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The Paris Commune lasted less than 100 days, yet this populist movement had extraordinary impact and offers a fascinating comparison to populist turbulence in 2021. Having survived the horrors of the Siege of Paris, winter of 1870-71, Parisians refused to accept the terms of French surrender after the Franco-Prussian war and declared independence. For ten weeks, the Communards experimented with alternative living: revolutionising education, political representation, the role of women, the upbringing of children, even parts of the landscape. The Commune was crushed brutally at the end of May, but it caught the attention of conservatives and radicals across the world. 150 years later, what does the Commune still have to say to us? Have we lost its legacy or, just maybe, are we all Communards now?

Dan Rebellato, writer and thinker, is inspired by personal observation of the modern legacy of the commune:

鈥淚n 2016, my wife and I moved to Paris and we had a baby. In London, walking along a narrow pavement with a buggy, people generally get out of your way. In Paris, there鈥檚 often a stand-off. In London, the public space is not really public at all; we carry with us a portable sphere of private space that should not be invaded. In Paris, if you鈥檙e on the street, you鈥檙e in the debate. Although French society is in many ways very deferential and hierarchical, this is not true on the streets. Anyone can speak to anyone - in Paris, every encounter is a debate. And so I found myself looking into the history of those Parisian streets; the way they鈥檝e been remodelled and remade, the way the famous cobblestones have been torn up as weapons, the way the boulevards are ghosted by barricades and street battles. It鈥檚 a story that has markers in 1968 and 1961 and 1945 and 1940 but ultimately this contested Paris, where the very streets are sites of battle and debate, takes us back to 1871 and the Commune.鈥�

These essays will bring the Commune to life with vivid description of key moments, entering into history, to explore how it shaped French society and beyond, through personal connection with the facts and the sense of a city Dan knows well.

Essay 4: Destruction

16 May 1871: On 16 May 1871, the Vendome Column, erected in honour of Napoleon鈥檚 Austerlitz victory, was smashed to the ground. In the Commune鈥檚 final days, many great buildings were set alight in what its enemies described as an orgy of destruction. But destruction is not always destructive. Some argue that Haussmann鈥檚 pre-Commune rebuilding, after the uprisings of 1830 and 1848, deliberately created streets too wide for revolutionaries to barricade, yet straight and long for swift deployment of the army to quell insurrection. The Commune showed the futility of that aim. In our era too, we have returned to destruction. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign argued that the statues to the architects of Imperialism should be taken down. There have been violent clashes over the bringing down of statues to Confederate generals in the USA. To some, pulling down a statue is to reject the values implicit in venerating such men; to others, it is to hide from history. Yet perhaps the only thing more destructive than destruction is restoration. Swiftly, a column identical to the former one rose again. Paradoxically, to prove the futility of trying to blot out history, the French government blotted out history 鈥� the new Vendome column is a kind of ruin of a ruin.

Dan Rebellato is a leading British radio dramatist, as well as a Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway London. He has written extensively for 大象传媒 Radio 3 and 4, most recently Killer for Radio 3, as well as theatres such as Plymouth Drum, Suspect Culture and Graeae, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He has won Sonys and 大象传媒 Audio Awards for his radio dramas. He was lead writer on the blockbuster 大象传媒 Radio 4 Series, Emile Zola; Blood Sex and Money, starring Glenda Jackson. He has published several books, most recently co editing Contemporary European Playwrights in 2020, and is currently writing a practical playwriting guide for the National Theatre, due out in 2021/22.

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