Anarchist & Radical Book Club discussion

Any recommendations for books about the Paris Commune?

Preferably nothing extremely long... any ideas?

Brecht wrote a play, The Days of the Commune. Marx and Bakunin both analyzed it in essays: "The Civil War in France" and "The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State," respectively. Mitch Abidor also just translated Voices of the Paris Commune, available through PM Press, which is a compilation of interviews after the fact. Also see Peter Kropotkin, "The Paris Commune," available in Words of a Rebel (Black Rose Books). Those are options I can think of off the top of my head.

Thank you! :)

Alistair Horne's The Fall of Paris is very good, although not all about the commune. There's a collection of contemporary writings by libertarian thinkers called The Commune: Paris, 1871, that came out only a couple of years ago, but I haven't read it yet.

If you are a movie fan, I recommend you "La Commune", a french film about it. It's really interesting especially by the style they use to narrate the story. It lasts 3 or 5 hours long depending on the format. Hope it's useful.

I liked "Paris Babylon" by Rupert Christiansen. It doesn't have an anarchist or radical perspective but I liked the bits in it about the siege and bourgeois Parisians eating pets and rats and stuff. I read a really great book in German about four women in the first international: Nicht Marxistin und auch nicht Anarchistin: Frauen in der Ersten Internationale by Schrupp, Antje and it had some interesting stuff about Andre Leo and also Elisabeth Dmitrieff who were both Communards. Louise Michel rightfully gets a lot of the attention but there were a gang of women in it to win it. Screw that Marx stuff about the Commune. He thought it was a bad idea while it was going on, telling everybody, don't go... then when everybody was like, hey, that was awesome, those people were heroes, then he changes his tune. So screw him on the Commune man. Just speaking from my heart.

Benjamin wrote: "Screw that Marx stuff about the Commune. He thought it was a bad idea while it was going on, telling everybody, don't go... then when everybody was like, hey, that was awesome, those people were heroes, then he changes his tune. ..."

Marx did allow egoism to creep into some of his attitudes as he slaved year after year to disseminate his own ideas. He was prone to jealousies and pettiness. He also found fault with the purity of the theories pursued by other men (LaSalle, for instance) or illustrated by other political events of the day. Perhaps, unsurprisingly so: he dwelt much in the abstract and was often irked/surprised by a world which didn't seem to be evolving 'as his texts dictated'.

But I don't think he was quite so much a vacillating, opportunistic, trend-follower as you're implying. With regard to the Commune, he thought both before and after that they had 'moved too fast'. The Communards simply swapped out bourgeois institutions with socialist ones, without an initial dismantling of any bourgeois structures by the proletariat. After the episode was over, Russ. students asked him whether he thought the same swift process could take place under Tsarism, (peasantry to worker's state without going through all the capitalist stages inbetween) and he answered in the negative.

This is just my private musing though. Good posts in this thread, for sure.

Fair enough. I was oversimplifying.

The event is also covered in the Goncourt Journals (a book I'm reading now). The Goncourt brothers were a pair of 19 c. Parisian theater dandies but they kept a daily journal of their lives for two decades, describing everyone they met and conversations they had. Eventually one brother died of syphilis and the narrative almost ended there; but as history in France became so tumultuous, the survivor resumed to document goings-on. Worth a look. It's considered the richest work of its type for the 1800s in Paris.