Paris and the Commune 187178

The politics of forgetting

By (author) Colette Wilson

Publication date:

01 November 2007

Length of book:

256 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719074769

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; some 20,000 to 35,000 people were killed on the streets of Paris in just the final week of the conflict.

Colette Wilson identifies a critical blind-spot in French studies and employs new critical approaches to neglected texts, marginalised aspects of the illustrated press, early photography and a selection of novels by Emile Zola. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying 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.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
1.Introduction
The Paris Commune 1871
Remembering and forgetting the Commune
The case studies
2.Le Monde illustré: Images Between the Lines
An illustrated world view
Language and icons, memories and myths
The fire in the key: the memory of the image
The moral modern metropolis: a Walker’s guide
3.Du Camp’s Paris: Between History, Memory and Reportage
Reconstructing the archive in Paris: ses organes
The Commune as prostitute in Les Convulsions de Paris
4.Zola’s ‘Art of Memory’
Le Ventre de Paris
L’Assommoir
Une Page d’amour
5.Paris and the Commune in the Photographic Imagination
Politics, memory and aesthetics in Soulier’s Paris incendié, mai 1871
Changing perspectives in Baldus’s Les Monuments principaux de la France
Pictures at an exhibition: Marville’s hygienic view
6.Conclusion
Appendix: Chronology of key events 1871-1880
Bibliography
Index

‘Colette Wilson’s tightly focused Paris and the Commune, 1871-78 is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on the Commune and its memory.’
Casey Harison, University of Southern Indiana, H-France Review Vol. 19 (February 2019), No. 22