La Commune de Paris, Saint-Barthélemy du XIXe siècle dans les mémoires des Communards

Abstract

After their amnesty in 1880, many Communards published their memoirs to rectify official history and tell their own stories of the repression, as part of what Jules Vallès called in L’Insurgé (1886) “the great federation of sorrows”. They intended to justify their political action, to present unpublished documents and testimonies and to depict themselves as writers in order to differentiate themselves from the common-law prisoners that had been sent with them to the penal colonies.In these writings, the Saint-Bartholomew's Day massacre is used as a metaphor and as an emblem of a fratricidal battle and of a shocking bloodbath. At the risk of oversimplification and hasty equivalence (Thiers and Charles IX, the Louvre and the Tuileries), the memoirs of the Communards use numerous analogies between the two events. This allows us to understand the construction of the event, but also the conception of historiography thus at stake. Through anecdotes and comparisons, those writers bring 1572 and 1871 closer together in order to better forget 1793.

Keywords

• 19th century
• civil war
• Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
• Paris Commune
• memoirs