Louise Michel and the Paris Commune of 1871: The Performance of Revolution

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“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”1 With this famous restatement of Hegel, Marx opens The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to preface his interpretation of the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the establishment of the Second Empire. Although, in Marx’s theatrical paradigm, the bourgeoisie of the Republic of 1793 sought their ideals and their art forms (and self deceptions) in the Roman Republic, it took heroism, terror and civil war to bring about the Revolution which was played out on the level of high tragedy. The events of 1848–1851, on the contrary, were a farcical parody of 1793–1795, and the society presided over by Louis Bonaparte a factitious transformation of social relationships into what Marx describes as a play of shadows that have lost their bodies. In contrast to his critique of the failed revolution of 1848, Marx praises the Commune of 1871, in The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, as a heroic people’s revolution. And, in his introduction to this work, Engels characterizes the Commune as a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, the Commune established a prototype for transformative communal action.