A Luxury Legacy for the Paris Commune

Kristin Ross’s new book on the Paris Commune extends her earlier work on revolution in the French capital, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune and May ’68 and Its Afterlives, through an exploration of “communal luxury” in the city of light. The history of the Commune is well known. This popular revolutionary moment, which continues to haunt the leftist imagination in the twenty-first century, lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871. The Commune itself emerged from the infamous Prussian siege of Paris, which eventually led to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and the National Guard’s stubborn resistance to both the Prussians, who remained posted in France until after the end of the Commune, and eventually the French government and regular army that sought to retake the city. The story of the Commune begins when the temporary French government headed by Adolphe Thiers decided to remove armaments from a Paris (and the National Guard based there) that they were afraid would revolt. This action led to the very revolt the Thiers government had hoped to avoid. Under the National Guard, Paris remained self-governing for seventy-two days, while the temporary French government set up in Versailles. The Commune survived in the form of a kind of socialist utopia through this period until the regular army retook the city toward the end of May. The massacres of the “bloody week” began on May 21.

However, the focus of Ross’s Communal Luxury is on the “centrifugal forces” of the Commune. Indeed, her real interest lies with the ideas, lines of influence, and nonmilitary events on either side of the Commune’s lifespan. Ross provides the Commune with a context and a legacy that would otherwise be lost by a conventional focus purely on the military events. This expanded story is in part possible because, in Ross’s view, the Commune has come unstuck from the narratives of both “state socialism” and republican France (4). She explains that, instead, the Commune is “free,” in-line with the wishes of some participants, to remain unassimilated, “disruptive,” and hostile to the later developments of French republicanism (37–38). Ross uses this freedom to investigate the imaginary of the Commune, as found in the thoughts and deeds of participants and those inspired by them (6). Karl Marx features, including his complaint that the Commune failed to seize the Bank of France and “wasted time” destroying the Vendôme Column. But Ross contests this order of priorities and suggests that destroying an imperial monument is the first step toward recreating public space (60) and what she calls “communal luxury.”

In terms of the structure of the book, Ross moves from an exploration of pre-Commune revolutionary sentiment, through the expression of this sentiment in political radicalism, to its continued diasporic afterlife. The first, pre-Commune Paris section of the book begins with a discussion of the revolutionary clubs—suppressed during the Empire but later revived—that hosted a variety of speakers, including participants in 1848’s unrest and those who expressed revolutionary ideas. Ross’s exploration takes off from an 1868 speech in one such club (15–18), in which Louis Alfred Briosne (an artificialflower maker), an otherwise unremarkable speaker, addresses his audience not as “Mesdames et Messieurs” but as “Citoyennes et citoyens.” In doing so, Ross explains, Briosne created a symbolic link between the present and earlier revolutionary times, to 1789 and 1848, and signaled the reemergence of the alternative political subject par excellence: the free citizen. Thus, Ross shows how pre-Commune radicalism challenged the image of France as a self-identical nation organized around a homogenous national identity without class conflict. For Ross, this challenge remains irrepressible, in spite of later attempts to rehabilitate the Commune as a development of the French Republic, which ignores the slaughter of the communards qua “class enemy” by the founders of the Republic (37).

Extending her approach to the...