Soldiers of Revolution: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

IF 0.3 Q4 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR
Nick Mansfield
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Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comrade later wrote of the old warrior's inspiration: “[We were] not soldiers of a nation, of a government or of a faction. We were the soldiers of humanity . . . a unique principle for the Republic” (175). Garibaldi and his volunteers scored some of the few successes against the German onslaught in eastern France.Given that these unofficial soldiers left few records, most remain faceless, though the deeds and motivations of some of their commanders are better known and are described in some detail. After service in the French army, Gustave Cluseret took part in the French Revolution of 1848 and the Italian unification in 1860. He became a Union general in the American Civil War before directing Irish Fenian raids on Canada. He seemed a natural choice for Delegate of War for the Paris Commune in 1871 but was deposed and imprisoned for trying to impose central discipline and organization on the sometimes mutinous forces of defense. This may have saved his life, as he went into hiding and then exile. Cluseret later returned under amnesty and was elected as a socialist deputy in 1884.Reactionaries of both Thiers's French Republican government and Bismarck's new German Second Reich perceived with horror the hidden hand of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), formed in 1864, in these mobilizations. Lause carefully explores this network throughout the story. While acknowledging its influence, he concludes that the IWA was generally powerless, in contrast to the views of both left- and right-wing commentators at the time and more recently.The IWA's most significant moment was during the Paris Commune with many of its Central Committee claiming loyalty. The Communards, with their vigorous left-wing program, were regarded as beyond civilized society. The failure of supporting provincial communes left Paris dangerously isolated. The occupying German forces blockaded the east of the city, allowing Thiers's nominally Republican troops, many of whom were returned prisoners of war, to close in from the west. Though the Communards were poor military organizers, the Commune inspired the Parisian working class (men, women, and children) to mobilize in a heroic and bloody resistance street by street, in which few prisoners were taken. “Fuelled by desperation and hope,” this fighting climaxed in the semaine sanglante, in which the self-destructive petroleuses may have been active, resulting in over seventeen thousand dead and over forty thousand captured; most of the latter were deported to overseas penal colonies (219).The “Soldiers of Revolution” had failed completely, with only the myth of the “might have beens” of the Paris Commune surviving to sustain the left. In France the Second Republic of conservatives was strengthened, and in newly unified Germany, Prussian autocracy dominated. It would take generations before political change was achieved.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581503","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria's favorite home and is now cared for by English Heritage. A “Swiss Cottage” in the grounds houses an eclectic museum put together by her children. One of the exhibits is a glass bottle allegedly carried during the Paris Commune of 1871 by a female incendiary (a petroleuse) who was summarily executed by government troops. The object testifies to horrific justification felt by polite Western society at the worst massacre in French history, which is at the heart of Mark Lause's latest book.Military history is too important to leave to traditional “drum and trumpet” military historians. Soldiers of Revolution joins a growing literature from labor historians interested in the role of working people in war. Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comrade later wrote of the old warrior's inspiration: “[We were] not soldiers of a nation, of a government or of a faction. We were the soldiers of humanity . . . a unique principle for the Republic” (175). Garibaldi and his volunteers scored some of the few successes against the German onslaught in eastern France.Given that these unofficial soldiers left few records, most remain faceless, though the deeds and motivations of some of their commanders are better known and are described in some detail. After service in the French army, Gustave Cluseret took part in the French Revolution of 1848 and the Italian unification in 1860. He became a Union general in the American Civil War before directing Irish Fenian raids on Canada. He seemed a natural choice for Delegate of War for the Paris Commune in 1871 but was deposed and imprisoned for trying to impose central discipline and organization on the sometimes mutinous forces of defense. This may have saved his life, as he went into hiding and then exile. Cluseret later returned under amnesty and was elected as a socialist deputy in 1884.Reactionaries of both Thiers's French Republican government and Bismarck's new German Second Reich perceived with horror the hidden hand of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), formed in 1864, in these mobilizations. Lause carefully explores this network throughout the story. While acknowledging its influence, he concludes that the IWA was generally powerless, in contrast to the views of both left- and right-wing commentators at the time and more recently.The IWA's most significant moment was during the Paris Commune with many of its Central Committee claiming loyalty. The Communards, with their vigorous left-wing program, were regarded as beyond civilized society. The failure of supporting provincial communes left Paris dangerously isolated. The occupying German forces blockaded the east of the city, allowing Thiers's nominally Republican troops, many of whom were returned prisoners of war, to close in from the west. Though the Communards were poor military organizers, the Commune inspired the Parisian working class (men, women, and children) to mobilize in a heroic and bloody resistance street by street, in which few prisoners were taken. “Fuelled by desperation and hope,” this fighting climaxed in the semaine sanglante, in which the self-destructive petroleuses may have been active, resulting in over seventeen thousand dead and over forty thousand captured; most of the latter were deported to overseas penal colonies (219).The “Soldiers of Revolution” had failed completely, with only the myth of the “might have beens” of the Paris Commune surviving to sustain the left. In France the Second Republic of conservatives was strengthened, and in newly unified Germany, Prussian autocracy dominated. It would take generations before political change was achieved.
革命的战士:普法战争与巴黎公社
位于怀特岛的奥斯本故居曾是维多利亚女王最喜爱的居所,现在由英国遗产协会保管。庭院里有一座“瑞士小屋”,里面有一个由她的孩子们拼凑起来的不拘一格的博物馆。其中一件展品是一个玻璃瓶,据说在1871年巴黎公社期间,一名女纵火犯(一名石油工人)携带了一个玻璃瓶,她被政府军队就地处决。这件物品证明了礼貌的西方社会对法国历史上最严重的大屠杀感到可怕的理由,这是马克·劳斯(Mark Lause)新书的核心。军事历史太重要了,不能把它留给传统的军事史学家。《革命士兵》加入了对劳动人民在战争中的角色感兴趣的劳动历史学家的行列。例如,已故的维克多·基尔南(Victor Kiernan)关于跨国帝国军队的著作,彼得·韦(Peter Way)和珍妮·赫尔-埃蒙(Jennine Hurl-Eamon)关于18世纪英国军队的著作,以及我自己关于阶级、政治和19世纪英国军队的两卷本劳动史著作。更专业的出版物包括罗杰·诺曼·巴克利(Roger Norman Buckley)对西印度群岛英军和奴隶制的研究,彼得·斯坦利(Peter Stanley)对东印度公司私人军队的研究,约瑟夫·科森斯(Joseph Cozens)对英国军队和民众抗议的研究。尼尔·阿雷利(Nir Arielli)和布鲁斯·柯林斯(Bruce Collins)编辑的一本书也涵盖了自由主义和社会主义跨国士兵的某些方面。马克·劳斯此前就这一主题发表了大量文章,内容涵盖美国内战时期,他接受了挑战,主要使用法国资料来研究同时期的欧洲冲突。这本书对一场不必要的王朝战争、复兴的法兰西共和国在灾难后重组的尝试,以及乌托邦社会主义者领导的工人阶级在今天游客熟悉的巴黎街道上的一场大屠杀中彻底失败,进行了密集而缜实的描述。虽然假设读者有一定的知识,但令人兴奋的按时间顺序的叙述,在广泛的信息支持下,完全扣人心弦,包括大量迷人的细节。大部分专业的法国帝国主义军队在克鲁普斯公司(Krupps and Co.)的工业化力量支持下,迅速被聪明指挥的德国应征入伍者击败。然而,新成立的共和国临时组建了一支军队来继续战争,这反映了法国社会中日益加剧的阶级紧张关系。军队主要由机动部队、兼职国民警卫队和领土国民警卫队的现役部队组成。此外,自治的法郎-轮胎单位在爱国热情中涌现出来。由于缺乏弹药和制服,他们有时会在敌后作战,如果被俘,可能会被德军枪决。还特别注意到从欧洲各地和其他地方聚集在具有超凡魅力的革命者朱塞佩·加里波第的民主社会主义和共和旗帜下的军事化跨国理想主义者。一位意大利同志后来写到这位老战士的灵感:“(我们)不是一个国家、一个政府或一个派系的士兵。我们是人类的战士……共和国的独特原则”(175)。加里波第和他的志愿军在法国东部对抗德军的进攻中取得了少数几次胜利。鉴于这些非官方士兵几乎没有留下什么记录,大多数人都没有露面,尽管他们的一些指挥官的行为和动机更为人所知,并有一些详细的描述。在法国军队服役后,古斯塔夫·克鲁塞参加了1848年的法国大革命和1860年的意大利统一。在指挥爱尔兰芬尼亚突袭加拿大之前,他在美国内战中成为联邦将军。1871年,他似乎是巴黎公社战争代表的自然选择,但由于试图将中央纪律和组织强加给有时会叛变的防御力量,他被免职并入狱。这可能救了他的命,因为他躲藏起来,然后被流放。克鲁塞特后来在大赦下回国,并于1884年当选为社会党议员。梯也尔的法国共和政府和俾斯麦的新德意志第二帝国的反动派都惊恐地发现,1864年成立的国际工人协会(IWA)在这些动员中隐藏了一只手。劳斯在整个故事中仔细探索了这个网络。在承认其影响力的同时,他得出结论,与当时和最近的左翼和右翼评论员的观点相反,IWA总体上是无能为力的。IWA最重要的时刻是在巴黎公社期间,它的许多中央委员会声称忠诚。以其激进的左翼纲领而著称的公社被认为是超越文明社会的。支持地方公社的失败使巴黎处于危险的孤立状态。 占领军德国军队封锁了城市的东部,允许梯也尔名义上的共和军(其中许多是被遣返的战俘)从西部逼近。虽然公社是拙劣的军事组织者,但公社激励了巴黎的工人阶级(男人、女人和孩子),动员起来,进行了一场英勇而血腥的街头抵抗,其中几乎没有俘虏。“在绝望和希望的推动下,”这场战斗在semaine sanglante达到高潮,在那里,自我毁灭的石油可能很活跃,导致一万七千多人死亡,四万多人被俘;后者大部分被驱逐到海外流放地(219)。“革命战士”彻底失败了,只有巴黎公社“本来可以”的神话还在支撑着左派。在法国,保守派的第二共和国得到加强,而在新统一的德国,普鲁士的专制统治占主导地位。实现政治变革需要几代人的时间。
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