[In the following excerpt, Fischer demonstrates the value of Vallès's play La Commune de Paris as a detailed and personal history of the Paris Commune of 1871, arguing that although the plot and characterizations are unrealistic, the drama vividly portrays the social and political conflicts surrounding the event.]

La Commune de Paris, subtitled by its author a "grand drame historique,"¹ is an extraordinarily long play, designed indeed on an impressive scale. The text of the book edition covers 341 pages, not counting the title pages preceding numerous textual divisions. The five acts of the play are subdivided into eleven tableaux, or scenic units, each requiring a new stage setting and each in turn consisting of many scenes. Vallès has meticulously entitled every act and tableau. The list of dramatic divisions and titles is as follows:

Act I: Prologue

1. tableau: Le Peuple Vaincu

Act II: La Fin de l'Empire

• tableau: Un Prince Assassin

Act III: Le Siège de Paris

• tableau: Le Quatre Septembre
• tableau: Le Bombardement

Act IV: La Commune

• tableau: Le 18 Mars
• tableau: La Trahison
• tableau: La Préfecture de Police
• tableau: Le Fort d'Issy
• tableau: La Croix Rouge

Act V: La Reaction

• tableau: Satory
• tableau: La Cour Martiale et l'Evasion

The divisions into acts and tableaux correspond exactly with chronological caesurae.

Of the four plays under discussion, La Commune de Paris is the most comprehensive historically. It covers a period of twenty-four years, from June 1848 to June 1871. The drama begins with the end of the revolution of 1848, the last scene of Act I showing the deportation of the defeated insurgents after the last barricade has fallen in the Rue Saint-Antoine. The way is thus prepared for Napoleon III and his second Empire, and the next act demonstrates the policies of repression and restoration which follow in the wake of the lost revolution. This tableau takes place twenty-three years later; the end of the empire is already in sight. The scene is a ball house in the workers' quarter of La Villette which serves as a meeting place for a revolutionary club, and the political rally under the topic "The Organization of Labor and its Relations to Capital and Property"² is connected with the assassination of a young revolutionary journalist named Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin of the Emperor, on January 10, 1870.³ The third tableau plays in front of the City Hall, on September 4 and deals with the proclamation of the republic and the installation of the Provisionary Government of National Defence. Tableau IV (Act III) demonstrates the effects of the siege: women are waiting in line in front of a bakery to buy their rations of 300 grams of bread. The time is now January 5, and the rumour spreads that the Prussians have begun to bombard Paris. Dramatic proof of this news is offered when a shell hits a house and explodes on stage.

The following five tableaux of Act IV deal with the Commune proper. Tableau V is set on Place Pigalle at Montmartre and describes the eventful day of March 18: the abortive attempt of the government to steal the cannons of the National Guard, the fraternization of the regular troops with the people of Paris, the flight of the government and the difficulties of the surprised leaders of the National Guard who all of a sudden have to form a government. The next tableau which takes place on April 4 after the installation of the Council of the Commune evolves around the military problem, the scene is now a battlefield on the plateau of Châtillon near the street to Versailles. Due to treason, a sortie of the Communards in the direction of Versailles is repulsed, and the general of the Commune, Duval, is executed on the spot together with two of his officers although they had been promised that their lives would be spared. Tableau 7 shows the police headquarters under the Commune; here Vallès attempts to explain some of the daily work of the delegates of the Commune. The last two scenes of Act IV are again reserved for the military development. Tableau 8 enacts the fight around the fort of Issy, evacuated by the Commune troops on May 12.⁴ The next scene at the intersection of Croix Rouge refers thematically back to the prologue: the Communards build barricades, offer heroic resistance against the invading troops and are finally defeated. On May 22 the end of the fight is at hand. Scene of the last act, consisting of tableaux X and XI, is the prison camp of Satory after the Bloody Week of May. A court martial pronounces its judgements; death or deportation is the rule.

Vallès' play thus covers a wide range of locations and extends over a period of a quarter of a century. The dramatic unity as well as the chronological continuity within this panoramic view is maintained primarily by the characters of the drama. There is a great number of actors, thirty-four identified by name plus many extras representing soldiers, workers, men, women and children of Paris. Although no clear protagonists emerge out of this multitude—like in the other plays about the Commune the revolutionary citizens appear much as a collective hero—some characters have leading parts and become representatives of the main social and political movements. One of the principal characters of La Commune de Paris is a worker named Pierre Beaudouin, whom Marie-Claire Bancquart and Lucien Scheler call "l'ouvrier le plus ouvrier"⁵ in all the works of Vallès. He is a blacksmith and a factory worker.

At the beginning of the play, we meet Beaudouin, aged 28, as one of the leaders of the revolution of 1848. He has to witness the execution of his brother Louis, wrongly accused by the government troops of being a sniper, while Pierre Beaudouin himself is arrested. In Act II Beaudouin is 48. We gather that he has returned from deportation to the penal colony of New Caledonia after the general amnesty of 1856, and he now appears as the step-father of his niece Jeanne, the daughter of his late brother and a beautiful young woman. Like her uncle, Jeanne is a worker, brave and endowed with the same revolutionary spirit. During the siege and the time of the Commune, Beaudouin is a member of the Central Committee and proves to be an able and energetic captain of the National Guard charged with the defense of the fort of Issy (tableau VIII). He fights until the bitter end and is finally, after the defeat of the Commune, condemned to death. La Commune de Paris is thus also the life-story of a worker, seen before the background of Parisian history in which this man participated and which he helped to shape. Vallès himself has indicated that his hero is modelled on the historic figure of Jean Malézieux,⁶ one of the veteran fighters of the Commune who participated already in the revolts of 1830 and 1834. Unlike Beaudouin in the play, Malézieux was again deported to New Caledonia after May 1871 and, after his return ten years later at the age of 76, he was unable to find work and to adjust to the new life and committed suicide.⁷

The main opponent of Beaudouin and the representative of the antirevolutionary forces is George Bonnal, a professional officer and reactionary bourgeois. Bonnal begins his career in 1848 as a young lieutenant who is responsible for the execution of Louis Beaudouin, participates as a colonel of the general staff in the attempted government coup of March 18, 1871, and in the civil war against the Commune of Paris. Finally he presides at the court martial of Satory and signs the death sentence of Pierre Beaudouin. The third principal figure of the play is Jacques Bryas, a bourgeois intellectual and left wing journalist. A friend of Beaudouin, Bryas is a revolutionary newcomer, as it were, who joins the dramatis personae only in Act II. He collaborates very briefly with the government of September 4, but realizes very soon the counterrevolutionary nature of this regime and henceforth becomes an ardent supporter of the Commune. Imprisoned together with Beaudouin in Satory, he manages to escape under circumstances which will be explained later in a different context. Vallès' work is to a large extent autobiographical, and it is not difficult to see in Jacques Bryas some of the traits of the communard and editor of Le Cri du Peuple, Jules Vallès.⁸

Other important characters of the play are Hélène de Veray, a rich young widow and sister of Bonnal, and Adèle Chauvelot, daughter of an insurgent of 1848 who has decided that the good life of a fashionable bourgeois is more attractive than the poverty of her father and his circle of friends. But this life requires capital and so Adèle has become a lorette: "Je vis de ma beauté comme un bourgeois de ses rentes,"⁹ as she puts it. There is also her unsuccessful suitor Racatel, "sorte de déclassé,"¹⁰ who turns traitor and spy for Versailles during the Commune. Among the many communards at least three may be mentioned: Kermadeux, a sergeant from Brittany who fraternizes with the National Guards and who pays for his devotion to the Commune with his life; Matouillet, a philosopher who discovers his military talents defending the capital against Versailles; and Sir Halifax, a British physician and philanthropist who donates his money and time to the Commune and organizes an ambulance service. Sir Halifax is again modelled after a historic figure,¹¹ but all other characters are fictitious.

The action of La Commune de Paris follows closely the historical developments as described above. The author's attention is specifically focused on the involvement of his three major characters in the individual events which make up the total of this revolutionary period. But the public aspect, so to speak, is only part of the play's dramatic matter. Interwoven in the historical framework is a net of private relations of love, aversion and jealousy which at times not only tend to take precedent over the political and historical developments but which are also constructed in such a melodramatic, unrealistic fashion that they threaten to destroy the seriousness of the whole drama. This "ridicule intrigue amoureuse surajoutée à l'histoire," as Marie-Claire Bancquart drastically puts it,¹² ties the main characters together in a circle of mutual or onesided affections, disregarding the most blatant social and ideological differences. Jeanne Beaudouin loves Jacques Bryas and is loved by him; however, the two are at first rather shy and unsure of their mutual feelings and find each other only late in the course of the play. Bryas is also loved by Madame de Vernay, but he has broken with her; she knows about his devotion to Jeanne and is violently jealous; yet she has to admit to herself the beauty and purity of her younger rival. Finally, Jeanne is loved by Vernay's brother, Bonnal: the reactionary colonel in love with the revolutionary girl of the people. We also have to remember that Bonnal is the one who had ordered Jeanne's father shot twenty years ago, and that her stepfather and uncle has identified him for her. Clearly there is enough conflict and complication for the most sensational melodrama.

These characters meet each other throughout the play, "par un hasard aussi opportun que surprenant,"¹³ as the editors of La Commune de Paris remark. These very emotionally charged dramatic confrontations are written with all the conventions of French classical theatre, including soliloquies, asides and a polished rhetorical style. Tableau V may serve as an example of Vallès' dramatic imagination. Colonel Bonnal has been taken prisoner on March 18 by Bryas who is in command of Place Pigalle after the attack of the government troops has failed. Bryas soliloquizes:

Impossible de garder cet homme! … Après avoir si brusquement rompu avec sa soeur, elle prendrait cela pour un acte de rancune et de vengeance … Ce serait affreux! … Cependant, c'est un otage important… je ne puis prendre sur moi de le mettre en liberté … Je vais parler à Beaudouin … il décidera! (Se reprenant.) Et encore non … Beaudouin peut encore moins que moi décider du sort du colonel… Ne l'ai-je pas entendu, le 4 septembre, reprocher à Bonnal d'avoir, en juin 1848, fait fusiller Louis Beaudouin, le père de Jeanne, son frère à lui? … (Avec angoisse.) Que faire?¹⁴

The inner conflict between Bryas' political convictions, his duties as an officer of the National Guard and his personal feelings of honour is further sharpened when a little later Hélène de Veray appears on the scene. She is accompanied, to complicate matters even more, by Bryas' mother who disapproves strongly of her son's revolutionary activities and who also demands that he should release Bonnal and immediately break with his friends. The discussion between the three is overheard by Jeanne who listens rather anxiously because she fears that Bryas might still be in love with Madame de Vernay.

Mme DE VERNAY (avec indignation à Bryas). —

Et vous allez rester avec ces assassins? [i.e., the insurgent National Guards.]

BRYAS. —

Oui! (S'animant.) Les assassins, Madame, sont au sein des gouvemements qui poussent le peuple à la révolter pour se donner le plaisir de le décimer et le mater, au nom de la répression. (A ce moment, on voit Jeanne qui, inquiète, à la vue des deux dames, descend, du fond de la scène, vers le groupe qui ne la voit pas venir.)

Mme DE VERNAY. —

Vous restez avec eux, soit! (Froissée.) Alors, tout est fini entre nous …

BRYAS (froidement). —

Madame, de mon côté… (Jeanne les ecoute depuis un instant) tout est fini depuis longtemps et j'ai souvent maudit le jour où nous sommes connus.

Mme BRYAS (désespérée et éclatant). —

Mon fils! …

BRYAS. —

Ma mére, laissez-moi. (Avec autorité.) Je le veux! … (A Madame de Vernay.) Seulement, afin que vous ne soyez pas convaincue que je suis de ceux qui fusillent, je rends la liberté à votre frère, un fusilleur de Juin! … (D'un mouvement brusque, il tourne le dos au groupe et aperçoit Jeanne, avec émotion.) Jeanne! elle a tout entendu! …

JEANNE (émue). —

Oui, j'ai tout entendu (avec élan) et je sais qu'enfin vous ne l'aimez plus… . '¹⁵

This rather hopeless quadrangular relationship is only resolved in the very last scene of the play. Madame de Vernay sacrifices her love to the well-being of her lover and her rival, consenting to marry the unattractive lawyer Dubray-Flochin under the condition that he helps her arrange the flight of Jeanne and Bryas from the prison of Satory where the two are kept prisoners. With the tacit approval of her brother, Hélène de Vernay and Dubray-Flochin visit the young lovers and change clothes with them. Jeanne and Bryas, however, accept only after Pierre Beaudouin, also imprisoned, has intervened and advised them to choose freedom, "dans l'intérêt de la Révolution."

The quoted passages are characteristic of the way Vallès has constructed his play. The plot remains dramatically as well as psychologically incredible, and the characters hardly surpass a uniform, stereotyped image which includes purity of feeling and intention, a certain tragic self-interpretation combined with, as a matter of course, the ever-present readiness for self-sacrifice. To be sure, these weaknesses can partly be explained by the fact that Vallès writes in the style and tradition of nineteenth century, prenaturalistic melodrama which is hardly suited to accommodate a topic like the Paris Commune. Vallès' dependence on contemporary but now obsolete theatrical conventions can be seen also in his declamatory language. As Marie-Claire Bancquart rightly observes: "Les personnages parlent, sur les barricades comme dans l'intimité, avocats ou artisans, un langage ampoulé, 'à effet,' qui rejoint cette fois le pire pastiche de l'Antiquité."¹⁷ Besides the trite and implausible main plot there are a number of other formal weaknesses, such as a few sub-plots and dramatic episodes at the periphery of the central action, which make La Commune de Paris an extremely opaque and (because of its sheer length and number of characters and locations) a technically almost impossible play.¹⁸ It is doubtless for these dramatic deficiencies that Vallès' play has never been performed and was published only a century after its composition.

One thought has to be added, however. The unrealistic, private plot line interwoven with the story of the Commune is not only a formal problem because of its theatrical faults regarding construction, characterization, etc., it also causes a conceptual failure related to the content of the play. The relationship between dramatic structure and subject matter is characterized by a disproportion: on one hand the grand historic scale of the revolution with its profound socio-political changes and unparalleled violence of bourgeois repression, on the other hand the awkward story of four love relations at cross-purposes, doubtlessly intended to be serious and tragic but lastly only pathetic. Furthermore, because of its great emotional impact, this type of plot which the author has chosen continually tends to reduce the historical conflict to the private level of the individual. Purely personal problems are brought into sharp conflict and appear even more pressing because of the background of the dramatic historical action. The characters hardly perceive of the extraordinary political conflict but always refer it to their own private circumstances which invariably take precedence, thus obscuring not only the historical events themselves but also the individual's involvement in them. The historical events, in other words, appear as catalyzing forces to bring about or to accentuate and sharpen personal conflicts, socio-political developments appear as stimuli to moral crises and personal problems of individual characters.¹⁹

We touch here, of course, on a fundamental issue inherent in every historical play and one which we will encounter again in the course of this study. The objective of the playwright of historical dramas is to put on stage social, military and political facts and events while at the same time to create dramatic characters who not merely function as personified mouthpieces or puppets of historical developments but who are fully rounded persons with their very own individual qualities and private preoccupations. Vallès has not solved this problem. The great historical conflict between a revolutionary Paris and a reactionary Versailles is reduced and personalized in the triangular confrontation between Jeanne, Bryas and Bonnal. The author's failure to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of historical and private drama and the disturbing melodramatic triteness of his story mar La Commune de Paris.

The plot treatment in La Commune de Paris constitutes one other disadvantage. In order to develop his rather extended and complicated intrigue, Vallès has to allow much space just to account for the various turns in the story of his four leading characters. As a result, the reader learns much about the private conflicts and pseudo-tragic involvements of the play's heroes, but comparatively little about the Commune. How exactly is the Paris Commune described in this play? We have noted already that Vallès has given quite a circumstantial consideration of the historical antecedent and the causes leading to the revolution of 1871. The Commune proper is dealt with in the play in act IV which is about as long as a normal play. Of the five tableaux of this act, three deal entirely with the military situation, the war between Paris and Versailles. The battle scenes of La Commune de Paris are rather stereotyped. The Versaillese are brutal, summarily executing their prisoners, and the Communards are brave, heroic, generous, defeated only because of spies and traitors. Thus in tableau VI, the Commune troops under General Duval suffer defeat because the plans of attack had been sold to Bonnal by the arch-opportunist Racatel. The conflict is not only personalized as usual in this play, but Vallès' description is also historically false. We know that the sortie led by Duval failed because it was almost spontaneous, badly organized and executed by inexperienced officers and troops.²⁰ If there was treason it was inconsequential. A similar scene is repeated in tableau VIII. Here a spy and traitor delivers the fort of Issy into the hands of Versailles, again commanded by Bonnal, although it ìs later recaptured through the bravery of Beaudouin, Bryas and their troops. We have to note, however, that Vallès does not exclusively engage in this black-and-white characterization. He mentions also the lack of responsible leadership and discipline among the Communards as one of the reasons of their defeat. In tableau IX Bryas says at the barricade, when it is clear that the battle is lost:

Tout est perdu, Jeanne! … la Garde nationale énervée par le Sèige, et deux mois de luttes stériles, est indécise … mal commandée, elle est surtout indisciplinée. On n'en obtient pas ce que 1'on pouvait en attendre …²¹

But this is an isolated statement. What is dramatized, i.e., enacted scenically, are the various acts of treachery, spying, and conspiracy against the Commune.

Otherwise, Vallès spends a great deal of time on discussions about strategy. The author clearly takes position against the Jacobin traditionalists who advocate to abandon the fortified positions around Paris and to return to the city in order to organize a defensive combat in the streets, each quarter for itself. At Issy one such group of traditionalists, who receive their inspirations mainly from the revolutionary tactics of 1830 and 1848, leave the fort, thus for once scenically demonstrating the ideological split within the Commune. In tableau IX the question of strategy centers around the barricades and their effectiveness. Again Vallès demonstrates that the reliance of the Communards on traditional models of revolutionary warfare leads to their defeat: "La barricade, utile jadis, est une erreur aujourd'hui … Elle étonnait autrefois la troupe, l'arretait … Aujourd'hui, le premier Saint-Cyrien venu s'en empare avec quelques hommes!"²² The new tactic of the government troops consists in occupying the houses on street comers and to fire from the windows of the upper floors at the insurgents who find themselves trapped behind the barricades without cover. Against the protest of some leaders, like Bryas, the National Guards finally resort to setting houses on fire as a last resort to keep the Versaillese enemy from advancing.

Of the other two tableaux of act IV, one deals with the revolution of March 18, i.e., the historical event immediately preceding and leading to the Commune, and only one tableau (VII, La Préfecture de Police) treats the political work of the Commune. The location of this act is an office in the police headquarters headed by a delegate of the Commune who, however, does not appear himself. Racatel in his mission as spy for Versailles is waiting to see the police commissioner to gather some information. He first learns from an employee about the reduction in crime; the secret police is almost out of work.

Ignorez-vous donc, mon cher, que, depuis la Commune, on n'entend plus parler de vols, d'a ttaques de nuit, d'assassinats? C'est à croire vraiment que la police d'autrefois les favorisait pour se rendre nécessaire, ou bien que tous les voleurs et bandits ont pris parti pour Versailles.²³

This point, which has also been confirmed and emphasized by Marx,²⁴ is then ironically contrasted with the reports in the papers of Versailles on the alleged daily pillages, orgies and debaucheries in the Paris of the Commune. Vallès simplifies again by having Racatel read one such article full of lies and inflammatory defamations which he himself has written, without forgetting, of course, to show the pangs of conscience Racatel feels about his less than honorable role. This is only one more example of Vallès' dramatic technique throughout the play: a historical condition gives way to a personal moral conflict, based on the character of a dramatic figure, which then takes precedence and thus deflects attention from the greater political issue.

Elsewhere in the tableau, mention is made of the night work of bakers without reference to the later decision of the Commune about this problem; the police officers hear accusations against a National Guard officer who has supposedly kept the pay of his soldiers for himself, and against general Dombrowski, temporarily military leader of the Commune and suspected of treason. While all this is only mentioned and hinted at, the question of the Bank of France is dealt with at some length. Racatel, partly from serious and honest concern about the revolution which he has betrayed and partly as an agent provocateur, suggests to the chief of police that he take the bank in order to use it as a basis for negotiations with the Prussians, to guarantee the financial obligations of the Commune and as a deterrent against Versailles. However, the police commissioner refuses, just as Bryas does later for fear of being accused of theft.²⁵ Unfortunately, the rest of the tableau is exclusively concerned again with developing the personal plot relations. Bryas is suspected of treason, mainly because of his relations to Madame de Vernay and because of the efforts of his mother to make him quit the Commune. All the characters involved meet miraculously once more and after a long, complicated story about Bryas' whereabouts, he is finally cleared of all suspicions. Accompanied by the usual outbreaks of passion and heroic suffering and sacrifice, the plot deteriorates into sheer melodrama. This then is all we learn about the political work and organization of the Commune. There is not a word about social and economic measures, not a word about the political and administrative structure. In one passage, Vallès mentions the division within the Council of the Commune:

Elle se querelle avec tout le monde, elle veut tout conduire, et elle ne sait pas se conduire elle-même … Majorité par ici … Minorité par là … les uns tirent à hue, les autres à dia …²⁶

But again the information is not developed; it remains unclear what these different factions within the council represented or how this division affected the work of the Commune. This extraordinary lack of information about objective facts, decrees and tendencies relating to the Commune is astonishing, to say the least, and not only because Vallès himself participated in the events and knew first-hand about what he was writing. We can understand the detailed treatment of the military developments because it is here that the Commune ultimately failed and the question of the civil war had to appear to the Communards as the most pressing and lastly decisive problem. But why this scarcity of information on the socio-political aspects of this revolution which for later generations are the most important and noteworthy?

One immediately obvious reason is the apologetic purpose of the play, the desire of the author to ask his compatriots for understanding and sympathy with the deported or exiled insurgents,²⁷ hence his insistence throughout the play on the honesty and the patriotism of the communards, hence his emphasis on the military necessity of their actions, particularly the setting of fires which had destroyed so many buildings in Paris and which had become an embittered argument for the condemnation of Vallès and his comrades. He doubtlessly wished to help sway public opinion to a mood of fairness and forgiveness in order to heal the wounds of the terrible civil war, and he hoped to prepare the way for an amnesty similar to that of 1856 which allowed the proscript of 1848 to return to France.²⁸ We have to remember that La Commune de Paris was written right after the defeat of the revolution, at a period of hate and repression during which everything that reminded of the Commune was hysterically denounced, at a time when communards were still being sentenced to prison or deportation.

But the primary reason for Vallès' failure to adequately describe and dramatize the political and economic realities of the Commune is, I contend, historical and political consciousness on the part of the author. Vallès was a déclassé, a leftist intellectual and radical journalist whose revolt was a protest against his own bourgeois past combined with an emotional and romantic attachment to the proletariat, as Victor Brombert has demonstrated²⁹—not the result of a conscious scientific political and economic analysis. Thus Vallès lacks the ultimate understanding or even appreciation of some of the revolutionary measures he helped to realize, especially those of an organizational and economic nature. His preoccupation with abstract idealistic matter, such as his demand for complete freedom of the press at a moment of highest danger and crisis for the Commune, is only one other confirmation of this evaluation. A second factor is Vallès' traditionalist concept of the Commune as a free and autonomous political entity which constitutes the ultimate goal of the revolution. Vallès thus pays little attention to the socioeconomic basis of such an independent city of Paris; for him the political nature of the capital is the only question that matters. This idea emerges also in La Commune de Paris, namely when Bryas, like his fellow revolutionaries of the Central Committee, is surprisingly confronted with the necessity to form a government and to develop a political program after the flight of the Provisional Government on March 18:

Paris libre! c'est une idée! … Voilà un programme tout trouvé! … . Fédération républicaine des grandes villes! …³⁰

In his journal Le Cri du Peuple of March 21, 1871, we find the same thought. Here Vallès demands that "Paris doit donc se déclarer Ville Libre, commune affrachie, cité républicaine, se gouvernant elle-même et réalisant dans la mesure du possible la théorie du gouvernement direct appliqué dans la République Helvétique.³¹ ' Vallès' understanding of the Commune is thus clearly inspired by historical bourgeois models, here the Swiss system of participatory democracy. He completely ignores the proletarian, antibourgeois character of the revolution for which he fought. Elsewhere he even cites the example of the free cities of the medieval Hanseatic League as a prototype of the French Communes.³²

The concept of federalism, e.g., the federation of the communes of France, is of course part of the pre-socialist theories of Proudhon who had a great influence on Vallès. Proudhon envisioned the political and economic emancipation of the proletariat through workers' cooperatives, established on the basis of his theory of a just exchange between labor and capital which was to be arranged through the intermediary supervision of so-called exchange banks. In this utopian socialism³³ might lie also the reason for Vallès' ambivalent attitude and his uneasiness with regard to the seizure of the National Bank of France which emerges in La Commune de Paris: he neither clearly criticizes Bryas nor approves of his refusal to touch the bank. Vallès has himself admitted his indebtedness to Proudhon: "C'est lui, I'auteur des Confessions, qui a jeté la lumière dans mon esprit et m'a montré le néant de ces gloires authoritaires et jacobines."³⁴ Interesting here is the criticism of the later-day Jacobins and their fixation on the traditional revolutionary precepts of 1789, such as the dictatorship of a Committee of Public Safety which appears also in his play.³⁵ The irony is only that Vallès is also and at the same time a traditionalist; his "socialisme romantique et global qu'il a hérité de 1848," as Marie-Claire Bancquart puts it,³⁶ is shaped after a revolutionary model based on the socio-economic conditions of artisans and the progressive liberal bourgeoisie which had only little relevance to the problems of the industrial proletariat of the Paris of 1871.

Vallès, or his alter ego Bryas, is in many ways ideologically representative of the Proudhonist members within the minority group of the Commune Council and, inasmuch as these revolutionaries did not consciously understand the importance and radical newness of some of the measure of the Commune, it is perhaps only natural that these developments are not represented in Vallès' dramatization. The greatest irony, however, seems that the author has created an industrial worker, Pierre Beaudouin, as his principal character who clearly is more consciously revolutionary and farseeing than his comrades, as demonstrated for instance in his comments about the out-dated tactics of Parisian barricade and street war or his decision to seize the bank, albeit too late. Unfortunately, Vallès has not given this character the opportunity to express more of his ideas, particularly as far as political and economic questions are concerned. Here ends, I contend, the understanding of Jules Vallès of the interpretation of the revolution with which he so totally identified.

After all this criticism of La Commune de Paris and its author, what remains to be said about the play? It is not entirely bad, and in parts it is even admirable. Of great documentary value as a dramatic eye-witness report and impressive in the scope with which it demonstrates the revolutionary continuity of 19th-century French history, the drama is rather less satisfactory as theater. The best scenes of La Commune de Paris, from a dramatic-technical point of view, are those which re-create the life of Paris and of the people of the city during these difficult times. One such scene is the one in Tableau IV during the siege in which a group of hungry and freezing Parisians are waiting in line in front of a bakery to receive their daily ration of 300 grams of bread only to find out much later that there is no bread at all. A little later in the same scene the people start cutting the trees which line the boulevards in order to use them for firewood, or for the same reason break down the fence around the large, empty house of a bourgeois who is waiting out the siege in Italy while they are being scolded by a bourgeois politician who lectures to them about the sacredness of private property. The best part of the play in my opinion is the treatment of the actual revolution on March 18 in Tableau V where Vallès succeeds fully in dramatizing the electric atmosphere of tension during the confrontation between the regular troops and the National Guards, the fraternization of the soldiers and the exuberant but at the same time anxious joy of the people at their victory. In these scenes Vallès achieves an atmosphere of realism full of precise details of observation and characterization which gives the play a convincing dramatic immediacy and vitality that is not too far away from the great social drama of his naturalist successors. Here the problem of the presentation of historical matter is also solved satisfactorily, in these scenes the great social and historical conflicts emerge much more clearly and more naturally, as it were, than in the contrived confrontation between a reactionary officer Bonnal and a revolutionary journalist Bryas. La Commune de Paris is not an analytical drama which attempts to interpret the course of history. Written immediately after the Commune, by an author who is intellectually and emotionally still clearly under the powerful influence of this experience, Vallès' drama is an outstanding documentary work, at its best when it directly describes the struggles and sufferings of the people of Paris, their dedication and their hopes to achieve a better life for themselves through their own revolutionary action.

Notes

¹ Jules Vallès, La Commune de Paris (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1970), p. 25.

² Page 74.

³ Vallès dates the scene January 12, but obviously confuses the date of the assassination with that of Noir's funeral which took place on that day. The funeral, incidentally, gave rise to a huge demonstration against the Empire, and Vallès has rightly chosen this important date and event to demonstrate "la fin de l'Empire." Cf. the comment by Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871, p. 49.

⁴ Cf. the editor's note on this date, Vallès, La Commune de Paris, p. 242.

⁵ Page 16 (Preface).

⁶ Page 25. See also Vallès portrait of Malézieux in his L'lnsurgé, ed. Lucien Scheler (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1950), p. 317.

⁷ See biographic note in La Commune de 1871, p. 435.

⁸ In fact Marie-Claire Bancquart suggests, and I agree, that the characterization of Bryas is a "transposition malheureuse" of the figure of the author. It fails partly because it lacks the immediacy and literary freshness of an autobiographic report which is elsewhere Vallès' primary quality.

⁹ Vallès, La Commune de Paris, p. 65.

¹⁰ Page. 25.

¹¹ Cf. editor's note, La Commune de Paris, pp. 209-10.

¹² Pages 77-78.

¹³ Page 11.

¹⁴ Pages 176-177.

¹⁵ Pages 191-192. A similarly contrived meeting takes place in tableau IX where the situation appears almost exactly reversed: Bryas is taken prisoner by Bonnal. See pages 292-295.

¹⁶ Page 376.

¹⁷ Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jules Vallès (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1971), p. 77.

¹⁸ Cf. Vallès, La Commune de Paris, p. 11.

¹⁹ Page 148.

²⁰ Cf. Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871, pp. 191-192, and Bruhat, La Commune de 1871, pp. 240-241.

²¹ Vallès, La Commune de Paris, p. 268.

²² Page 266.

²³ Page 211.

²⁴ Cf. Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, p. 86.

²⁵ Cf. Vallès, La Commune de Paris, pp. 269-70. At the end of the play we learn that Beaudouin, who certainly is the most consciously revolutionary character, has signed an order to seize the bank but by then it was too late already, according to Vallès.

²⁶ Page 244.

²⁷ The editors of the play call La Commune de Paris "[une] oeuvre apologétique," p. 8. Cf. also pp. 14-15 of Preface.

²⁸ Amnesty was granted, however, only in 1880.

²⁹ Victor Brombert, "Vallès and the Pathos of Rebellion," in The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961), pp. 43-51. Cf. especially p. 46 and 49.

³⁰ Vallès, La Commune de Paris, p. 182.

³¹ Vallès, Le Cri du Peuple, ed. Lucien Scheler (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1953), p. 96.

³² Pages 99-100.

³³ Marx's criticism of Proudhon is developed at length in The Poverty of Philosophy (Das Elend der Philosophie, Berlin: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1970). Cf. also Engels' critique in his preface to Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, pp. 16-18, with his concluding sentence "Die Kommune [war] das Grab der Proudhonschen Schule des Sozialismus."

³⁴ From an article on Proudhon in La Rue, quoted in Jules Vallès, p. 109 ; See also Marie-Claire Bancquart's comment on Vallès' Proudhonistic convictions, Jules Vallès, p. 34.

³⁵ Cf. Vallès, La Commune de Paris, pp. 244-45.

³⁶ Bancquart, Jules Vallès, p. 81.

Works Cited

Bancquart, Marie-Claire. Jules Vallès. Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1971.

Brombert, Victor. "Vallès and the Pathos of Rebellion." The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1961.

Jellinek, Frank. The Paris Commune of 1871. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965.

Marx, Karl. Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1963.

Marx, Karl. Das Elend der Philosophie. Berlin: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1970.

Vallès, Jules. La Commune de Paris: Pièce en 5 actes et 11 tableaux, préface et notes de Marie-Claire Bancquart et Lucien Scheler. Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1970.

Vallès, Jules. Le Cri du Peuple, ed. Lucien Scheler. Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1953.

Vallès, Jules. L 'Insurgé, ed. Lucien Scheler. Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1950.