>> From The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> Jason Steinhauer:
Well, good afternoon. My name is Jason Steinhauer. I'm a Program Specialist with
The John W. Kluge Center. Today's lecture is presented
by The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capitol Hill that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one
another, to distill wisdom from The Library's rich
resources and to interact with policymakers and the public. The Center offers opportunities
for senior scholars, post-doctoral fellows and Ph.D.
candidates to conduct research in The Library of Congress
collections and we offer free public
lectures, conferences, symposia and other programs, as well
as administer The Kluge Prize, which recognizes outstanding
achievement in the humanities and
social sciences. For more information about The
Kluge Center I encourage you to sign up for our e-mail alerts on
your way out this afternoon or to visit our website,
loc.gov/kluge. You can sign up to learn
about future events, as well as opportunities for you
to conduct your own research here at The Library of Congress. Today's program is titled
1871, The Ruins of Paris. It features Dr. Peter Brooks, currently a Distinguished Visiting
Scholar at The John W. Kluge Center. While at The Library of Congress
Dr. Brooks has conducted research on Gustave Flaubert, his
novel Sentimental Education and the tumultuous events
in Paris in 1870 and 1871. 1871 has been called
the terrible year, as Napoleon's Third Army was
defeated in the Franco Prussian War and an insurgency called
the Paris Commune followed. It was crushed partially by the
National Government and much of central Paris was
burned as a result. Flaubert visited these ruins of
Paris and found in them a lesson, if only they had understood the
novel he had published some months earlier the cataclysmic destruction
never could have happened. Dr. Brooks will speak about
this today during his talk. Dr. Brooks is Sterling [Assumed
Spelling] Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
at Yale University and is currently Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation Scholar in the University Center for
Human Values in the Department of Comparative Literature. At Princeton University he directs
a project on the ethics of reading and the cultures of professionalism. He was the Founding Director of the
Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, and he has also been
University Professor at the University of Virginia. His publications include
Henry James Goes to Paris, winner of the 2008 Christian Gauss
Award, as well as Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Speaking
Guilt in Law and Literature, and Psycho Analysis
and Storytelling. His writing has appeared in the
New York Times, New York Review of Books, the New Republic,
the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and London
Review of Books, and his work has been
supported by fellowships from the American Council
of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities and most
recently The John W. Kluge Center at The Library of Congress where
he has spent the past four months. So please join me in
welcoming Dr. Peter Brooks. [ Applause ] >> Peter Brooks: Just find a
place for my water bottle here. Jason, thank you very much. And before I begin I want to
extend my thanks, as well, to Lou Reyker [Assumed Spelling],
Dan Terello [Assumed Spelling], Travis Hensley [Assumed Spelling]
and all my colleagues here at The Kluge Center, which has
been an absolutely wonderful place to do research and write. I recommend it to you all. And the book I've been writing
here, I'm trying to tell the story of what the French still call the
terrible years, Jason mentioned, as lived by two great writers
who were devoted friends, Gustave Flaubert and George
Sonde [Assumed Spelling]. George Sonde, of course, a woman
writer who used that pseudonym. And to talk, also, about Flaubert's
novel, Sentimental Education, which he thought should
have kept his patriots, compatriots from the
catastrophe they were enduring. It was a year of almost unimaginable
suffering, humiliation, defeat, hatred, fratricidal conflict. A year where war and surrendered
were followed by siege, cold, hunger, then class warfare
on a scale never seen before. A national bloodletting that left
France traumatized on the threshold of its most enduring experiment
with Republican Government, even as it seemed poised
to retreat into Monarchy. By the end of the so-called Bloody
Week at the end of May 1871 much of central Paris was
a smoking ruin and out of these ruins modern
France emerged. But to give as a background just the
barest historical sketch of events, Second Empire France under Napoleon
the Third, who became Emperor a year after his Coup d'Etat
on December 2nd, 1851, killed off the fragile Second
Republic born of Revolution in 1848. That Second Empire seemed
immensely wealthy and powerful. Paris was the undisputed
Capitol of Europe. But the Empire came to an
abrupt and unexpected end in the Franco Prussian War,
which began in July 1870. The war was totally unnecessary,
I suppose most wars are but this one certainly was. It was the result of
diplomatic blunders and the deliberate provocation
of the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck,
who thought that war with France would strengthen his
hand and unify the German states under Prussian phylogeny
[Assumed Spelling]. French confidence in its army and its vaunted new Chassepot
bolt action, breach loading rifle, was unbounded but certainly
misplaced. Appallingly commanded and outmaneuvered the French
Army quickly suffered loss after loss on the battlefield. Whole Army Corps were made prisoner. And then on September 2nd
so was the Emperor, himself. His fall quickly led to a
quick revolution in Paris and the declaration of a new
Republic on September 4th. But the war was not at all over,
the Prussian Army advanced rapidly to Paris, captured the outlying
forts built to defend the city and put it under a siege that would
last through a long, frigid winter. The Government of National Defense
struggled to maintain the war effort and to keep the Capitol alive. The City of Light went dark. Paris ran out of fuel and food. Trees were chopped down, the [inaudible] Velunya
[Assumed Spelling] raised. Eating became a greater
problem with each passing day. The animals in the Paris
Zoo were sacrificed, including the beloved elephants, Castor and Pollack
[Assumed Spelling]. They went largely to the
tables of the rich, though. Butchers having exhausted horses,
dogs and cats began selling rats. Urzatz [Assumed Spelling]
food was the rule, including coffee made from acorns. Besides the Prussians began
bombarding the city in the middle of the winter since they got
bored with the French Resistance, and that made life dangerous
as well as precarious. By the end of January the
Government reached an armistice with the Prussians
with a stipulation that a new French Assembly
would be elected and empowered to make a final peace treaty. Paris finally began to see supplies
arrive from the countryside, but national elections led to
an ultra-conservative Assembly with the majority of its members
dedicated to restoring the Monarchy with the old political pro
Adultiere [Assumed Spelling] as Provisional Chief Executive. And then to a peace
treaty in February that surrendered the
Provinces of Alsace and most of Reven [Assumed Spelling] to
the Germans, levied reparations of 5 billion Francs on France and
stipulated a Prussian victory parade down the Champs de Sion
[Assumed Spelling] on March 1st. This capitulation seemed a betrayal
of heroic Parisian resistance. When the new Government
in March then decided, this very conservative
new Government decided to terminate a moratorium
on rent payments and commercial loan repayments and
also the repossession of items left in the pawn shops that the
wartime Government had decreed, there was also a sense
of class betrayal. The trigger point was
reached on March 18th when Thiers decided he needed
to disarm the National Guard, which was civilian
militia of dubious loyalty to the Conservative Government. He decided to disarm them
by taking away his cannon, many of which had been purchased
by published subscription and bore affectionate nicknames, Victor Hugo was the
name of one of them. So during the night of
the 17th, 18th of March, 1871 official Army troops climbed up to the Boot von Maude [Assumed
Spelling] to the Cannon Park, which you see in this
photograph from the time, a very rare photograph, the only one
of that National Guard Cannon Park. It was early morning and the
populace, mainly women at first, out to buy their bread
moved to protect the cannon. The troops ordered to
fire on them, refused. Two Generals were seized and
then executed later that day. Thiers and his Ministers fled to
their [inaudible] taking the whole of the official Government
with them. So Paris then declared itself
an independent Commune. I'm not going to discuss
the Commune, itself. It's a very complex subject,
it still divides historians. A sphinx to the bourgeois mind, Karl
Marx called it, it marked an attempt at local Government run
by and for the people, by people meaning essentially
the Petite Bourgeoisie, artisans and workers, are Government
without a single ideology but with many strange
strands of socialism mingled and largely dominated by the
Coulomb [Assumed Spelling] model of classic anarchism, the
notion that power should be kept in the hands of those affected
directly by its exercise. During its brief existence, 72 days, the community instituted
some remarkable reforms, but it was from the start at
war with the official Government in Versailles and its military
effort was never adequate to the situation. Versailles, which is now the
seat of the official Government, waited for the regular
Army to reach full strength through the release
of prisoners of war. Bismarck was only too happy to aid
in crushing the Paris proletariat. When invasion came, starting on May
21st, 1871, it was swift and brutal. Many of the commanders in charge had
been trained in French colonial wars in Algeria and Mexico and they
treated the Parisian working class as if they were natives. They advanced inexorably through
Paris in a methodical massacre. They're treating [inaudible]
tried to put a wall of fire between themselves
and their attackers. This is a popular lithograph
of the time by a man named Fishou
[Assumed Spelling]. From enemy shelling and from
defensive fires central Paris was in flames. The two contemporary
lithographs, that by Fishou and this showing the burning of the
Royal Palace, the Tuileries Palace, right across from The
Louvre, which we know today. These fires, of course, were
to come chief among the crimes of the Commune, along with the
disastrous decision on the part of the newly created Committee of
Public Safety towards the very end of the Commune to execute
hostages held by the Commune, which included the Archbishop
of Paris, Monsignor del Guam. It was the other side that
started executing hostages first, but still this wasn't
a very good idea. Reprisal was brutal. Local commanders carried out summary
executions on anyone suspected of engaging in the insurrection, sending the rest to
Versailles in chains. Estimates vary, but most agree that
around 20,000 Parisians were killed by the Army during what became known as the Bloody Week,
in a single week. Now the Novelist, Gustave Flaubert,
who had been following events from afar in his home in Normandy,
came to Paris at the start of June, I think just as soon as the
trains began running again. Not sure what date he took the
train, but he was there by June 5th, which must have been just
about as soon as was possible. And he toured through the
ruins with his good friend, Maxim Ducomp [Assumed Spelling], and
it's Ducomp who gives us the report that really lies at the
heart of my book project. Ducomp writes as we were
looking at the blackened carcass of the Tuileries, of the Treasury
of the Palace of the Legion of Honor and I was exclaiming on it, he said to me if they had understood
the Decasiant sante Vantel [Assumed Spelling] none of this
would have happened. Now the Decasiant sante
Vantel, Sentimental Education, was Flaubert's novel published from
18 months earlier, which he intended as the history of his own generation
and which by this point had come to seem to him prophetic of the
horrors of the terrible year. It's a novel that hadn't been
very well received by its critics. It was largely misunderstood. In his view if only his
contemporaries had read it and understood it they would
have gained a political lesson. Well, at the end of this talk,
I'll say just a few words about that novel and why Flaubert
thought it contained a lesson. But mainly I just want to talk
about the ruins and the record given by the contemporary photographers. The photography was
coming of age in 1871 and catastrophe was
a compelling subject. Think of the record of the
American Civil War created by Matthew Brady [Assumed Spelling]
and others just a few years earlier. Exposure times were too
long to record action. The most memorable in Brady's
photographs are essentially the corpses left after the battle,
though there is one notable image of Paris on fire on the
night of May 24th taken by one Epolite Blankou
[Assumed Spelling]. It's looking over towards the
Edelacite [Assumed Spelling] and the Crafectile
Police [Assumed Spelling]. During the brief reign of the
Commune there were portraits, photographic portraits of its
leaders, often assembled at the seat of municipal government, the
Hotel de Ville [Assumed Spelling]. Then there were a number of
posed photos of the barricades and those manning them in kind of
staged defiance, including this of the barricade in
Minilmonton [Assumed Spelling], workers district, that would in fact
be the last part of Paris to fall to the Versailles troops
during the Bloody Week. There's this, which
was the masterpiece of the Commune's chief
barricade builder, a man named Napoleon Gaem [Assumed
Spelling], who I think figures in the background of that picture. I think that's Gaem [Assumed
Spelling] with a lot of whiskers. The barricades were something
of a Communal fetish, but they proved largely ineffective
since the Versailles troops when they arrived would smash
through the houses on either side of the barricades, run upstairs to
shoot down on the defenders or come up from behind them and
catch them between fires. The Buttebomatta [Assumed Spelling]
where that Cannon Park stood, where it all began, now
belonged to the Communal. Wait a second, I've
lost one in here. There it is, they're out of
order, no, not out of order. I wanted to show that one first. That's the barricade in front of the
Hotel de Ville [Assumed Spelling], the seat of Municipal Government
going back over centuries in Paris, taken over by the Communal. And this one is taken by a man named
Alfonse Liabear [Assumed Spelling], whom I'll talk more about, one of
the great photographers of the time. And you can see the
shadow of his camera and of himself in the
foreground then. Yes, back to the Buttebomatta,
where it all began. It now belongs to the Communal, and
this wonderfully evocative photo of cannon looking out from
Buttebomatta over the Paris suburbs. It was very likely taken by a
man named Bruno Bloquet [Assumed Spelling], who had made a profitable
business during the Second Empire photographing studio nudes,
semi pornography, if you will, but apparently became a
Communal sympathizer and was in Paris during the
whole of this period. He recorded this, Bloquet [Assumed
Spelling] recorded in a series of remarkable plates the
destruction of a column of the elegant Placevandome
[Assumed Spelling], which you know if you've ever been in Paris that's
as it stands today reconstructed. It commemorates the first
Napoleon, whose gilded statue as Roman Emperor stands
on top of it. It was sheathed originally in brass
baroleafs [Assumed Spelling] made from the melted down cannon captured
by the French Army at the Battle of Austerlitz [Assumed
Spelling] in 1804. It was by 1871 a familiar
and generally beloved part of the Paris landscape, yet it drew
the particular ire of the Communal who declared it to be, quote,
a monument to barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false
glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a
permanent insult of the conquerors to the vanquished, a
perpetual attack on one of the three great principles of
the French Revolution, fraternity. It surely was all that, but its destruction seems a
strange expenditure of energy and political capital and it
was, of course, quickly rebuilt after the fall of the Commune. Bloquet [Assumed Spelling] might
be dubbed an early photo journalist in a sequence he creates
about the destruction of the Vandome [Assumed
Spelling] Column, although I give you a
small selection here. We start with this kind of
celebratory picture of the base of the Column the day of its
destruction, with lots of Communal, mostly in their National
Guard uniform. In theory every active male
belonged to the National Guard and that was the main source of most
people's income during the Commune, the pay of the National Guard. But here you also have a
mother with a boy who seems to be acting up at her feet. It's a kind of festive occasion. The next one shows you the
Column rigged for destruction and the Placevandome largely
cleared, there are just people on the edges, these
three men on horseback, as it's about to be pulled over. And then this quite beautiful
high angle shot taken from a fifth or sixth story balcony. This is by a different prominent
photographer of the time, Jue Anvere [Assumed Spelling]. That's the column after it's fallen. And to conclude, notably evocative
picture of the statue of Napoleon from the top of the column,
done up as Roman Emperor, falling in the dust like an
assassinated Julius Caesar, the orb of the world is
still clutched in his hand. This, again, by Bruno Bloquet. And I think this picture
more than any other speaks to why the Communal wanted
to pull down the column. They were against everything
symbolized by the Imperial Napoleon. Anyway, it's a curious
series in which the Commune and its photographer seem to
be intent on making a record of their own folly, willfully
creating a kind of scar on Paris, which will be later cited
among their chief crimes, anti-monumentalizing
the city, so to speak. If they think they're effacing
a tribute to militarism and dictatorship paradoxically they
make starkly visible before us what one of the guidebooks is going to call A Day Whose Memory
Will Never Be Effaced. Now crime is a word
that returns frequently in the guidebooks published
for tourists in the ruins. There were a number
of these produced with remarkable speed
following the events to profit from the tourist industry, including for instance this collection
of postcards. The word tourist industry
I don't use lightly. Cooks [Assumed Spelling] in London,
for instance, is offering tours of the ruins and there came to be a
resentment on the part of Parisians at the number of British
who came to see the ruins and as the local thought gloat over
the results of French fratricide. And provincials who had been
locked out of Paris essentially for the last year flocked
to the Capital. Many of the guidebooks are
simple pamphlets with itineraries through the ruins and comments
on the destroyed buildings, others are heavily
illustrated with etchings or rotograph [Assumed Spelling]
years, which one comes to recognize as having been made from the
photographs of the ruins. There was no way of
reproducing photographs in printed books at the time. Efficient photography was
still some years in the future. But there were a few albums that
are large format, luxurious affairs, containing photographic plates. These were produced
separately for each edition, then glued by hand into the volume. They're often of astonishing
quality, as are many of the
individual photographs produced for souvenirs and postcards
and so on. One of the most impressive of these
volumes is Au France Lebere [Assumed Spelling], we saw that Lebere of
the Hotel de Ville with the shadow of the photographer earlier. This is his book, Lou Paris [Assumed
Spelling], of which The Library of Congress fortunately possesses
a copy, and that's its title page. Just parenthetically you see at the bottom there is Entere
Par La Photography American [Assumed Spelling]. Lebere had originally set
up shop in San Francisco and become a prominent West Coast
American photographer before returning to France. The rhetoric of these guidebooks
is routinely anti-Communal. The tropes [Assumed Spelling] become
familiar - crime, wild beasts, insensate destruction, et cetera. As an Author, who calls himself
George Belle [Assumed Spelling], puts is in his book, Parie Ensandie
[Assumed Spelling], Paris Burnt. In many quarters of Paris one
finds what he calls vede aculatere [Assumed Spelling], emptiness
that accuse the perpetrators. This language of the void,
of emptiness is interesting. Another guide tells us, quote, only
photography with its brutal realism and its pitiless precision can
represent these indescribable things that were houses, palaces, cities. Only photography can capture
what now is from what once was. Then Africet Dornet [Assumed
Spelling], who writes the text, this preface to Lebere's magnificent
album, notes that warrants of a war are now past and resemble
a bad dream half forgotten, but he goes on, this site had the
sun for witness and the sun fixed on Bristol paper, that's
photographic paper, this Legubria [Assumed
Spelling] souvenir. So photography is presented as
the work of the sun as eye witness and the fixing of the
object of witness on paper. Photography has given what you
might call a quasi-forensic role, producing unforgettable
memorializations of sites that one would like to
forget as from a bad dream. Dornet's [Assumed Spelling]
remark captures a notion that comes back repeatedly in the discourse accompanying
these photographs. The Ruins, which themselves
record a kind of absence of what was once there are something that should be effaced,
blotted out, forgotten. As George Belle puts
it the more one looks at them the more ardent becomes
the desire to see them disappear. And yet they're irresistibly
made present by the photographs. The principal monuments, most
notably the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries Palace, were
nightmarish unforgettable images of both absence and presence. Absences that refer
to a lost presence, presences that make absence
present, you might say. I offer only a selection
from the many, many images of the Hotel de Ville. Perhaps the most photographed of all
the ruins, the Renaissance Building that had for centuries housed
the Municipal Paris Government and which became the
headquarters for the Commune. This photograph is by the great
Charlee Mataville [Assumed Spelling], whom some
of you may know, he's been much exhibited including
in a big show at the Metropolitan in New York a few years ago. He had originally been commissioned to record old Paris
before Napoleon III and his Lieutenant Baron Olston
[Assumed Spelling] wiped it out. This was done, as you can see,
a few weeks after the fire when the building is already
surrounded by hoardings and clearance and reconstruction
have already begun. And here is one of the many
stark images of the interior of the building, this one also done
by Mataville [Assumed Spelling]. Then I want to show you an
often reproduced Lebere photo, which looks like an action photo. Firefighters attempting to extinguish the blazing Hotel
de Ville, but on close inspection and I had the opportunity to inspect
it myself in Paris two summers ago, on close inspection it's retouched. Someone has very cleverly drawn
in those firemen, firehoses and smoke with pen and ink. This is the original from which
it was made, and you can see how that tempted the retoucher to
put in more figures and turn it into an action photo, but
that's from the Lebere volume that The Library of Congress has. That retouched photo I think you can
consider fairly innocent compared to a number of photo montage
from the time, recording events of the Commune, especially by a man
named Ugen Apere [Assumed Spelling], who published an album called Le
Crime La Commune [Assumed Spelling], The Crimes of the Commune, which
depicted such crucial events as the execution of Generals
Claymont Tomar [Assumed Spelling] and Jules Lacont [Assumed Spelling]
on March 18th, the founding violence of the Commune, and the execution of
Monsieur Dubois [Assumed Spelling] and other hostages at the
Rickette Prison [Assumed Spelling]. These fakes are sometimes clever
and were surely taken as evidence by many people, though their
wooden quality is made evident by the genuine photographs, but
they do, these photo montages which were sold as real without
any mention of what they were, do urge a certain caution when
using photos as witness to events. Absence and presence was a crucial
issue, too, on the practical level of stone and mortar and the question of rebuilding these
destroyed monuments. The Government that would
soon preach moral order, that was the slogan of the
reactionary Government that came into power after the
Commune, as if watch word, wanted to reface the Commune by
ridding the Capitol of ruins just as soon as possible and most of
the functional public buildings, such as the Ministry of Finance
and the Palace of Justice and the Crue de Comte
[Assumed Spelling], were quickly rebuilt or replaced. This is very quickly what some
of them looked like as viewed by Flaubert and Maxim
Ducomp in early June. That's the Palay de Justice
[Assumed Spelling] photographed by Epolite Bloncoute
[Assumed Spelling] from inside the Ministry of Justice. That is the Finance, Ministry
of Finance, by Lebere. Yes, that one is by Lebere. And then that one is
by Epolite Bloncoute, a really remarkable photograph. The clarity of these photographs. As a colleague of mine said,
photography has gotten faster since the 1870s but it hasn't gotten
any better, and I think that's true. And then the Tatra Lalique [Assumed
Spelling] that would be reborn again under a different name
three years later. And in addition to the
specific destroyed buildings, often those were crucial to
the administration of the city and the nation, there were
also whole areas of the city that suffered heavily from damage. On the right bank, that length of
that major artery, the [inaudible], in a photo that gives you a
sense of the remarkable depth of field that's achieved
in some of these photos. And I don't know who that's by. I suspect it's Bloncoute or
perhaps Melville [Assumed Spelling], but I just present it as anonymous. And then on the left bank, not far from Sanjay Marie Prey
[Assumed Spelling], the [inaudible], the scene of an intense onslaught
against Communal barricades. That's another photo by Lebere. And then a few days after the event,
because someone has already put up a sign saying that
the shop that used to be there has moved elsewhere. [laughter] All these would
have to be made whole again and they were with notable speed. The rapidity of French recovery
from war, siege, invasion and then civil war astonished
observers and the rebuilding of Paris was an urgent part
of national restoration. Now the Hotel de Ville, which
was commissioned originally in the 16th Century by Francois
Pomay [Assumed Spelling], King Francis the First, was crucial
both practically and symbolically. Some proposed replacing the
ruined building with a new design, but the Government
quickly opted to restore and reuse the Renaissance
Building while going 19th Century for the interior. Work proceeded at a pace so
that the many haunting images of its ruined condition
would become a kind of counterproof of French resolve. It stands today slightly enlarged from the original, a
defiant reproduction. As for the Tuileries Palace,
another of the most dramatic ruins, there ensued a long
and heated debate as to whether and how to restore it. This is the Saldaymatashore
[Assumed Spelling], one of the principal
reception rooms inside of the Tuileries Palace,
again by Alfonse Lebere. Now if the restoration of
the Monarchy in the person of the Compdeshonbal [Assumed
Spelling], the Bourbon Pretender, crowned as Henry the Fifth
[inaudible] had taken place in 1873, as at one time seemed
really inevitable, it is certain the Palace
would have risen again. But Chombot [Assumed Spelling]
stymied the return of Monarchy by refusing to accept the Twekala
[Assumed Spelling] French flag, the red-white-and-blue
flag, insisting on a return to the white flag of his ancestors,
the Bourbons, with the fleur-de-lis on a white ground, proving
once again the adage that the Bourbons learned
nothing and forgot nothing. [laughter] He went back into exile,
and then failure of restoration, even the conservative Republic of
Dukes that followed upon the fall of the Thiers Government had
trouble mustering much enthusiasm for rebuilding what had come to
seem a symbol of tyranny in excess. The debate ended only in 1882 when
the Republicans were now firmly in charge of the Government with
a decision to raise the ruins and remove the debris, thus, creating the Plasducalasal [Assumed
Spelling] right outside The Louver, as we know it today. Nonetheless, I discovered that
there is still an active National Committee for the reconstruction of
the Tuileries run by people who need to have the memories take
literal physical form. Now the message from the
Government and the official sources of information was all about
forgetfulness and erasure. The Commune would soon become
virtually unmentionable, fallen from official history,
and yet there is this phenomenon of the several guidebooks produced
precisely to publicize the ruins and there were the
visitors who purchased them and like Flaubert toured the city. What did it meant that these symbols
of national defeat and class warfare and heedless destruction
became a privileged site of tourism and of sightseeing? The rhetoric of wishing to
see and wishing to cover over the site returns again
and again in a contradiction that I don't think can be resolved. That work I suppose is our
inevitable attraction to the site of cataclysmic happenings, from
earthquakes to highway accidents, along with the accompanying
wish that they hadn't happened. But something else seems to
be going on here, as well. In part, it seems to have
been the eerie beauty of the ruins themselves
evoked in a number of guidebooks and commentaries. So along with the desire to
remove the emblems of destruction by making present again the
buildings recorded in their absence as photographed ruins there was a
concurrent discourse of fascination with the beauty of the
ruins, a perverse wish that they might be preserved. Many Parisians, as well as visitors,
were captivated by the images of a living city instantly reduced
to lifeless rubble in the manner of Pompeii, the ruin created
by an instant cataclysm. The guide Alcavel de Paris
[Assumed Spelling] notes that the Rueielle [Assumed
Spelling], which I show you here, is the street of another
Pompeii, shaken by the eruption of the volcano of a populace
blinder in its furies, more stupidly [inaudible]
than Vesuvius or Etnam [Assumed Spelling],
that's the Rueielle. And that comparison to
Pompeii becomes commonplace, and yet the results of volcanic
eruption, here the volcanic eruption of the crowd, are beautiful. The same guidebook notes of the
Hotel de Ville that is black, white, bluish, reddish, rose, so intense
was the furnace they cooked and recooked it. We have no colored pictures
from the time, of course, so we don't really know
what it looks like. But apparently stone set afire with
petrol, which was what they used to create these fires, takes on wonderfully enticing
iridescent colors. The poet, Terfuel Gotiette [Assumed
Spelling] viewing what remained of the Caldeconte [Assumed Spelling]
said above all we were struck by the beauty of the ruins. And the novelist and
art connoisseur, Edmund Degon [Assumed Spelling]
wandering through Paris the day after the fighting ended developed
in his journal the full aesthetic of the burned Hotel de Ville. He said the ruin is magnificent,
splendid, ruin in tones of rose and ash green, of white
hot iron, a ruin shimmering in the agate color taken
by stone burnt in petrol. It resembles the ruin of an
Italian palace colored by the sun of many centuries or better
still the ruin of a magic palace, lit up in an opera with
shimmering electric reflections. It's a marvel of the picturesque. It should be preserved. And another guide, the Guilot
Veren [Assumed Spelling], written by Hans [Assumed Spelling]
notes the Ministry of Finance, which in the past was
only a mediocre edifice, has become a superb ruin. Fire is a worker of genius. Again, we have the
Pompeiian reference. It makes one dream of a city
swallowed up by a cataclysm. To Gottier [Assumed Spelling], the Ministry of Finance
looked like the Coliseum. The ruins have a kind of antique
beauty, as here in the remains of what was known as the Grainery
debendos [Assumed Spelling], the Grainery or Storehouse,
which was filled with substances against possible future
famine, and it was full of wine, oil and petrol and, of
course, went up like a torch. This is a photograph by Jules Andrea
[Assumed Spelling] recording the Grainery debendos. So you have the rhetoric of the
guidebooks and tourist reactions to the ruins, a simultaneous
lament on the destruction wrought by the Communal, the work of a kind
of human volcano, and a meditation on the seductive beauty
of this instant Pompeii. The ruins resurrected the
earlier fascination of romantics and gothic revival with
a picturesque ruin. The sentiment that led the money
to have instant ruins created on their states, for instance, and a book such as Count Vornet's
[Assumed Spelling] The Ruins of Empire. And then here, of course,
the tourist was in a sense viewing the
ruins of an empire, that of Napoleon's Second Empire,
which had seemed such an affluent, powerful, enduring regime
until it undid itself in the War with Prussia. Now you see the ruins aesthetics and
full flower in a rare oil painting of the Tuileries done by Ans Masonet
[Assumed Spelling], who was famous as a painter of Napoleonic battles and became almost an official court
painter under the Second Empire. This first is [inaudible] photograph of the [inaudible] inside
the Tuileries Palace. And then here is Masonet's [Assumed
Spelling] using the same general sight line through Palace. Possibly working from a photograph, Masonet looks through the ruined
Saldefet [Assumed Spelling] of the Palace, out towards the
Arcdetriumphant de Carousel [Assumed Spelling], which is still
there, which was originally part of the Paris Palace
complex, but now stands alone in the Tuileries Garden,
itself a kind of evocation of the Palace that once was there. Masonet described the arch with its
imperial figure in a chariot drawn by four horses as, quote, Victory
on Her Chariot Abandoning Us, but others view this glimpse of past
glory through the ruins as promise of a better future,
the rebirth of France. The painting, of course, stands in
a tradition going back to people like Pyronaisie [Assumed Spelling]
and Uber Orber [Assumed Spelling] of evocative ruins which are often
meditations on the transitory nature of human works and aspirations. Masonet explicitly inserts himself
in the tradition of painters of Roman ruins with the
Latin inscription he puts on the inscription at the
bottom of the painting, Gloria Myorem Per Flamas usques
Superstes [Assumed Spelling], The Glory of our Forebearers
Survives Through the Flames and then May 1871,
predicting a greater future, the survivors of the flames, an
image of purification by fire that would return again and again. And on the walls of the ruins,
though you can't see them in this reproduction,
there are inscriptions of Marengo [Assumed Spelling]
and Austulitz [Assumed Spelling], two of the first Napoleon's
great victories. So I think he kind of captures
that mixture of emotions we find in the guidebooks, a sense
of irrecoverable loss along with a fascination with the
ruins left in the wake of loss and also an obligatory
hope for the future. Since the work of critics, like
Olenbart [Assumed Spelling] and Susan Sontag [Assumed
Spelling] on photography, we've become acutely aware
I think of the cohabitation of the photograph with death. The haunting sense that
the instant made present in the image no longer exists,
that's why it's an image. This death affect is strangely
redoubled in the case of photographs of the remains of what once was. The point can be starkly
illustrated by the most famous photo from the Bloody Week, probably taken by a man named Ugen
Desre [Assumed Spelling], who earlier invented the
calling card embellished with a photographic portrait, which expanded photography
throughout the middle classes. This is bodies of executed
Communal in their coffins. The circumstances and intention
of this stark, haunting and nearly unbearable
photo remained conjectural. It somehow looks like an
official act of witnessing, and someone suggested that Desre
[Assumed Spelling] took the photo at the behest of the victorious
Versailles to record the dead, but that's not very persuasive when
you think of the fact that most of the dead went totally
unrecorded and were just thrown into unmarked mass graves. In any event, the photo
authenticates more than any other document I
know the horror of the event. And it's incidentally
one of just two or three authentic
photos of the victims. There are a lot of other ones
that are posed, of troops and civilians artfully
arranged bodies. Whereas, Brady's American Civil War
photos often record bodies mowed down like wheat fields, with
the exception of Desre's photo, the bodies are largely
absent and probably because they were carted off the
scene and hastily buried so quickly by a Government anxious to
erase any trace of them. There's also an act of artistic
witnessing less horrifying than the photo, but equally tragic
in its way, in a sketchy lithograph by Edward Manet [Assumed Spelling],
who left Paris after the Armistice but returned during the Bloody
Week, called simply Civil War. The very lack of photos of
the acts of the Bloody Week, the way in which emphasis has
been thrown forward instead onto the ruins suggests a
specific form of intervention of the photograph in the
historiography of this moment. The visually recorded
history of the life and death of the Commune is the
ruins left in their wake. The burning of Paris
becomes the unforgettable and unpardonable record. That may explain why the image
of the largely mythic figure of the Pitalours [Assumed Spelling],
the proletarian woman running from building to building with
a milk can filled with petrol and setting fires,
became so dominant in the first journalistic
histories of the Commune. The petrolist probably never
existed, she's a figure invented to create a dramatic
and infernal narrative of the burning of central Paris. She's in a sense a fictional
narrative that results from the photographs of the ruins. Recall Alfred Donet's
[Assumed Spelling] words in the Lierbere [Assumed Spelling]
volume, this site have the sun for witness and the sun fixed
the image on photographic paper. The witnessing of the Commune
is largely in those ruins. Photography in this
sense inflects history. It produces fictions of the
events whose outcomes it records. Though the memorialization of
historical event was by this point in the 19th Century clearly a
central role for photography, the ruins of Paris photographs make
a different kind of contribution to the creation of history. They take on a forensic role
while the events are still ongoing in public memory, while the trials
of the Communal, for instance, are going forward in Versailles. They offer a kind of factual support
for the existence and the death of the Commune, its trace left in
the destruction of central Paris. Roland Bacter [Assumed Spelling],
once again, writes, quote, perhaps we have an invincible
resistance to believing in the past, in history, except
in the form of myth. The photograph for the first time
puts an end to this resistance, henceforth, the past is
as certain as the present. What we see on paper is as
certain as what we touch. It is the advent of the
photograph and not as has been said of the cinema, which divides
the history of the world. In the absence of action photographs
and the aftermath of the massacre of so many of the Communal,
including their leaders, the mute testimony of the photographed ruins allows
the construction of its history. There will be other
kinds of memorialization in the wake of the Commune. Since there was an official
wish to silence the history of the terrible year, most
of the early discourses of the Commune are wholly negative. Memoirs by surviving Communal
could not be published in France, some of them were published
in Belgium and elsewhere. Only after the amnesty voted in 1880
and the return of surviving Communal from their exile in New
Caledonia do we begin to have a fuller public
record of the event. One has to await the
20th Century for there to be a commemorative plaque to
the dead of the Commune affixed to their so-called mildefidehet
[Assumed Spelling] at the foot of Pierre la Chez [Assumed
Spelling] Cemetery, where a massacre of Communal took place on the next
to the last day of the Bloody Week, where they were lined up row
after row and slaughtered. The wall became a site of memory with the annual so-called
Monteomea [Assumed Spelling], the going up to the wall that from
1880 onward gathered Socialists, Communists and other left
formations with tributes oral and floral every May in
commemoration of the Bloody Week. It reached its ephagy [Assumed
Spelling] during the popular front in 1936 with a crowd
of some 600,000. Now I wanted this context to talk,
but not today, I spare you that, about some displaced
memorializations of the Commune. First, Victor Hugo's [Assumed
Spelling] remarkable novel, 93 Catavantaz [Assumed Spelling],
named for the year of the reign of terror during the original
French Revolution, which he wrote in the immediate wake of
offense and published in 1874 with the explicit desire to reconcile the opposing
camps of his compatriots. And then another to be somewhat
more sinister kind of novelization of history in the building
of the Basilica of the Sacre Curl [Assumed Spelling]
atop the Butte Monmonta [Assumed Spelling] as expiation for the sins
of Republican France in response to a so-called national vow. The complex history of the Sacre
Curl, both the church and the call to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that
lay behind it, is a notable story of reactionary France
pushing its views on the nation in the
wake of disaster. The building of the Basilica
was declared of public interest by the National Assembly in 1873, its very conservative Monarchist
assembly, allowing the symbolic site up on Monmonta [Assumed Spelling]
where the Communal cannons had stood to be taken by what we
would call eminent domain. Built where the Commune had
begun its reign, it was designed to rise high above the Pantheon,
the home of such impious figures as Voltaire and Rousseau, the
fathers of Republican France. Successive Republican
Governments then attempted to kill the project, but in vain. As finally completed not until 1914
it not only dominates the Paris skylines, but contains within it
mosaics memorializing some strange heroes of the far right, next
to four Archbishops of Paris, offering the Basilica to Paris. We have the authors of the National
vow made during the Franco Prussian War and the subsequent
destruction, to build the church - Manon Aso Anti [Assumed Spelling] and Uber Fluorine [Assumed
Spelling], and then behind them Generals
Desonis [Assumed Spelling] and Cheret [Assumed Spelling],
and the second of them in his Papal Zoove
[Assumed Spelling] uniform. These were descendants of the Vondaya [Assumed
Spelling] resistance to the French Republic
during the great Revolution, who had then go off to defend the
Pope against Italian Republicans. And then in December 1870
they joined the French Army, though as a separate
battalion, under the banner of the bleeding heart, being
the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and led a final chivalrous but
absurd charge at the Battle of Luanye [Assumed Spelling], where
they were both severely wounded and accomplished nothing. And then behind them you have Louis
16th and his family, kneeling wall, dedicating France to
the Sacred Heart, which is said to be a vow he
made when he was imprisoned by the Jacobians during
the French Revolution. He was going to devote
France to the call to the Sacred Heart
if he was released. When he wasn't released, but
instead was guillotined this call to the Sacred Heart became even
stronger among anti-Republicans. And in the back of the scene,
leaning against a pillar, you have an indifferent and impious
proletariat, what they called in the French Revolution Asant
Culate [Assumed Spelling], who looks disdainfully on the scene. Really remarkable, and most French
don't know what's going on up in those mosaics, they're
hard to see. Gallia Penitence at Devota [Assumed
Spelling] reads the inscription over the entrance to the church. France penitent proclaims her place
as an elder daughter of the church. I think it's quite odd that
glorious past should be crowned with this monument of penitence. Now the upsurge of nationalist
feeling led also to a new cult of Joan of Arc, who
came from the Province of Lorraine [Assumed Spelling], which had now passed
largely into German hands. Joan was the symbol who finally
could rally both right and left, the spirit of the nation who saved
the French Monarchy, but also began as a humble peasant woman. Here she is as the heroic
Joan in the gilded statue by Immanuel Fromere [Assumed
Spelling], erected in 1874 that still today stands in the
Place de Pihabide [Assumed Spelling] in Paris. And then this somewhat stranger
attempt by the painters, Ul Bastion LaPage [Assumed
Spelling] to portray her as a peasant girl called
to by Saint Michael, who hovers in the background
in gilded armor, in her parents' back garden,
their poteget [Assumed Spelling]. As for Flaubert, like the
entire middle class of France, he thought the Commune
was a criminal mistake. You don't find anyone in the
French bourgeoisie defending him, but he blamed the reaction
to it even more. Those with power and supposedly
with education are the more to blame in what he sees as
an immense treason against civilization, itself. During a visit to Paris in early
June of 1871 he wrote a letter to his confidant, George Sonde,
I'm overcome or rather nauseated. The odor of the corpses
disgusts me less than the swamps of egotism exhaling from all mouths. The site of the ruins
is nothing next to the immense Parisian stupidity. With some very rare exceptions
everyone appeared ready for the madhouse. Half the population wishes
to strangle the other half, which reciprocates the sentiment. You can read that clearly in
the faces of the passersby. And the Prussians no longer exist. People excuse them and admire them. Reasonable people want to
become naturalized Germans. I assure you it's enough to make
one despair of the human species. Now what I claim in my book is
that a rereading of this novel, Sentimental Education,
published in November of 1869, that is just shortly before
the war breaks out and leads to its awful sequels, when you
set the novel in the context of the terrible year does read as a history lesson
to his contemporaries. It takes its place in a long line
of 19th Century historical novels, but in a strangely prophetic mode. You might say it's part of
a more general novelization of history going on in this period
that sets large historical forces in play against the
individual's understanding or in Flaubert's case more often
non-understanding of the forces that he or she has to deal with. Recall that Marx called
the Commune a sphinx. Flaubert is much interested in the
sphinx of history, but not convinced that questioning her
will get you an answer. He rather wants to make us
understand how we have to live in the shadow of that
unresponsive sphinx. Thank you for your attention. [ Applause ] Thank you. I would be delighted
to have your questions and Jason tells me we do
have about 10 minutes, so if you have them ask away. Yes? Yes, there's a microphone. >> You showed pictures of ruined
offices, you showed pictures of ruined - the Hotel de
Ville, of neighborhoods. You showed no pictures
of damaged churches, were there no damaged churches or
were they not photographed or - because Paris has lots
of nice churches? >> Peter Brooks: That's interesting. There were damaged churches,
particularly in the west of the City, in Otet
[Assumed Spelling] and San Klue [Assumed Spelling]. I think that damage came more from the Prussian bombardments
than from the Communal. So far as I know the Communal did
not set fire to any of the churches. They were anti-clerical
in many ways, and a number of the
churches became places for political meetings
during the Commune, but they didn't undertake
any destruction. The Commune actually was a rather
peaceful period, and there are lots of contemporary accounts of
how pleasant it was to live in Paris under the Commune. It's just at the time
of the Versailles attack that they start burning things. And one could talk a lot about
the motives of those burnings. Essentially I think it was
a defensive maneuver, right, set up a wall of flame
between you and that. But some of it may have
also been vindictive, particularly the Tuileries Palace. Some of it may have been
wanting to cover their tracks because when they burned the Hotel
de Ville they burned all the records of what they had been doing. Yes? You'd better wait for the
microphone, which is coming by. >> Thank you. At the time he wrote Madam Bovary in the 1850s [inaudible]
was the French bourgeoisie, and I was wondering by this
time had he tempered his views, the Third Republic was a
bourgeoisie Government, was he - did he become more
moderate in his estimation of the French middle class? And he had ever espoused any - I
don't know if he ever did any kind of empathy for the working
class, the proletariat? >> Peter Brooks: Good questions. He always remained a bourgeoisie
phobe throughout his life, but curiously, almost
without his realizing it, in the wake of the Commune and its
suppression he becomes a Republican. And he says very interesting
things about the Republic. The Republic is unstable for quite
awhile, it's only in the late 1870s that it really gets firmed up. He says he likes it
because it has no ideology, that it's just getting
on with things. But he continues to
attack the bourgeoisie. He reads all the political
platforms of the candidates for the Assembly from Normandy. This is around 1874. And he says, he writes
to George Sonde, what we have to do is enlighten
the enlightened classes because they know nothing. And he says that, you know, the proletariat isn't really the
problem, they know nothing, too, but it's the bourgeoisie who pretend to run the world and
they know nothing. Yes? Go ahead? >> Can you explain for us how
out of this cataclysm of conflict between left and right
in the Capitol of France within 10 years there
actually was a Republic, notwithstanding the decisive
military victory of the right and the deportation of
the Communal and all that. How did the Republic actually
succeed given all these forces, beyond the fact that the King, the
would be King was so unacceptable that he didn't resume Royalism? >> Peter Brooks: That's
an astonishing story. I don't know quite
how to explain it. You know, Thiers was a real bastard, but he was also politically
very adept. He said the Republic is the
regime that divides us least. And I think that really comes
about in a kind of negative way, that on the one hand Socialists,
on the other hand Monarchists. The Republic sort of
slips down the middle. And when the Republic gets
going, following the Commune, there actually is an
agreement not to decide on the form of the Government. In the Assembly in 1871 that's left
as a blank, and the assumption is that the Monarchy will be restored. And it's only when you get to the Velo [Assumed Spelling]
Amendment a few years later that it officially is entered into
the record that the Government of France will be a Republic and
the Amendment wins by one vote. So it's a very precarious thing. >> Thank you. >> Yes, I was interested when
you were mentioning the sort of metaphors of volcanic eruption because the same things
were appearing in late 19th Century British
narratives of the city, the sense of people sitting
on a volcanic eruption, liable to blow at any moment. I'm just wondering was
there something going on, was there more archeological
evidence of volcanic eruptions or was there more narratives
or volcanology? Why was this metaphor suddenly
appearing for urbanizing societies? >> Peter Brooks: That's
an interesting question. I don't know. Of course, meditations
on the slope of Vesuvius and Etna [Assumed Spelling]
are fairly common in the early 19th Century. I mean Byron's child, Harold, Chateau Briand [Assumed
Spelling] in France and so on. So the image of these [inaudible] but enormously destructive
volcanoes are there, they're not far away
in Italy, right? And so I think this comparison comes
fairly naturally to people's minds. And then to equate the volcano
with the populace, you know, for right wing writers is too much
of a temptation to be resisted. >> I have one comment on
the previous question, how did the Republic
succeed in carrying the day? The explanation I had
when I took history was that the Royalists were
divided among themselves. You had the legitimate
just Bourbons, you had early on it's Bourbons,
and then you had Bonapartists, and they just couldn't
agree among themselves. >> Peter Brooks: Yes, but they did,
they came to a so-called fusion. The Count dechonbal
[Assumed Spelling], who is the Bourbon pretender
to the throne, was childless, so the fusion, this worked out in
1873 I think or maybe that summer of 1874 - I think it's 1873 - said that Chambo [Assumed
Spelling] become King as [inaudible] and when he died the throne passed to the Orleone [Assumed Spelling]
branch, which is the branch of Louis Phillipe, right,
and the Count de Paris. So they had worked
that all out finally. It took 75 years, but
they had worked it out. >> Did any other French
writers write about the Commune in their fiction? Malpassant [Assumed
Spelling], for example? >> Peter Brooks: There is - it's
interesting - there is one writer who writes directly about
his experiences coming out, and that's Roux Vales [Assumed
Spelling], though his novel, Lasiogaine [Assumed Spelling], doesn't appear till a good
deal later, around mid-1880s. There are a lot of people
later on who returned to the Commune, and it's funny. It's one of these events that as
history has gone on has become more and more important,
rather than less important. And the amount of historical
graphical material being produced, I can't even keep up with it, and really very interesting
reinterpretations, not only of the politics but
of the aesthetics of the time. I've just been reading a book by a woman named Christine
Ross [Assumed Spelling], who teaches at NYU, about the
meaning of the destruction of the column of the Place von Dome
[Assumed Spelling], and the attempt to create a new kind
of Communal aesthetics. Connected to William Morris
[Assumed Spelling] in England, who is better known for
his craftsmen movement. But there was a lot of that, every man an artist,
participatory artistry. So this is straying a little bit
from your question about novelists, but it is something which is
I'd say more and more talked about by novelists and
artists as time goes by. >> So, as you were speaking about
the photograph as an eyewitness, so the past becomes as certain
as the present, I was thinking about in relation to the
obviously manipulated image that you pointed out earlier. And I know that later in the
century that that kind of editing and manipulation of photographs
became sort of popular. I wondered if you came
across any other photographs that had been edited to present
any particular point of view? >> Peter Brooks: Other photographs? >> Yes, so the photograph that
you showed of the firemen putting out the fire, that
had been added later, did you find any other photographs that had been manipulated
in that way? >> Peter Brooks: Yes, that's
an interesting question about the manipulation
of photographs. The ones I showed,
except for that one, I promise you are not
manipulated, but there are a lot of manipulated photographs. And I kept them out
of the show partly because I didn't want
to confuse people. For instance, there's a very
artfully posed pile of corpses of National Guardsmen, but
as you study it you realize that this is a posed picture. So there's some pictures of killed
children lying in a Paris street. But the poses, the way - you realize
that the thing is artificial, there's something wrong about it. Then there's Ugen Apierre
[Assumed Spelling], who really was an early
exponent of Photoshop, right? I mean he takes faces from
portraits and he puts them on bodies and rearranges them all. So there's a lot of
manipulation going on. And it's interesting because
people have said that at the trial of the Communals the
photographs were used as evidence. Well, I don't know how much
they counted as evidence, but if they did they
shouldn't have, right? So my point is really the
real evidence is the ruins. >> Jason Steinhauer: We
have time for one more. >> Peter Brooks: Okay. >> I think I fall in the category
of those who are fascinated with the morbid that
you pointed out. but that photo of the
corpses arranged in the grave so meticulously it seems,
the first layer they seemed to be wearing just white, plain
white garments, and those that are on the layer on top are
more fancily dressed. Is that - was there
any lesson in that or? >> Peter Brooks: It could have been
that the photographer wanted that. you notice that they have numbers on
them, too, and I think the numbers - I can't tell because I've
never examined the original of this the way I have of the
Labere [Assumed Spelling], whether the numbers were added
on the photograph or were they on the corpses - I think they're
on the corpses because if you look in the lower row for instance
it looks as if some of them are on paper tickets or
stickers on the corpses. So there's evidently some
record being created here, some register being
kept of the dead, and I don't know at whose behest. I think it's an absolutely
stunning photograph, horrible. >> Jason Steinhauer: I think
we will have to stop there. So please join me in
thanking Dr. Peter Brooks. >> Peter Brooks: Thank you. Thank you for coming. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of The Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
