Utopian visions

Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with Louise Michel, teacher, poet and revolutionary heroine of the 1871 Paris Commune, but she’s not exactly a well-known figure in the English-speaking world. Yet. If The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, the new graphic biography by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, has anything like the success of their remarkable first collaboration, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes – and it certainly deserves to – this could be about to change.

Michel is hardly obscure.  In fact she’s legendary.  She’s iconic.  In France (and indeed New Caledonia) there have been schools and streets and squares named after her, not to mention two International Brigade battalions and a Metro station.  She romanticised her own life in her memoirs, and has been mythologised ever since.  She was a saint, but a trying one, as an imagined contemporary in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia admits.  By embedding her biography within not one but two other narratives, the Talbots subtly acknowledge all this and simultaneously reframe Michel in an entirely new way.  She emerges as an inspiring if imperfect visionary, whose utopian dreams and desires for a more perfect world might actually, by implication, be one day within our reach.

I won’t give away its surprising outer envelope, but the main story begins with Michel’s death, and the arrival of her coffin at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on January 22nd 1905.  Michel’s formidable face is framed by a wreath of red carnations, but she’s not named, and the reader is left to work out why crowds are gathering, and red flags flying. As the cortège leaves the station, in a scene which manages to look both forwards and back to the proclamation of the Commune at the Hôtel de Ville on March 26th 1871, we see a young woman holding up a sign for Mrs Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  America’s famous feminist is on a European lecture tour. Michel’s story will emerge in conversation between Gilman and Monique, the daughter of fellow revolutionary who stood on the barricades with Michel.  A little later, the unnamed one-eyed Communarde joins them.

The double narrative hinges on an imagined meeting in London.  As far as I’m aware, Gilman only once encountered Michel and her fellow anarchists, Kropotkin and Reclus (‘desperately earnest souls’), at the alternative meeting arranged in London 1896 after the anarchists had been banned from the International Socialist and Labour Congress.  She was impatient with what she perceived as the weakness of the anarchists’ philosophy.  In the Talbots’ version, Gilman, who will eventually write Herland, instead recalls a delightful evening spent with Michel around that time discussing their shared obsession with utopian novels. (‘She was full of fantastical ideas.’)  Monique and Gilman reflect on fiction’s potential as ‘food for the mind’, and sci-fi becomes a creative lens through which The Red Virgin can view the life of a nineteenth-century political radical.

In an otherwise almost exclusively black-and-white visual narrative, splashes of red link flowers, flags, banners, scarves, pens, books, and a giant octopus.  There are a few other significant shifts in colour. The sky turns rosy at the pivotal moment on March 18th when the French government sent the regular army soldiers to steal Montmartre’s canon from the city militia, the National Guard.  Later, in two wordless images, a missile hits a cherry tree: chassepot on her shoulder, Michel looks up through an explosion of pink blossom.  Here the Talbots exquisitely evoke the hope and destruction of the ‘temps des cerises’, and also Michel’s ‘curious aesthetic’ – a slightly disturbing capacity to see beauty in bombs, to be enchanted by revolutionary destruction.

The graphic format lends itself particularly well to interacting narratives: hard white frames seperate the Gilman/Monique conversation from the soft blurred edges of the story it narrates.   But when it comes to the massacre in Paris that followed the invasion of the Versailles army – the paving stones ran with blood as the city burned – all borders vanish.  The horror can’t be contained.  A fog of ash descends like snow, and the flies gather over thousands of lime-sprinkled stinking corpses.

The Commune only lasted 72 days, and rightly takes up about half of this book.  Naturally I’d hoped the rest would take in a little more of Michel’s life in London, including perhaps her school in Fitzrovia, and her houseful of cats, but tight selection is precisely the art of a biography like this. The sequence depicting Michel’s deportation to New Caledonia and her support of the indigenous Melanesians’ revolution more than compensates.  It cleverly reveals the double-standards and blindspots not only of her fellow Communards-in-exile but also Charlotte Perkins Gilman, showing just how unusual Louise Michel was in her empathy for all the oppressed of this earth, regardless of race, class or gender.  She was equally zealous in her attention to needy animals.

Published on the 400th anniversary of More’ Utopia, this book both simplifies and complicates the story of the Commune and its thinkers and activists; it does so beautifully, by putting the imagination centre stage, and looking at the past with an eye always on the future.

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot was published by Jonathan Cape last month. This review was first published on my own website: www.lydiasyson.com. More Paris Commune reading recommendations here.

Intimate Friends by Lydia Syson

Today I want to celebrate the birthday of Frédéric Bazille, who was born on December 6th in Montpellier in 1841.  A medical student turned painter, who wore wonderful checked trousers, he was at the heart of the circle of artists who became the Impressionists. He volunteered to fight in the Franco-Prussian war and was killed by a sniper's bullet on 28th November 1870 in the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande during a disastrous attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.  If you've never heard of him, that's why.

Portrait of Fréderic Bazille by Etienne Carat, 1865

Here he is in 1867, full of concentration at his easel, one red-ribboned, espadrille'd foot curling gently over the other.  He was a tall young man, as you'll see. This painting is by Renoir.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Frédéric Bazille
1867
Oil on canvas
H. 105; W. 73.5 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

On the wall behind Bazille's head hangs a snow scene by Monet. (See yesterday's post by Joan Lennon for more on snowy landscapes.) A fourth friend who shared the studio, out of sight in the image above, was tackling the same still life at the same time. Here's what Alfred Sisley painted.

Alfred Sisley, Heron with Outstretched Wings, 1867
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Here's Bazille's version.  Presumably Sisley decided to leave out the fourth avian corpse.

Bazille, The Heron, 1867, Private Collection

And at some point the same year, Bazille produced this portrait of Renoir:

   

Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1867, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Unstudied and informal, Renoir's rakish pose reveals not just his elastic-sided boots (something I learned from the sumptuous exhibition catalogue in which I first came across the picture: Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity, The Art Insitute of Chicago, 2012) but also, perhaps, something about the friendship that existed between the two artists.  I've looked at this painting a lot, though only in reproduction.  It lives in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, where an exhibition devoted to Bazille and his place in Impressionism will open next summer. It made me very curious about the relationship between Renoir and Bazille.  

Bazille, Scène d'été, 1869, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Like his distinctly homo-erotic Summer Scene (above), which Bazille painted two years later, and his Fisherman with a Net (below), Bazille's painting of his friend fed into my thinking while I was writing Liberty's Fire and trying to clarify the relationship between two young men, one rich, one poor - just like Bazille and Renoir, as I now discover - sharing an apartment in Paris in 1871. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault identified 1870 as the year in which the concept of homosexuality was 'invented' - although obviously I'm giving you a drastic oversimplification of a much-debated and often-quoted argument - and I found myself wondering about the relationship between this and the emerging figure of the 'flâneur'.  What might it have been like to have been gay at a period when this was just beginning to be conceptualised as an identity, I wondered, in a country where it wasn't a crime?  I didn't know then that 2015 would turn out to be the year of LGBT novels for Young Adults, but I had been concerned that this was an aspect of diversity that certainly doesn't often feature in YA historical fiction.   

Bazille, The Fisherman with a Net, 1868,
Foundation Rau pour le Tiers-Monde, Zurich, Switzerland

When I realised that my last History Girls posting date of 2016 fell on Bazille's birthday, I was full of good intentions.  I'd investigate further, I decided, and find out (if I possibly could) whether Bazille really did have unreciprocated feelings for Renoir as his paintings had led me to suspect.  I'd find out more about his political views, and also about the incident during the Paris Commune when Renoir, out painting en plein air, was nearly executed as a spy, but his life was saved by Raoul Rigault.  But time has run away with me. Writing deadlines. Teaching. Christmas coming. I've left it too late.  I'm very sorry. I've made very little progress with this and all I can do today is leave you with these thoughts and one more enticing image.  

Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Bazille's Studio
1870
Oil on Canvas
H. 98; W. 128.5 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais-Grand Palais-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Bazille - the tall, gangly figure standing by the painting on the easel near the centre - was actually painted in by Manet.  Bazille has painted Manet wearing a hat and standing in front of the canvas. Monet is thought to be standing behind him, if he isn't the young man looking down from the stairs, who might be Zola.  On the far left, the artist sitting on the table with one foot swinging could be Sisley or Renoir. At the piano is their friend, patron and companion at the Café Guerbois, Edmond Maître, who was devastated by Bazille's death later that year, and wrote: 'Of all the young people I've known, Bazille was the most gifted and likeable.'  

 

Anarchy in Fitzrovia by Lydia Syson

Nervous eyes on cloudy skies, last month I slid a garden cane into a homemade red flag and set off to Fitzrovia to lead my first ever history walk.

Liberty’s Fire is a novel that could hardly be more firmly set in Paris, but in a sense, Fitzrovia is both where it began and where it ends.  I had found my way to the Paris Commune through the chance discovery that my great-great grandmother, Nannie Dryhurst, had worked as a volunteer teacher in the early 1890s at the anarchist International School set up by the legendary Communarde, Louise Michel – more about whom here.  And since this part of London was home to several generations of French revolutionaries during the nineteenth century, I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that it made sense to gather my surviving characters here at the close of the novel. When the Fitzrovia Festival invited me to design a walk exploring the fates of Communard exiles in London, I happily agreed – and began to investigate.  Here's just a little of what I discovered and the route we took, and since I’m not now extemporising on the move, I can include some references word-for-word rather than summarised from memory…

Outside the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street,
 with some of the walkers before we set off.

First stop: Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street

A little background before I introduce my main characters….French political exiles came to London in several waves.  The first were known as the quarante-huitards, who took flight in the wake of the 1848 uprising (vividly – if partially – described in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education) and a few years later in ’51 after Louis-Napoleon’s coup, when the Second Republic was overthrown and the Second Empire set up.  (Sticking with fiction, Zola’s The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thin opens with the return of his hero from a penal colony seven years later.)  Following the dramatic fall of the Paris Commune in May 1871, and the horrors of ‘Bloody Week’, over three 3,000 took refuge here, and were welcomed and looked after by the rump of the quarante-huitards who remained.  Some of course were involved in both revolutions, having returned to Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war after the defeat of the Emperor and the declaration of the Third Republic.  They fled to escape firing squads, prison and transportation to New Caledonia.  Most were ordinary working-class Communards in their 20s and 30s, 1200 were children, and some were prominent political leaders like Lissagaray. Wondering why London’s oldest patisserie, Maison Bertaux, was founded in 1871? Wonder no longer. And then followed yet another wave, arriving in dribs and drabs in the decade after the amnesty of 1880.  Some, like Louise Michel, had tried going back to France to take up the revolutionary cudgels once more after eight years in the Pacific, and were fed up with constant arrests and imprisonment.  Not  all were necessarily anarchists before the Commune, but many embraced the movement in one form or another afterwards. 

Second stop: Newman Passage

Old Fitzrovia lives on in this atmospheric alleyway, pictured here in the illustrated newspaper, The Graphic, (2 February 1972).  

©The Museum of London

Most Communards arrived here with absolutely nothing, lucky to have kept their lives.  Many had had nothing to start with, which was why they were prepared to risk everything for the progressive Commune. As Constance Bantman puts it, ‘the comrades tended to the most basic needs of one another’, and as you can see here, this meant feeding minds as well as bodies.  This co-operative ‘soup kitchen’ allowed exiles to talk as well as eat, and carried on the principles of collective action and social reform established by Communards like Nathalie Lemel and her fellow Internationalist Eugene Varlin in Paris in 1868 when the Emperor’s restrictions on freedom of association first began to lift a little.  Both were bookbinders and trade unionists, and Varlin, one of the most popular delegates on the Commune’s Council, who had opposed the anti-democratic Committee of Public Safety with its echoes of the Terror, fought on the barricades in the 6^th and 10^th arrondissements during Bloody Week, and tried to stop the controversial execution of the Commune’s hostages.  However he was arrested after being recognised by a priest, tortured, and shot, and died with ‘Vive la Commune’ on his lips.  In 2007 a small (triangular) square in the Marais, just by the rue de la Corderie, was named after Lemel, who is credited with having converted Louise Michel to anarchism while they were both deportees. 

Newman Passage

Third stop: the Autonomie Club, 32 Charlotte Street

Later exiles found soup and comradeship just round the corner at the Autonomie Club, a forum for international anarchism in London founded by German comrades in 1886. In November that year it held a fundraising evening featuring speeches, song, dancing and a tombola to support a radical newsletter in Bohemia.  Later the club moved a few streets away to Windmill Street, and it may have been here that ‘chemistry lessons’ were held…a.k.a. instruction in the making of explosives.  The principle of ‘propaganda of the deed’ was beginning to divide the movement.  The police continued to raid the premises.

I imagine my great-great grandmother introducing her lover Henry Nevinson to the enticing world of the Autonomie club, as they both escaped unhappy marriages for the combined excitement of politics and romance.  In a crowded cellar, full of foreign refugees  and English ‘enthusiasts for anarchism’ Nevinson met for the first time the Russian anarchist, Pierre Kropotkin.
 

“Anarchists do not have a chairman, but when enough of us had assembled a man stood up and began to speak.  His pronunciation was queer until one grew accustomed to it (‘own’ rhyed with ‘town’, ‘law’ with ‘low’, and the ‘sluffter field of Urope’ became a kindly joke among us).  He began with the sentence, ‘Our first step must be the abolition of all low’.  I was a little started. I had no exaggerated devotion to the law, but, as a first step, its abolition seemed rather a bound.  Without a pause the speaker continued speaking, with rapidity, but with the difficulties of a foreigner who has to translate rushing thoughts as he goes along…Comrade Kropotkin was then about fifty, but he looked more.  He was already bald.  His face was battered and crinkled into a kind of softness, perhaps owing to loss of teeth through prison scurvy.  His unrestrained and bushy beard was already touched with the white that soon overcame its reddish brown.  But eternal youth diffused his speech and stature.  His mind was always full gallop, like a horse that sometimes stumbles in its eagerness.  Behind his spectacles his grey eyes gleamed with invincible benevolence….He seemed longing to take all mankind to his bosom and keep it warm…” (Fire of Life, page 53)

Kropotkin, 'the Anarchist Prince'

Dryhurst was already a close friend of Kropotkin through the English Anarchist group centred around Charlotte Wilson, founder of the only recently defunct Freedom newspaper; later Dryhurst would translate his book The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793.  Nick Heath’s short biography of Dryhurst includes a description of her own first meeting with Kropotkin at a party given by William Morris.  Many readers of this blog will already know that Kropotkin – along with Stepniak – was the model for E. Nesbit’s Russian dissident in The Railway Children. A little later I waved my red flag and reminded my fellow-walkers of Bobbie's red petticoats.

Fourth stop: Colville Place

Surely the prettiest street in Fitzrovia?  I couldn’t resist this setting for the final chapter of Liberty’s Fire, although you have to imagine it without the window boxes and birdsong.  A wide, quiet empty pavement and a refreshingly flowery backdrop gave us a moment away from passing traffic and pedestrians to discuss why London was such a magnet for revolutionary exiles, and how we know about what they got up to when they arrived here.

London was an obvious destination for escaping communards: its size and publishing industry offered the best chance of work, not to mention political sympathy and French speakers.  Within the capital, Fitzrovia had plenty of cheap accommodation, and was already well established as a home of freethinkers. Cleveland Hall, for example, was a centre of secularism, where Harriet Law, a salaried public speaker and the first woman in the First International, had been lecturing since the 1860s. 

Patriotic libertarianism was a defining characteristic of Victorian Britain, a nation which utterly refused to kow-tow to despotic foreign governments.  This made it one of the few countries in Europe where you couldn’t be extradited for political crimes.  Communard, journalist and novelist Jules Vallès (another great source for Liberty’s Fire) was deeply critical of London, not least the lack of places the city offered for illicit sex, and the canoodling on park benches that resulted, but said London taught him ‘what Liberty is.’  Kropotkin became cynical about the joys of free speech, press and assembly, arguing to Emma Goldman that political liberties here were actually the best security against the spread of discontent: ‘The average Britisher loves to think he is free; it helps him to forget his misery.  That is the irony and pathos of the English working class.’ 

And the most fruitful source for academics researching French exiles in London? The police records.  Spies and informers flocked to Fitzrovia too, and anonymous agent reports found their way back to Paris.  You couldn’t step out onto Charlotte Street without bumping into a ‘mouchard’.  Not that their reports were necessarily reliable.  Denunciations and counter-claims were frequent. (Nick Heath paints a lively picture of the espionage scene here.)

Charles Malato’s satirical memoir of his time in the ‘small anarchist republic’, The Joys of Exile, (Les Joyeusetés de l’Exil) is extremely entertaining but also needs to be read with a small pinch of salt.  I would dearly love to find out more about Malato, a fascinating character who was exiled to New Caledonia with his father in his teens and ended up in London as a journalist, Henry Rochefort’s secretary, and also the French correspondent for Freedom.  He provides very lively descriptions of our next characters, and was also the author of a vaudeville play staged at the Autonomie Club called ‘Dynamite Wedding’, which mocked clueless spies and Parisian police agents.  The final chapter of his book, a guide to new exiles, includes a hilarious phrasebook, giving first the French, then the written English, then 'Anglais parlé' in a heavy French accent, with useful expressions like Bladé forégneur!, Oh! maille pôr belli and Ite iz improper you nême de mêlée of de henna, ouse nême iz olso given tou enne odeur tinge ('Bloody foreigner!'; 'Oh! My poor belly'; 'It is improper to name the male of the hen, whose name is also given to an other thing.') More practically: 'I have a friend in Wardour Street'; 'Sir, I am a political refugee'; 'Search my pockets, you will see I am not a minister'.

Fifth stop…via Goodge Street…59 and 67 Charlotte Street

67 Charlotte Street 

59 Charlotte Street

As we left Colville Place, I had to announce an on-the-hoof change of plan…a hasty discussion with Linus Rees of the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre about changes in street names – presumably the bane of all city guides’ lives – had just revealed that our next stop was not where we thought it was.  The Librairie Internationale, the bookshop and newsagent run by Armand Lapie, and probably the most heavily policed and spied-upon spot in Fitzrovia in the 1890s, was not actually at 30 Goodge Street but at 30 Little Goodge Street – now renamed Goodge Place, and precisely where we had begun our walk.  Actually, a much more atmospheric spot too – the street bends nicely, so you can imagine people hiding round corners – and it's one that’s changed less since then than many.  I’ve not yet been able to establish the numbering in the 1890s, so I’m still working on the precise location of the shop, which was a crucial crossnational hub for continental anarchists: Lapie has been revealed as by far the most densely connected individual in those circles.  Later, in Geneva,  Lapie published the memoirs of Victorine B. – Souvenir d’une morte vivante – another of my key sources. Madam Brocher  – as I subsequently discovered – was also involved in Michel’s school.  More and more links keep emerging….

So we hurried back to Charlotte Street, where Louise Michel lived at one point, at no. 59.  She had quite a few London addresses over the years, including one just round the corner from where I live now in South London, and seems to have shared most of them with one or more cats…she even came back from New Caledonia with several stray felines in her pockets, and was as incapable of passing an animal in distress as she was of walking by a suffering human being.  (Did you notice the cat - and the policeman - in the picture of the Newman Passage co-operative kitchen?)

A few doors up was another landmark to which newcomers were always directed, Victor Richard’s épicerie.  Malato paints the grocer in Rabelaisian terms – rotund in figure and character, he was bald, pink and charming – and joked that he’d been radicalised by prolonged contact with red beans and believed white ones to be reactionary.  He also claims that before his flight to England, his friend Richard had contributed to the defeat of the Prussians by supplying the French army with beans that made them fart and had advocated pickling the deputies of the Versailles government and feeding them to the hungry of Paris.  A great friend of Vallès too, and many other Communard leaders, Richard provided political exiles with a poste restante and staging post in London for years.

Sixth stop: 19 Fitzroy Street

And finally we came to the site of the International School where educationalist Margaret McMillan - named as a teacher on the prospectus - was shocked to find children gazing at pictures showing Communards lined up against the wall to be shot and the hanged Haymarket anarchists of Chicago.  I had been confused about exactly where the school was, as so many accounts put it in Fitzroy Square - where a suitable corner building still stands - and my hopes had been further raised by finding a painting in the Tate of that building by Henry Nevinson’s son Christopher (think Kit Neville in Pat Barker’s Life Class). But Fitzroy Square was actually the name given to the whole area in those days – ‘Fitzrovia’ wasn’t coined until the 1940s – and both the prospectus itself, and the two leading historians of the school, Constance Bantman and Martyn Everett, confirmed that the school was actually in Fitzroy Street.  

Nannie Dryhurst with her daughters Nora (left) and Sylvia (my great-grandmother- right - later Lynd)
in 1892. Photo by Frederick Hollyer ©From LSE Library Collections, SHAW PHOTOGRAPHS/1/12/899

The school itself definitely deserves a blogpost of its own, on which I will hold off until Everett publishes his research later this year.  All will then become clear, I hope, about the role played by Michel's colleague and school secretary, agent provocateur Auguste Coulon, the 'vile' spymaster Melville, and the bomb-making equipment found in the basement that seems to have got the school closed down.  Today I will leave you to admire the beautiful cover of the school's 1890 prospectus  designed by no other than Walter Crane. I first encountered Crane on my mother's knee at the piano, and introduced him to my own children the same way, singing nursery rhymes like 'Lavender's Blue' from the exquisitely illustrated pages of The Baby's Opera and The Baby's Bouquet.  Of course my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother must all have sung from those pages too. I'd never even considered Crane's politics before I saw this:

©The British Library

I love the fact that this teacher plucks apples for her pupils from the Tree of Enlightenment rather than the Tree of Knowledge.  She wears a liberty cap while filling her lamp with the oil of Truth.  No surprise, looking at this, to find the name W. Morris among the Honorary Members of the school's committee.  'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs', a slogan popularised by Marx, was actually first used by the French socialist Louis Blanc, who was not a Communard, but was in the provisional government set up after the 1848 revolution. Blanc lived in exile in London (in St John's Wood rather than Fitzrovia) until the Third Republic was declared in September 1870 when he rushed back to Paris.  

Turn the page, and the prospectus announces its principles to be those of Mikhail Bakunin, founder of collectivist anarchism, who believed 'the whole education of children must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and independence, not on that of piety and obedience. . . the final object of education necessarily being the formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of others.'  Louise Michel naturally does not forget her girls, and adds beneath: 'In a word, therefore, the object of the School is to make free and noble-minded men and women, not commercial machines.'

Tramping the streets looking for clues while you're researching a historical novel is a wonderful thing…tramping them after you've written it, in the company of curious and like-minded strangers and new acquaintances, even more so. Long may the Fitzrovia Festival and the Neighbourhood Centre continue to flourish. Thank you for having me, and thanks to everyone who came.

www.lydiasyson.com 

                                   

Follow links for sources mentioned. Others include Angela V. John's War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (2006); P. Martinez, “A Police Spy and the Exiled Communards, 1871-1873,” English Historical Revue, Vol. 97, No. 382 (January 1982), pp. 99-112 and Thomas C. Jones and Robert Tombs, “The French left in exile: Quarante-huitards and Communards in London, 1848—80,” in Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, eds., A History of the French in London: liberty, equality, opportunity, London Institute of Historical Research, London 2013.  

Please don't reproduce copyrighted images without permission of the copyright holders.

Ways of Seeing (The Paris Commune) by Lydia Syson

I spent a lot of time thinking about point of view when I was writing Liberty’s Fire.  So many of my sources saw Paris as a stage, a spectacle, a panorama, and I kept trying to find a way to convey this without becoming overly theatrical myself.  But while I was actually walking the streets of Paris, I often found myself looking down.  I stared at the paving stones, and thought how different they were from London slabs, and how much better for building barricades:

 I became an expert in ventilation shafts for cellars:

Their different sizes and gratings. . .

And how they could be blocked up. . .

Thanks to Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (the forefather of the werewolf sub-genre, which is set in 1871 and, despite this lurid cover, impressive in its historical accuracy) I even discovered the name for these openings in French: soupirail. (Another new word I learned was ‘délation’, which has a very interesting history in France.)  

In the last days of the Commune, a rumour sprang up that would be the death of many women. 

‘The Emancipated Woman Shedding Light on the World’
1871, Lithograph by J. Lecerf

 “Petroleuses!” writes novelist Lucien Descaves in his spirited introduction to that rare thing, a published memoir by an active Communarde, Victorine B. [Brocher]. “Until the last days of the Paris Commune, during the red week, this designation was fatal to the unlucky women who received it from a vindictive concierge, a perfidious neighbour, a passing hallucinator, from no matter whom. . . But much later, in exile, the word marked the shoulder not just of refugees, but even their friends.” (Souvenirs d’une morte vivante*, 1909)

Paris Incendie, night of the 24-5 May 1871, Michel Charles Fichot

Paris was in flames: the Tuileries Palace was burning, part of the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, the Finance ministry. . .the river ran red with the reflected conflagration.  The situation felt apocalyptic.  The world decided to blame women, who had already been far too active in the Commune, with their club oratory and public pronouncements, their vigilance committees and the Union of Women.  Of course they were represented as ugly, impoverished, unnatural, wicked women with loosened hair and dishevelled clothing.  ‘Femelles’ (‘bitches’), so maddened and unsexed or oversexed by politics that they would rather see Paris destroyed than give up their dangerous socialist ideals. 

In his 1873 illustrated catalogue of Commune ‘types’, Bertall naturally includes a Picture of ‘a pair of pétroleuses’ stealing out at night with petrol cans and matches.  He cheerfully admits that even if they didn’t exist, thanks to the fact that plenty of women had been summarily shot by soldiers on suspicion, ‘they existed in every one’s imagination’ and so the mania continued long after ‘the Insurrection’.  For weeks people bricked up cellar openings and even keyholes.  Bertall’s pétroleuses represent feverish panic rather than reality, ‘an embodiment of what all the World believed in, and feared at the Moment.’

 

Bertall’s image is relatively kind.  Another shows a petroleuse with a pig's snout.  They are furies, viragoes, tigresses.  They had to be punished, and they were.

The word ‘pétroleuse’ has been almost forgotten now, but it quickly became one of the most powerful and most negative political symbols of the nineteenth century, according to Gay Gullickson, author of Unruly Women of Paris: ‘The female incendiary became an international symbol, not only of the Commune itself, but also of the evils of revolution.’  

Fifteen years after the invention of the pétroleuse, Eleanor Marx Aveling’s rallying introduction to Lissagaray’s History of the Commune explains the necessity for her translation:

‘To most English people the Commune still spells ‘rapine, fear and lust’, and when they speak of its ‘atrocities’ they have some vague idea of hostages ruthlessly massacred by brutal revolutionaries, of houses burnt down by furious petroleuses.  Is it not time that English people at last learnt the truth? Is it not time they were reminded that for the sixty-five hostages shot, not by the Commune, but by a few people made mad by the massacre of prisoners by the Versaillese, the troops of law and order shot down thirty thousand men, women, and children, for the most part long after all fighting had ceased?’

Eleanor Marx

A year later her call for the truth was echoed, rather surprisingly, by a public schoolmaster best known for the anthem ‘Forty Years On’, in a lecture to the Harrow Liberal Club on 31^st October 1887.  Edward Bowen decided to put together an outline of the facts as he’d experienced them because, he said ‘there are no books on the subject which are even approximately truthful’.  (I'm not sure if he includes Lissagaray's or simply hadn't come across it.)  Bowen's account is vivid, balanced, humane and also quite angry.  He concludes - and most contemporary historians agree – that shells from Versailles forces on the heights of Montmartre caused some of the fires, while others were probably started deliberately and strategically by retreating soldiers of the Commune.

‘A crime…a barbarous act…to destroy the monuments of history’ says everyone, but remember you are speaking of men who did not look on the glories of Louis XIV and the trophies of art as we do. I think they saw in them big buildings into which a common man was never allowed to penetrate, which existed for the pleasure of emperors & courtiers, and moreover, buildings the blaze of which might give the defenders some twenty-four hours longer life in this world.’

©Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections,
Northwestern University Library

As for the women incendiaries, Bowen is categorical:

’Every woman who looked ragged, or who could not stammer out a good account of herself, fell under suspicion, and no sooner was the cry of petroleuse raised than all hope for that woman was gone.  No one knows how many wretched creatures perished under the accusation.  Well, it was false from first to last.  Not one single woman was ever proved to have acted thus from one end of the week to the other.  If you wish to know on what authority I say this, it is on the authority of the chief law officer of the Versailles government.’

Liberty’s Fire is published by Hot Key Books on May 7^th.  Full details of all my sources can be found on my website, where I’ve also written about some of the real women who supported the Paris Commune, such as Louise Michel, Nathalie Lemel, Elizabeth Dmitrieff, André Leo, Paule Minck and Anna Jaclard.

* I consulted a translator friend about how best to render Souvenir d'une morte vivante in English and she immediately assumed it was a book about zombies – the ‘living dead’.  Horror and the Commune are rarely far apart. ‘The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters’ (attributed to Gramsci) is the epigraph for a compelling article by Eric Smith analysing the Paris Commune as an important but unacknowledged source for the ‘deep social distress’ expressed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: it’s expressed in red fogs, rats, Dracula’s pseudonym ‘de Ville’ which recalls the burning of the Hôtel de Ville, and Lucy Western as the ‘oblique invocation of the quasi-mythic female agent of the latter-day Commune, the reviled petroleuse, the loathsome embodiment of the Commune’s political/libidinal excess’. Appalled at the brutality with which the Commune was suppressed, massacres on a scale which dwarfed the endlessly decried execution of hostages, the narrator of The Werewolf of Paris concludes that we are all monsters now.  Why pick on werewolfs?