From what can be inferred from the composer’s correspondence and writings, Debussy was indifferent to political debate. It is noteworthy that the names of politicians are virtually absent from his letters, and that none of the major affairs or terrorist episodes that shook French public opinion are the subject of his public or private writings. This chapter describes France’s volatile politics and the impact of the Prussian invasion, the Commune (1871), the Dreyfus affair, the First World War, and other events that shaped the country. Relations with Germany and the catastrophe of the First World War are discussed. Although Debussy was directly affected by some political events, for example his father’s involvement in the Commune, he comes across as fairly apathetic in his few political pronouncements.

Chapter 16 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of their own majority populations during the industrial Urban Planetary acceleration of the nineteenth century. Millions of new urban industrial workers and colonial subjects profoundly shaped cities by means of their own massive, often very-long-distance migrations; their grueling, often indentured and semi-servile labor; their construction and habitation of new housing; and their multifarious forms of political activism. The chapter examines the built structures and the associated political contests required for movement, changes in home life, factory work, associational life, and street protest. Urban political institutions also changed amidst a radicalization of revolutionary movements exemplified by the Paris Commune of 1871 and massive strike waves that followed everywhere on the Urban Planet at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71 exercised a dramatic impact on the rhetoric around private collecting, this chapter suggests. It examines why conservative collectors such as baron Jérôme Pichon felt that they were personally under attack as the city was shelled and burned during the année terrible, and suggests that heritage became intensely politicised, as radicals were blamed for repeating the vandalism previously seen in the Revolution of 1789. The chapter emphasis the emergence of a belligerent branch of art history written by Pichon’s associations- like Louis Courajod and baron Charles Davillier- and stresses that conservative collectors took their vision of the past into the public sphere through the vibrant culture of temporary exhibitions which emerged under the Second Empire. Through the figure of baron Léopold Double, it explores the cult of the old regime created by royalists but also argues that this cult proved very unstable in the new political and economic circumstances of the 1880s.

The first part of this book explores how French revolutionaries narrated, interpreted, and debated the Commune in the decade following its suppression during the Semaine Sanglante in May 1871. I delineate this output into two clear interpretations of the Commune: the ‘realist’ and the ‘violent’. Chapter 1 examines the ‘realist’ interpretation of the Commune, whose chief advocates were proponents of a ‘federal’ socialism. These accounts were highly detailed and focused on the practical dimensions of the Commune, heavily contextualising its inception and acknowledging the organisational flaws that contributed to its defeat. Exponents of this interpretation aimed to reverse the prevailing narrative of the Commune, which cast revolutionaries as dangerous criminals and the army as agents of order. They also celebrated the Commune’s concrete achievements and drew attention to its progressive ideas, which they claimed offered a genuine alternative to contemporary French society. The chapter further suggests that this interpretation’s emphasis on the value of personal experience and eyewitness testimony represented an attempt to wrest back control of the Commune narrative from Karl Marx, whose influential work Civil War in France appeared just days after its fall in May 1871.

The introduction highlights the significant role that revolution played in French political thought during the nineteenth century and identifies the historiographical gaps that this study will fill. Rather than fading into obscurity after 1871, revolutionaries remained active and sought, relatively successfully, to re-establish a viable ‘revolutionary’ position in French politics and society. This was achieved through intellectual experimentation rather than unifying behind a single revolutionary voice. From 1789 to the mid-1880s, successive generations of activists sought to reinvent continuities with their predecessors, drawing upon new ideas to invest familiar terms such as equality and solidarity with fresh meanings more appropriate to their circumstances. There was no fixed ‘revolutionary tradition’ in France during the nineteenth century: rather, it was a process of perpetual intellectual adaptation.

This chapter explores the second of two contemporary revolutionary interpretations of the Commune: the ‘violent’, which was mainly upheld by adherents of Louis Auguste Blanqui. These activists had held power during the Commune, and were more inclined to promote violent insurrection and state interventionism. This interpretation ignored the Commune’s ideas and its duration, focusing instead upon the shared experience of its violent end as part of an effort to turn Commune into a lasting revolutionary symbol and obscure the mistakes the Blanquists had made in power. Although this interpretation proved more enduring, it was not as beneficial as its ‘realist’ counterpart during the 1870s, because it was unable to characterise the Commune as anything more than a tragic event. I conclude by noting that while both readings were aimed at promoting unity, such competing interpretations also reflected the continuation of divisions that emerged during the Commune and continued to fracture the French revolutionary movement well into the early 1880s.

The first part of this book explores how French revolutionaries narrated, interpreted, and debated the Commune in the decade following its suppression during the Semaine Sanglante in May 1871. I delineate this output into two clear interpretations of the Commune: the ‘realist’ and the ‘violent’. Chapter 1 examines the ‘realist’ interpretation of the Commune, whose chief advocates were proponents of a ‘federal’ socialism. These accounts were highly detailed and focused on the practical dimensions of the Commune, heavily contextualising its inception and acknowledging the organisational flaws that contributed to its defeat. Exponents of this interpretation aimed to reverse the prevailing narrative of the Commune, which cast revolutionaries as dangerous criminals and the army as agents of order. They also celebrated the Commune’s concrete achievements and drew attention to its progressive ideas, which they claimed offered a genuine alternative to contemporary French society. The chapter further suggests that this interpretation’s emphasis on the value of personal experience and eyewitness testimony represented an attempt to wrest back control of the Commune narrative from Karl Marx, whose influential work Civil War in France appeared just days after its fall in May 1871.