Volume 12, Issue 3
FRONT COVER: Gustave Doré
ALLÉGORIE SUR LA LIBERATION DU PROLETARIAT
PAR LA FRATERNITÉ UNIVERSELLE
PAINTING
This number of The Massachusetts Review marks an innovation. The magazine for the first time suspends its normal allocation of space for regular departments of fiction, poetry, theatre, criticism, and reviews in favor of a number almost wholly devoted to the single subject of our concern.
The occasion is the 100th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, noted here by evaluations of that event, its causes, the violent counter-reactions it engendered, and the significance it continues to have for social thought and change in the contemporary world. Illustrations cover episodes of the Commune, principal figures, and political caricatures of the period. The collection argues no special point. It does put light upon various forces that can be seen with the clarity that comes from a century of retrospect. Certain of these—pertaining to issues of war and peace, participatory democracy, women’s rights, political and industrial bureaucracy, economic and social discrimination, injustice, etc.—are much alive in our time.
To the latter point, the final pages of this number function importantly, Peter Clecak of the University of California at Irvine deals with today’s American political and cultural revolutionaries. Norman Birnbaum of Amherst College writes on governance and power in modern societies, and on the repressive effects of industrial and educational bureaucracy. Robert Márquez of Hampshire College translates short revolutionary poems from Nicaragua. William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, the so-called Block Island Two, address a letter to the radical priests, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan.
The anniversary of the Commune obviously would not be put off. To acknowledge it as we have, several valued features must wait for later publication. Among these are a review of a year’s work in poetry by Josephine Miles, a Theatre Chronicle by Seymour Rudin, and the concluding part of a study of modern literary form by Donald M. Kartiganer. These and others will appear in our Autumn number in November.
Notes on the contributors to Revolution and Reaction: The Paris Commune 1871—A Century After appear at the close of that section, on p. 589.
John Hicks
Robert Tucker
Table of Contents
Revolution and Reaction: The Paris Commune of 1871:
The Commune—A Century After: Non-Fiction by Henri Peyre
The Permanence of the Commune, Non-Fiction by Richard Greeman
The Failure of Revolution, Non-Fiction by Frederick Busi
The Women of the Commune, Non-Fiction by Edith Thomas
Feminism and Anti-Clericalism Under the Commune, Non-Fiction by Persis Hunt
The Commune in 1971, Non-Fiction by C. L. R. James
The Impact of the Paris Commune in the US, Non-Fiction by Samuel Bernstein
Facsimile: Interview with Karl Marx. The New York World July 18, 1871. Note by Philip S. Foner
The Paris Commune and Marx’s Conception of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Non-Fiction by Monty Johnstone
Marx, Engels, and the British Response to the Commune, Non-Fiction by Royden Harrison
From a Letter of 1871 by W. J. Linton
Images of the Paris Commune in Contemporary Chinese Marxist Thought, Non-Fiction by Maurice Meisner
Jules Antoine Castagnary’s “A Plea for A Dead Friend” (Gustave Courbet and the Destruction of the Vendome Column) Edited and translated by Alda Cannon and Frank Anderson Trapp
Bresdon to Redon: Two letters (1870, 1871), Notes and translation by Seymour S. Weiner; with an engraving by Leonard Baskin
Rimbaud and the Commune, Non-Fiction by Wallace Fowlie
Edmund De Goncourt and the Paris Commune, Non-Fiction by Richard B. Grant
Trauma and Recoil: the Intellectuals, Non-Fiction by W. M. Frohock
French Writers and the Commune, Non-Fiction by Henrietta Psichari
Bertolt Brecht: The Days of the Commune, Translated by Leonard Lehrman
Person, Event, & Caricature, Illustrations
Revolution Delayed: The Political and Cultural Revolutionaries in America, Non-Fiction by Peter Clecak
The Problem of a Knowledge Elite, Non-Fiction by Norman Birnbaum
Nicaraguan Poems:
Epigram, Poetry by Anonymous, Translated by Robert Márquez
The Curtain of the Native Land, Poetry by Anonymous, Translated by Robert Márquez
Epigram, Poetry by Ernesto Cardenal, Translated by Robert Márquez
Letter to the Berrigans, Non-Fiction by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne
Contributors
Leonard Baskin‘s latest show, featuring drawings of American Indians, was held in Fort Worth, Texas in May.
Former editor of Science and Society, Samuel Bernstein now lives in Maine: his books include The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in France and The First International in America.
Bertolt Brecht‘s The Days of the Commune (1948) appears here in its first American translation rendered by Leonard Lehrman.
Author of L’Esthetique d’André Saurés, Frederick Busi is Associate Professor of French at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).
The first English translation of Castagnary’s defense of Courbet is partly the work of Alda Cannon, who lives in Austin, Texas.
Philip S. Foner is editor of W. B. Dubois Speaks.
James B. Duke Professor of French at Duke University, Wallace Fowlie is author of Rimbaud: A Critical Study and Andre Gide: His Life and Art.
W. M. Frohock teaches at Harvard, has published books on Malraux, Rimbaud, and The Novel of Violence in America.
Author of the recently published The Goncourt Brothers, Richard B. Grant has also written about Zola and Victor Hugo; he teaches French Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.
Richard Greeman, author of articles on Herbert Marcuse, has also published political and social commentary on the 1968 Columbia student rebellion, occupied Czechoslovakia, and the French labor movement.
Political and social historian of the British Labour movement, and official biographer of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Royden Harrison is at the Center for the Study of Social History at Warwick University, England.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr, currently at Tufts University, Persis Hunt specializes in feminist history.
C. L. R. James is author of The Black Jacobins, and teaches at Federal City College, Washington, D.C.
Monty Johnstone teaches at the London School of Economics.
A graduate of Harvard University, Class Of 1971, Leonard Lehrman translated and directed the American premiere of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune.
Maurice Meisner is a specialist on the influence of the Commune on Chinese thought, and is at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Henri Peyre, Sterling Professor of French (retired) at Yale, now teaching at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, is a distinguished interpreter of France in America,
Madame Henrietta Psichari is author of studies of Renan and Zola, and is editor of the complete edition of Renan.
Gallimard has recently published Edith Thomas‘s new book on Louise Michel, completed before Miss Thomas’s death last December.
Frank Trapp, chairman of the Department of Art at Amherst College, has just published a book on Delacroix with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Seymour Weiner is chairman of graduate studies in French at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).