Shameless Irony: Jules Vallès and the Politics of Childhood Luke Bouvier J'ai l'honneur d'être un vaincu; un vaincu qui ne se repent pas; je le jure par tous mes sentiments d'honnêteté et de justice. Vous le voyez: je ne me plie ni ne me tais pour passer sous les fourches Caudines qui pourraient être la porte ouverte de la patrie. —Jules Vallès, Lettre au Président de la République (Jules Grévy), 10 February 18791 PERHAPS AT NO TIME during the nineteenth century was France as riven by the politics of shame as during the convulsive events of 187071 and their aftermath. In the wake of the disastrous French military collapse in the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the Second Empire, the humiliation of foreign occupation, and the desperate resistance of Paris against the besieging Prussian troops, the Paris Commune of 1871 would initially emerge not primarily as a social revolution, but rather as a defiant patriotic protest against the "betrayal" of the government at Versailles and the "shameful" peace treaty negotiated by Adolphe Thiers and Jules Favre with Bismarck. For the supporters of the Commune, the leaders of the government at Versailles were hated capitularás, who negotiated away France's honor and surrendered to the Prussians despite Paris's unbroken will to resist the siege, acceding to Bismarck's most ignominious demands: the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, exorbitant war indemnity payments, and the profound humiliation of a ceremonial entry of the Prussian troops into Paris.2 The authority of the government at Versailles, however, rested on a legislative assembly hastily elected in February 1871, in which the heavily republican delegation from Paris and the other urban centers of France found itself outnumbered by a monarchist majority elected primarily from the conservative rural areas of the country. "Majorité rurale! honte de la France!" protested the Marseille republican Gaston Crémieux when the new assembly first met (Serman 176). Rooted in a utopie, republican sense of "the nation," this accusation of "national" shame implicitly looks ahead towards an inchoate "national community," one in which considerations of equality and individual social mobility would take precedence over class identity. The majority of nobles, clerics and provincial notables, however, would oppose a significantly different conception of honor and shame, one that harks back to Vol. XXXIX, No. 4 39 L'Esprit Créateur a nostalgie vision of pre-Revolutionary class prerogative and a fixed understanding of social identity. Such an "institutional" or class-based notion of shame issues from a conservative sense of social order and hierarchy, the "rightful place" of various social groups, and the deference and respect that they owe to their social "superiors." In the eyes of this majority, then, the refusal of Paris to submit to the authority of the Versailles government was in this sense inherently "shameless," the act of an "impudent" group of urban workers, artisans, and a variety of socially marginal figures who were outrageously taking liberties with the bounds of appropriate class behavior.' "Shamelessness," in this context, is the very symptom of the politically and socially contested nature of shame, a fault line where clashing notions of propriety collide. If the accusation of "shamelessness" is intended to elicit its opposite, a "shameful" return or submission to established norms, its failure to do so can inadvertently reveal the existence of a divergent perspective on propriety, even as the label of "shameless" would attempt to deny its validity. Indeed, a deliberately "shameless" stance or act can serve precisely to challenge or confront such norms, to contest established meaning or provoke a reevaluation of governing conventions—in this case, those that decree the very "appropriateness" of class humility itself. There is no doubt that the skillful political manipulation of this sense of "institutional" shame by the Versailles government underlay the assembly's attempts to humiliate and bring to heel the "shamelessly" intransigent Parisian population in the weeks before the Commune, and greatly contributed later to the bitterness and ferocity of the Versailles troops during the so-called semaine sanglante at the end of May 1871, when the Commune was violently crushed. Fired by class hatred and by the...