Julie C. Nay and Dr. Daryl Lee, French and Italian

In March 1871, in response to the brutal Prussian siege of the city, a humiliating peace treaty with the Germans, and an attempt by the national government to deprive Paris of her cannons, the Central Committee of the National Guard declared Paris independent of the national government and installed itself in the Hôtel de Ville. The Commune de Paris was born. For seventy-two days the Commune held sway over Paris, occupying important public buildings. During the final week of the Commune, called the “Bloody Week” of 21-28 May, many of these buildings were destroyed in the struggle between the Communards and the French forces. The ruins of the most significant of these buildings were not razed for several years, creating the unnatural spectacle of an acropolis in the centre ville of post-Haussmanian Paris.

Public buildings are not intended merely to house the mechanisms of the municipality or the state. Symbolic meanings grow from these official functions and become synonymous with the structure itself, perceived easily by the public eye. These meanings can fluctuate as power changes hands and political and social groups aim to manipulate the historical memories associated with these places. During the course of my research, I discovered that this situation describes the symbolic dynamic of the public buildings destroyed during the Paris Commune.

Because this destruction was so vast, I originally settled on three buildings only as the foci of my research: the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais des Tuileries, and Cour des Comptes. Spurred on by the expertise of my mentor, I wanted to discover the changes in identity that these buildings underwent because of the Commune and particularly because of their destruction during the Bloody Week. I planned on dividing the research into two phases. In the first phase (Fall Semester 2002 and Winter Semester 2003) I was to become as familiar as possible with the primary and secondary literature available on the subject in the Harold B. Lee Library. A week’s research in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris would constitute the second phase. I made one significant change to this research design. In the course of my work at the Harold B. Lee Library, I found that little was written about the role of the Cour des Comptes or its destruction, so I resolved to postpone that segment of my research until I had more time and resources to complete the project.

In researching the symbolic identity of the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), I discovered that two historical connotations attached to that building (preexisting the Commune), were particularly determinant in the role of that building after the fall of the Second Empire. The first was that this seat of municipal power was seen as the political property of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The Communards, by contrast, came largely from a skilled working-class background and Commune doctrine was rooted strongly in those specific social values. The Communard seizure of the Hôtel de Ville was an attempt to recast those bourgeois values with working-class ownership of the building. The second historical connotation of the Hôtel de Ville, its revolutionary aspect, was a rediscovery of previous identity rather than a reversal. After the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the Hôtel de Ville housed an arm of the revolutionary General Committee, also called the Commune, and served as a rallying place for the Parisian public in every revolution thereafter.

The political environment of the Second Empire attempted to smother the volatility associated with this place in a very physical sense when Baron Georges Haussman widened the Place de Grève (the site of the Hôtel de Ville) to facilitate military suppression of public insurrections. The Commune, as the latest revolution, renewed the revolutionary identity of the building. It is unclear whether the Communards or the French troops started the fire that destroyed the Hôtel de Ville, but after the Commune fell the ruins of that building became the property of the Third Republic. They served as a reminder to the public of the destructive nature of political subversion.

The case of the Palais des Tuileries is a similar one, but before its destruction in 1871 that imperial residence symbolized the weak and extravagant Second Empire, an image that was exacerbated in the eyes of many Parisians by the failure of Napoleon III to prevent the Prussians from besieging of the city. In an attempt to overturn this image, the Palais des Tuileries was used by the Communards as a concert hall where the musical selections were carefully chosen to reinforce Commune doctrine. When the Communards failed to defend Paris against the French forces, they could not retain their symbolic ownership of the Palais des Tuileries either, so the decision was made to burn it. The ruins were not razed until 1883. The destruction of the Tuileries attached a new meaning to the building: rather than standing for Empire or release from oppressive imperial regimes, the ruins now warned of the dangers of radicalism. Tourism among the ruins was popular in the years after the Commune. Bourgeois Parisians had thus succeeded in condemning the Commune for its destruction of the Tuileries while incorporating the destruction itself into the popular culture of Paris, negating the Commune in the process.

While working on this project, I sharpened some of my previous research skills and acquired some new ones. For example, my work in the HBLL and with Dr. Lee familiarized me with the literature on the Commune and with many of the researching resources available in that library. Most of the literature I read and consulted was in French and my reading ability in that language improved significantly. The greatest lesson this project taught me I learned in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris: how to research in a French library. Though this library was rather small, its collections and systems were quite different from that to which I was accustomed. To make the best use of my limited time at the Bibliothèque Historique, I was forced to leave my comfort zone and learn the system, which proved very rewarding.