"The scene is the same: the evening meeting in the Vaux-Hall ballroom at Château-d’eau [in 1869]. By then Parisians had already taken possession of their right to gather and associate and had been meeting together for a few months. In the first reunions veterans of 1848, old and experienced orators, met together with young workers from the Paris section of the International Workers’ Association and with refugees from London, Brussels, and Geneva. Those who spoke did so “with decorum, tact, often with some talent, and showed real knowledge of the questions they addressed.” The topic, for several weeks, had been women’s labor and ways of getting their salaries increased. Two months of such meetings had ensued: they were orderly, statistical exposés on women’s salaries to which the press paid little attention and to which the government sometimes forgot to send its police spies. But one evening in the autumn a certain Louis Alfred Briosne, forty-six years old and a feuillagiste (artificial flower and leaf maker) by trade, took the podium amidst an atmosphere of fairly generalized boredom. Neither his less-than-average stature nor the fact that his body was ridden with the tuberculosis he would soon thereafter succumb to, prevented him from dropping a bomb into the room:
There arrived at the dais a short man leaning on the podium, as several people observed, as though he were about to swim out into the audience.
Up until then, orators had begun to speak with the sacramental formula: “Mesdames et Messieurs…” This speaker, in a clear and sufficiently vibrant voice cried out an appellation that had been deeply forgotten for a quarter century: “Citoyennes et citoyens!”
The room erupted in applause. The man who had been welcomed in this fashion did not, perhaps, go on to say anything more interesting than any of the others had— what does it matter? By throwing out his “citoyens,” he had evoked—whether purposely or not, who knows?—a whole world of memories and hopes. Each person present gave a start, shivered … the effect was immense and its reverberation spread outdoors.
Communard Gustave Lefrançais, whose account this is, links the resonance of the words immediately to their last moment of common usage a quarter of a century earlier—sacred words of the revolutionary vocabulary widespread in 1789 and again in 1848. “Citoyens” was among the appellations that date back to 1789 and that were kept alive thanks to secret societies and revolutionary traditions—“patriots,” another such word, had, for example, gone out of fashion with young socialists and was nowhere to be found in 1871. But the particular force of its use by Briosne in the Vaux-Hall meeting has less to do with a hearkening back to the past than it does with the way that “citoyen,” in this instance, does not connote membership in a national body but rather a cleavage therein, a social gap or division affirmed in the heart of the national citizenry, a separation of the citoyen from what at that precise moment becomes its antonym, the now ghostly departed mesdames and messieurs—the bourgeoisie, les honnêtes gens.
And “connote” is the wrong word to use, for the words perform a forcible inscription of social division, an active, self-authorizing assertion of disidentification —from the state, from the nation, from all of the customs and phatic politesses that make up middle-class French society. The words citoyen, citoyenne no longer indicate national belonging—they are addressed to people who have separated themselves from the national collectivity. And because the words are an interpellation, a direct second-person address, they create that gap or division in a now, in the contemporary moment constituted by the speech act; they create a new temporality in the present and, essentially, an agenda—something that all the speeches presenting well-meaning statistical data about women’s labor could not have begun to create. They allow an understanding of the present, in its unfolding, as historical, as changing.
Paradoxically, perhaps, in this instance, it is the unspoken words “Mesdames, messieurs” which, when they are spoken and repeated, create the space/time of the nation and not citoyen. For the repetitive temporality created by the “sacramental formula” “Mesdames, messieurs” is the saturated time of the nation—a spatialized time, in fact, in keeping with Ernst Bloch’s observation that there is no time in national history, only space. “Thus, nationhood,” he writes, “drives time, indeed history out of history: it is space and organic fare, nothing else; it is that ‘true collective’ whose underground elements are supposed to swallow the uncomfortable class struggle of the present…” The name “citoyen,” on the other hand, may well be old and originate in another moment of the political past, but its iteration in this instance creates the now of a shared political subjectivization, “the uncomfortable class struggle of the present.” It interpellates listeners to be part of that present. Citoyen, citoyenne summons, then, a subject predicated on any number of disidentifications—from the state, the Empire, the police, and the world of the so-called “honnêtes gens.” The words are not addressed to the French national citizen. They conjure up an ideal of la femme libre, l’homme libre, a non-nationally circumscribed being, and are addressed to and responded to by such listeners accordingly."
- Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London & New York: Verso, 2016), 28-32
