Paris Babylon by Rupert Christiansen

(Book Review)

This is another book on the Paris Commune, a subject which, as I’ve indicated several times on this blog, has become an interest of mine.

The Paris Commune is like any event in history in that it is very easy to understand if viewed in its simplest terms, but becomes very complex and confusing when you look at the details.

The accepted myth about the Paris Commune is that it is the first communist revolution. The French right was eager to demonize the Paris Commune with this accusation, and the Communists were eager to take credit, so the myth went unchallenged by both left and right historians for many years. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao all wrote extensively about the Paris Commune and viewed it as the birth of the communist era.

The anarchists also lay claim to the Paris Commune for different reasons. This may seem contradictory, but remember anarchism and communism come out of the same socialist tradition, and 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, was before anarchists had been expelled from Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. (This website here explains the Paris Commune from an Anarchist perspective).

But what was the Paris Commune really? Was it an international conspiracy controlled by the nefarious Dr. Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association, or was it a spontaneous uprising by a population who had suffered too much under the callous of the Second Empire, the blunders of the French Government during the Franco-Prussian War, and the Siege of Paris by the Prussian army.

Although Christiansen’s book is subtitled “The Story of the Paris Commune”, the Paris Commune itself doesn’t come on the scene until the last 100 pages. The rest of the book is dealing with the decadence of Paris under Napoleon III and the Second Empire, and the sufferings of the Parisian population during the siege. Hence the title and the comparisons with Paris as the second Babylon.

As a popular historian Christiansen does a great job during the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. During both the siege and Commune he gives a day by day blow of what was going on in Paris, focusing on journal entries and memoirs from the participants. Fascinating reading.

Unfortunately the beginning of the book, the first 160 pages, is a bit slow. And nothing kills a book like a slow beginning. Unless the reader has a lot of patience, they might never get to the interesting parts.

For example there is the long chapter devoted to Urban renewal programs in Paris in the 1860s, during which I almost gave up the book. This is important historically, and certainly one of the causes of the Commune. (The fact that the poor were forced out of their old neighborhoods to make room for the Opera houses of the rich is cited by every historian as one of the causes of urban unrest in the late 1860s). But in a popular history, is it necessary to spend a whole chapter on the details of the urban renewal program? Could this point have been made in fewer words?

Others of Christiansen’s excursions are of questionable relevance. He devotes another chapter to the murder of Kinck family, a brutal murder which became a media circus in Paris in the 1860s. Even 100 years later the crime still feels fresh with tabloid voyeurism, but what is the connection to the Commune? According to Christiansen: “Every murder holds a mirror to society’s underbelly–its conscience, its values its soul. [Kinck’s murder trial] tells us about the way the Second Empire’s promotion of enterprise, commerce and profit as moral ideals could poison a fantasizing young teenager; it tells us about the bourgeois’ fear of the worker and the corruption of justice.”

Yeah, I suppose. Or one could say that every society, at any point in history, has always had its sickos and murderers.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The Metric calendar was abolished because having a ten-day work week gave workers less rest (one day off every ten instead of one day off every seven); because the equinox was a mobile date to start every new year (a fantastic source of confusion for almost everybody); and because it was incompatible with the secular rhythms of trade fairs and agricultural markets.

Link of the Day
The Rightwing Language Police

Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune by Rupert Christiansen: Book Review (Scripted)