Duncan Bowie on Communards in exile
The Paris Commune in Britain by Laura Forster published by Oxford University Press
This is an important book as well as a very readable study. Forster is a history lecturer at the University of York and a member of the History Workshop editorial collective. The book is a study of the impact of the Paris Commune of 1871 on British radicals. While much has been written on the European republican refugees in England after 1848, there is less material on the post-Commune refugees.
The early chapters of the book focus on the geographical spread of communard refugees in London, centred on Fitzrovia in London, and map the pubs, coffee houses, shops and meeting halls in which they met, distinguishing their networks from the established French emigration which was centred on Soho and Holborn to the south of Fitzrovia. It is perhaps difficult to imagine how Fitzrovia, now such an upmarket area (full of developers’ offices) was host not just to Louise Michel’s anarchist school but to a fairly numerous group of poor, transient republican and anarchist French working men (and women) revolutionaries.
Forster also provides a guide to the various institutions formed in London by the communards, such as La Societe des Refugees de la Commune a Londres. La Commune Revolutionnaire and the Cercle d’Etudes Sociales, also mentioning (in passing) the English Federalist Council and the short-lived International Labour Union (which involved the secularist republicans Charles Bradlaugh and Harriet Law). Forster does not, however fully examine the politics and inter-relationships of these different organisations or the writings of the exiled communards such as Charles Malato.
Instead, Forster examines the role of friendship between communards and English radicals.
Interestingly, Forster does not comment on the role of leading communard exiles – French republicans such as the Blanquist Edouard Valliant or Marx’s son in law, Charles Longuet, but on the activities and friendships of lesser-known individuals. Forster chooses the communard and engineer Victor Delahaye, who worked with the young John Burns at various workshops in South London, and in effect became his political mentor, with Burns being inspired by Delahaye’s memoir of the commune. Burns was to be the first working-class member of the London County Council, later writing a pamphlet on the LCC as a London commune, as also did the SDF leader, Henry Hyndman.
Her second choice is the Clarion writer, Alexander Thompson, known as “Dangle”, who grew up in Paris and later wrote on his personal experience of the commune. Forster examines the impact of his later writings on direct democracy and his friendship with communards Jules Magny, who grew vines in the Old Kent Road, and Jean Allemaine, a leading socialist in the Third Republic, who, though not an exile in London, Thompson later visited in Paris.
The second half of the book focuses on the English positivists, the followers of August Comte, Frederick Harrison and Edward Spenser Beesley and their defence of the commune. Beesly and Harrison were both liberal intellectuals with links to the trade union movement – Beesly was a friend of Marx and knew Engels and was later to chair the inaugural meeting of Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, but like Harrison, was active in the Liberal Party. Harrison’s main political activity was criticising the successive government’s aggressive imperial policies. He later joined Burns as a progressive member of the London County Council. However, neither was involved in the artisan-based London republican and radical networks – organisations such as the International Democratic Association, the Land and Labour League or the Metropolitan Radical Federation.
By focusing on the positivists, Forster has perhaps missed other key relationships between communards and their ideas and working-class radicalism and republicanism – the Irish and Scottish links are also only very briefly mentioned. Forster is, however, stronger on her review of popular fiction relating to the commune, such as the writing of G A Henty and Eliza Lyn Linton (the novelist wife of the Chartist William Linton) and on the commemorative activities of the socialist organisations of the 1880’s and 1890s-the Socialist League; the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party.
These are perhaps minor points, and Forster’s study is certainly welcome and includes interesting new material as well as a novel approach to the subject.