The Essay: Paris 2021

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The Essay: Paris 2021: Women

Paris 2021

Women

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Key moments in shaping modern Europe, on the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

Dan Rebellato revisits the Paris Commune, a cornerstone of radical culture, politics and social movements, and its legacy today, on its 150th anniversary.

The Paris Commune lasted less than 100 days, yet this populist movement had extraordinary impact and offers a fascinating comparison to populist turbulence in 2021. Having survived the horrors of the Siege of Paris, winter of 1870-71, Parisians refused to accept the terms of French surrender after the Franco-Prussian war and declared independence. For ten weeks, the Communards experimented with alternative living: revolutionising education, political representation, the role of women, the upbringing of children, even parts of the landscape. The Commune was crushed brutally at the end of May, but it caught the attention of conservatives and radicals across the world. 150 years later, what does the Commune still have to say to us? Have we lost its legacy or, just maybe, are we all Communards now?

Dan Rebellato, writer and thinker, is inspired by personal observation of the modern legacy of the commune: 

“In 2016, my wife and I moved to Paris and we had a baby. In London, walking along a narrow pavement with a buggy, people generally get out of your way. In Paris, there’s often a stand-off. In London, the public space is not really public at all; we carry with us a portable sphere of private space that should not be invaded. In Paris, if you’re on the street, you’re in the debate. Although French society is in many ways very deferential and hierarchical, this is not true on the streets. Anyone can speak to anyone - in Paris, every encounter is a debate. And so I found myself looking into the history of those Parisian streets; the way they’ve been remodelled and remade, the way the famous cobblestones have been torn up as weapons, the way the boulevards are ghosted by barricades and street battles. It’s a story that has markers in 1968 and 1961 and 1945 and 1940 but ultimately this contested Paris, where the very streets are sites of battle and debate, takes us back to 1871 and the Commune.”

These essays will bring the Commune to life with vivid description of key moments, entering into history, to explore how it shaped French society and beyond, through personal connection with the facts and the sense of a city Dan knows well. 


Essay 5: Women

23 May 1871: As the French army poured into Paris to end the Commune, Parisians set light to some major buildings in a vain effort to stop their advance. On 23 May 1871, the Tuileries Palace was ignited. Amid the smoke and fire a new figure was born: the ‘petroleuse’, the woman communard with a bottle of petrol, glorying in the destruction she wreaked. In fact, there is very little evidence that such determined incendiarists existed, yet reports spread, ironically, like wildfire. The destructive woman became a cautionary tale and an icon of the Commune, haunting generations to come. The complexity and contradiction of women gaining independence is still resonant – the demonisation and vilification of over strident women is ubiquitous. The Commune genuinely offered women new ways of being, new models and roles. Yet this new woman is ghosted in the figure of the petroleuse, a horrified and horrifying response to repudiating a conventional domesticity.
   
Dan Rebellato is a leading British radio dramatist, as well as a Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway London. He has written extensively for BBC Radio 3 and 4, most recently Killer for Radio 3, as well as theatres such as Plymouth Drum, Suspect Culture and Graeae, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He has won Sonys and BBC Audio Awards for his radio dramas.  He was lead writer on the blockbuster BBC Radio 4 Series, Emile Zola; Blood Sex and Money, starring Glenda Jackson. He has published several books, most recently co editing Contemporary European Playwrights in 2020, and is currently writing a practical playwriting guide for the National Theatre, due out in 2021/22.


Director/Producer, Polly Thomas
Executive Producer, Eloise Whitmore

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