Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune

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Cornell University Press, 1996 - History - 283 pages

In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune.

In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal, for example, raved: "Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers." Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others.

Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.

 

Contents

The First Seal of the Republic 78
7
Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People on the Ramparts
8
La Commune de Paris
14
Map of Paris 1871
22
The National Guards Cannons on the Butte Montmartre LIllustration 1871
26
The Women of March 18
27
Remembering and Representing
57
The Symbolic Female Figure
74
The Amazons of the Seine
101
Bertall La Colonelle The Communists of Paris 1871
106
Bertall La Barricade Les communeux 1871
107
The Taking of Paris May 1871
108
The Grrrreat Female Orator of the Grrrrand Amazon Club of the Commune Paris sous la Commune
115
Frédéric Lix Scenes of ParisA Meeting of the Womens Club in the Church of SaintGermainlAuxerrois Le Monde Illustré May 20 1871
117
The Femmes Fortes of Paris
120
Alfred Le Petit Louise Michel Les Contemporains 1880
155

Honoré Daumier Appalled by the Heritage
76
The Triumph of the Monarchy
84
The Joan of Arc of the Commune S G D G
88
Léonce Schérer The Defenders of the Sector Souvenirs de la Commune
91
Bertall Cantinières Les communeux 1871
93
Les Pétroleuses
159
Women on Trial
191
The Unruly Woman and the Revolutionary City
218
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Gay L. Gullickson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland.