L’imaginaire de la Commune is the title of Kristin Ross’s new book in its first, French edition. It is debatable whether this laconic phrasing could have survived the passage into English with its resonances unimpaired. Verso’s more elaborate formulation is properly informative, recalling an event and its animating vision, and defining the emphasis of Ross’s treatment, which falls on a triumph of political and social imagination. What it surrenders, though, is the great, stirring generality of the simple phrase ‘The Commune!’—‘the rallying cry’ as well as ‘the thing itself’—which the author herself insists upon, as she ranges through the experiences of seventy-two days in Paris in the spring of 1871, reconstructing an altogether more extensive and complex time-space, both objective and inward, of communes past, present and to come.

The unique military conjuncture is well known: the victorious Prussians camped to the east of the capital, staying their hand, as the defeated government forces, now regrouped at Versailles to the west, began a sustained bombardment of the city’s revolutionaries. But in Ross’s treatment, even a strict measurement of time reaches back some years into the later 1860s, which saw a ferment of political discussion among the workers of Paris, as the Second Empire faltered. ‘It is the clubs and the associations that have done all the harm,’ was one police official’s retrospective judgement. There, in what one anti-Communard author called ‘the Collège de France of insurrection’, the idea of the ‘social Commune’ had taken shape well before the collapse of official resistance to Prussia’s armies. Its imaginative hold on posterity would be greater and longer-lived, sustained through the 1870s and 80s and beyond by those who had survived the bloody repression to make it to the Communard colonies of London and Geneva—and also by such unflagging champions as Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. Only one French veteran, the geographer and anarchist thinker Élisée Reclus, gets as much attention as these two, a Russian gentleman-scientist and an English poet and decorator who had neither first-hand experience of the insurrection nor even much initial awareness of what was unfolding—in contrast, say, with Marx, who, in his London exile, was intensely engaged. But that is in keeping with Ross’s understanding of the Commune’s imaginary, which is not inhibited either by national borders or by the programmed sequences of modernizing reason. It is a four-dimensional network of sorts in which familiar lines of political inheritance criss-cross with new bondings in the present and retrospective acts of affiliation that enrich the significance of the events they look back on. Thus, Jacobin and Proudhonist currents were predictably to the fore from the outset; Elisabeth Dmitrieff, the founder of the Women’s Union, opened a key intellectual ‘transversal’ between Marx and revolutionary forces in Russia; Kropotkin and Morris became a part of the memory of the Commune by virtue of their embrace of its historic promise and their own later individual contributions to the thought-cluster for which it offered the foremost symbol—in a word, its imaginary.

This is a long-standing preoccupation in Ross’s work, as readers of her first book, The Emergence of Social Space (1988), centred on the poetry of Rimbaud, will be aware. The constructions of social memory and their political implications were the matter of an incisive critical study, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (2002). Communal Luxury bears a close relation to both these books, as historical writing in a modernist mode: Bloch’s Erbschaft is an explicit presence in it, and the Benjamin of the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is Ross’s inspiration for the priorities she sets herself. ‘I have preferred’, she says, to attend to the ‘voices and actions’ of the Communards themselves, rather than

the long chorus of political commentary or analysis—whether celebratory or critical—that followed. I have not been concerned with weighing the Commune’s successes or failures, nor with ascertaining in any direct way the lessons it might have provided or might continue to provide for the movements, insurrections and revolutions that have come in its wake. It is not clear to me that the past actually gives lessons.

However, she continues, ‘Like Walter Benjamin . . . I believe that there are moments when a particular event or struggle enters vividly into the figurability of the present, and this seems to me to be the case with the Commune today.’ The alternatives mapped here are not so stark, in truth. Ross’s arresting declaration implies a different style of learning, not the conclusion that there is nothing to learn. The lessons are in the first place historical, and the procedure, following Henri Lefebvre, involves both ‘the lived’ and the ‘conceptual’, retracing the actual words and actions of the insurgents—such as Reclus and Dmitrieff—and also pursuing certain ‘logics’ arising from them. Her purpose is to return to the Commune as it can now be more easily seen, without interpretive pre-emption by two state narratives that have in her view worked to confine its meaning and force. The first and more insistent has been that of official French political culture, which has represented the insurrection as a convulsive episode in the long march, since concluded, towards the Republic. The second, which has lost much of its authority since the collapse of the powers and the movement that sponsored it, is the narrative of ‘state-communism’, in which the Commune became ‘the failed revolution of which [the Russian October] would be the corrective’. Rejecting both narratives, Ross disclaims any intention of founding a third, and it is true that the network she traces, with its openness and unprogrammed transversals through spaces and times, does not much resemble the grand narratives of the Fifth Republic and the Soviet Union. What, then, is the specific character of this political imaginary and what is its force, as it enters ‘into the configurability of the present’?

The Commune was ‘an audacious act of internationalism’—that above all, in one veteran’s judgement. The first city-wide institutional form of the revolution, the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements, was the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association, whose Paris membership at this time was reportedly 50,000. Foreigners were welcomed from the start, and supporters such as Dmitrieff were made citizens in recognition of their engagement. (The Versailles authorities were correspondingly obsessed with the involvement of foreigners in the Commune, circulating ridiculously inflated estimates of numbers laced with the usual xenophobic slurs.) However, Dmitrieff’s new-found citizenship was Parisian, not French, and was awarded pending the day when ‘the Universal Republic [would] make her a citizen of humanity’. Ross herself chooses as the symbolic point of departure for the Commune a political meeting in the autumn of 1868, when, as one old revolutionary recorded, a certain maker of artificial flowers rose to speak, and, dispensing with the established etiquette of such gatherings, began not with the ‘sacramental’ Mesdames et Messieurs but with Citoyennes et citoyens! ‘The room erupted in applause.’ The sacrament was that of the nation, which the Commune’s revolutionaries repudiated, wanting Paris to be, in Ross’s words, ‘not the capital of France but an autonomous collective in a universal federation of peoples’. This was not the false universalism of the French state, be it imperial or newly republican: anti-colonial and anti-chauvinist sentiment ran strongly in the city, and as one Communard put it, the Republic itself was merely ‘the last form, and not the least malevolent’ of authoritarian rule.

Casting off the illusions and trammels of the nation, the revolutionaries of the Universal Republic, or ‘the workers’ republic’, as the International also termed it, set their faces against the state as well. For all the radicalism of particular social reforms—the invention of the crèche system, for instance, or the remaking of education—the truly momentous originality of the Commune lay, as Marx declared, in the very fact of its ‘working existence’, which constituted a blow against the state as such as a mode of social organization. The elected Commune was not a parliamentary body but an organ uniting legislative and executive powers; the standing army was abolished; permanent offices were recast to be occupied in principle by anyone, at a worker’s salary and subject to recall; priests were dispatched to ‘the recesses of private life’. In the ‘simple fact’ of itself, as Ross puts it, the Commune discovered the means of working-class self-emancipation, what Engels would call a state ‘that is not, properly speaking, a state, but is “what exists in common”.’ Within its ranks, however, there were significant differences in understanding of the scope of political practice. Whereas the International’s immediate response to the proclamation of a new republic had been to call for elections to a municipal government, months later the members of the Women’s Union, ‘the Commune’s largest and most effective organization’, ‘showed no interest in parliamentary or rights-based demands’, and were ‘indifferent to the vote’; ‘participation in public life . . . was for them in no way tied to the franchise.’