Self-Representation in the Arms of Defeat: Fatal Nostalgia and Surviving Comrades in French New Caledonia, 1871-1880

Abstract

The bitter end to the Paris Commune in May of 1871 resulted in the massacre of some 25,000 to 30,000 Parisians by the forces of the central government of France, known as the Versaillais. Those who escaped the slaughter faced arrest, military trials, and, if convicted, deportation to penal colony in New Caledonia. Out of some 35,000 military trials of the Communards, there were 4,500 sentences of deportation (Rougerie 1964:20-21). This exile persisted for the vast majority until the partial amnesty in 1879, followed by general amnesty of all political convicts in 1880. The fate of Albert Grandier, Communard journalist and editor of Le Rappel, is emblematic of the worst fate of the deportes.' Grandier, exhausted by the two-month siege and the final battles of Bloody Week that marked the Paris Commune, and sick even prior to departure from France, proved incapable of sustaining the privations of the deportation. In New Caledonia, he and comrade built rude hut for shelter and attempted, without success, to establish small garden in the infertile soil. But his heart had remained in France with adored sister, and disgust soon seized entirely. We watched as little by little live and nervous intelligence weakened, wrote friend. Finally, he left hut and comrade to go live in the woods, and to meditate in solitude on the fixed idea that had seized him (Grousset and Jourde 1876:35). Fixed idea, or ideefixe in 19th-century French medical language, was a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind (Goldstein 1987:155-156). The id6e fixe that drove