"Who Kindled Courage"

"Shameless slatterns, half-naked women, who kindled course and breathed life into arson…" 

     --unknown, on the 

       "women incendiaries"

While the working class revolutions of 1848 across Europe were largely unsuccessful, they led to a series of consequences that were dramatically important. They increased the insistence in both German lands and Italian lands for unification. The new working class continued to grow in their political education and awareness, making them a group no longer to be ignored in the resolution of conflicts or the creation or recreation of governments. In France the revolution of 1848 was an indication that the Revolutionary ideals of 1789 had not been forgotten. Enlightenment ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité grew ever stronger in the minds of this new working class. But fifty years, two unsuccessful revolts, and the Industrial Revolution had changed those ideas.

Internal divisions led to weaknesses of the new political theories. These divisions had become more defined--often running along class divisions. Socialists and communists claimed that liberal theories didn't adequately represent the working class, whose labor was used and abused by a bourgeoise or capitalist system…

This is not the post that I want to write, but felt like it was important to give background to the Paris Commune, a short-lived (two months!) worker or proletariate controlled government during the spring of 1871…

It's not even the Paris Commune that I want to write about. It's the women of this revolution. The pétroleuses. The fire-starters of the the Paris Commune. The largely imaginary women, who used what would later become the Molotov Cocktail, to burn down "much of Paris" during the extremely violent retaking of Paris by the regular army.

They represent something an important tension that had been steadily growing since early Enlightenment (oh, and we could argue further back… but I'm not going to here…) about women's roles in an educated, republican society, and in the nineteenth-century women's role in the new working class, the highly-politicized socialist and communists movements.

There have been a few times throughout history when women have asked for and philosophy has conceded an equal existence for both men and women. Some early Greek philosophers (Plato and Epicurus, not mind you, Aristotle) contended women's mental acuity and ability in society to be on par with their male counterparts. Jesus' acceptance and the role of women in early Christian congregations was another. Women were often leaders in this early movement, while at the same time male bishops met and decided the "women's question." Women working during the so-called Scientific Revolution (like, Cavendish, Bassi, Winkelmann and others), if not literally, contextually argued in favor of women's equality in the intellectual or in a public sphere. By the Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges are writing Enlightenment-styled, revolutionary-supporting treatises on the inclusion of women in a new world centered centered on the Enlightenment, Liberté, and Egalité.

"Fraternité", here, takes us back to the problem. The society was (is) one deeply entrenched in patriarchy, and our favorite male philosophers while beautifully breaking the boundaries of tradition, often excruciatingly chose a continued tradition of patriarchy when it came to their revolutionary sisters. It was not liberté, egalité, and HUMANITÉ, it was a brotherhood.

Socialists and communists had a similar choice throughout the nineteenth century. In fact many of these radical thinkers believed that a socialist society could only be fully formed with the help of and inclusion of women (like Saint-Simon).

Stories of women and children protesting in front of cannons, as the regular army came to take the munitions from the National Guarde, bought time for the Paris Commune and forced the regular army back out of the city. Women helped to defend their districts as Paris and their Commune help to the regulars. These were working women, mothers, unable to feed their children from the salary they earned. These were women born during the Enlightenment.

The Pétroleuses were the women, about whom fathers warned their sons. Breaking out of their domestic and private spheres (if at all these women ever existed in a domestic or private sphere), these women were "unnatural" and "barbaric". The implication was that when women are unnatural and wild, society itself will be destroyed by their barbaric ways.

While the pétroleuse didn't exist, the ideals of the pétroleuse lives on in women across time, as they ask to be treated with the respect and equality that ALL people of ALL kinds deserve in an enlightened and democratic society.