Unlike visual artists, practically all writers openly took sides against the Commune, some with a rage and hatred of staggering violence!

Only Jules Vallès, himself a Communard, and Rimbaud and Verlaine supported the Commune. Victor Hugo was critical of the Commune but defended the Communards in all circumstances.

Théophile Gautier, Maxime Du Camp, Edmond de Goncourt, Leconte de Lisle and Ernest Feydeau joined Gustave Flaubert, George Sand and Émile Zola in denouncing the Commune as a "government of crime and madness" (Anatole France), responsible for plunging Paris into a pathological state, exploited by a group of ambitious, mad and exalted people.

• Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle wrote to José-Maria de Heredia: "La Commune? It was the league of all the déclassés, of all the incompetents, of all the envious, of all the assassins, of all the thieves, bad poets, bad painters, failed journalists, low-class tenants".

• George Sand to Gustave Flaubert: "This Commune is a fit of vomiting, the saturnalia of madness."

• The Communards according to Alphonse Daudet: "The heads of pawns, grimy collars, shiny hair, the toqués, the snail breeders, the saviours of the people, the déclassés, the sad, the laggards, the incompetents; Why did the workers get involved in politics? "

• Les communardes according to Dumas fils: "We will say nothing about their females out of respect for women, whom they resemble when they are dead."

• Émile Littré: "I abhor the war that the Parisian proletariat has just provoked. It has been cruelly guilty towards the fatherland, drunk as it was with fierce doctrines: the strict duty of governments is to firmly repress socialism in its anarchic deviations."

Oscillating between verbal outrage and the crudest schematism, never shying away from Manichaeism and developing caricature to the extreme, anti-Communard literature oozed from every line the hatred these writers had for the working class.

To find out more, see: Paul LIDSKY, "Les écrivains contre la Commune" (Writers against the Commune), published by La Découverte, republished in 2010.

Paul Lidsky analyses the political and literary convictions of these anti-Communard writers and shows how they reasoned and thought, and with what class prejudices.