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1 Why Confusion? Why the Commune? Confusion, I have suggested, is both this study’s principal subject and its historiographical limit. How and why, we will be asking, were the events most central to the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 perceived as confounding by contemporary participants and commentators? How did these forms of confusion differ from those felt to be endemic to French society under the Second Empire or, later, the Third Republic? How did the confusion diagnosis as applied to the Commune come to serve a progressivist vision of history? What were the uses of confusion, from a revolutionary point of view or from the point of view of a revolutionary aesthetic? How did the strategic appropriation of a revolutionary confusion to which they themselves were generally hostile help certain highly visible French authors work through the confounding events of 1870–1871? As my quotations from Auerbach and Geertz have suggested, moreover, confusion will also function here as a necessary methodological risk. In addressing the questions above, I aim to trace a historical trajectory that avoids both the Scylla of mimicked confusion and the Charybdis of overly simple (Auerbach would say ‘‘legendary ’’) classification. In order to give some sense of the rich historical context within and against which the literary and filmic texts I will be analyzing in chapters 2 through 7 actively negotiate with confusion, this opening chapter contains a brief overview of French political history from the beginnings of the Second Empire through the first two decades of the Third Republic. In the course of this survey, whose limitations are as obvious as they are inevitable, I will lay out some of the grounds on which those who lived through the events of this period would have had reason to find them confounding. This line of inquiry leads me to examine, in a crucial middle section, the function of the confusion diagnosis in two key texts of Marxist literature on the Commune : Karl Marx’s ‘‘The Civil War in France’’ of 1871 and Henri Lefebvre’s 1965 study, La Proclamation de la Commune. 13 14 Commemorating Trauma From Empire to Commune In December 1848, just half a year after the ‘‘June Days’’ had put a bloody end to the so-called February Revolution, a newly enfranchised French electorate overwhelmingly elected Louis-Napoléon, nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte , president of the republic. ‘‘In the oddest election of the nineteenth century,’’ Roger Williams writes of the elections of December 10, ‘‘the Radicals had supported Louis-Napoléon, thinking him a Socialist; the Moderate Republicans, thinking him a Jacobin; the Orleanists, supposing him a Liberal ; the Catholics, confident he would defend the Faith against radical onslaught’’ (51). ‘‘Just because he was nothing,’’ Marx quipped, LouisNapole ́on ‘‘could signify everything save himself’’ (Class Struggles, 72). On December 2, 1851, in the face of a constitution that limited him to a single four-year term, Louis-Napoléon dissolved the Legislative Assembly, laying the groundwork for a restoration of empire the following month. From its establishment in January 1852 to its demise in September 1870, the Second Empire was marked by extraordinary economic growth, in whose benefits the lower classes largely failed to share.1 Rapid construction of the nation’s railways; the establishment of great credit institutions, beginning with the Crédit Foncier de France and the Crédit Mobilier in 1852; industrialization of the French north; and an increasing concentration of capital and the means of production in the hands of a privileged few—these are but some of the developments that would lead Friedrich Engels to find in the Second Empire ‘‘the exploitation of France by a gang of political and financial adventurers, but at the same time an industrial development as had never been possible under the narrow-minded and timorous system of Louis-Philippe’’ (introduction, 24). No initiative better symbolizes the empire of Napoléon III—its expansionist spirit as well as its speculative corruption—than the so-called Haussmannization of Paris. From 1853 to the regime’s end, Baron GeorgesEuge ̀ne Haussmann led a massive effort to revolutionize the city’s urban landscape. In laying out the great boulevards that characterize Paris as we know it today, Haussmann sought to replace the city’s ‘‘warren of dangerous slums with public monuments and commercial development attractive to a new class of clean-living, high-spending, Empire-supporting bourgeois’’ (Christianson, 95). In the process, he managed to displace the Parisian working class...

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