Paris and the Commune 1871–78 : The Politics of Forgetting

This book is a work of original scholarship that makes a strong contribution to our understanding of French cultural memory. Despite the scholarship and political activism devoted to keeping the memory of the Paris Commune alive, there still remains much ignorance both in France and elsewhere, about the traumatic civil war of 1871 and particularly about the terrible retribution meted out by the French state on its own citizens; some 20,000 to 35,000 people were killed on the streets of Paris in just the final week of the conflict.

Colette E. Wilson identifies a critical blindspot in French studies which since the 1960s has focused primarily on representations of the Commune by writers and artists who were either Communards themselves or at least sympathetic to the Communard cause. New critical approaches are instead set to work on neglected texts (by Maxime Du Camp), marginalised aspects of the illustrated press (Le Monde illustré), early photography (Charles Marville, Edouard-Denis Baldus and Charles Soulier) and a selection of novels by Emile Zola. Wilson writes clearly and authoritatively and her book will be of interest to students and academics working on France in the nineteenth century from a number of different perspectives – war and revolution studies, cultural studies, history and cultural memory, literature, art history, photography, the illustrated press, city studies and human geography. The book will appeal equally to all lovers of Paris who wish to know and understand more about the city’s turbulent past.