Looking for Minerva’s Sisters in the Revolutionary 1871 Paris Commune

Indicative of the methodological and historiographical challenges of better understanding women’s roles in civil war, the site of women’s initiation of the revolutionary Paris Commune on March 18, 1871 is known currently only for the view of Paris from the basilica of Sacré Cœur, intentionally created by a republic to annihilate a site of revolutionary memory. Despite the fairly consistent disregard for their histories, women were blatantly visible during military hostilities occurring during the four-and-one-half month Prussian siege of Paris, lasting until late January 1871, and during the French civil war that followed in March. Using examples from this era, my presentation will survey some of the methodological and historiographical challenges inherent in the study of women’s participation in revolution and war.

Well into the 1990s, most all historians and those using historians’ work to write popular accounts had concluded that working women’s participation during the Commune was an intriguing but marginal consideration, even though women were consistently visible in the fighting and the historical and archival record.  As the Commune succumbed to military attack from the nominal French Third Republic, women became specific targets of troops entering the city, contributing to the 30,000 deaths of Parisians during the last “Bloody Week” of May 1871. Some women were initially sentenced to death for their perceived Commune participation. Others served almost a decade in prison or on penal colonies before an 1880 amnesty. Thousands more were arrested, then tried or released, their records still intact but ignored. This presentation exposes that their significance has generally been marginalized, not only due to France’s disavowal of the Commune as part of its national history, evident in its construction of Sacré Cœur, but because of gendered assumptions about what constitutes significant political, diplomatic, and military contributions.