Literature and Revolution: British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871

By Owen Holland

Between March and May 1871, the Parisian Communards fought for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo grounded in a vision of internationalism, radical democracy and economic justice for the working masses that cut across national borders. The eventual defeat and bloody suppression of the Commune resonated far beyond Paris. In Britain, the Commune provoked widespread and fierce condemnation, while its defenders constituted a small, but vocal, minority. The Commune evoked long-standing fears about the continental ‘spectre’ of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order.

This book examines how a heterogeneous group of authors in Britain responded to the Commune. In doing so, it provides the first full-length critical study of the reception and representation of the Commune in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen to project hope and fear, serving as a warning for some and an example to others. Writers considered in the book include John Ruskin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, Alfred Austin and H.G. Wells. As the book shows, many, but not all, of these writers responded to the Commune with literary strategies that sought to stabilize bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event. The book extends critical understanding of the Commune’s cultural afterlives and explores the relationship between literature and revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978821941

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Cover: Literature and Revolution, British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871 by Owen Holland

Literature and Revolution

REINVENTIONS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

Edited by

Kristin Ross

Available titles in the series:

Carolyn J. Eichner, The Paris Commune: A Brief History

Owen Holland, Literature and Revolution: British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871

Literature and Revolution

British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871

OWEN HOLLAND

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

978-1-9788-2193-4 (paperback)

978-1-9788-2985-5 (cloth)

978-1-9788-2194-1 (epub)

978-1-9788-2195-8 (mobi)

978-1-9788-2196-5 (pdf)

Cataloging-in-publication-data is available from the Library of Congress

LCCN 2021025114

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Owen Holland

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: A Commune in Literature

2 Refugees, Renegades, and Misrepresentation: Edward Bulwer Lytton and Eliza Lynn Linton

3 Dangerous Sympathies: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Margaret Oliphant

4 Dreams of the Coming Revolution: George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn

5 Revolution and Ressentiment: Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima

6 The Uses of Tragedy: Alfred Austin’s The Human Tragedy and William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope

7 It Had to Come Back: H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes

8 Conclusion: Looking without Seeing

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

It has been observed that trees are a difficult subject for human observation and study for the simple reason that the duration of a typical tree’s life so greatly exceeds that of most people. The same might be said of revolutions. Much as a revolutionary moment is undoubtedly the effect of a particular historical conjuncture and set of material circumstances—a national defeat in war, for instance, or an exorbitant rise in the price of bread—revolutions are also processes that unfold across extended periods of time, and the temporal determination of such a process can be hard to predict, to fathom, and retrospectively to narrate. As Raymond Williams put it in The Long Revolution (1961), the subject of his book was hard to define because its uneven action is taking place over so long a period that it is almost impossible not to get lost in its exceptionally complicated process.¹ The rather more circumscribed aim of this book is to examine the influence of one very short-lived revolutionary moment that took place in Paris between March and May 1871 on the literary and cultural life of another country.

In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, which had been concluded by armistice on 28 January 1871 and which had involved a lengthy and punishing siege of Paris, the republican government of Adolphe Thiers became increasingly worried about political mobilization among the Parisian working class. On 18 March, the government’s attempt to seize and confiscate the cannon of the National Guard in Montmartre spurred the people of Paris into action, triggering a popular insurrection that saw women fraternize with soldiers of the regular army, two of whose generals, Thomas and Lecomte, were captured and executed following a breakdown in military discipline. After mass demonstrations converged on the Hôtel de Ville, the government fled for Versailles, and Paris was presided over for ten days by the Central Committee of the National Guard until the Commune was proclaimed on 28 March, after municipal elections had been conducted two days beforehand.

The Commune represented an alternative nucleus of political authority that posed a direct challenge to the national government in Versailles. During its two-month existence, it took a number of radical steps, including the separation of church and state and the abolition of the death penalty, and it passed various measures in support of the Parisian working class; all political representatives were paid at the rate of an ordinary worker, and their mandates were immediately revocable. In this sense, the Commune was both radically democratic and incipiently socialist. Far more significant, however, was the very fact of the Commune’s existence. On the occasion of its one hundredth anniversary, the historian Eugene Schulkind wrote that until the advent of the Commune, most workers of Paris, as in the rest of France, appear to have consciously or unconsciously accepted the assumption that working people were not equipped to be legislators.² Confined within the compass of a single city, the Commune can nonetheless stake a strong claim to be recognized as the first working-class government of the radical Left, animated by a revolutionary vision of internationalism, solidarity, and economic justice. After the government at Versailles had regrouped, it reacted to the Commune by brutally suppressing it during the semaine sanglante (Bloody Week) of 21–28 May. As the British artist and socialist Walter Crane wrote two decades later in a poem, In Memory of the Commune of Paris, the Commune was Maligned, betrayed, short-lived to act and teach.³ Nevertheless, its impact was felt across much of Europe for the decades to come. As one of its earliest British historians observed, for a movement of major historical importance, the Paris Commune was compact almost beyond precedent, but he nonetheless regarded it as one of the most remarkable events of modern times.⁴ When Oscar Wilde visited Paris in 1883, over a decade after the Commune’s fall, Robert Sherard reported Wilde’s comment, on passing the ruins of the Tuileries Palace, which had been destroyed during the Bloody Week, that each little blackened stone was, to him, a chapter in the Bible of Democracy.⁵

Britain is separated from France by little more than a short stretch of water, but political disturbances in France have often proved to be a source of acute anxiety on both sides of La Manche. The longue durée of Britain’s political development is, as Perry Anderson has written, defined by the historical complications consequent upon the eventual defeat and failure of its own bourgeois revolution.⁶ This has meant that British responses to European, and particularly French, revolutionary upheavals have always been particularly fraught with internal as well as external significance. This book is, first and foremost, a work of literary criticism. Yet, as Anderson has argued elsewhere, the discipline of literary criticism enjoys (or once enjoyed) a peculiar status in English cultural life as a displaced home of the totality, partly as a symptom of the vacuum at the centre of the culture.⁷ So while this book is primarily a literary study of certain British authors who responded, in different ways, to the political event of the Paris Commune, it also covers a period in which certain assumptions were formed—about the relationship of literature to society and politics, the integral connection between culture and civilization, and the nature of the masses’ access to such cultural goods—that would go on to undergird the professional discipline of literary criticism when it emerged and began to consolidate its institutional status during the early decades of the twentieth century.⁸

If Anderson’s claim about the discipline of literary criticism is taken seriously, one might also extend its logic backward and consider whether the absence in nineteenth-century Britain of any academic discipline or intellectual formation capable of supplying a general theory of the social totality might therefore be perceived to place a special burden on cultural commentators and literary figures like novelists and poets to act as keepers of the social and political peace. One discipline that might have undertaken such work was sociology, and the closest equivalent to sociology in Victorian Britain was a French import, practiced by the Positivist disciples of the philosopher Auguste Comte. These figures, notably Frederic Harrison and Edward Spencer Beesly, were generally sympathetic to the Commune and featured among its earliest British defenders—a fact that did not endear them to many of their contemporaries. On Anderson’s terms, then, a study such as this one would need to accentuate the intellectual significance of the cultural response to an event like the Paris Commune, partly for lack of any other sustained response, notwithstanding the ubiquitous denunciations of the popular press. The difficult task of suturing the psychic wounds that had been inflicted on bourgeois subjectivity by the Commune’s challenge to the ruling social order, albeit at one remove, fell instead to a heterogeneous group of novelists and literary figures who responded, in the main, by reasserting the sanctity of the cultural realm as a space of privilege while identifying the Communards themselves with a nihilistic desire for destruction. As the later chapters of this book demonstrate, novelists including George Gissing, Henry James, and H. G. Wells all responded to the Commune by mobilizing a Nietzschean ideologeme of ressentiment that contained the threat of social revolution by reducing its determining impetus to little more than a politics of envy.

The emergence of the Commune in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War disturbed the established order of rival nation-states in proposing a vision of international, working-class solidarity that cut across national boundaries. Its suppression resonated far beyond the particular locality of Paris, and after its defeat, an influx of political refugees led London to become an asylum of the defeated.⁹ At the same time, the Franco-Prussian War sparked imperial anxieties about the threat of invasion, in which European powers figured as potential sources of domination.¹⁰ In the wake of this traumatic shock to the ruling social order and its predominant mode of social and economic organization, a wide range of British writers responded to these contradictory pressures toward integration and disintegration, seeking to represent the Commune to a British reading public that consumed accounts of the conflict in newspaper reportage, commentary in journals, diaries, historical fiction, and poetry.

In a period of renewed crisis of pan-European identity, it is an apt moment to revisit episodes in the history of the Continent during which anxieties about social stability and fragmentation have loomed large. The brutal suppression of the Commune—which the British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne supported with the assertion that the Communards should be shot down wherever met like dogs—exemplifies what Jacques Rancière has characterized as hatred of democracy on the part of ruling elites.¹¹ Cultural critics played an important role in elaborating the terms of this response in Britain. For some, the Commune represented a dangerous (and potentially contagious) threat to civilization, while others heralded the dawn of a new liberty. Although the contemporary moment is animated by very different tensions, this book alludes, in terms that remain largely unspoken, to a longer history of British anxiety about Europe by focusing on the way in which such anxieties have been culturally produced, particularly during periods of political instability both within and beyond the nation’s borders.

The book examines three different kinds of material: newspaper and periodical commentary (including the wide array of images relating to the Commune that circulated in periodicals such as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic); poetic responses to the Commune; and the numerous historical and other novels that take the Commune as their backdrop, both explicitly and implicitly. A large number of novelists fictionalized the Commune, or aspects of its aftermath, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, George Gissing, and Henry James. Margaret Oliphant and H. G. Wells, meanwhile, responded more obliquely to the anxieties engendered by the Commune through the medium of spectral allegory and dystopian science fiction, respectively. The Commune also met with a more positive response, particularly among Britain’s emerging fin-de-siècle socialist movement. In socialist periodicals such as Commonweal and To-day, a number of poets—most notably William Morris—elaborated a poetics of martyrdom with reference to the Communards, as part of a wider culture of celebrating and commemorating the Commune. This book interweaves close reading of these works with a more expansive account of the Commune’s place in the intellectual landscape of late-Victorian Britain, drawing on the writings of Victorian thinkers including John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Frederic Harrison, and George Bernard Shaw. The book explores how different writers appealed to and created different publics, contributing to wider cultural debates about the meaning of the Commune. Almost all of the writers discussed in this book used the traumatic experience of the Commune to orientate themselves in relation to contemporary developments in Britain. As time passed, writers responded not only to the event itself, as mediated by the initial reports, but also to intervening fictions and representations. While the book follows a roughly chronological sequence, it also traces the cumulative effect of changing representations of the Commune, which tracked domestic anxieties engendered by the 1880s socialist revival and the Woman Question.

The historiography of the Commune is both well established and current, but there is a relative dearth of material that investigates cultural and literary responses to the Commune in Britain. Compared to the widespread critical literature on British responses to the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848, cultural responses to the revolution of 1871 have been relatively (though not entirely) overlooked, despite the wide array of primary material that would allow such a narrative to be reconstructed. This book attempts to make good on that lack, while also extending and revising critical understandings of the Commune by accentuating the transnational aspect of its afterlife in Britain. In the French context, the historiography of the Commune is strongly identified with the work of historians such as Eugene Schulkind, Stewart Edwards, Jacques Rougerie, Alain Dalotel, Robert Tombs, Gay L. Gullickson, Martin Phillip Johnson, Carolyn Eichner, and John M. Merriman.¹² Their work has detailed the events of the Commune and offered different interpretations of the reasons underlying its emergence. Kristin Ross, Peter Starr, Colette E. Wilson, Philip M. Katz, and J. Michelle Coghlan have surveyed the Commune’s cultural afterlives in France and the United States, with Starr, Wilson and Coghlan focusing particularly on the politics of cultural memory.¹³ With regard to its reception in Britain, Matthew Beaumont situates responses to the Commune within a broader trend of anticommunism and cacotopianism, placing particular emphasis on the genre of reactionary future histories as one kind of fin-de-siècle ideology of social dreaming.¹⁴ Beaumont also cogently argues that if the Commune was a non-event in England, it was nonetheless a decisive non-event, a point echoed by Scott McCracken, who notes in his work on the literary afterlives of the Commune that it was often paradoxically represented through a discourse of its non-representation.¹⁵ Other scholars, notably Albert Boime, Gonzalo J. Sánchez, John Milner, Bertrand Tillier, and Adrian Rifkin, have recovered the Commune’s place in art history and visual culture, while Julia Nicholls’s recent monograph has made a significant contribution to understanding the intellectual history of its partisans and fellow travelers.¹⁶ Building on these works, as well as the suggestive insights offered in Kristin Ross’s Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015), the present book extends this growing body of research to encompass the literary landscape of late-Victorian Britain, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen for the projection of hopes and fears, serving as a warning for some and an example to others, as well as a sounding board for the cultural production of anxiety about revolution during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Literature and Revolution

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A COMMUNE IN LITERATURE

In an admiring obituary for Alfred Tennyson, published in the New Review in November 1892, Edmund Gosse suggests that some of his contemporaries mourned the passing not only of an esteemed poet laureate but of an entire epoch in English literature. In doing so, Gosse allows himself a revealing reference to (relatively) recent history when he writes: What I dread, what I have long dreaded, is the eruption of a sort of Commune in literature. At no period could the danger of such an outbreak of rebellion against tradition be so great as during the reaction which must follow the death of our most illustrious writer.¹ Brief though Gosse’s reference to the Paris Commune of 1871 is, it suggests the way in which this acute and localized episode of class struggle, which triggered a much broader crisis of bourgeois confidence across most of Europe, continued to haunt his ruminations on the literary landscape of late-Victorian Britain two decades after the event itself. In imagining the potential crisis of cultural authority following Tennyson’s death, Gosse’s mind, it seems, turned instinctively to the Commune. Yet even as Gosse declaratively announces the termination of an entire literary epoch, he also unknowingly preempts the opening of another in his anticipation of a later current of conservative modernism.² While the anticommunism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound would fasten on the specter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gosse’s tilt toward reaction was more muted in being less shaken by the turn of world-historical events.

In Gosse’s attempt to summarize the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Tennyson’s death, he suggests that some people might think we have no poet left so venerable, or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of craftsmanship, and, straining toward the superlative, he adds that some might even imagine poetry is dead amongst us. Such a view, he quickly qualifies, is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous.³ In listing some living poets whom Tennyson favored with correspondence, Gosse includes Rudyard Kipling and William Watson (on whose posthumous reputation fate can hardly be said to have smiled kindly) among those who would be likely to keep the flame of culture burning. But Gosse also calls readers’ attention to the rather more alarming presence of the multitude so stirred into an excited curiosity about a great poet, whom he observed hovering on the edges of Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, and he frets in rather more genuine terms that this multitude will presently crave … a little more excitement still over another poet, which will not be satisfied because We have not, and shall not have for a generation at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the monster.⁴ The mere attendance of the multitude at Tennyson’s funeral should not be taken to suggest their conversion to a love of fine literature, Gosse warns, because fine literature—however scandalous it may sound in the ears of this generation to say it—is for the few.⁵ The knack for reading and appreciating fine literature, Gosse suggests, is less a matter of volition than of inherited taste and innate capacity for discrimination of value. Such a knack would thus always prove beyond the reach of the demogorgon that had unsurreptitiously intruded itself on Tennyson’s literary lying-in-state. In a roughly contemporaneous 1891 Contemporary Review article titled The Influence of Democracy on Literature, Gosse’s humble protestation that he seeks to do no more than tap the intellectual barometer cheerfully is rather belied by his later statement that whatever the form of government, literature has always been aristocratic, or at least oligarchic.⁶ While it is not wholly to be regretted, in Gosse’s view, the influence of democracy on literature is generally to the bad, not least because its essence … is marked by the destruction of those very ramparts which protected and inspirited the old intellectual free States.⁷

Paris under the Commune, according to one contemporary British eyewitness, was like Rome after the barbarians had overrun it.⁸ In Gosse’s cultural imaginary, these latter-day barbarians continued to muster at the gates, motivating his own self-presentation as gatekeeper and guardian of the sacred groves of Parnassus, and it is particularly telling that, as late as 1892, he could still look to the Commune as a touchstone for this latter-day barbarianism. The Commune’s suppression resonated far beyond the particular locality of Paris, and as Karl Marx commented about the Commune in his first draft of The Civil War in France (1871), Whatever … its fate at Paris, it will make its way around the world.⁹ For Marx, along with many other partisans of the socialist movement, the Commune lived on as a talismanic symbol, heralding the consolidation of a sense of collective identity and purpose and providing a focal point for rituals of collective memory and celebration. The Commune made its way, as Marx predicted, into the political writings of several of the most significant radical writers of fin-de-siècle Britain, at the same time as the Commune’s surviving militants were scattered in exile from the Jura region in Switzerland all the way to the antipodes in the French territory of New Caledonia. Jürgen Osterhammel records that more than 3,800 insurgents were sent in nineteen convoys of ships to the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia, a colony under French rule since 1853 and points out that the deportation was conceived as a means of ‘civilizing’ both the indigenous kanaks and the Communard revolutionaries, and that was the spirit in which it was carried out.¹⁰ Meanwhile, around 1,500 adult male Communards …, accompanied by at least 600 wives and 1,200 children, sought refuge in London, a fact that generated both media interest and more practical efforts to organize solidarity.¹¹

The aim of this book is to demonstrate how the Commune also made its way into the literary culture of Britain during the years between 1871 and the first decade of the twentieth century. Unlike the exiles, many other Communards did not escape the ferocity of the Versailles reprisals, and as Eric Hobsbawm has observed, This brief, brutal—and for the time uncharacteristic—unleashing of blind terror by respectable society reflected a fundamental problem of the politics of bourgeois society: that of its democratization.¹² The blind terror soon subsided into patterns of rhetorical and discursive containment, sometimes no less brutal, only differently so. Gosse’s remarks attest that the problem of democratization proved especially pronounced in the realm of fin-de-siècle Britain’s cultural life, and the effects of this impasse were exacerbated by the advent of the Commune. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has commented with reference to French responses to the Commune, the sheer virulence of the condemnation of the Commune by most writers of the time flows from the fear of what abolition of hierarchy would do to the very conception of literature and the literary.¹³ That this was also true, from a distance, for many British writers is one of the principal arguments that will be unfolded in later chapters of this book.

Gosse’s seemingly incidental remarks are, in this respect, simply the tip of an iceberg, and he was by no means alone in his discomfort. George Moore, who spent much of the 1870s in Paris training to be an artist, studiously avoids any reference to the Commune in his Rousseauian memoir Confessions of a Young Man (1886), but he does record that he returned from Paris to London convinced that art is the direct antithesis to democracy, while professing a Nietzschean disdain for the mass.¹⁴ In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche—who numbered Gosse and Moore among his earliest Anglophone readers—characterized "modern democracy, anarchy … and especially the hankering for la commune as an immense afterclap, which he identified with the most primitive form of society.¹⁵ For Nietzsche, the Commune represented a form of atavistic regression that posed an existential threat to his aristocratic conception of individualism. False reports about the burning of the Louvre seriously disturbed his mood and confirmed his predisposition to view events through the sole focus of culture.¹⁶ As Jacques Rancière has observed, in a different but related context, such a denunciation of ‘democratic individualism’ is simply the hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd.¹⁷ British responses to the Commune were similarly marked, in some quarters, by a hatred of equality, and Eleanor Marx later recalled, in an 1893 letter, the condition of perfectly frantic fury of the whole middle class against the Commune to the point where it was proposed—quite seriously—that the Communards who had taken refuge in England should be handed over to the doctors and the hospitals for purposes of vivisection."¹⁸

In Britain, the Commune also evoked longer-standing fears about the Continental specter of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order. As late as 1892, Gosse could still turn to the Commune as a byword for this threat, which he invokes by way of a displacement into the realm of culture in general, and literature in particular, held at one remove from the real politics of the actual Parisian Communards, many of whom were, as Kristin Ross has shown, deeply motivated by the idea that culture itself might be radically democratized without the kind of loss or attenuation imagined in Gosse’s fearful prophecy of a sort of Commune in literature. In Ross’s words, the Communards’ ideal of communal luxury entails transforming the aesthetic coordinates of the entire community in line with the demand that beauty be allowed to flourish in spaces shared in common and not just in special privatized preserves.¹⁹ Such a demand, according to Ross, means reconfiguring art to be fully integrated into everyday life.²⁰ These ideas were shared by a number of the Commune’s defenders in Britain, from the revolutionary socialist William Morris to the exiled Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. One of the important insights of Ross’s book has to do with her extension of the Commune’s temporal horizon in order to examine "a kind of afterlife that does not exactly come after but … is part and parcel of the event itself: … a life beyond life."²¹ This book is, in part, similarly concerned with the prolongation of the Commune in the writings of its British partisans and celebrants (discussed at more length in chapter 6), but it also devotes significant attention to those who sought to contain and disavow its memory; what Ross refers to as the continuation of the combat by other means was a two-sided affair, and this book is equally concerned to investigate the responses of those British writers who found various literary strategies with which to attempt the stabilization of bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event.²² Attending to these multiple patterns of response to the Commune confirms the intensity of the struggle between the consciously pro- and anti-Communard writers, but it also reveals the existence of a kind of ideological no-man’s-land, in between and sometimes adjacent to the main fronts, and several of the writers who will be discussed in this book occupied a portion of this terrain.

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Against the Communard imaginary of communal luxury and the democratization of cultural life, Gosse performs a rearguard action in defense of an elitist conception of tradition, canonicity, and exclusivity. He envisages the prospect of a Commune in literature as a threat to standards of taste, bearing within it a leveling impulse that would sacrifice high culture on the altar of social revolution. In his 1891 article The Influence of Democracy on Literature, Gosse is even more forthright in identifying communism (or democracy pushed to an impossible extremity) with the attempt to prevent intellectual capacity of every kind from developing, for fear of the ascendency which it would exercise.²³ In his Tennyson obituary, meanwhile, he does not explicitly mention the politics of the Commune but instead relies on an unspoken conception of literary and cultural production as a field of political struggle, in which both the Commune’s partisans and its enemies might play opposing roles. It is telling, however, that Gosse dramatizes these apprehensions with passing reference to the Commune, an event that Marx characterized as the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative.²⁴ In a brief aside in Gosse’s 1891 essay, he momentarily entertains this alarming possibility, applying it to the sphere of cultural production, writing: It may be that we are still under the oligarchic tradition, and that a social revolution, introducing a sudden breach in our habits, and perhaps paralysing the profession of letters for a few years, would be followed by a new literature of a decidedly democratic class.²⁵ Although he immediately abandons this speculative thought to return to his antidemocratic tirade, Gosse here briefly recognizes that social forces and relations of production animate the very creative and aesthetic endeavors of the literary coteries whose praises he sings. He also acknowledges that a social revolution might alter and democratize these conditions. Gosse soon represses this thought, consigning it to the spectral mirror of the future, but if one were given to bold statement, one might say that he unwittingly discloses the political unconscious of the fin de siècle’s entire bourgeois literary profession.²⁶

In Karl Marx’s midcentury essay The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 (1850), he observes that the degree to which the continental revolutions have repercussions on England is also the thermometer by which one can measure how far they really challenge bourgeois conditions of life, rather than affecting only its political formations.²⁷ Marx was principally concerned with the prospective economic effects of an earlier period of class struggle, but this statement is no less applicable to the potential cultural and ideological repercussions of the events of 1871. The Commune certainly provoked outrage and dismay in London’s literary circles. Among those whom Gosse would later esteem as likely inheritors of Tennyson’s poetic mantle, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s response to the Commune is especially notable for its extremity. Gosse edited the 1918 edition of Swinburne’s letters for William Heinemann and dated their friendship from the beginning of 1871, meaning that the first flowering of their literary relationship, which had an importantly formative influence on the young Gosse, coincided with the period of the Commune.²⁸ Swinburne’s knee-jerk response to the Commune was intransigent and authoritarian. In a letter to William Michael Rossetti, he comments, I may say to you as frankly as I would say to [Victor] Hugo that so far from objecting to the infliction of death on the incendiaries of the Louvre I should wish to have them proclaimed (to use a phrase of his own) not merely ‘hors la loi’ but ‘hors l’humanité,’ and a law passed throughout the world authorising any citizen of any nation to take their lives with impunity and assurance of national thanks—to shoot them down wherever met like dogs.²⁹ Swinburne invokes humanity, here, in order to rationalize the taking of human life in the name of culture. It would be hard to find a more unmitigated expression of class hatred that, for Swinburne, apparently overrides the Communard insurgents’ claims to even the most basic human dignity. That he dated this letter 1 June 1871, several days after the Versaillais soldiers had committed widespread atrocities in retaking Paris from the Communards, only heightens the effect of Swinburne’s unabashed disclosure of these protoauthoritarian reflexes.

Swinburne articulates his anti-Communard sentiment in terms of a claim to cultural universalism, continuing as follows: A political crime is a national crime and punishable only by the nation sinned against; France alone has the right to punish the shedding of French blood by putting to death on that charge a Bonaparte or a Thiers, a Rigault or a Gallifet; but it is the whole world’s right and duty to take vengeance on men who should strike at the whole world such a blow as to inflict an everlasting incurable wound by the attempted destruction of Rome, Venice, Paris, London—of the Vatican, Ducal Palace, Louvre, or Museum.³⁰ Although the Louvre had been badly damaged during the Bloody Week, reports that it had been deliberately burned down were, in fact, false, and it has long been a source of historiographical controversy as to whether the Communards or the Versaillais should bear the brunt of responsibility for the destruction of Paris during the fierce, street-by-street fighting of the Commune’s last days.³¹ As the historian Gay L. Gullickson writes, Virtually everyone has taken sides in telling its story.³² Notwithstanding this uncertainty, Swinburne’s mobilization of a cultural universalism (the whole world’s right and duty) in the name of vengeance against the revolutionary militants of the Commune reveals a dark underside to the world republic of letters, whose central locus Pascale Casanova situates in Paris: the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth.³³ For Swinburne, an aggressively curatorial ideal of cultural preservation reduces the Communards to a kind of bare life that could be readily and unthinkingly taken (hors l’humanité).³⁴

In this respect, Swinburne’s response closely (though unknowingly) mirrors that of the French poet, critic, and aesthete Théophile Gautier, whose Tableaux de Siège: Paris 1870–1871 (1871) contains a number of scathing reflections on the Communards and whose aestheticism was an important influence on Swinburne’s poetry. In the chapter The Venus of Milo, Gautier tracks the movements of the ancient Greek statue (held by the Louvre and since attributed to Alexandros of Antioch) during the two sieges of Paris. He observes that Venus was about to be restored in her radiant beauty to her pedestal after the lifting of the Prussian siege,

when came the Commune with its host of barbarians, come, not from the Cimmerian fogs, but sprung up from the Paris pavements like the foul fermentation of subterranean filth. The aesthetics of these fierce sectaries and their contempt for the ideal are well known. In their hands the goddess, had they discovered her, would have run great risk; they would have sold her or broken her up as being a proof of human genius offensive to levelling stupidity. Is not the aristocracy of masterpieces that which most offends envious mediocrity? It is quite natural that the ugly should hate the beautiful.³⁵

Gautier’s choice of terms (levelling stupidity, envious mediocrity) already anticipates the Nietzschean ideologeme of ressentiment that,