Crowds and Party · 第 83 页

After March 18, there would be argument over who the Commune is—a workingclass government?—and what it wants, but no one will dispute the fact that the situation had turned on the actuality of an insistence and a desire. The crowd forces an opening, an interruption that changes the political setting. It ruptures suppositions of order, inciting thereby attempts to expand, enclose, and target the unleashed intensities in one direction rather than another.

That the March 18 crowd event was followed by the Commune does not mean that the crowd creates the Commune or that the Commune expresses the constituent power of the people. The Commune form precedes the crowd event. It was an already existent political possibility, attempted yet thwarted in revolts in October and January. Throughout the fall and winter of 1870–71, militants organized as vigilance committees in the districts of Paris debated proposals and planned demonstrations. Yet when in their attempts to establish the Commune they pushed for revolt, the people weren’t with them. In the elections following the October 31 march on the Hotel de Ville, over 322,000 Parisians voted in support of the National Government. 54,000 voted against.²² In January, only a few hundred people responded to the “red poster” calling for insurrection that was distributed by the delegation of the Twenty Districts, which “saw itself as the Commune to be constituted.”²³ Later that month, even as thousands were dying from the Prussian siege, only a few insurgents showed up for a new insurrection planned for January 22. The insurrection was brutally suppressed, and the National Government cracked down on clubs, public meetings, and newspapers. The national elections held in February, however, made it clear that while the majority of the French countryside supported monarchy, the cities favored a republic. Resulting anxiety over the restoration of a monarchy, the convening of the National Assembly in Bordeaux, the Assembly’s failure to pay the National Guard in Paris, and the exodus of the bourgeoisie, not to mention the ongoing destitution of the people because of the siege, produced conditions more auspicious for an uprising. The previous efforts on behalf of the Commune establish in advance the idea of what an uprising would produce even as they can’t themselves produce it. Commune could name a division, “the direct antithesis to the empire,” in Marx’s words.²⁴ Yet until the crowd creates the opening for it, it was just this “vague aspiration” denoting a fundamental opposition. As antithesis and aspiration, the Commune form precedes its arrival.

The struggle for the Commune is also a struggle over its meaning. It has been offered as a figure for republicanism, patriotic nationalism, federalism, centralism, communism, socialism, anarchism, even secessionism. Marx views the multiplicity of its interpretations, “and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor,” as indicative of the thorough expansiveness of the Commune form.²⁵ This same excess can also be read as a lack, as the gap of the political. For example, although Charles Beslay’s opening speech depicts the Commune as a municipal government concentrating on local matters, its decrees quickly encompassed national affairs. As Prosper Olivier Lissagaray observes in his definitive account, it was “Commune in the morning, Constituent Assembly in the evening.”²⁶ Contention over the political form of the Commune is inseparable from, indicative of, the Commune event.²⁷ Multiplicity isn’t attributable to institutional innovations specific to the Commune. It’s an index of political division and the struggle over the Commune name: would the Commune be animated by fidelity to the crowd discharge or would another politics appropriate crowd energy in a direction antithetical to equality and collectivity?

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