Thanks to Louis for posting this and his review of the film/TV docu-drama series.
In France the Commune was long a taboo subject, one of the largest "repressed memories" of modern Europe (like the Spanish Civil War which could not be discussed in Spain, even after Franco). The Commune was hardly touched upon in school history and no public commemorial sites were authorized. Mostly this was oppression from the right, but for their own reasons the Communist and Socialist Parties were not keen to publicly embrace the Commune. In May 1871, at the end of the Commune thousands of Communard prisoners were shot against the wall of a famous Paris cemetery by the Versailles regimes. Finally, a few years ago, a small plaque was placed at the site. Around the same time, government TV accepted to air the docu-drama Louis has reviewed. But for over 100 years unofficial public memory remained constant - for example in the 1930s at the height of the popular front movement (it was a movement besides being a government) 600,000 people showed up at the wall on the day the prisoners had been shot. Europeans have long memories. I happened to see the first two episodes of the docu-drama on TV in Paris, but missed the rest. It is well worth catching, almost more as a 1960s type experience (but don't expect fancy "production values). Paul
While looking for incriminating evidence of bias on the Paris Commune in the NY Times archives for the year 1871, I came across the occasional exception to the rule, including statements from Karl Marx's First International. The one that really floored me, however, was by Wendell Phillips the erstwhile abolitionist. It starts:
