Archive for Commune de Paris
Écoles laïques [150 years ago]
Posted in Statistics with tags 150th anniversary, 1870 Franco-Prussian war, Commune de Paris, free education, French history, Paris, Paris siege, secularism on April 28, 2021 by xi'an
proclamation de la Commune [150 years ago]
Posted in Statistics with tags 150th anniversary, 1870 Franco-Prussian war, Adolphe Thiers, Belleville, Butte Montmartre, Commune de Paris, French history, Garde nationale, Napoléon III, Paris, proclamation, Versailles on March 18, 2021 by xi'an
the nihilist girl [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids with tags Acta Mathematica, book reviews, Commune de Paris, Fiodor Dostoïevski, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Karl Weierstrass, Nigilista, nihilism, partial differential equations, Russian mathematicians, Siberia, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Sweden on October 7, 2017 by xi'an
When stopping by an enticing bookstore on Rue Saint-Jacques, in front of La Sorbonne, last July, I came across a book by the mathematician Sofia Kovaleskaya called the nihilist girl. Having never heard of non-mathematical books written by this Russian mathematician whose poster stood in my high school classroom, I bought it (along with other summer reads). And then discovered that besides being a woman of many “firsts”, from getting a PhD at Heidelberg (under Weirstraß) to getting a professor position in Stockholm, to being nominated to a Chair in the Russian Academy of Sciences, she also took an active part in the Commune de Paris, along with many emigrated Russian revolutionaries (or nihilists). 
Which explains for this book about a nihilist girl leaving everything to follow a revolutionary deported to Siberia. While not autobiographical (Sweden is not Siberia!), the novel contains many aspects inspired from the (amazing if desperately short) life of Sofia Kovaleskaya herself. A most interesting coincidence is that Sofia’s sister, Anna, was engaged for a while to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novel The Demons takes the opposite view on nihilists. (As a feminist and anarchist, Anna took a significant part in the Commune de Paris, to the point of having to flee to Switzerland to escape deportation to New Caledonia, while her husband was sentenced to death.) The book itself is not particularly enjoyable, as being quite naïve in its plot and construction. It is nonetheless a great testimony of the situation of Russia in the 19th Century and of the move of the upper-class liberals towards revolutionary ideals, while the exploited peasant class they wanted to free showed no inclination to join them. I think Dostoyevsky expresses much more clearly this most ambiguous posturing of the cultivated classes at the time, yearning for more freedom and fairness for all, but fearing the Tsarist police, unable to connect with the peasantry, and above all getting a living from revenues produced by their farmlands.
rehabilitation of the communards
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags 1871, Adolphe Thiers, Bloody Week, Commune de Paris, Paris on December 4, 2016 by xi'an
Today the French National Assembly voted the rehabilitation of all victims of the repression of the Commune de Paris (March 18—May 28, 1871), which saw between 10,000 and 20,000 Parisian men and women summarily executed by troops of the provisional government of Adolphe Thiers during the Bloody Week.
