*IN THE TIME OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

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BOOK REVIEW

PARIS BABYLON, RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN, PENQUIN, NEW YORK, 1996

MARCH 18TH IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871

March 18th every year is the anniversary of the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871. That event rightly takes its place in an honored position in the revolutionary pantheon and is commemorated, especially in Paris, as such. Why? As the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, noted in his spirited defense of the Commune against the raging reaction of capitalist Europe and the faint-hearted in the international labor movement at the time this was the first, trembling, expression of the `dictatorship of the proletariat'-the time of working class rule. That it was crushed quickly by that same capitalist Europe and repressed thoroughly does not take away from the grandeur of the experience. Historians have rightly taken it as a seminal event in late 19th century European history. The book under review takes up the narrative around the establishment of the Commune in an interesting way.

The study of history, like other major scholarly disciplines, goes through cycles and, frankly, fads concerning the important lessons of any period and about what and who to emphasize or not emphasize. This book belongs in the camp of the social micro-history school where setting up the milieu is decisive for interpreting the sequence of events. The author has done a creditable job of setting the milieu of the Second Empire in France under the dyspeptic Louis Bonaparte and his entourage, including his demanding and, at times, bizarre wife. Moreover he sets the scene by a rather vivid, and perhaps too vivid, detailing of Parisian manners, mores, cuisine, architecture and other cultural phenomena which point menacingly to the disastrous military overconfidence and woeful under preparedness that was about to occur in 1870 when confronted by the Prussians.

Less satisfactory is his analysis of the enigmatic but politically clever Louis Bonaparte and the social base on which his regime rested. Karl Marx did a much more thorough, if more polemical, analysis on that base of mainly rural farmers and their political dependents who stuck by Bonaparte to the end in his classic exposition of historical materialism, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Also the author's narrative of the establishment and crushing of the Paris Commune does not lend itself to drawing any lessons from the experience.

While the author is not overtly hostile to the Commune he is clearly no friend, and makes no bones about it. Seemingly the Communards got what they deserved, or at least what they should have expected. If you want to get an in-depth analysis of those lessons you must look elsewhere, especially if you are looking for the implications for future revolutionary strategy for the 20th century Marxist movement.
With those shortcomings in mind if you want a good literary Inside Edition-like social travelogue of Paris in the third quarter of the 19th century this is as good a place as any to start.