As Susan McClary wrote in her still-controversial book on Bizet’s still-controversial opera, ‘Carmen was always about politics’.Footnote ¹ Indeed, political tensions arguably informed the work’s contested premiere in 1875. Although scholars disagree over the extent to which the first run of Carmen deserves its status as a legendary failure – if nothing else, it survived forty-eight performances – there were certainly a number of exceptionally hostile reviews.Footnote ² Many theories have been put forward to explain this hostility, but at least one of them has not been investigated in sufficient depth: that the opera recalled the spectre of the Paris Commune of 1871, the brief but momentous workers’ uprising that culminated in the destruction of large parts of the city, and the death – at the hands of Republican forces – of several thousand Communards.Footnote ³

Carmen can be productively seen as a work that intersects with the Commune on a number of levels, not least through the provocative qualities of its famous protagonist.Footnote ⁴ Women had played a particularly active role in the uprising, from speaking out on feminist issues to manning the barricades. Depicted as vulgar, cigarette-smoking, absinthe-drinking viragos, they were further maligned by accusations that they had set fire to the city – the mythic pétroleuses.Footnote ⁵ These female incendiaries became one of the dominant symbols of the Commune, held up to exemplify the evils of the revolt, and the extent to which the foundations of society had been undermined. Factory-working, liberty-loving Carmen, even at first sight – and sound – manifested many of these Communarde traits: her Habanera thus offers a starting point for exploring the relationship between the opera and its post-Commune context.

Throughout the 1870s, government policy was to act as though the Commune had never happened; works for the theatre were prohibited from including overt references to the Commune, and anything deemed an allusion to it – scenes of massacres, revolts, fires, or trials – was censored.Footnote ⁶ Despite these efforts, however, there were constant reminders, not least in the city’s transformed topography: the Tuileries Palace, for example, remained a ghostly ruin for over a decade; until it was finally pulled down in 1882, it acted both as a commemoration of the Commune’s crimes and as a warning against further revolutionary activity.Footnote ⁷ In addition to the physical sites of memory, the ghosts of the Commune were regularly stirred by arrests, deportations and executions, with over 32,000 suspected Communards prosecuted between 1871 and 1874.Footnote ⁸ During this period dominated by the tension between censorship of the uprising and its ineluctable absent presence, it is not surprising that Carmen, and the work’s critics, made only implicit references to the themes, stereotypes and symbols of the Commune.Footnote ⁹ In other words, Carmen became a covert lieu de mémoire: a site founded in the recent traumatic experience of the opera’s authors and audiences, and the shared codes that invoked the Commune at a time when explicit reference to it was actively avoided.Footnote ¹⁰ Many of these codes are evident in Carmen’s entrance aria, and its mise en scène.

As Act I unfurls, the stage fills with swarms of soldiers and female factory workers, neither group neutral in the wake of a people’s revolution quashed by military force, in a city operating under martial law. Even before Carmen enters, then, the scene is set for a revolutionary reading. Moreover, these are not just any workers, but cigarette – factory workers – and smokers. Smoking at this time was deemed a masculine pursuit; that Communarde women were commonly depicted with cigarettes had contributed to the image of them as flouting traditional gender roles, thus threatening the stability of society.Footnote ¹¹ The setting into which our heroine is launched thus introduces the first of several transgressive behaviours that she shares with her Communarde predecessors; the others, gradually revealed, include a penchant for violence and an aptitude for brigandry.

When Carmen at last appears, she does so sporting a short red skirt, a far from innocuous detail. The prominence of this colour in the opera has been seen as a symbol of eroticism, Spain, blood and fire.Footnote ¹² But it is also the colour of revolution: in addition to the red flags they displayed throughout the city, Communardes had identified themselves by wearing red sashes or scarves.Footnote ¹³ Carmen’s costume of choice thus adds to the already thickly layered imagery, embodied in, and transcended by, the Habanera.

This aria famously originated in Yradier’s ‘El Arreglito’.Footnote ¹⁴ McClary suggests that Bizet first heard the song in a Parisian cabaret,Footnote ¹⁵ and that the Habanera was hence tainted with the mark of the ‘houses of ill-fame’ that Bizet frequented.Footnote ¹⁶ While not denying this possibility, recent scholarship has put McClary’s claims in doubt.Footnote ¹⁷ If the music does not necessarily have clear links to the lower-class world of the cabarets, however, the libretto does hint at such a connection, not least through the rich resonance of ‘L’amour est enfant de Bohème’, a line Bizet penned himself, and repeats insistently: it is heard eight times, including a final iteration as Carmen escapes to freedom at the close of Act I. The crucial word here is ‘Bohème’: as McClary observes, ‘the label “bohemian” … could refer to the gypsies or to the underclass subculture that became a breeding ground for both avant-garde artists and political unrest’.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, Jerrold Seigel has noted the ties between the Commune and bohemian café life, which nurtured a number of the luminaries of the revolution:Footnote ¹⁹ in its depiction of Lillas Pastia’s tavern as a ‘regular meeting-place for all the smugglers of the province’, the second act of Carmen emulated this close offstage association between cafés, crime and political activism.Footnote ²⁰

While foreshadowing the setting of Act II, the evocation of bohemia in the Habanera also points to a deeper conflict that lies at the heart of the opera. As suggested earlier, Bizet has often been portrayed as a bohemian artist, prizing personal liberty, which, Curtiss claims, translated into the ‘motivating passion for liberty’ that ‘Bizet contributed to the characterisation of Carmen’.Footnote ²¹ But Bizet was also a bourgeois Republican who condemned the Commune, describing the insurgents as a ‘band of incendiaries, of brigands, of cannibals’.Footnote ²² Bizet’s letters hint at the tensions inherent in his political and personal perspectives, making clear both his horror at the revolutionary activity, and his fear of reactionary reprisals.Footnote ²³ Such ambivalence was widespread, with many anti-Communards finding it hard to come to terms with the brutal way in which the uprising had been repressed.Footnote ²⁴ As the tale of a bourgeois soldier tempted by utopian promises of freedom and liberty that the bohemian life can offer, Carmen can be read as an attempt to reconcile conflicting feelings of hostility and sympathy towards the Commune, its participants, and ideals.

The Habanera itself offers a particular set of these temptations in its emphasis on sexual autonomy, perhaps a reflection of Bizet’s own struggle between his marital responsibilities, and his desire to escape the strictures of that relationship.Footnote ²⁵ But this desire for personal freedom also recalls the Communardes’ campaigns to replace marriage – seen as enslaving – with free unions.Footnote ²⁶ Bernard Noël has noted that the extraordinary female support for the Commune should be seen as a sign of ‘the hope for a radical change in the female situation where love, liberty and daily life would from now on be inseparable’.Footnote ²⁷ The Habanera, in its perception of love as above the law (‘il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi’), is the perfect Communarde love song.

Such notions of free love were, however, commonly linked by the bourgeoisie with prostitution. A perceived association with this social transgression, alongside the Communardes’ violent and criminal actions, contributed to their image – and later Carmen’s – as savage and lawless. But, as her polar opposite Micaëla asserts, Carmen is not only dangerous but also beautiful,Footnote ²⁸ a duality reflected in the seductive strains of the Habanera, with its exotic chromaticism and hip-swinging rhythms.Footnote ²⁹ It was partly just such an inflammatory mix of violence and sexual allure that had made the women of the Commune so feared; frightened conservatives dealt with this fear by meting out punishments as severe as that which Don José carries out on his errant beloved.Footnote ³⁰ As their own form of retribution for the power that Communarde women held over them, anti-Communard authors drew on a pool of pre-existing misogynist writing to describe them:Footnote ³¹ many of Carmen’s first reviewers reverted to the same Communarde lexicon, repeatedly describing the central character not only as a prostitute,Footnote ³² but also as an animal,Footnote ³³ a scabrous viragoFootnote ³⁴ and a demon.Footnote ³⁵

To a greater extent than any other opera of its time, Carmen has been trapped in what we might call the economy of its representation. Routinely painted in broad brushstrokes of primary colours, the reception and performance of Carmen over the last century have been repeatedly drenched in issues of gender, but rarely in issues of history. In particular, the swish of Carmen’s red skirt has obscured the opera’s complex relationship to then recent political upheavals. One reason for this lies in the widespread view of the 1871 uprising as an end-point to the French Revolutionary era; unlike the events of 1789, or 1830 or 1848, the Commune was not a catalyst for a new, long-term political regime.Footnote ³⁶ However, like most Revolutions, the Paris Commune left a deep scar, inflamed by the frequent official attempts to write it out of history. Locating Bizet’s Habanera in this still-controversial historical context offers a way to begin liberating Carmen from all too common reductive interpretations, historicising the gender and class issues that remain so dominant and so constricting.