As we commemorate the #SemaineSanglante - crushing of the Paris Commune 149 years ago this week - today I'm focusing on Victorine Brocher... cantiniere of the Turcos de la Commune, and her action at the Bastille on Weds 24 May....
By 24 May the Communards had been pushed out of the Hotel de Ville and were defending the Bastille/Place de Voges. Victorine's unit took position at 3 Boulevard Beaumarchais (now a pharmacy) with an excellent field of fire over the entire intersection...
Victorine's husband was a regular soldier in an elite unit, which partially went over to the Commune - so not a National Guard battalion. They were called the Turcos de la Commune, and were similar to zouaves... she was technically the cantiniere...
They were shelled and outflanked: Victorian tried to place a red flag on a barricade but in the process several of the unit got killed... so they retreated towards Belleville...
Victorian survived and wrote the memoir Souvenirs d'une mort vivante... which I will come back to on the 26/28th - she ended up in Lausanne and married the anarchist leader Gustave Brocher...
Her original name was Victorine Louise Malenfant. This carte de visite in Northwestern University's collection is labelled "Louise Bonenfant, cantiniere". Side by side with her in later life it looks possible they are the same person. Any face recognition experts out there???
Victorine and Gustave rocked up in London just in time for the famous anarchist conference of 1891, where the census captures them living in Akerman Road, near Kennington, where I live! With a house full of, er, youngish anarchist sounding people and of course a servant...
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Trump's apparent victory has 5 big implications for the UK: 🧵
1️⃣ It can happen here. He will back Farage, the Musk propaganda machine will crank up against Labour; the Tories will remould themselves into Trump-lite Islamophobes ...
2️⃣ The UK needs to become the European leader of NATO, and all European countries need to hike spending on defence and democratic resilience. America is a permanently unreliable ally in this century
3️⃣ Misogyny will enter mainstream politics - and the whole anti-woke cocktail will be normalised by the BBC and alt media - that's proved successful in America. We need to stand up for women's rights across the board
With Harris strengthening in late polls, there are three overnight scenarios: 1/ Harris wins clearly. Trump refuses to concede but is reliant on vexatious claims and lawsuits. Harris declares victory. World community recognises result quickly (btw look at these kids' faces!)...
2/ Harris wins but result relies on one or two states and MAGA begin a mixture of Jan 6, Charlottesville, Brooks Bros riot targeting these states alone. Recounts and lawsuits fly. At this stage Western govts have to seize first opportunity to recognise result or that fuels tension....
3/ Trump scores high enough in the popular vote and a lot of states are genuinely messy. Serious violence from far right, plus Trump's far left shills and Putin proxies weigh in calling it for Trump... 🤞 it's not this!
"We shall have only one class in this country - the working class..." Who said that? The woman in the picture behind @RachelReevesMP as she prepares the first real growth budget for 14 years. 1/ Here's what that means...🧵
2/ Today's budget is about choices. The first choice Labour will make is to promote growth - because the 2008 crisis, Brexit and post-Covid have all suppressed it, and we cannot deliver to working class people without growth...
3/ In the election, I heard people in leafy, Green supporting areas of Bristol come out of £2m houses and say "I cannot support Labour because you are in favour of growth"... so today's pro-worker Budget is a •choice• the Greens could never deliver...
See what's happening here? Putin's sympathisers - far left and far right - are calling Ukraine's justified demand for permission to defend itself "escalation" ... 1/ but it's not just about StormShadows for Ukraine ...
2/ The Western alliance of democratic countries is on the verge of big choices that, once taken, will lead to Russia's defeat. First off - ignoring Putin's claim that permission to strike equals direct war. If true Iran would be at war with Ukraine
3/ But 🇺🇦 doesn't just need permission to strike deep into Russia - it needs Western arms, money, aid and technical help, including targeting. & if RAF Typhoons can shoot down Iranian missiles over Jordan why can't they shoot down Russian ones over Ukraine?
Today's OBR report into the the long-term impacts of climate and ageing on UK debt is typically sobering: to follow neoliberal strictures, we would need 50 years of unremitting austerity...1/ But here's why we don't need to...🧵
2/ The OBR methodology is to project demands on spending against policies in place in March 2024. This always produces dire graphic projections... but there is good news: higher productivity wipes out the debt burden of demographic ageing and climate
3/ The report gives progressive politics some ammunition: (a) the economic costs of climate are higher if we miss the 2 degree target (b) most of the cost is not transition to Net Zero - it's lost revenue from petrol taxes and the damage from extreme events...
Last night's anti-racist demos were a moral victory over fascism - much bigger in their political impact than their local effect 👇... but it's only the start. 1/ The fact remains: hundreds of thousands of English people hate their neighbours badly enough to attack them in riots...
2/ I was at Walthamstow. It was relaxed, peaceful, confident and well policed. But one train-load of "football lads" arriving would have led to disaster because - make no mistake, the targeted communities are ready for self-defence...
3/ So why did things go so well, here and elsewhere? a) Because the "hit-list" was largely ignored by potential rioters: they're not interested in legal premises - they want to attack Mosques and hotels...plus word went out it was a "state provocation"....