 Thanks very much to everyone. I hope you enjoyed your coffee break. It now falls to me to introduce quickly panel two, or at least just to say that panel two is now upon us. That's Franco Prussian War and Forging of Modern France. And I'll hand over to Dr. Talita Lacroix of University of Oxford who will share and commentate on this panel. So Talita, over to you. Hello everyone. Welcome and thank you for being here. As Michael says, I am at Oxford at the moment, but I'm very much a King's product. So I'm happy to be back or be virtually. And it's my pleasure to introduce you the three speakers of this panel who will talk about the Franco Prussian War and the Forging of Modern France. They speak for about 20 minutes, then I say a few things for about five, and then we'll open the virtual floor to questions. So the first speaker is Professor Robert Toomes, who was Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of a number of books on French history, including The War Against Paris, 1871, which is very relevant today. A co-authored biography of Thiers, a book on France from 1815 to 1914, and on nationalism in France, as well as a piece on the number of victims of the commune that caused quite a stir when it first came out. But more recently, he's been exploring the history of the British Isles. And today, he'd be talking about the Franco-Prussian War and the Forging of the French Third Republic. Robert. Right. Well, can you hear me, Talita? Great. Okay. Well, first, thanks for asking me. It's fun to do this. It's going back to my youth, and I want to talk a bit about, well, what I want to talk about in the 20 minutes I've got is really how the memory of the war or a conflicted memory of the war affected the way that the early Third Republic developed. Now, many of you will know this story. It's a quite familiar one, but I hope I'll be able to at least inject a little bit of novelty into it. And I'm also going to show one or two slides, mainly for entertainment purposes, but they do also have a serious purpose, which is... No, I'm doing this wrong. We've practiced this, but I think I'm doing it wrong. No, there we go. So what I'm going to try to do is to talk about the way in which the both political and cultural representations of the war helped to shape the early years of the Third Republic. And wars, of course, usually begin by creating unity, and then they create disunity. And this one was no exception, especially wars which lead to defeat, inevitably create disunity. For a whole generation that I'm going to concentrate on the early, the first decade of the Third Republic, but for a whole generation, diagnosing the failures of 1870-71, seeking scapegoats or at least villains, who to blame, who to praise, who were the heroes, who were the villains, that is going to be my subject for today. This was not only a political debate, though it was certainly a very important political debate, it was also played out in the literary field and also in popular art. One of the major documents or sets of documents is the huge parliamentary inquiry, the Enquête sur les Actes du gouvernement de la défense nationale, which is really a conservative hatchet job on the republican government that led and lost the war. And a huge number of memoirs by politicians, generals, and also by lots of ordinary people about their experiences during the war. It becomes a great sort of industry, but one of the most important of the memoirs is by Charles de Fressinay, called De la Guerre en Provinces, which is really a defence of himself and Gombetta against the charges made by the parliamentary report. And I just mentioned some of, I think the more significant literary works, Victor Hugo's cycle of poems, La Née Terrible, Paul Derouled's far less meritorious, in fact, execrable set of verses, but very famous and popular, which helped to make his name, Chant du soldat. Also his later memoirs, Derouled, I heard the need to say, later became a leading nationalist politician. And this is one of the ways in which he established his position through his experience of the war as the authentic voice of French nationalism. His memoirs are much better than his poems and indeed are extremely readable in places quite moving. Short story writers like Alphonse Doday, whom I have to say I rather like, wrote some actually rather brilliant, if jaundiced, short stories published first of all in the press and later as collections, more or less attacking everybody, attacking the old imperial army, attacking Republican chauvinism, attacking the Parisians, the National Guard, and perhaps most famously, he's rather sentimental short story about the last class in a primary school in Alsace before it was taken over by the Germans. Guy de Mopassant probably wrote the most famous, I guess the most famous story about the war which is which is Boudessuif, but again a very jaundiced view of de-romanticizing the war. Again, almost everybody comes in for attack, but I'm not going to talk in detail about their stories. I suppose I mentioned them partly because some of you might like them if you don't know them already, but I do want to talk a little bit and show something about the paintings by military artists, Alphonse de Noville, Detay and Maisonnier, whose paintings were widely famous in print, even children's cutouts were made of some of them in panoramas which were the equivalent then of course of films today, and so a major impact on the way the war was understood and remembered, and I want to show you one or two of these. Okay, I'm going to make a rather crude, well yes I admit, a rather crude or simple division into narratives, competing narratives of the war. I'm going to say there is first of all a conservative which combines bonapartist and legitimist views of the war, you could break those down into subsections, a moderate republican view, a radical revolutionary view, and finally what I'm with some difficulty finding a label for, which you could call a rationalist or realist or lionist, or ultimately a terrorist view of the war. So I want to look at these briefly in turn. The conservative and bonapartist, legitimist view, is essentially one of praising the regular army, and this is probably, I would guess the most famous image of the whole war, and it's interesting a painting that created a museum, the House of the Last Cartridge at Bazay on the outskirts of Sedon is a small museum of the war, but it was based on this painting, and this painting was based on an anecdote told to Noville, who's a leading military artist by one of the participants, but it's not an incident that's recorded in the official records of the of the battle, and what it shows is the supposedly the last cartridge being fired by this heroic little garrison of French soldiers, marines in this house in near Sedon. Why is it significant? Because the symbolism is of an honorable defeat. If you write ammunition, how can you fight on? What Noville does is to make this a symbol, not simply of the unit that fought, which was a marine unit, but of the whole French army. So there would only have been in fact marines, infantry de marine, but he shows them as including infantry of the line, and a turco, an Arab soldier who wouldn't in fact have been there, but therefore he makes this a symbol of the defeat of the whole army, but an honorable defeat to save the army from criticism. So if the army is not to blame for defeat, who is? And for conservatives it's Republicans, revolutionaries, and there's a great deal of mockery in the in the government and indeed quite bitter attacks in the official parliamentary report on Garibaldi, who was fighting in the east, on Gambetta, on left-wing patriots or pseudo-patriots who are seen as simply playing politics or pretending to be to be soldiers, unlike the real soldiers who give their lives or who risk their lives and limb in really defending France. So why did France lose? Well for them it is of course the left. It's due to the incompetence, the treachery, the hypocrisy of almost all of the left from Gambetta to the radicals in Paris, and who were the heroes? Well the regular army as here, and let me show you another of Nerville's famous, this painting was quite early, this is a later one I think for a panorama, but also quite a famous one which shows a similar kind of scene. The cemetery at Saint-Privat, Saint-Privat, a major battle outside mess, and here again the symbolism is very clear. A small patch of sacred land, the church yard, is being defended by a gallant little band of French soldiers who are going to have to surrender. In fact we see some of them who have been wounded and who are standing quietly in the shelter of one of the buildings waiting to be made prisoner, whereas the hordes of Germans are coming from each side, smashing open the gates, that was one of the things that he liked to show in several of his paintings. So again a heroic defeat, and that was his quite deliberate and ostensible aim. So these are the heroes, ordinary soldiers and indeed generals. And also secondly for conservatives the peasants of the provincial Garmobile, the the Zouave Pontifico, the former soldiers of the Pope who volunteered to fight, and who by remarkable coincidence fought on the battlefield of Pate which is that on which Joan of Arc fought, and again they're betrayed by the foolish and ruthless republican government sent into battle starved, ill-equipped, untrained. And the the consequence is that peace is necessary and justified and honourable. The second narrative I'd call a republican narrative which essentially is praising Gambetta and the government of national defence for doing their best. This is what is contained in Fressine's memoirs which I mentioned earlier who tries to justify the decisions they took and show the position they were in. It praises the the armies of the national defence government, especially those fighting on the Loire and in the north. It praises their leaders, generals Federbe and Chansy and Colonel Danferrochereau, of course famous because a square was named after him in Paris, all republican soldiers or supposedly republican soldiers who show true patriotism. Danferrochereau was the commander of the defence of Belfort, the only French fortress if I remember rightly that never surrendered. And also there's praise for Parisians who resist during the siege and this painting later painted by another very famous military artist Ernest Messonnier. The Siege of Paris is again one of these symbolic images which show the unity of the city. What we see there are uniforms of regular soldiers of the Garde Nationale, sailors who are manning the guns, priests who are carrying away the wounded. So this is the the community of Paris irrespective of political beliefs standing united but in a hopeless position, again a small band surrounded by the hordes of of Germans. So Parisians the Holocene is united or at least that's the ideal and who are the villains from this point of view? Well of course the right, the right who are cowards, who are capitular, the royalists who want to make peace because of their political ambitions and their economic interests, the bonapartists who betrayed the country, peasants who are selfish and stupid, the bourgeois who are selfish by definition and the villains, generals such as Bazin, Marshal Bazin who surrendered Mess, General Trochus who mismanaged the Siege of Paris and the the the moral of their narrative is the war should continue outrance to the end though not by revolutionary means and then afterwards to justify this as a viable policy. If only the republicans had been followed, if they had not been betrayed then the war could have been won. This was always Gambetta's position and the third narrative is a radical revolutionary and really communal narrative. There could have found lots of images for this but here we see the real heroes of the war are the the ordinary people of Paris, the workers and their left-wing activist leaders and civilians who suffer the the siege. Who are the heroes? People like Florence the the the professor of anthropology who leads the National Guard, Blanqui the veteran left-wing leader, Garibaldi fighting for France in the east, who are the villains, well practically everyone else, the government of national defense, the generals, the bourgeoisie, the right, the peasants, the Catholics and then they urge revolutionary war and afterwards of course the commune is an aspect of this and the fourth narrative, I won't say much about this because it's pretty well known I think, the fourth narrative is the one that I would call is essentially comes down to being a tierist narrative which is therefore one of conservative oleanists and of moderate republicans who I mean well it has to say that Tier had what might be called a good war, he opposed the war in the beginning, Tier and Gombetter were the only people in the in the in the core legislative who spoke out against the war at the beginning but nevertheless he did his duty during the war gave support to the the Bonaparte's government in its defense efforts, then under the government of national defense he went on a diplomatic mission to try to get support from foreign powers, he tried to negotiate the best possible peace with the Germans and and then this is his apotheosis, you can see Tier I hope right in the middle, a little figure sitting in the middle between the the center left and the republican left and this is a real incident somewhat neuromanticized no doubt, you have a glum looking ministers on their center benches, a glum looking right but you have Gombetter standing there representing the republicans pointing to Tier and saying here is the liberator of the territory and this is because Tier after crushing the commune was able to raise the money to pay off the German indemnity and accelerate the German evacuation of France, so the moral here is that Tier was right to oppose the war but he did his best during the defense, he was he was right to to negotiate the peace and he was proven right by by negotiating the the Treaty of Paris and then getting the Germans out how does this affect the early years of the Third Republic and I'll cover this fairly quickly of course there is a monarchist victory in the national assembly elections in February 1871 and this confirms the view of many on the left that these are traitors and it leads directly to the to the outbreak of the commune, we have a majority of Orleanists, Legitimists and a very few Bonapartists who tend to be blamed by the other parts of the right as well as by the left, a defeat of moderate republicans like Gombetter who retires from politics for the time being and of many of the the government of national except in Paris where people like Gombetter, Hugo, Louis Blanc and Garibaldi are elected but their sideline then of course comes the commune and the crushing of the commune and this is partly not of course not holy but partly because Paris had been divided from the rest of the country by its experience of the war and its perceptions of the war and its perceptions of the siege, most of the country don't see the Parisians as heroes as they see themselves but tend to think of them having spent the war safely behind their fortifications, drinking, making speeches whereas the rest of the country was suffering from German occupation and from the real war in the provinces so the political situation was one of royalist opportunity except that their most effective group, the Bonapartists were temporarily out of action because of their being blamed for the war, could there have been a restoration of the monarchy? Almost certainly yes but the winner is not the Count de Chambord or the Count de Paris but of course Thiers, the liberator of the territory for the reasons that I've summarised and he cannot really be presented as many on the right were as a traitor or a capitular because he had although opposed the war at the beginning which seemed to prove his wisdom, had tried to get foreign support the only man who could which seemed to prove his patriotism, had saved Belfort in negotiating with Bismarck again the best that could be done had saved the republic it seemed both from the royalists and from the communards and therefore the republic that would come into existence would be his conception of what he called la République conservatrice, the conservative republic, the contradiction in terms until he coined that formula and here in his apotheosis he's hailed by the whole of the left including Gambetta and this is a moment of reconciliation between the let's say the Orleanis Thieris narrative of the war and the Gambettist narrative of the war which sees patriotism vindicated by the liberation of the territory by not by arms but by cash but the future of course sees the war coming back to haunt France. Derroulade becomes the leader of the League des Patriotes and one of the main figures of right wing nationalism up until and after the the Dreyfus Affair, Boulanger who again who of course almost or at least comes within sight of overthrowing the republic in the name of revenge against Germany. The ghosts of the war are still there and I couldn't resist this final painting by Edouard de Thailles called Le Rêve 1888 which shows the France's new young republican army on manoeuvres no doubt the men sleeping out in the in the open but what they're dreaming about is the glory of the first empire and of course by implication of the day in which revenge against Germany will come so the war cannot be forgotten. Gambetta famously said think of it always speak of it never and it's always there in the background of the third republic in some senses as a legitimizing myth but also as one that is a cause of constant division rather as the second world war was for later generations and that thank you very much is my time up and that's all that I all that I want to say. Thank you Robert the next speaker is Dr. Cantin de Luremose who's a professor of history at the Université Paris-Tres. He's a specialist of order and disorder in the 19th century and of epistemology of history and social sciences. He's also the author of a number of publications including a recent book that was published last year called Commune's of 1870-71 and another book published a few years ago that's a personal favorite of mine Le Crepuscule des révolutions that looks at France from 1848 to 1871 and it's part of a collection a series of volumes about modern French history. In 2015 he also created an interdisciplinary review called sensibilité histoire science sociale et critique and today he's speaking about the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris commune. Cantin. Thank you very much. I haven't spoken English for a year because of the crisis so I hope this will be okay. I just share my worst PowerPoint. Is it okay? Thank you. So thank you very much for this invitation. My paper intends to return to a classic but challenging problem that of the link between the Paris commune and the Franco-Prussian war. It is classic because it poses a problem of causality and temporal proximity. One precedes the other so one is supposed to be the cause of the other but we know that in history things are not so simple. The problem here is all the more important because it concerns the Paris commune an episode that has been for 150 years a high place of reflection on the revolutionary phenomenon. The question therefore covers two political as epistemological problems. In all the historical works of course the Franco-Prussian war is present as an element of context but the importance given to it varies according to the author and the approach. Thus for those interested in the revolutionary phenomenon it is rather secondary in particular for Marxist or Marxist inspired historians. They will insist in a longer-term perspective on the resumption of the cycle of revolution or on the renewal of socialist and republican oppositions at the end of the 1860s. The more libertarian or anarchist historian or sociologist will insist more on revolutionary spontaneity suggesting that the past is secondary. What comes for them is the emergence. Convertingly, those who want to insist on the war or on the establishment of the Third Republic will minimize the role of the Paris commune which lasted only 72 days. They will insist more on its contingent character and underline its closed link with the Franco-Prussian war. It then appears mayor as an accident drowned in the maelstrom of the terrible year. This is the case of François Furet or François Ross for example. Some historians finally such as Robert Tombs or Jacques Rougerie have proposed a more subtle reading that recalls the role of circumstances against the great sociological models while inviting us to grasp the singularity of the commune. What am I proposing today goes in this direction by integrating the work of sociology of political crisis and the history of the revolution as this from Timout Stecquet for example and for two aspects, first the commune movement and second its large-scale repercussion. My question then is can we include the commune in the history of the 1871 war and how we will see how the war of 1870 the condition of possibility of the commune but also other commune produces another history. This one allows us in return to see aspects of the Franco-Prussian war to which we are sometimes less attentive. Paraphrase my predecessor, I will see how the Franco-Prussian war forges the commune and vice versa. So my first point the Franco-Prussian war caused of the Paris commune. To establish a causal link the simplest way is to use something like a counterfactual reasoning without the Franco-Prussian war there would not have been a Paris commune. This makes it possible to go against a priori reading and to highlight the unimaginable upheaval that this war brought about that is first the end of the Second Empire, the military defeat of one of the great European powers, the establishment of a new republic, the Parisian siege that teared up anger not to mention the wound inflicted on national pride and the election of 8 February 1871. This saw the victory of the monarchists partly because of the war. They increased the tension with Paris which was at that time a very working class city and the most republican in the country. This tension led to the 18th march. So unlike previous revolutions which arose almost unexpectedly, the Paris commune came about after a slow size and long glissement. So it's an original type in the history of revolutions in the 19th century. Its link with the Franco-Prussian war and its consequences is therefore quite particular. To arise the Paris commune requires the entire destructuring of the previous political, social and cultural order to be envisaged. There was the war, although it had more concrete effects on the following events. The situation of dual power between Paris and Bordeaux and the Versailles led to dissociation that led to dissociation between the capital and the seat of power which made the civil war possible. The siege of autumn 1872 explains the existence of a democratized national guard that is 300,000 people in principle, as well as the presence of a large amount of weaponry in Paris. Finally, the experience of war had an influence even during the communal period. We must insist here on the culture of war, the fear of spies and the patriotic language so present in the clubs of the capital. This link is even at stake in some of the commitments. That is the case of this employee, François Michaud, who was rather uninvolved in political matters, but who committed himself to the commune out of reality to the man who has his battalion commander during the siege. The continuity here between the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris commune is real. That said, these elements are not in house to capture the whole of the commune. To take up the work of the Solange of Christ, the war does not define a cause, but rather the conditions of possibility. And to understand the commune, we must add what this works called the dynamics of the crisis. We have a good example of this with the famous week of uncertainty from 18 March to 26 March. It took a week for the opposition to solidify into a too clearly indemnifiable camp as shown, for example, by a study of the proclamation on both sides during the event. You can observe then the radicalization of position. In fact, another dynamic was added to that of the end of the war. That is the revival of a well-established repertoire of action as the national guard, clubs, designations as citoyens and so on. It is the same for the expression of the socialism and republicanism of the 19th century, which had been latent until then, or the installation of a government in Paris and its major measures, and finally the deployment of a republic that claimed to be both democratic and social. That is to say, that you cannot change the political order without changing the play of social relations through what the communists call the association. This explains what we observe when one analyzes the situation in Paris from below, that is at the neighborhood level, with the relevant archive. On the one hand, you can observe great disorganization, tensions between authorities, the concern to survive in a city under siege. On the other hand, you can observe use of imperative mandates, the Manda Imperative, a popular sovereignty partially exercised in the national guard, and in addition to unrealized projects, certain measures, such as the lowering of the highest salaries and the raising of the other in several administrations. Added to this was, and it's important, the awakening of revolutionary memories. For those who were most involved, a different timeline emerged that gathered all that has gone before into one old regime and revived what they call the unfulfilled promise of previous revolutions. The communes then produced a different relationship to time and history. And this explains why there can be an impetus and the beginning of a modification of social relations while the situation seemed unfavorable. The two go together. On the other hand, focusing on the Paris commune makes it possible to insist on certain aspects that are sometimes neglected in the 1870-1871 war. That is the importance of the republican dynamic of September fueled by a revolutionary memory. Or the strength of municipal republicanism under the Second Empire, which explains too why the first commune to be declared in variable sense were proclaimed before Paris, as early as September in Lyon, Marseille, or even Algiers. The Franco-Poussaint Noir itself appears even more multiform. That is my first point. I'm going to my second one. Let's come to my second point, the question of transnational and global dimension. It is a question that has long been asked in history, in historiography. How could the Paris commune, which was so short 72 days, have such posterity on a global scale? One of the first answers is that such a dimension at that moment as early as March. And a second one is that this is linked to the 1860 war again according to the same play of extension and discordance. I will follow three examples. First, as you can see on this slide, the international volunteers. They were present in the Paris commune, but the movement was launched with the Franco-Poussaint Noir. As soon as the political transition took place on 4th September, the French cause became republican as was linked to the idea of a universal republic. Thousands of international volunteers then came to France to fight in the name of the freedom of peoples. That is Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Belgians, Irish, American, and even Uruguayans. These men, rarely women, generally took part in the other great battles of the time. That is the Italian liberation struggle, the Polish conflict, the glorious Spanish revolution of 1868, or the American civil war. A large number of these volunteers were brought together in the famous Vauge Armée, under the command of General Guy Balny, a great patriotic and republican figure of the time. And what is interesting is that these flows continued during the commune. After the end of the conflict, some of the 1870 fighters went to the capital and took part in the Paris commune in March. This is the case of Maximilien Rogovsky. This veteran of the Polish interaction, established as a mercantile Marseille, was Marchand de Quattresaison, became commander of the Polish cavalry in Gary Balny's army. Then, at the end of March, he placed himself at the disposal of the commune. There are, in fact, shifts in the flow, but the link is very visible. Let's think of the role of those who call themselves Garibaldians during the commune. It is difficult to evaluate the share of these foreign fighters. They are undoubtedly a minority in the mass of Parisian national group, but they had a remarkable visibility. Since, because of their military knowledge, they are part of the higher ranks. For instance, the case of Yaroslav Dombrovsky. They thus gave substance and credibility, not without tension, to the commune's frequent school for the Universal Republic. Forcusing on the Paris commune also implies identifying another link in this connection, that is the International Working Men's Association. This association was funded in London in 1864 at the same time, and it was at the same time, a trade union organization, an international political association, and a place of reflection on sims, such as the freedom of people or the defense of the proletarians. And the IWA were there in 1870. It declared itself against the War of Conquest and against the annexation of Al-Zathlerem. But above all, it played a role during the commune. The old idea that the commune was organized by the International Working Men's Association has been contradicted by historical research. Its role was more external, but it also contributed to the internationalization of the commune cause on a European scale. Another aspect, and I don't have a slide for this, I'm sorry, of this transnational and imperial dimension is the undermining by this conflict of that imperial national state that was France at that time. In 1860, France had the world's second largest colonial empire, and with Great Britain together, they accounted for 90% of foreign investment in the world. So the events of 1870, 1871, therefore inevitably had wider repercussions. Here, the link with the 1871 is even clearer. Diplomatic archives record the commotion and the panic of the foreign ministers. Repayment of certain loans were stopped in Haiti or Venezuela, for instance, as were transfers of technology. In China, these difficulties were used by the authorities to slow down the processing of a diplomatic judicial case that has been going on for several months. The French presence was as if suspended. And in this context, the Paris commune came at the worst possible moment for the French authorities, that is when the country was struggling to recover. The outbreak of the Parisian revolution was often used, in fact, by the elites of the population under French control, whether direct or indirect, as an opportunity to challenge this imperial power once again. There are a lot of examples, but maybe the most revealing one is the cabal interaction of January to October 1871 in Algeria. And naturally, don't have time to develop this. But it suffices to recall that it was linked to extra-European movements as two or two episodes. The Franco-Prussian war was also an imperial war. It mobilized what was called the African troops, weakening the military position in the French colony. In addition, a commune of Algiers was proclaimed as of September 1870, and in March 1871, declared his adhesion to the commune of Paris. But this commune was very favorable to colonization, and then accentuating the return, the cabal interaction was in progress. Here we have a good example of the ricochet game that associated European wars and revolution with colonial struggles in the 19th century, and thus the commune as a colonial dimension. The last phenomenon, and I have now a new slide, is the mediatization, which has been evolved this morning. In relation, it is related to the new information structure. With the end of the 1867s, a media culture developed in several countries as France, United States, or naturally the Great Britain. The major press agency were also created at this time, Reuters, Wolf-Avas, while with the construction of the Atlantic cable in 1866, news traveled from one continent to another in a few hours rather than several days. Finally, the foreign press sent war reporters that had experiences of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. So the Franco-Plucian War was clearly followed by the media at that time at a global scale. And the Paris commune took its place in this context. But it also shifts the spotlight. The fixtures obtained from Reuters Telegram during the week following 18 March show that in media terms, the Paris commune stood out from the Franco-Plucian War as well as from other provincial revolutions. I have a map that I made out of this Reuters Telegram. Why was it so? Because a new revolution broke out in France and in Paris, then considered as the capital of modernity and of revolution in the 19th century. The Paris commune arose with extraordinary attention. This reception was not a simple diffusion of ideas, but rather a rare appropriation according to complex local logics in Spain, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Mexico, and so on. I will not detail here the Bloody Week. The recomposition of media perception both very negative and at the same time heroic are the consequences in terms of political ideas because Julian Eakles will speak about this in a few minutes. Just two things here. First, this media construction plays a role in the Franco-Plucian War's outcome. Why? Because quickly after the fact, the Paris commune was associated with the International Working Men's Association and read as the new symbol of the revolutionary and cosmopolitan threats as the modern threat. Its action said the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jules Favre, was based, I quote, on numbers, discipline, and cosmopolitanism that is for the International Working Men's Association. It thus provided for the defeated France a mean of returning to the concert of nation by posing itself as a bulwark against the new modern revolution, even vis-à-vis Germany. Second thing, the symbolic significance of the commune remained very strong and was recomposed in the following decade, to the point that two different memories of the year 1870-1871 emerged which shed light on our initial question. Let's go to my conclusion. Did the 1870 war forge the Paris commune? The link between war and revolution in the 18th and 20th century is well known, but the question of the precise impact always remained delicate. The commune offered a very good case to the undertaker. On the one hand, the commune, the product of this war, and it would be a mistake not to include it in the continuity of the 1870 war, especially as it is well marked by this fighting experience. On the other hand, everything happens as if the commune also began another history. It gives birth to other temporalities and historicities. It is necessary here to underline the discontinuity that characterizes revolutionary events. They have the capacity to create historical categories such as commune, and this allows to understand how the Paris commune, whose immediate impact is less than the war, progressively imposes itself on the symbolic level on a global scale. So how does the commune allow us to reassess the Franco-Prussian war by showing the multiplicity of histories, disappointments, hopes, and other worlds that it has regenerated? I thank you very much. Thank you, Cantin. And I should say that if you have questions, please write them in the chat or the Q&A functions below, and I'll try to keep track. But now let's move on to the final speaker, who's Dr Julia Nichols, who's lecturer in French and European Studies at King's College London. She worked at Oxford, Cambridge, and Queen Mary before landing at King's, and she is an intellectual historian primarily, and she's the author of a recent book that I also like very much called revolutionary thoughts after the Paris commune. And today she's going to talk about the Paris commune and the Franco-Prussian war in French revolutionary thought. Julia. Thank you. Thank you, Terita. I do not have any slides, unlike our previous two speakers. So I'll just be confronted with my face for the duration of the paper. And yeah, I mean, I wanted to say to extend my thanks to the organisers for inviting me to speak at this conference as well. It's a really nice opportunity. I'm very happy to be here, especially to be speaking on this panel with two such distinguished colleagues as Robert and Quentin. So I know that the conference is focused on the Franco-Prussian war, or the focus of the conference is the Franco-Prussian war, but I want to focus in my paper a bit on the Franco-Prussian war, but mainly on the commune and the period after the commune, specifically on memories of the commune in revolutionary writing after 1871. And I think actually this after hearing the other two papers, this follows on quite nicely thematically from Robert and Quentin discussed. So I'm sure everybody who's here is aware that on the edges of Pallasche's Cemetery in Paris, the Mur de Ferrer stands as a kind of a permanent monument to the revolutionaries who died during the Paris commune. It's against this wall that the last some of the last defenders of the commune were lined up and shot at the end of the commune. Facing this wall, so on the other side of the wall are the graves of various different fantasy activists and politicians. So some of these were involved in the commune and some of them were, but their commitment to the commune is kind of immortalised forever in this, you know, the stones that are strategically placed opposite the mural. And in the years after the commune, towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, a lot of these activists, these revolutionaries will come to enjoy kind of great success actually in French politics and also in international socialists and other politics as well in these kinds of arenas. So if you think about perhaps Poulavard, who was the first kind of really proper socialist deputy to be elected to the Assemblée Nationale. So for me this is interesting that, you know, the commune was really a kind of a definitive political failure. It only lasted for a couple of months, but clearly it remained of paramount importance, both for its participants and for observers afterwards as well. You know, it's with this event, with the commune that they wanted to be associated in perpetuity forever when people thought about them. So almost from the moment that it ended, the commune has been invested with a kind of immense symbolic power. So on the left, we have Karl Marx, you know, talking about it as the glorious harbinger of a new society. And on the right, this is a kind of a crude division. On the right, we have people minimizing, seeking to minimize the kind of the emotional impact of those kinds of assertions, depicting it as the definitive end to a specifically French revolutionary tradition, something which began in 1789 and ended definitively in 1871. And so the commune and also the participants of the commune are kind of, they are very well known, at least superficially because of these associations and because of the place that the commune has occupied in global politics in the 20th century especially. But I think on an intellectual level, those people aren't known so well, we don't understand them so well. You know, there are many studies of the commune, but lots of those studies don't look at the ideas of the people who are involved and they don't look at what the commune are themselves, thought of the commune, how they understood their place in this story, how they understood the commune's place in history. So I want today to kind of talk about that. And I want to argue that, you know, this kind of absence isn't synonymous with a lack of ideas, actually that, you know, far from trying to kind of distance themselves from this, you know, this very traumatic year for most of these people right, 1870, 1871, the Franco-Prussian War and the commune. Both of these things loomed very large in French Revolutionary thought during the period after it. So I want to show this by kind of briefly sketching out two ways in which Revolutionary's ex-communal in the 1870s and the 1880s interpreted the events of 1870 to 1871. And then after that, I want to kind of place these these two different interpretations in the context of contemporary French Republicanism and international revolutionary socialism as well. So that really actually the kind of things that Robert and Quentin have already discussed. But I want to suggest that the way that these revolutionaries remembered these events was a kind of a precise political intervention. It was something that they were doing very purposefully. And then finally, I want to talk about some of the limitations to those possibilities as well. So several months after the commune's fall, the Genard de Paris observed that, quote, like the siege of Paris, the commune was bound to have its legions of historians and chroniclers. And the paper, I mean, this really isn't wrong. In the years following the commune, in the years following the commune, there was a variety or a variety of different interpretations of what exactly had happened and why exactly it had happened emerged. So I guess conservative writers like Maxime Ducan, is probably the most famous one, presented the commune as something that had been a criminal act. Its participants were outside the boundaries of civil society. I think Ippolizen likens commune to savage wolves and brigands. So kind of similarly. And parliamentary Republicans as well also kind of agreed that the commune had been a terrible event. You know, this thing shouldn't have happened. These people shouldn't have done that. And actually, the thing that I think was most surprising is that commentators on the left often weren't that much more sympathetic. So, you know, we see now Marxist civil war in France as really the kind of the paradigmatic kind of defense of the commune. And he did certainly praise the event. And he was very critical of those who've been opposed to it, you know, called Tia, kind of a monstrous gnome, very unkind about bourgeois Parisians who had left during the commune, and then kind of observed it from afar. I think it approached it as almost like a melodrama. So he praised the event. He was critical of those who were critical of the commune. But he didn't really try to rehabilitate either the commune or their ideas. You know, it was more useful for Marx as something that had been attempted and then failed. And I think commune themselves were well aware of the potential of these interpretations to damage them. And they were very aware of their need to formulate an alternative to that. So, lots of commune began that work by taking a kind of a restrained approach to the commune. So, for example, Ian, I think was probably the most well known and also the most widely read revolutionary account of the commune, which is Cosbert Olivier Lisaga's Histoire de la Commune de 1868. So the history of the commune of 1871. He argued that all the revolutionary eulogizing about the 18th of March, 1871, is not worth one page of true history. So, you know, this is what we need. We need true history. We don't need memorializing. And this approach was also kind of reflected in the content of those accounts as well. They focused very much on contextualization. So specifically, the context of the Franco-Prussian War and the context of the siege of Paris. So they talked a lot about the fact that the national government had actually evacuated Paris. It had removed itself, most people to Bordeaux, Gombe-Tav famously in a hot air balloon, I think to tour. And so, you know, they focused on this a lot and implied that really in these circumstances, it was their duty to reestablish order. It was almost the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris and the French government's reaction to those things that had caused the Commune. So, and, you know, this was important for them. In this reading, the Communes weren't wantonly destructive, right? They were desperate. They were attempting to make responsible decisions, decisions that nobody else had been willing to make in very difficult circumstances. And this played a really important part in their interpretations of the Commune. Because in their mind, let's say, absolving themselves of much of the responsibility for the 18th of March, for the kind of the causation of the event, these interpretations of the Commune returned then to the ideas of the event itself. So, you know, these writers, they very proudly drew attention to some of the reforms that the Commune had attempted to implement. So, you know, it obviously didn't have very much time to legislate. And these things were all, I mean, to the extent that they were ever implemented, that were repealed after the fall of the Commune. But they drew attention to the Commune's attempt to legislate for reform on social issues. So things like night work, divorce, and most notably, I suppose, the separation of church and state. So, this really stood in kind of direct contrast to hostile accounts of the Commune. And also, to the kind of the Marxist contention that the Commune had been almost, you know, an intellectually barren event. They argued that actually the Commune had had ideas. And more importantly, they had had socially progressive ideas. It wasn't only a desperate response to the circumstances that they've been in, although these those things were extremely important, you know, the situation, the context of the Franco-Prussian War, as Quentin said, kind of created the conditions of possibility. But it was also a genuine intellectual and social alternative to contemporary French society. So, by classifying it that way, these writers were able to kind of at once explain away the failure of the Commune and also retain their faith kind of credibly in what had been the Commune's ideas. So they said, you know what, it was just an event that was too progressive for its own circumstances. It had been bound to fail. There was nothing that we could have done about it. And now it is our responsibility to preserve those ideas for the future. So the other kind of interpretation that I wanted to mention briefly, although it's to my mind slightly less interesting, centered on violence. So I suppose here it might be useful to briefly say something about who exactly was constructing these narratives. So briefly, writers who put forward the narrative that I have just explained, the one that focuses a lot on context and circumstances, the war, have mostly been members of the minority faction of the Commune's ruling councils. So they were primarily federalists, internationalists, self-proclaimed socialists. And those on the other hand who were advancing a kind of a violent interpretation, an interpretation of the Commune that focused on violence, had overwhelmingly been members of the majority, the governing majority of the Commune. So followers of Louis Rue's Blanqui, the kind of more nationalist members, more traditionalist revolutionaries. This is a kind of a crude distinction, but I think it's useful. So returning to this interpretation, these were obviously framed by the violent nature of the Commune. This was what they focused on when they were remembering the event. And in particular, they focused on the final week of the Commune, in which a large contested number, but still a large number of revolutionaries had died, which became known as the Semence on Glom, the Bloody Week, very quickly. So we can see this approach in really actually a lot of work. But for example, in an article by the journalist Aldi Rochefort, so he kind of very briefly mentioned the Commune, the kind of the duration of the Commune as a battle of two and a half months. But then he quickly moved on to a discussion of the Semence on Glom. He described a scene of corpses floating down the Sen and the swollen streams bathed in pavements in blood. So this article, like many others, it not only provided a description of the violence of the Commune, but it placed it in a position where it was of primary importance. So in this interpretation, the Commune's importance wasn't tied to the value of its ideas. Actually, they didn't really talk about its ideas at all. They didn't even particularly talk about its context. Basically, they argued that these things weren't really important. And I mean, I suppose this focus might seem surprising, but actually, I think the violence of the end of the Commune, the violence of the Semence on Glom, was often more uncomfortable for other people than for revolutionaries themselves. So for example, Republicans who had supported what the Commune would call the Valseille, it was also uncomfortable for moral order, conservative politicians who, you know, they had staked their reputation on preserving order, preserving morality. They had demonstrably failed to do that. In revolutionary interpretations, the demonstrably failed to do that in 1871. So by remembering the Commune in those terms, revolutionary writers were kind of trying to shift the focus away from their own failings, and onto the violent actions of their opponents. So they're suggesting that the Commune's significance didn't lie in what it had to say about the revolutionary movement, but in the ways it visualized the failings of those in power. So I just want to move on to, yes, another point. So this kind of attachment to the Commune, whether in the form of its ideas or in the form of the kind of violence of the Commune's end, I think it's tempting to see this as kind of symptomatic of the increasing marginalization of French revolutionaries and their ideas during this period, their ideas in the Third Republic, the New Third Republic. So the Commune is obviously, you know, a very significant break. We can see it, and many historians have seen it, at the end of the French Revolution as a phenomenon. It's an event after which revolutionaries who were hoping to remain relevant were forced to make a kind of a choice between, you know, becoming a Republican or moving towards international socialism. So, you know, you can see this kind of interpretation in Laws of Works. If we think about François Puret, to quote Puret on the Commune, he said it was in this burning Paris that the French Revolution said it's good-byes to history. But what I hope that I've shown is that French Revolutionary thought on the Commune and on the Commune's place in recent French history actually doesn't provide that much support for this thesis of kind of decisive change. The writings on the Commune, you know, they certainly didn't indicate that these revolutionaries were amenable to any kind of integration into more mainstream Republican parties. And they also didn't signify any kind of conscious shift towards a Marxian socialism either. Actually, what I want to argue is that remembering the Commune was a precise political intervention. That both of these narratives represented a pragmatic attempt to maintain a unified and distinct French Revolutionary identity. So, expressing their ideas through the medium of the Commune and through the medium of the terrible year of 1870-71 was a way for revolutionaries who, at this point, were in exile to guarantee a kind of a widespread exposure for their ideas. Everybody wanted to read about the Commune. And also to maintain a kind of an independent position in French politics despite their physical absence from France. And also in kind of international Revolutionary circles, if we think about something like the First International, these attempts to establish and maintain a kind of an autonomous yet viable identity for themselves also centered on recollections of the Commune. So almost paradoxically, you know, it was through their thought on the Commune, through this failure that revolutionaries tried to assert their relevance and their necessity in the present as well, both in the Third Republic and in international socialist circles. So I just want to make one very brief final point and then conclude. So I've kind of talked up until this point about the idea of the Commune opening a lot of doors, almost. But I don't want to say that talking about the Commune was just amazing and it was really helpful for everybody. It also kind of there were also quite significant limitations to this, to the possibilities of talking about the Commune. You know, one person observed that the 18th of March distinctly reformulated the revolutionary question. And this was, you know, undeniably true. It did so in a way that actually only really benefited some survivors of the Commune, particularly members of the minority. So not the blankiest traditional revolutionaries. You know, that that kind of dominance during the Commune had also exposed that almost the impracticality of their political ideas. So thinkers from the minority of the Commune were able to use their lack of influence. They were able to use the circumstances of March the May 1871, even before then to transform the Commune into a kind of a vindication of their ideas. But these same ideas at the same time, they marginalised the blankiest elements of the revolutionary movement. They were kind of unable to learn from the Commune's mistakes. So it's an interesting picture where, you know, even as revolutionaries were using the Commune to try to project an image of unity, their accounts exposed the fallacy of those claims. So to conclude, I think if we're thinking about this in a wider perspective, as kind of both the Commune and its participants became increasingly distant memories, remembering the Commune's actual ideas became less important, largely because nobody's reputation depended on it anymore. But that wasn't the case during this period. This period was dominated by the two interpretations that I have put forward. So one focused on, the most effective one, focused on precision, on personal experience, on heavy contextualisation of the 18th of March within the context of the Franco-Prussian War, in order to begin to kind of absolve revolutionaries of the blame for this event, and also to reinvest the Commune with intellectual importance. The other of these ignored the Commune's ideas and its duration and it focused instead on kind of the shared experience of its violent end in an attempt to obscure the mistakes that lots of revolutionaries have made during this period. So both of these were kind of a precise intervention. It was a conscious intervention, but it was the first one, the one that focused on the Franco-Prussian War that was ultimately more popular during this period and also more effective. The final interesting thing to note is that this early kind of historiography of the Paris Commune wasn't a revolutionary historiography, wasn't a tool indicative of the directions that it would take later on. So it also directly contradicts, you know, this idea that the Commune and the 1870, 1871 very quickly became legends. So although in the 1880s people started to move towards a more symbolic interpretation, for the majority of the period that I've been talking about, revolutionary thought on this subject was quite heterogenous, it was quite undefined. So we can't actually characterize this thought by thinking in kind of terms of, you know, this is left, this is right, or even the labels that were kind of commonly used to distinguish revolutionary groups during this period, socialist, nationalist, anarchist, and so on. Rather, Commune on French revolutionary thought on the Commune and on 1870-71 was all of these things at once, often in the ideas of individual writers or publications. So I suppose in order for the Commune to become a kind of a legend or an event with a capital E, it was necessary to achieve some kind of agreement about what had happened during that year. But during the period that I've been talking about, no such agreement really existed. You know, these these events were still a kind of a lived and a living experience. And their meaning and their structure remained unclear. And I think that has important implications for our understandings of the beginning of the Third Republic as well. But I will leave it there. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Julia. And thank you again to all three speakers for very fascinating papers. Now, before we open the floor to questions, I will try and bring together the three papers, although I can't do justice to that depth. But I think that there are three points that all papers were more or less making. The first point is that the Franco-Brushan War and the Commune were moments of rapture only when they were looked at in hindsight, so in retrospect. Because despite military defeat and the Commune's exile, the protagonists of these events didn't necessarily believe that they were living a sort of watershed moment or the end of a nearer. Both in France, but also as Kantar pointed out in the international context. And although it seems pretty obvious, it's still important to be pointed out because the classic historiography tends to look at the Commune as a moment of rapture, as Julia said. And therefore the papers seem to show some of the limits of this long-durée approach to history, as opposed to a more histoire événementielle type of approach. The second point that is linked to the first is that there was no intellectual rapture. The political traditions that were inherent in the events of 1870-71 didn't disappear with defeat, but came to define both the international political spectrum and the political spectrum of the early Third Republic. And this is, of course, evident in Julia's paper, but also in the other two, when Robert, for instance, was explaining how the war was explained through narratives that came from 1789 and the Napoleonic period then across the 19th century, or when Kantar was explaining that the ideals of the revolution coming from 1789 was a universal language understood beyond Paris, across France, other European contexts, and the colonial empire. And finally, one other thing that really struck me was the extent of the memorialisation of the past in the immediate aftermath of the events and the historicisation of such recent history and, of course, to an extent, every national tradition has a shared past. But it seems to me that there's something quintessentially French about such aggressive memorialisation of the past, especially at such an early time, because, as Robert mentioned earlier here, we're not talking about the aftermath of World War II, we're talking about the 1870s. So I think both by looking at the broader international context, but also by bringing us back to France, and in particular to Paris, the three papers point us to a very French tradition of interpreting events through a 1789 prism, which shows both the continuity rather than the rapture between 1789, 1870, and the aftermath of these events. And it allows us to place the period of the 1870s as part of a French revolutionary tradition. And I'll stop that, and now we can answer some questions. There's a question in the Q&A by Jim Dingerman. Jim, do you want to actually ask the question yourself? If not, I can read it out loud. Okay, so the question is... I would like to ask it myself. Thank you. Thank you so much for your presentations. They're really stimulating. You know, I wanted to ask you first the issue of defeat because the 1870-71 campaign is a massive defeat that delegitimizes a social order and leads to the Paris Commune. And I'm thinking comparatively, historically, you know, we can think of the Russian Revolution where the Tsarist army revolts, or other examples of military's suffering defeats but don't have occupation and revolt. So I wondered what you thought historically broadly of the lessons of the Paris Commune in that context. And secondly, the idea of the impact on revolutionary thought that the last speaker was talking about is quite interesting. What's the meaning of the Paris Commune today? Because we're living in a situation where a pandemic has exposed the inequalities of the societies all around the world. I'm thinking of what's going on in the United States right now. And the issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy is something that we don't, we experienced to some extent but not to the same extent as a military defeat does. So I'm wondering, you know, how do we process the Commune in the present and how it is impact or does not impact on how we look at the situation we live in today? Thank you. I can try to begin. Thank you very much for your question. To think first, the question of the comparative perspective, it's true that there is a strong link between war and revolution but it's not always the case. Think to the 1848 revolution, there is no war before. So the question of the link between war and revolution is a very old question of the historical sociology. And we don't have very clear answer. That's why we speak about the conditions of possibility. What shows Thélacoc Paul works on that question, making a big comparison between the French revolution and the Russian revolution? She said that revolution do reinforce the state. And that's true for the Paris Commune to after the Paris Commune, you can show something like a reinforcing of the state. So the relationship has to be considered in a more ambivalent way. And that's the interest of the comparative approach, that is to make the continuity less evident. As for the second question and the aspects you evoked in your text, for the Paris Commune, you can give more importance to the revolutionary experience when you don't look at the Commune from the outcome but when you look at what it is going through during the experience. And what you observe is something like a republican from below, a federalist republic, something called social and democratic republic. And the question is why does the memory of the Commune come back again? Because 20 years ago it was not so present in the public debates in France or in the United States or even in Mexico. Something changed in the last 20 years. One of the possibilities is that there have been a big shift in the political order since 20 years. And you can see it in the suspicion to the party, to the organization, to the syndicate and so on. And the Paris Commune proposed a relationship to democracy that seems to be more relevant today that maybe it was 20 or 50 years ago. In the 1970s, the Paris Commune was linked to the class struggle of the urban revolt. Today it is linked to the question of republic or democracy from below. So it's very interesting to see what it said of our own situation today. I don't know if I have been very clear but thank you very much for your question. Could I say a word about defeat then? The question was partly about defeat. And I think the defeat of 1870, 1771 was in some ways unusual. After all it was the plan was that this should be a short war and a not very devastating defeat. That was the Prussian plan. That was Bismarck's intention as in the case of the war against Austria. It was not meant to be a destruction of the state and it was not meant to be a complete defeat of society. And the war got out of control. It was not possible to end it. Bismarck wanted to end it, Thier wanted to end it, part of the government of national defence wanted to end it, but nobody knew how to end it and so it continued. But nevertheless it was not the kind of complete defeat that you saw in 1814 and again in 1815 or in 1914 which you get the occupation of the country, the subjugation of its government. So what happened was that France was defeated of course and this defeat was a terrible shock. It was very few people expected it, but that it left the state and it left Paris as continuing major political forces. One of the questions that was often asked in an attempt to cast blame was why the Paris National Guard had not been disarmed at the armistice? Why had the Germans not disarmed them or why had the government of national defence not disarmed them? Why had all these people I think as Contin said, in theory about 300,000 people had been left with guns? That's an unusual if not unique situation for a defeated nation and hence although the Paris Commune certainly came out of a long tradition of a revolutionary culture it's sort of in the sense over determined if this was going to happen anywhere it would happen in Paris. The circumstances of 1871 were at the same time unique in that you have a revolutionary movement which has the force of an army and in some senses of a state and it is not under the control of anybody not under the control of the Prussians or of its own of the national government and therefore the defeat has okay a great psychological effect a great political effect in that France as Europe's greatest power is suddenly dethroned from that position but it's not a devastating defeat and it's and okay final thought in parentheses one of the things that many contemporaries are surprised by is how quickly the country appears to recover and even Paris appears to recover quite quickly in a way that could not was not the case after the defeat of Napoleon or of course the case after the the German invasion of 1940. Julia do you want to answer that if not a question that it's about Marxism and since you mentioned. Yeah sure let's go say let's go to the other questions I know we don't have that much time. I read it out because we're running out of time but it asks does the panel consider the Paris Commune to be the only true representation of Marxist doctrine as we were taught in history classes which covered the Franco-Prussian War this is by Daniel Addison. I can answer well quite quickly I mean it's a good question and the Paris Commune comes up so I mean the Paris Commune comes up so much in these kind of terms and this 20th century doesn't it you know it's used by Lenin, it's used by Mao, it's used by all of these people named as a kind of an inspiration. I mean I certainly don't think that Marx would have thought of the Commune as an expression of Marxist doctrine. I mean he's quite scathing about it at the time you know the Civil War in France is very kind of polite about the potential importance symbolic importance of the Commune but if you read Marx's letters to other people from the the kind of period of of March to May 1871 he's not particularly I don't think impolite is the right word but he never considered it to be an expression of Marxism I don't think certainly not a good one and he also never thought that it would succeed even if you look back to kind of relatively near to the beginning of the Commune. I'm also not sure how many of the people involved in the Commune would have thought of themselves or would have described themselves as Marxists at the time. I think certainly you know there were people involved in the Commune who were involved in the international who who had dealings with Marx as Constance said although I think that the the involvement of the international was kind of overplayed after the end of the Commune but a lot of people who were involved in the Commune would not have considered themselves Marxists you know if you think about the Blanc Geist I don't think that any of them would put up their hands and say oh yeah I'm a Marxist so I think that almost this kind of association or this link between Marxism and the Commune and the idea that the Commune is an expression of a kind of a Marxist doctrine is almost one that comes about later rather than one that is circulating widely at the time. Yeah thank you Julia we've run out of time so I thank everyone again and I'll hand it over to Michael. Thanks very much Talita and a big round of kind of virtual applause to our free panelists and thanks very much you know to the audience for such wonderful questions. We have an hour's break now ahead of us and we will reconvene at two o'clock for our third panel which is on fighting the Franco-Prussian War so thanks very much and see you all later.