When Marx wrote that what mattered most about the Paris Commune of 1871 was not any ideals it sought to realize but rather its own “working existence,” he underlined the extent to which the insurgents shared no blueprint of the society to come. The Commune, in this sense, was a working laboratory of political inventions, improvised on the spot or hobbled together out of past scenarios and phrases, reconfigured as need be, and fed by desires awakened in the popular reunions at the end of the Empire. An insurrection in the capital fought under the flag of the Universal Republic, the Commune as event and as political culture has always proved resistant to any seamless integration into the national narrative. As one of its former members recalled years later, it was, above all else, “an audacious act of internationalism.”¹ Under the Commune Paris wanted to be not the capital of France but an autonomous collective in a universal federation of peoples. It did not wish to be a state but rather an element, a unit in a federation of communes that was ultimately international in scale. Yet aside from a regular nod from historians to the number and prominence of some of its foreign members, the non-nationalist originality of the Commune has not been central to the way it has been remembered. And the traces of the way that this aspect of its distinct political imaginary was produced and practiced are not easily perceptible in standard histories of the event, preoccupied for the most part by military maneuvers and the legislative quarrels and accomplishments at the Hôtel de Ville.

Here we can begin to make out the improbable and unscheduled makeup of Commune activities, practices that could draw together an African from the Papal Guards and former school-teacher Louise Michel, her old army trooper’s godillots under her dress, the two alone performing sentry duty late at night. The Papal Army had fought on the side of the French in the Franco-Prussian War but disbanded when the Prussians entered Paris; this fact helps explain the African’s presence in the area at the time but it does not explain his conversion to the Commune. But beyond the striking visual distribution of these particular individuals in a narrative and in a trench, there is also the way the two can be heard reflecting upon how to understand their own presence in history and its workings as it is occurring. These are enigmatic and elliptical reflections to be sure, but we might interpret them something like this: Are we going somewhere new, or are we reading an old, illustrated book, an adventure story, perhaps, or a story of the French Revolution? Are we to reach a new world, or are we figures speaking from our ready-made place in a narrative? Are we new men, new women, or are we repositioned characters in the vividly tinted imagery of an old story? The experiences expressed by the two Communards are different and show how differently one’s relationship to one’s own political subjectivization might come to be lived. But they are not contradictory, and they give us a glimpse into the transformation of the experience of time under the Commune and its relation to the social, a relation that has everything to do with forms of historical memory taking on new shapes and figures or mobilizing old shapes and figures in a new context.

Communard Gustave Lefrançais, whose account this is, links the resonance of the words immediately to their last moment of common usage a quarter of a century earlier—sacred words of the revolutionary vocabulary widespread in 1789 and again in 1848. “Citoyens” was among the appellations that date back to 1789 and that were kept alive thanks to secret societies and revolutionary traditions—“patriots,” another such word, had, for example, gone out of fashion with young socialists and was nowhere to be found in 1871. But the particular force of its use by Briosne in the Vaux-Hall meeting has less to do with a hearkening back to the past than it does with the way that “citoyen,” in this instance, does not connote membership in a national body but rather a cleavage therein, a social gap or division affirmed in the heart of the national citizenry, a separation of the citoyen from what at that precise moment becomes its antonym, the now ghostly departed mesdames and messieurs—the bourgeoisie, les honnêtes gens. And “connote” is the wrong word to use, for the words perform a forcible inscription of social division, an active, self-authorizing assertion of disidentification—from the state, from the nation, from all of the customs and phatic politesses that make up middle-class French society. The words citoyen, citoyenne no longer indicate national belonging—they are addressed to people who have separated themselves from the national collectivity. And because the words are an interpellation, a direct second-person address, they create that gap or division in a now, in the contemporary moment constituted by the speech act; they create a new temporality in the present and, essentially, an agenda—something that all the speeches presenting well-meaning statistical data about women’s labor could not have begun to create. They allow an understanding of the present, in its unfolding, as historical, as changing. Paradoxically, perhaps, in this instance, it is the unspoken words “Mesdames, messieurs” which, when they are spoken and repeated, create the space/time of the nation and not citoyen. For the repetitive temporality created by the “sacramental formula” “Mesdames, messieurs” is the saturated time of the nation—a spatialized time, in fact, in keeping with Ernst Bloch’s observation that there is no time in national history, only space. “Thus, nationhood,” he writes, “drives time, indeed history out of history: it is space and organic fare, nothing else; it is that ‘true collective’ whose underground elements are supposed to swallow the uncomfortable class struggle of the present…”⁹ The name “citoyen,” on the other hand, may well be old and originate in another moment of the political past, but its iteration in this instance creates the now of a shared political subjectivization, “the uncomfortable class struggle of the present.” It interpellates listeners to be part of that present. Citoyen, citoyenne summons, then, a subject predicated on any number of disidentifications—from the state, the Empire, the police, and the world of the so-called “honnêtes gens.” The words are not addressed to the French national citizen. They conjure up an ideal of la femme libre, l’homme libre, a non-nationally circumscribed being, and are addressed to and responded to by such listeners accordingly.