Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath

Introduction: The Commune and the Right to Confusion

Introduction The Commune and the Right to Confusion Perhaps it would be worth dwelling on this realm of confusion— which is simply that in which the whole human opera buffa is played out—to understand the pathways by which analysis proceeds, not only to restore order here but also to establish the conditions of possibility of its restoration. —Jacques Lacan, ‘‘L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’’ (The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious) This century is meant to confuse everything. We are marching toward chaos. —Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black) In the opening chapter of his Mimesis, Erich Auerbach draws a famously sharp distinction between legend and history. In legend, he writes, thinking of Homer: ‘‘All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared’’ (19). Legend thus ‘‘detaches [its material] from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it’’ (19). To legend’s essential simplification, Auerbach opposes the complex richness of historical narrative, approximated by the stories of the Old Testament but fully realized only in the course of the nineteenth century. Whether we witness the historical event directly or learn of it from others, Auerbach writes, that event runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data 1 2 Introduction before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events! (19) If we reread the two epigraphs above in light of Auerbach’s distinction, we see that it is not enough simply to assume, with Lacan, that the ‘‘whole human opera buffa’’ plays itself out under the sign of confusion, though in the way that Lacan means this—as a necessary function of the self’s radical heteronomy—it certainly does.1 Nor is it sufficient to follow the Marquis de la Môle in speaking of the French nineteenth century as ‘‘meant to confuse everything’’ (though the breakdown of class distinction to which the marquis’s conception of ‘‘chaos’’ alludes is likewise indisputable). Rather, the confusions specific to, say, the revolutionary dynamics of late nineteenth -century France themselves need to be read through that complex, and properly endless, negotiation with confusion that is historical analysis in Auerbach’s terms. The principal aim of this book is to examine the function of confusion in a body of French fiction defined by that historical moment which includes the Franco–Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the first decade of the Third Republic. How, the book asks, does the literary and/or philosophical representation of confusion both reflect and inflect the confusions inherent in an ongoing process of social upheaval evident in late nineteenthcentury France—a process whose benchmarks include democratization and the blurring of social classes, a persistent and evolving revolutionism, radical reconfigurations of the city as lived environment, and the development of specifically capitalist logics of commerce, with their corollary conception of desire as properly endless? More specifically, how might such representations of confusion be read as effects of, or responses to, the historical traumas occasioned by the events of the so-called Terrible Year (année terrible), from the French army’s defeat at Sedan (September 1870), through the Prussian occupation and first siege of Paris, to the Paris Commune (March–May 1871) and the bloody reprisals that attended its demise? By titling this study Commemorating Trauma, I mean to underscore confusion’s literary inscription , in and around the Terrible Year, in a process of endlessly repeated commemoration that served a clear foundational role for the early Third Republic. You may have noted a significant shift in the meaning of the term ‘‘confusion ’’ in the course of my last paragraph. When one evokes the confusions that resulted from such massive tectonic shifts as the breakdown of an inherited class structure or the development, under the twin pressures of capitalism and revolutionary experience, of a functionally modern conception of Introduction 3 the crowd...