Editing Paris Commune (section)

=== Contemporary artists and writers ===
[[File:Paris Commune rue de Rivoli.jpg|thumb|View of the Rue de Rivoli after Bloody Week]]

French writers and artists had strong views about the Commune. [[Gustave Courbet]] was the most prominent artist to take part in the Commune, and was an enthusiastic participant and supporter, though he criticised its executions of suspected enemies. On the other side, the young [[Anatole France]] described the Commune as "A committee of assassins, a band of hooligans [{{lang|fr|fripouillards}}], a government of crime and madness."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003">Pivot, Sylvain, "La Commune, les Communards, les ecrivains ou la haine et la gloire." December 2003. La revue des Anciens Élèves de l'École Nationale d'Administration"</ref> The diarist [[Edmond de Goncourt]] wrote, three days after ''La Semaine Sanglante'', "...the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it..."<ref>[[Edmond de Goncourt]], [[Jules de Goncourt]], [[Robert Baldick]], ''Pages from the Goncourt Journal'' (Oxford, 1962), p. 194</ref>

On 23 April, [[George Sand]], an ardent republican who had taken part in the 1848 revolution, took the opposite view. She wrote "The horrible adventure continues. They ransom, they threaten, they arrest, they judge. They have taken over all the city halls, all the public establishments, they're pillaging the munitions and the food supplies."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> Soon after the Commune began, [[Gustave Flaubert]] wrote to Sand, "[[Austrian Empire|Austria]] did not go into Revolution after [[Battle of Königgrätz|Sadowa]], nor Italy after [[Battle of Novara (1849)|Novara]], nor Russia after [[Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55)|Sebastopol]]! But our good Frenchmen hasten to pull down their house as soon as the chimney takes fire..." Near the end of the Commune, Flaubert [[Flaubert's letters|wrote to her again]], "As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages." On 10 June, when the Commune was finished, Flaubert wrote to Sand:<ref name="online-literature.com">[http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/ Correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140322001118/http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/sand-flaubert-letters/4/ |date=22 March 2014 }}. online-literature.com.</ref>

{{blockquote|I come from Paris, and I do not know whom to speak to. I am suffocated. I am quite upset, or rather out of heart. The sight of the ruins is nothing compared to the great Parisian insanity. With very rare exceptions, everybody seemed to me only fit for the strait-jacket. One half of the population longs to hang the other half, which returns the compliment. That is clearly to be read in the eyes of the passers-by.}}

[[Victor Hugo]] blamed Thiers for his short-sightedness. At the news that the government had failed to have the cannons seized he wrote in his diary, "He touched off the fuse to the powder keg. Thiers is premeditated thoughtlessness."<ref>Hugo, Victor, Choses vues, 1870–1885. Paris. Gallimard (1972). {{ISBN|2-07-036141-1}}. p. 159</ref> On the other hand, he was critical of the Commune but sympathetic to the Communards. At the beginning of April, he moved to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who had just died. On 9 April, he wrote, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> He wrote poems that criticized both the government and the Commune's policy of taking hostages for reprisals, and condemned the destruction of the Vendôme Column.<ref>Hugo, Victor, ''L'Année Terrible''</ref> On 25 May, during the Bloody Week, he wrote: "A monstrous act; they've set fire to Paris. They've been searching for firemen as far away as Brussels." But after the repression, he offered to give sanctuary to members of the Commune, which, he said, "was barely elected, and of which I never approved."<ref name="Pivot, Sylvain 2003" /> He became the most vocal advocate of an amnesty for exiled Communards, finally granted in the 1880s.{{sfn|Milza|2009a|pp=457–460}}

[[Émile Zola]], as a journalist for {{interlanguage link|Le Sémaphore|lt=Le Sémaphore de Marseille|fr|Le Sémaphore (journal)}}, reported on the fall of the Commune, and was one of the first reporters to enter the city during Bloody Week. On 25 May he reported: "Never in civilised times has such a terrible crime ravaged a great city... The men of the Hôtel de Ville could not be other than assassins and arsonists. They were beaten and fled like robbers from the regular army, and took vengeance upon the monuments and houses.... The fires of Paris have pushed over the limit the exasperation of the army. ...Those who burn and who massacre merit no other justice than the gunshot of a soldier."<ref>[http://www.deslettres.fr 4th letter of Émile Zola on the Commune] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122180843/https://deslettres.fr/ |date=22 January 2022 }}, 25 May 1871</ref> But on 1 June, when the fighting was over, his tone had changed, "The court martials {{sic}} are still meeting and the summary executions continue, less numerous, it's true. The sound of firing squads, which one still hears in the mournful city, atrociously prolongs the nightmare ... Paris is sick of executions. It seems to Paris that they're shooting everyone. Paris is not complaining about the shooting of the members of the Commune, but of innocent people. It believes that, among the pile, there are innocent people, and that it's time that each execution is preceded by at least an attempt at a serious inquiry ... When the echoes of the last shots have ceased, it will take a great deal of gentleness to heal the million people suffering nightmares, those who have emerged, shivering from the fire and massacre."<ref>[http://www.deslettres.fr 11th letter of Émile Zola on the Commune] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122180843/https://deslettres.fr/ |date=22 January 2022 }}, 1 June 1871</ref>