within a hierarchically ordered state and civil society. The Jacobins looked to a strong, centralized power but sought to root its legitimacy in the sovereign will of a people liberated from hierarchy in civil society. They attacked the workers’ corporations that restrained the liberty of labor with the same vehemence they attacked religion. The Second Empire tried to have the best of both worlds, using universal suffrage to legitimize the Emperor, from whom all authority then flowed. But there were strong currents of criticism of such forms of centralization. An English visitor considered the political system “a coarse form of communism” and wondered how his compatriots could so laud the practical application of a doctrine that, in its theoretical form, “smites them with so much horror.”19 The enemies of Empire increasingly focused their attacks, therefore, upon its excessive centralization. Much depended, however, upon whether it was economic, political, or territorial centralization of power that was the focus of complaint.
The Second Empire saw the state enhance direct economic control and indirect economic influence through the formation of strong institutions for the centralization of capital. The connection between the Pereires and Haussmann was typical of an organizational form close to state monopoly or finance capitalism. Because they controlled banking, transport, communications, the press, urban services, and property speculation, there were few arenas of economic life outside the orbit of finance capital and the state. This sparked debate over the nature of capitalism and the relative virtues of competition and monopoly. The debate pitted what might loosely be called Saint-Simonian ideology and practice against the doctrines of the free-market economists. While the Saint-Simonians never developed a coherent economic theory, they did cultivate an attitude of mind that, being both pragmatic and broadly oriented to social questions, led many of them to adapt their ideas, albeit always around the general theme of production, in diverse ways. The Emperor may have entered the Empire as “Saint-Simon on horseback” (to use Sainte-Beuve’s famous phrase), but he left it as a liberal free trader. Chevalier, an original member of the sect and then professor of economics, negotiated the free-trade agreement with Britain in 1860 and then embraced liberalism. And the practices of the Pereires evolved in pragmatic and often self-interested ways. But Saint-Simonian doctrine gave legitimacy to imperial economic policy and the centralization of capital.
Free-market economists like Bastiat and Say, by contrast, advocated greater market liberty and competition (supposed virtues already forced on the working class in 1852). As private property rights were reasserted against state power in Paris in the late 1850s, and as fears of the Pereires’ power mounted, free-market ideology was mobilized as part of an attack upon imperial policy. In the hands of industrialists or bankers like Rothschild, the arguments appeared hypocritical and self-serving. But the 1860s saw a growing consensus, within both the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement, that the excessive centralization of economic power had to be checked. Though the solutions they might offer were very different, a powerful class alliance (joining Proudhonists like Duchêne and Rothschild’s protégé Say) could form around the theme of opposition to the further centralization of capital. The downfall of the Pereires and of Haussmann, the transition to liberal Empire, and the increasing credibility of the “economists” (liberals) testified to the growing power of that alliance.
The question of political decentralization stirred similar passions. The Second Empire produced a tightly controlled hierarchy of power from the Emperor down to the prefects and subprefects, appointed mayors and local councils, appointed heads of mutual benefit societies, worker-employer commissions, and the like. Local democracy was negligible. But local autonomy outside of Paris was partly protected by inaccessibility. The new transport and communications system, often pushed hard by local elites, had the ironic effect of making central government control easier and thus reducing local autonomy. Increasing spatial integration was accompanied by a rising clamor for some degree of local self-government. Legitimists, Orléanists, republicans, and socialists all took to championing the cause of local liberties during the 1860s. All of them, even the Bonapartists, trumpeted the importance of the commune as a central political institution. But Bonapartists supported it as a local vehicle for central administration; royalists supported it, provided it empowered local notables and the clergy; republicans supported it, as a central institution of local democracy (governed by the local bourgeois or, among democrats, by the people); communists supported it because it was within the commune that political solidarities were formed; and mutualists like Proudhon supported it as the basis of federal governance. Historians debated it endlessly, usually through discussion of the relative merits of the Jacobin Robespierre and the more democratically minded Girondists, almost always coming down on the side of the latter. By the late 1860s “decentralization had assumed all the appearances of a national crusade.” It certainly became the centerpiece of attack against Haussmann.20
It is hard to differentiate, however, between purely opportunistic arguments of those out of power (the monarchist case is particularly suspect) and deeply held beliefs of someone like Proudhon, who looked to the withering away of the state through the federation of independent and autonomous associations as his ideal, and who in any case saw political reorganization as irrelevant in the absence of a fundamental reorganization of production against the centralization of capital. But whatever the basis, the fight for political decentralization was real enough, and it put the question of self-government for Paris squarely on the agenda. The fact that hardly anyone was against the idea of the commune (with a small “c”) was to play a crucial role in the way so many disparate forces rallied to support the Paris Commune of 1871.
But that posed another problem. For was not Paris, as Haussmann insisted, “centralization itself ”? Fearful of the immense centralization of economic, political, administrative, and cultural power in Paris, many a provincial who supported decentralization demurred when it came to self—government for so influential a city, one that had also been prone to radical if not “red” political leanings. And there were many in the Parisian bourgeoisie, like Thiers, who shared those fears. This was the sort of coalition that behaved in such an inflammatory way toward the Paris Commune. Nonetheless, there were many Parisians who supported the cause of decentralization but who also proudly held that Paris was “the head, the brain, and the heart of Europe”—a view “which may explain,” an English visitor wryly observed, “why Europe sometimes plays such strange antics.”21 Proudhon thus wanted Paris to “discard the crown of capital” but nevertheless to “take the lead as a free and independent commune in the crusade for a federated nation.” Blanqui agreed that the revolution had to begin in Paris, but, Jacobin that he was, he thought of a revolutionary Paris conquering, ruling over, and bringing enlightenment to the backward provincials. That Blanquists and mutualists fought side by side to create and defend the Commune was, therefore, nowhere nearly as odd as it may have seemed.
Clearly, there was a sense in which the Commune was a rising for municipal liberty. That it was exclusively so in the social democratic sense, as Greenberg argues, or that it was purely about community and in no way about class, as Gould insists, is, however, beyond the bounds of credibility. Certainly, different factions saw the Commune very differently. For mutualists and communists, it was the shield behind which they could begin their more solid work of reorganizing production, distribution, and consumption, in alliance with other movements in other centers. For the Blanquists it was the first step in the political liberation of France, if not the world. For the republican mayors of the arrondissements, it was the first step in integrating Parts into a republican system of government and, if necessary, a defensive weapon to be used against monarchist reaction. For all of them it was easier to define what the Commune was against than what it was for. And the paradox, of course, was that the strong sentiment for decentralization in the provinces could so easily be mobilized to crush a movement of decentralization within a city where so much power was centralized.
Four o’clock. The other Paris awakes, the Paris of work. The two cities hardly know each other, the one that rises at midday and the one that beds down at eight. They rarely look each other in the eye and then—all too often—only on the sad and somber days of revolution. They live far from each other; they speak a different language. There is no love lost between them; they are two peoples.22
No matter how intricate the class structure and the division of social space in actuality, the simplistic image of Paris as a city divided into two classes and two spaces erupts again and again in representations of the time. It was an image with a long history. Before 1848, the “other Paris” was seen in terms of “dangerous classes,” whose utter destitution sometimes inspired pity, but more often horror, disgust, and loathing. Terms like “savage” and “barbarian,” and epithets like “animal,” gave racial coloration to bourgeois imagery, justifying the murderous violence with which the bourgeoisie often approached workers and the impoverished.23 “Equality asserted itself triumphantly,” wrote Flaubert of 1848; “an equality of brute beasts, a common level of bloody atrocities; for the fanaticism of the rich counterbalanced the frenzy of the poor, the aristocracy shared the fury of the rabble, and the cotton nightcap was just as savage as the red bonnet.”24 Though 1848 may have proved there were differences between the laboring and the dangerous classes, it had also promised, then denied, real political power to the workers. Power shifted—relatively permanently, as it turned out—to the bourgeois side of the barricades. Thereafter, many in the bourgeoisie felt free to tar all those who had been on the other side with the same brush. The imagery previously applied to the dangerous classes now clung not only to the laboring classes but even to their defenders, like Blanqui. Furthermore, everyone knew where the barricades had been erected, what part of the city belonged to “the other.” A barricade makes for a simple dividing line. The experience of 1848 lived on in simplified, polarized representations of social and physical space.
Figure 97 The distribution of barricades in Paris during the June uprising of 1848 illustrates how strong the political division was between the east and the west of the city (after Girard, 1981).
Bourgeois representations of what existed “on the other side” were colored by the nature of their contacts. Most of the haute bourgeoisie were either economically inactive (in Paris) or in government service, and the economically active tended to concentrate in high finance. Industrialists who actually dealt with workers (like Poulot) were few and far between, and in any case were considered inferior. Yet Paris was a working-class city, increasingly organized so that the conspicuous consumers could, as Lazare put it, “long savor the taste of the honey without being troubled by the buzzing of the bees.”25 The imagery of what existed “on the other side” was not built out of human contact, save casual and usually unfortunate street encounters (of the sort described in Baudelaire’s “The Eyes of the Poor”). The reports of bourgeois reformers (of no matter what political persuasion) on conditions in working-class Paris fueled rather than assuaged the imagery by dwelling upon the destitution and degradation. Living in such animal conditions, could the people be anything other than animals? That sort of racial reasoning was not far from the surface in influential circles and filtered with ease into literary representations. It was standard fare in response to the Commune. In all cities, wrote the poet Théophile Gautier, there were closed caverns for
wild animals, stinking beasts, venomous beasts, all the refractory perversities that civilization has been unable to tame, those who love blood, who are as amused by burning down as by fireworks, who delight in thievery, those for whom attacks against decency pass for gestures of love, all the monsters of the heart and the crippled of spirit; a population from another world, unused to daylight, craving trapped in the depths of subterranean shadows. One day, when the animal tamer inadvertently leaves his keys in the gate of this zoo, these ferocious creatures go about a terrified city with savage cries. The cages open, the hyenas of’93 and the gorillas of the Commune pour forth.26
The venomous violence of such sentiments was all too common. It is hard to read influential journals like the Revue des Deux Mondes during the 1860s without blanching. And the violence has a curious quality to it, rather as if there is an inner longing to exorcise a devil, to burn out some excruciating sore on society, to seek some ultimate denouement, a catharsis. “There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet,” wrote Baudelaire, “to know, to kill and to create. “ Flaubert confessed that the riot was the only thing he understood in politics: “I despise modern tyranny because it seems to me stupid, weak and without the courage of its convictions.” He added, “I have a deep cult of ancient tyranny which I regard as mankind’s finest manifestation.”27 The scenes of murderous violence toward conquered people in Salammbo led to accusations of sadism. But it was exactly such scenes that were to be acted out against the Commune, a brutal bloodletting justified by Goncourt as a bleeding white by killing off the combative reds. Fearfully recalling the Reign of Terror, it seems the bourgeoisie built images and representations to justify launching its own preemptive terror against the other Paris.
Revolutionaries, particularly those drawn from the ranks of students and la bohème, played the image in reverse. They saw the workers as noble, skilled, self-reliant, intelligent, generous, and capable of leadership. Their “other Paris,” to the west, was populated by speculators, stock-exchange wolves, rentiers, parasites, and vampires, who sucked the lifeblood of the workers and destroyed their dignity and self-respect. Crushed under the burden of the idle rich, working-class Paris had every right to rise up in revolution. The Blanquists took that idea even farther. They saw Paris as the revolutionary hearth from which liberation had to spread not only to the rest of France but to the rest of the world, as it had in 1789. It was, furthermore, in the “other” Paris, more particularly in Belleville and the quarter of Père Lachaise, that the revolution would have its origin.28 It was into this quarter that those with Blanquist sympathies, like the influential Gustave Flourens (a professor of human anatomy, killed in the early days of the Commune), moved to cultivate their revolutionary base. And there is more than a hint of that same sense of violent revolutionary catharsis in the Blanquist rhetoric (drawing, as it did, so explicitly on the ideals of Hebertist revolutionary purity of 1793).
Not everyone was caught in such polarized imagery. Yet even those who sought to soften its edges often ended up reinforcing the general argument. Contemporary writers like Audiganne, Corbon, and Poulot at least had intimate contact with the Parisian workers and provide us with a composite character sketch. Writes Audiganne:
Paris workers are extremely sociable, open, with grand ideas and strong philanthropic concerns, expressed as mutual aid and reciprocal tolerance. On the other hand, they have an irresistible taste for dissipation and expenditure, an ardent thirst for pleasure, and a passionate love of change. … They participate in riots with the same enthusiasm as they do in fêtes, delighted to break the monotony of their daily life without concern for the consequences. The cult of equality and nationality is their hallmark.29
The irresponsibility of Parisian workers was, of course, anathema to the rather puritanical radical bourgeoisie (Poulot, for example). But many commentators who knew them, like the socialist Vallés, who moved to working-class Paris out of sympathy for the oppressed, were amazed at the warmth and generosity they found there. All the more reason, therefore, to regret both the polarization of opinion and the weight of oppression that fell on working-class Paris. But in arguing for relief of the latter, reformers could not help but reinforce the former. Corbon lamented the perpetuation and deepening of class divisions and argued that although the poor did not resent wealth as such, their own perilous condition, taken together with the increasing affluence of the rich, was certain to pose a threat to the security of the wealthy. That threat, moreover, had a geopolitical expression. “The transformation of Paris, having forcibly removed the working population from the center towards the extremities, has made two cities of the capital—one rich, one poor…. The deprived classes form an immense cordon around the well-off.” Lazare resorted to the same threatening imagery: “The flood of poverty rose in Belleville,” he wrote, “while the river of luxury flowed at full crest in the new quarters of Paris.”30 The haute bourgeoisie suspected, with good reason, that the “reds” were submerging themselves in that flood of poverty in Belleville. To the degree that they could not and would not even set foot in the place, such accounts could only exacerbate their fears. There dwelt “the dregs of the people,” editorialized newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Moniteur. There you found, wrote the journalist Sarcey, “the deepest depths of poverty and of hatred where ferments of envy, of sloth and anger, bubble without cease.”31
Feared though he was by the bourgeoisie, Blanqui never succeeded in establishing a mass base within the working class. Indeed, there were periods when he seemed totally without influence, except as a remote, uncompromising, and incarcerated symbol. Only in the 1860s did the Blanquist movement spring to life, and then mainly among militant, atheist intellectuals, and students, drawn to the nobility of his suffering and the purity of his cause.32 During the active class struggles of 1868–1871, the Blanquists, partly out of their dedicated concern for education and their willingness to swim in the “rivers of poverty” that flowed in the “other Paris,” did acquire an important following. Their lack of mass influence was partly a matter of choice. The experience of 1848 and the foundation of Empire through universal suffrage made them suspicious of mass democracy under conditions of ignorance and bourgeois domination of the instruments of mass communication. Their roots in the pure forms of the French revolutionary tradition (as represented by Babeuf, Hébert, and Buonarotti) held them to an insurrectionary Jacobin politics. Under conditions of tight police surveillance, this meant the formation of closed cells, impenetrable to infiltration but also closed to mass participation. Dictatorship of the proletariat through insurrectionary violence was their aim.
Their influence was also checked by circumstances of class structure that did not fit easily with the message they sought to convey. While insurrection against a state apparatus controlled by the haute bourgeoisie made a great deal of sense, it could not address the question of the organization of work in a city where the small workshop and the putting-out system dominated, and where the line between capital and labor in production was still somewhat blurred even by the end of Empire. The Parisian workshops had, in fact, been fertile breeding grounds, as we saw in chapter 2, for all kinds of socialist, communalist, and communist ideologies ever since the early 1830s, and they continued to be so.
The communist slogan “From each according to his capacity and to each according to his need” sounded seductive to the mass of the impoverished, and had a powerful hold among craft workers faced with insecurity of employment and the ravages of technological change. But the communists were, as Corbon noted, of two sorts. There were those who sought to impose their system on the whole of society through an increase in state power vis-à-vis private property. They had looked in 1848 to the formation of national workshops as a prelude to state ownership, a guaranteed right to work, and equality of distribution. From this standpoint socialists like Louis Blanc, Raspail, and Barbès could make common cause with Blanqui (interpersonal rivalries permitting) to seize state power in the abortive movements of April 16 and May 15, 1848. Others, like the Cabetists (Icarians) and the Fourierists, sought to live out their doctrines in their own daily lives, hoping by their example to persuade people of the virtues of collective organization and communism. After the frustration of 1848, these latter groups chose emigration or were forced into exile, mostly to the United States, as their only hope.
Proudhon, however, drew quite different conclusions from the experience of 1848. He felt the insurrectionary movements offered nothing but the replacement of one regime of repression and domination by another. The problem of work could not be solved through political channels. The state was the enemy no matter who controlled it. This put Proudhon at odds not only with Blanquists and communists but also with all those who saw the political republic as a necessary prelude to social change. The struggle to liberate the worker was to begin in the workshop with the implementation of practical plans rather than utopian schemes. Cooperation and mutualism meant a new conception of workers’ democracy in the labor process, and it was to be backed by mutual credit and banking, mutual insurance and benefit societies, cooperative housing schemes, and the like. The virtue of such a program was that it avoided state intervention and could lay a basis for the withering away of the state. Just as important, it could bypass class confrontation in the workshops and rally small masters (threatened by competition, changing conditions of credit and marketing, etc.) to the cause.
Proudhon supported private property in housing, retailing, and so forth, provided it was open to all; objected to strikes and unions; and was suspicious of the idea of association, since by 1860 it was becoming part of an ideology of class struggle. His ideas were influential. We thus find Clément, the shoemakers’ representative to the Workers’ Commission of 1867, defying and condemning those who looked to strikes, class struggle, and other forms of confrontation to advance the workers’ cause.33 The power of private property could be undermined and class struggle avoided, he argued, “by laborers working in solidarity, coming together, learning to know each other, living in the family,” building up their own capital and thus eliminating the power of external ownership over their lives.
But within the debates that swirled around the organization of labor in Second Empire Paris, one concept exercised a peculiar power and fascination: association. It acquired its central position in part because of its deep roots in tradition but also by virtue of its ambiguity. It had been central to Saint-Simonian thought in the 1830s as well as to the Fourierism and workers’ socialism that cut their teeth in the same period (see chapter 2). Initially it was an idea that sought to overcome class conflict and the social anarchy, selfish greed, and social inequalities engendered by private property capitalism. In the hands of the Saint-Simonians, it meant the association of all capitals, great and small, mobilized to such productive and socially desirable ends that the whole of civil society, including the workers themselves, would be embraced within the harmony of social progress. The Pereires were schooled in that ideology in the 1830s and put it to use in the 1850s to try to construct a kind of democratic state-monopoly capitalism. The idea of association therefore had a certain legitimacy and was actively supported by the government. Even Marx, who mocked the idea that the association of capitals could do anything other than spark orgies of speculation, conceded that it might constitute a “form of transition to a new mode of production,” thus endowing the Pereires “with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.”34
In the hands of the workers’ movement, the idea underwent a significant evolution. In its earliest manifestations in the 1830s, it meant producer associations, mutual benefit societies, and other forms of which Proudhon was later to approve. But repression followed by the ravages of technological change and capitalist exploitation later turned “association” into a code word for class and corporatist resistance. The first sense seems to have remained dominant in Paris at least until 1848–1851. The provisional government decree of 1848 that guaranteed the right to work also guaranteed the right of workers to associate “in order to enjoy the legitimate benefits of their labor.” The phrase is ambiguous. Does it mean the right to form trade unions or the right to found producer cooperatives? In practice, it rallied all those craft workers who, understanding that wealth was founded on labor, saw the free association of workers in production as the means to capture the benefits of their own labor and simultaneously to ensure the peaceful reorganization of society under the control of the direct producers.35
The vicious repression of all forms of worker organization in 1851 (save the mutual benefit societies and those under strict imperial control) drove such hopes underground, from whence Proudhon strove to resurrect them in their voluntaristic rather than state-directed form. But Corbon thought the idea steadily lost ground after 1848, not as a noble vision of some socialist future, but as a practical matter. Given the reorganization of the labor process and the increasing schism between capital and labor in Parisian industry, collective means had to be found to resist the deskilling of labor and sagging real incomes. Corbon noted the revival of corporatist sentiments during the 1860s and the mobilization of corporatist forms (abolished in the French Revolution) to defend working-class interests and to challenge the liberty of labor markets.36 “Association” then meant the right to form unions to negotiate collectively regarding wage rates and work conditions. The two meanings ran along side by side in the late 1860s. Liberty of association was one of the demands of all workers at the Workers’ Commission meetings of 1867. But they either meant different things by it or consciously chose to straddle the ambiguity in order to make good political use of it.
In 1869, Moilin published a utopian tract, Paris en l’An 2000.37 A dedicated and learned doctor (he had been the assistant to Claude Bernard, an eminent physician) he had acquired a significant reputation for his care of the poor in the First Arrondissement during the cholera epidemics. During the 1860s he became enamored of a socialist future based on order and social justice, and at times ran into difficulty with the authorities because of his ideas. He envisaged a socialist government that would reshape the city by the year 2000 to promote the well-being of all. The state would own all the property, eliminating property speculation and landlordism. The reshaping of the city was placed in the hands of architects, who would remove dilapidated slums and unhygienic structures. But the process would be gradual and avoid the brutality and class biases of Haussmann’s demolitions. The urban fabric would ultimately be dominated by structures reminiscent of Fourier’s phalanstères, square blocks of housing with a central space of gardens and courtyards for social and common activities. Connectivity within the city would be assured by second-floor arcades linked together with bridges and passages and serviced with elevators. This provided connected shopping and walking spaces and a sheltered system of communication for the whole of the urban population (ideal for the flaneur). Workshops were located on the ground floor and, light and airy in design, ensured work under the very best environmental conditions.
The whole of the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St. Louis were occupied by an immense structure, the Palais Internationale (shades of Perreymond—see above, pp. 83–85), into which flowed aerial railways and which functioned as a reception station into something like a permanent world exposition to celebrate universal fraternity and the unity of humanity. Here also were located government functions and a temple of socialism (replacing Notre Dame) that was the center of ritual and worship in the new order. Innumerable civic activities took place here through which a sense of identity with the city was forged for everyone. A balcony high up on this structure permitted people to look out over the whole city and appreciate its unity. Immense columns surrounding the palace supported a huge covering dome, made practicable by the new architecture in glass and iron.
By the year 2000, income inequality had been much reduced (no more than 1 to 5) and, thanks to public ownership, equality had entered into the organization of work. Social habits of generosity, mutual support, and equality of engagement had been achieved by reforms in education and apprenticeship. Ownership of property was rare, rents were modest, and housing blocks were characterized by the greatest possible diversity of people. Domestic service had been abolished. Many women worked according to their aptitudes, but they still did not have political rights (a concession to Proudhon?) and the family was still the basis of the social order (though divorce was recognized and prostitution forbidden). The intellectual world was marked by lively discussions and debates within the Academy of Paris (to which women and the young could be elected by universal suffrage). The strong taste for exhibitions, balls, concerts, theaters, journals, and for competition and achievement of marks of distinction (the Medal of the Republic being most valued), continued to be an important feature of cultural life. Huge cafés (where one did not drink too much) were centers of sociality and conversation. Parisians had not forgotten how to pursue their pleasures, and the arts of the lounger and the flaneur were much appreciated. As Benjamin noted rather dismissively, Moilin not only derived much from Fourier but envisaged the ideal city largely in terms of consumption and democratized fête impérial rather than of organized production.
The art of utopian thought, so thoroughly crushed in 1848, was here resuscitated twenty years later. Moilin was to play a very minor part in the Commune of 1871—he was an acting mayor of his arrondissement for the first three days in March. But he was arrested by the Versaille forces on May 27, brought before a summary court-martial in the Luxembourg Gardens, and instantly condemned to death, not because of his actions, the judgment said, but because “he was one of the leaders of the Socialist party, dangerous through his talents, his character and his influence over the masses; one of those men, in short, of whom a prudent and wise government must rid itself when it finds a legitimate occasion to do so.”38 He was given a respite of twelve hours to marry his pregnant companion, and then shot in the Gardens on the morning of May 28, 1871.
Shortly before the Commune, Edmond de Goncourt noted in his journal, “They speak of the nervous over-excitation of women … of the fear of having to suppress riots of women.” After the Commune that fear became a legend of “sinister females,” of “amazons and viragos,” inspiring and inflaming men by their obscene and unashamed immodesty, … clothing undone, their bosoms almost bare,” inciting and leading the torching of Paris. Contemplating the bodies of women dragged from houses and barricades and summarily shot, Houssaye wrote: “Not one of these women had a human face; only the image of crime and vice. They were bodies without souls, deserving of a thousand deaths, even before having touched the petrol. There is only one word to portray them: hideous.”39
This imagery of the bestiality and barbarism of women in the midst of riot and revolution, of the role of “women incendiaries” in the Commune, lived powerfully on, even though the military tribunals could find hardly any evidence for it—and not for want of trying.40 Zola, drawing heavily upon Maxime du Camp’s descriptions of the Commune, inserted into Germinal a horrendous scene of lynching and castration of the village shopkeeper by enraged women. Images of this sort were far from uncommon. They can be traced throughout the whole of the Second Empire. What, then, was this all about?
The connection between women, liberty, and the Republic (and hence with revolution) had long been in the making (as we saw in chapter 2). The imagery was so powerful that the manner in which women were depicted became, as we have seen, a tense focus of iconographic rivalry. In the June Days of 1848, the London Examiner reported an incident that reads like a reenactment of Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (though with a less than happy outcome):
One of the females, a young woman neatly dressed, picked up the flag, and leaping over the barricade, rushed towards the national guards, uttering language of provocation … a shot reached her and she was killed. The other female then advanced, took the flag, and began to throw stones at the national guards … [who] killed the second female.
Victor Hugo recorded the same incident. But he called both the women “prostitutes, beautiful, dishevelled, terrifying.” Uttering obscenities, they pulled up their dresses to the waist, crying, “Cowards! Fire, if you dare, at the belly of a woman.” “That was how this war began,” adds Hugo somberly.41 De Tocqueville, as we have seen, likewise gave vent to all the bourgeois fears of the unsubmissive and uncontrollable woman as an agent of revolution, and Flaubert’s depiction of the prostitute posing as liberty in the Tuileries in 1848 continued the tradition. On the other side of the English Channel, Charles Dickens propagated the same idea (though it was, of course, depicted as peculiarly French) in his portrayal of Madame Defarge and “La Vengeance” in A Tale of Two Cities.
Events of the sort that Hugo describes put the allegory into motion. And the symbolism was surely not lost: Had not the Republic shot down Liberty on the barricades? The iconography thereafter split along lines exactly demarcated by the distinction between the social and the political republic. The “cautious Republic of order and reconciliation” needed a quite different representation from the “impetuous and rebellious” image of the people’s Republic: “It began to look as if soon the camps of those clad in workers’ clothes would have one Republic with a red cap and a gaping bodice, while the camp of dark-suited gentlemen would have another, a ladylike Republic behatted with foliage and draped in robes from top to toe.”42 After 1848, the respectable republicans set out to domesticate the image (Bartholdi first discussed his plans for the Statue of Liberty that now stands in New York Harbor in the late 1860s). The workers clung to a more revolutionary image. They formed “Mariannist conspiracies” mainly in rural areas, although one was broken up in Paris in 1855. The emancipation of women, the nationalization of land and “all that lies therein,” and guarantees of adequate living, employment, and education for all were part of its program. Such sentiments evidently died hard. When women observers came to the Workers’ Commission of 1867, a worker was moved to cry out: “Madame, on seeing you enter, I believed I saw liberty enter. Whenever women sit down with men at these meetings, there commences the reign of liberty and justice. Vive la Femme! Vive la Liberté!”43
That women belonged exclusively in the home was a fiercely held belief among the bourgeoisie. Even radical republicans, like Michelet, and socialists espoused it. Proudhon’s notes for Pornocratie contain “every cruelly reactionary notion ever used against female emancipation by the most extreme anti-feminist.”44 Reinforced by a cult of domesticity (which broadly paralleled the taming of the image of liberty), its material underpinnings lay in a conception of marriage as a business enterprise, in the increasing separation of workplace from residence, and in the crucial importance of a well-managed domestic economy to bourgeois success. It also had much to do with a system of property and inheritance that made the habits and morals of the aristocracy impractical except under conditions of enormous wealth. Bourgeois republicans were trapped between the specter of collapse into the dissolute ways of the working class and the noblesse oblige of the aristocracy. For them, control over women was deemed essential to the preservation of class position. What is more, most women seem to have accepted that equation. Even George Sand took to lauding the virtues of the family in the 1860s, and after the Commune felt free to direct the most vitriolic barbs against the communards, even though she had never stirred from her rural estate. Those women like d’Hericourt who dissented were not paid much attention, and there was little sign of an independent feminist politics—the question of women’s suffrage (much debated in England) did not come up. Only toward the end of Empire did a group of women (Louise Michel, Paule Minck, Andrée Leo, and Elizabeth Dmitrieff)—begin to speak out on women’s rights and organize groups such as the Union des Femmes that played such an important role in the Commune.45
Figure 98 Daumier picks up on bourgeois fears of feminism and of the political consequences of women engaging with politics in this 1848 depiction of women threatening to storm the National Assembly to obtain the right to divorce.
It is tempting to speculate on the social-psychological meaning of all this. The image of liberty as a terrifying and uncontrollable woman of the sort de Tocqueville encountered—worse still, a public whore—in a phallocratic society where the preservation of bourgeois private property and class position depended on the control of women must have shaken the bourgeois male psyche to the core. Manet’s representations of women (in Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’Herbe) seem to have provoked bourgeois wrath precisely because the women appeared to be common prostitutes with an insufficiently submissive gaze.46 Hertz suggests that castration fears (of the sort that Zola made so explicit in Germinal) combined with class antagonism to produce “male hysteria under political pressure.”47 It is hard to explain the extraordinary violence of male rhetoric against women who participated in revolutionary action in any other way. It is hard even to grapple with conventional republican representations.
Michelet’s La Femme, first published in 1859, was a very influential tract by a celebrated republican historian. When the Workers’ Commission of 1867 turned its attention to women, a certain Dr. Dupas spelled out a crude version of Michelet’s ideas at length. The woman, he argued, is not equal to the man in physical strength, intellect, moral concerns, or devotion to public affairs, but her love and devotion as wife and mother surpass a thousandfold anything that men are capable of. Men are representatives of civilization, and women are creatures of nature (“Woman is natural. that is to say abominable,” sputtered Baudelaire, while Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe seems simultaneously to represent and to parody the opposition that Michelet made so much of).
The opposition between men and women could have a creative or a destructive resolution. In the absence of male restraint, the unclean side of woman’s nature (represented by menstruation) could dominate and erupt into violent hysteria (which is presumably what Hugo, de Tocqueville, and the anti-communards thought they saw in the midst of revolution). Woman at work and outside the restraint of men, Dupas continued, put a moral blot on society; this unhappy situation exposed society to the degradation and hysteria produced in the workshop. The only positive resolution lay in the union of male and female under the domination of men (the man is “1” and the woman is “0,” he explained, and the only way to multiply their social power was to put the “1” in front of the “0”; that way you got 10). But it was essential that the woman be given respect and sympathy. And here was the crux of Michelet’s message. The woman was to be cast in the role of suffering madonna, whose natural burdens could be relieved and whose infinite capacity for love and devotion could be released only under conditions of respectful and paternalistic male control.48 It is significant, I think, that not a single worker spoke up in support of such a view, and most condemned it outright.
Jules Simon also appeared before the Workers’ Commission, but he took a quite different tack. He deplored the fact that women worked, since that tended to destroy the family, led to the neglect of children, and deprived the man of a stable, caring, and loving home environment where he could replenish his body and his soul. Some way had to be found to preserve the family. Yet Simon knew that for most of the working class, women’s work was a necessity. He also knew that industry needed women’s labor power. He attacked the idea that women should be banned from the workplace on the grounds that this interfered with a precious liberty (that of the market) and that women needed employment. The problem was to find respectable and well-remunerated employment and so to prevent the slide into debauchery and prostitution. The answer lay in free education provided by the state. This would allow women to increase the value of their labor power (a human capital argument) at the same time that they would improve their skills as educators within the family. The educational reforms of the late 1860s did open up this possibility, and apparently were appreciated by workers and even the more militant feminists. Simon was popular enough to draw a massive working-class vote for his election in 1869, and his ideas were appreciated by militant feminists. But as several workers pointed out at the commission meetings, the improved education of women would increase the range of jobs for which women could compete and would push wages down. Simon did indeed have the support of the industrial interest, who saw merit in his proposals from their own standpoint.49
So what did workers think? Fribourg, a member of the International, spoke up at the Workers’ Commission for what was probably the majority, echoing Proudhon. The latter held that women belonged at home, under the authority of men. Though there was more than a touch of misogyny in Proudhon’s writings, worker sentiment did not rest on the kinds of arguments that Michelet or Dupas advanced. It drew, in the first instance, on a tradition in which the man had the legal and moral right to dispose of the family labor power. It also drew upon the desire to protect the family and the authority of the male as the grand provider. Men should therefore be paid more than women. But in Second Empire Paris it was also fueled by intense hostility to competition from women’s labor power, whether mobilized by the convents or directly in the workshops. The printers’ strike of 1862 was, in this regard, a cause célèbre; the introduction of women at a third less pay to break the strike was exactly what the male workers feared. The short-run solution was to raise men’s wages to cover family needs and to legislate women out of the workshops. The printers petitioned the Emperor to do just that. And in so doing they were not loath to use the sorts of arguments advanced by Michelet. They pointed to the hysteria generated by exposure to the workshop and argued, probably correctly, that the nature of the work and the toxic substances to which women were exposed induced a high rate of stillbirths and spontaeous abortions among the women employed there. So strongly were such views held that the French delegation to the Geneva meetings of the International in 1866 forced passage of a resolution banning women from the workshops and confining them to the home.
Socialist feminists like Paule Minck militated against such attitudes within the Parisian branch of the International. “We want to be treated neither as madonnas nor as slaves,” she argued at a public meeting in 1868, “but as ordinary human beings, different but equal, with the right to work at equal pay and to associate for our own economic emancipation.” She had male allies like Varlin, who rebutted Fribourg before the Workers’ Commission: “Women’s right to work was the only means to their true liberation,” and those who refused it “simply wanted to keep them under the domination of men.” Varlin, at least, was as good as his word, and wrote the right of women to work at equal pay into the constitution of the bookbinders’ union.50 The shoemakers, however, thought it sufficiently progressive to permit women into their union only if they asked no questions except in writing or through a male member.
Representations and rhetoric flew past each other at the Workers’ Commission meetings without touching. The real tragedy of that was already etched into women’s daily lives. The grisly aftermath of the Commune illustrates the violence and horror unleashed when class and gender antagonism reinforce each other. Many of the women dragged before the military tribunals had simply acted as ambulance or canteen helpers, and were totally mystified by the rhetoric and charges of heinous crimes directed against them. They had lived by the nobility of one vision only to be judged by the hysterical rhetoric of another.
When private representations enter into public rhetoric, they become means and motivations for both individual and collective action. It is always easier, of course, to reconstruct what people said, much harder to guess how they thought. And individual variation in this sphere is often so great that any general statement must appear misleading. Yet within the numerous conflicting eddies of ideas, broad themes stand out to suggest motivations. The final testing ground must lie, however, in action. For there is much that can be thought that never acquires the status of material force, since it stays forever locked in the realm of dreams. The themes we have here examined were not of that sort. The experience of the Commune saw all of them enter into social life, often with a vengeance. And there is enough evidence of the ordering of daily life in Second Empire Paris to make it at least reasonable to infer that the manner of the rhetoric and representation, as well as of the science and the sentiment, were more than just idle moments for the few. What ought, however, to be added is another category, that of silences—the silences of that multitude whose ideas we cannot trace and the strategic silences of those we can.