¹ McClary, Susan, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge, 1992), 124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² See Wright, Lesley, ‘Introduction’, Georges Bizet: Carmen, Dossier de presse parisienne (1875) (Weinsberg, 2001), i–x Google Scholar.

³ On the history of the Paris Commune, see Tombs, Robert, The War Against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁴ The Commune does have occasional cameos in the secondary literature on Carmen, usually in biographies of Bizet. Examples of more substantive engagement with the uprising include: Gould, Evlyn, The Fate of Carmen (Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar; Rifkin, Adrian, ‘Carmenology’, New Formations 5 (1988), 91–107 Google Scholar; and Cardoze, Michel, Georges Bizet (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar. McClary, too, suggests that ‘the class tensions in Carmen were possibly perceived by the original audiences in terms of the Commune’, and that none of the violence, treachery, smuggling and prostitution, would ‘have seemed coincidental in 1875, a scant four years after the trauma of the Commune’; McClary, Carmen, 124, 35. But these are no more than passing references, slipped in alongside feminism, race and Orientalism, as one of many filters through which the opera should be understood.

⁵ See Gullickson, Gay L., Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, 1996), 159–190 Google Scholar.

⁶ Parrain, Josette, ‘Censure, théâtre et Commune 1871–1914’, Le Mouvement social 79 (1972), 331 Google Scholar. In addition to theatrical censorship, all images of the Commune considered to be of danger to public order were forbidden: in 1875, 225 illustrations were banned by the censors; see Wilson, Colette, Paris and the Commune 1871–1878: The Politics of Forgetting (Manchester, 2007), 37 Google Scholar.

⁷ Amid the ruins of the city, new symbolic structures also emerged. On 16 June 1875, the founding stone of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur was placed on the Butte Montmartre: the Basilica’s location at the site of the Commune’s birth meant that it would act as a prominent reminder of the uprising; see Burton, Richard D. E., Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 (Ithaca, 2001), 174–191 Google Scholar.

⁸ See Sánchez, Gonzalo J., Organizing Independence: The Artists Federation of the Paris Commune and Its Legacy, 1871–1889 (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 108 Google Scholar.

⁹ I have found only one direct reference to the Commune in contemporary reviews of Carmen, though it is not aimed at the opera itself; rather, Wagner’s music is described as ‘la musique Communarde’; Léon Escudier, ‘Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique’, L’Art musical (11 March 1875). Wagner was seen as attacking musical traditions in the way the Communards had attacked the monuments and social values of the Second Empire.

¹⁰ Bizet and one of Carmen’s two librettists, Ludovic Halévy, both left detailed commentaries on their experiences of the Commune. See Bizet, , Lettres de Georges Bizet: Impressions de Rome (1857–1860); La Commune (1871), préface de Louis Ganderax (Paris, 1907)Google Scholar; and Halévy, , Notes and Remembrances, 1871–1872, trans. Roger L. Williams (Newark, DE, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹¹ See, for example, Bertall’s portrayals of Communardes in ‘Les Types de la Commune’, reproduced in L’Album du Figaro (Paris, 1875), unpaginated. For more on Carmen and smoking, see Hutcheon, Linda and Hutcheon, Michael, ‘Smoking in Opera’, in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London, 2004), 230–235 Google Scholar; Maingueneau, Dominique, Carmen: Les racines d’un mythe (Paris, 1984), 95–105 Google Scholar; Klein, Richard, Cigarettes are Sublime (Durham, NC, 1993), 105–134 Google Scholar; and Lacombe, Hervé and Rodriguez, Christine, La Habanera de Carmen: Naissance d’un tube (Paris, 2014), 35–45 Google Scholar.

¹² See Maingueneau, Carmen, 50.

¹³ See Eichner, Carolyn J., Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington, 2004), 116 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See Locke, Ralph, ‘Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen: Unexplored Borrowings and Transformations’, in Music, Theater and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago, 2009), 354–355 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ McClary has made this claim on several occasions, at first speculatively: ‘We do not know how Bizet came to know this song … but Yradier’s music appeared on programs in the café-concerts in which Céleste Mogador performed. “El Arreglito” thus brings with it associations not with art music, but with the popular music of the Parisian cabarets’ (McClary, Carmen, 52). Over twenty years later, speculation has become ‘fact’: Bizet’s ‘addiction to slumming … drew him on a regular basis … to the cabarets where he first heard Sébastián Yradier’s Afro-Cuban song “El Arreglito”’; McClary, , ‘ Carmen as Perennial Fusion: From Habanera to Hip-Hop’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, eds. Chris Perriam and Ann Davis (Amsterdam, 2005), 205 Google Scholar.

¹⁶ McClary, Carmen, 52.

¹⁷ Elizabeth Kertesz and Michael Christoforidis have noted that the habanera, as a genre, ‘was popularised in the court of Napoleon III and his Spanish wife, and in the leading salons of Paris’; furthermore, many of the Parisian editions of Yradier’s work named singers who performed his music, including opera stars Maria Malibran, Pauline Viardot and Adelina Patti; see Christoforidis, Kertesz and, ‘Confronting Carmen beyond the Pyrenees: Bizet’s Opera in Madrid, 1887–1888’, Cambridge Opera Journal 20 (2008), 102 Google Scholar. A similar point is made by Locke, ‘Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen’, 354.

¹⁸ McClary, Carmen, 34.

¹⁹ Seigel, Jerrold, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore, MD, 1999), 183 Google Scholar.

²⁰ Zuniga to Lillas Pastia, dialogue, Act II, scene 1; Bizet, , Carmen, ed. Richard Langham Smith, trans. David Parry (London, 2013), 136 Google Scholar.

²¹ Curtiss, Mina, Bizet and His World (London, 1959), 407 Google Scholar.

²² Bizet, letter to Léonie Halévy, 27 May 1871; quoted and translated in Curtiss, Bizet and His World, 291.

²³ See Curtiss, Bizet and His World, 281 and 284.

²⁴ See Boime, Albert, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris After War and Revolution (Princeton, 1995), 13 Google Scholar.

²⁵ See Curtiss, Bizet and his World, 407.

²⁶ See Gullickson, Unruly Women, 111–13.

²⁷ ‘il témoigne de l’espoir d’un changement radical de la situation féminine où amour, liberté et vie quotidienne seraient désormais inséparables’; Noël, Bernard, ‘Amour’, Dictionnaire de la Commune (Paris, 2003), 41–42 Google Scholar.

²⁸ ‘Elle est dangereuse … elle est belle!…’, from Micaëla’s Act III aria, ‘Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante’.

²⁹ Karen Henson has noted that critics in 1875 ‘repeatedly refer, in their descriptions of the Habanera and of [Célestine] Galli-Marié [the first Carmen] in general, to the singer’s hips and to the movements of her lower body’; see Henson, , Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2015), 85 Google Scholar.

³⁰ Gullickson, Unruly Women, 183–90.

³¹ See Lidsky, Paul, Les écrivains contre la Commune (Paris, 1999), 112–115 Google Scholar.

³² ‘la véritable prostituée de la bourbe et du carrefour’; M. de Thémines [Achille de Lauzières], ‘Revue Musicale’, La Patrie (8 March 1875) in Wright, Carmen, 55.

³³ ‘cette figure diabolique, toute instinctive, presque animale, moitié bacchante et moitié panthère’; Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘Revue dramatique et littéraire’, Moniteur universel (8 March 1875) in Wright, Carmen, 46. Carmen’s librettists, as well as Mérimée himself, had employed similarly bestial imagery to characterise their heroine.

³⁴ ‘cette virago à la toilette sale et aux chants obscènes’; Bernard, Paul, ‘Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique’, Revue et gazette musicale (7 March 1875) in Wright, Carmen, 25 Google Scholar.

³⁵ ‘Comme contraste à ce démon [Carmen], les auteurs ont imaginé de produire un ange’; de Lagenevais, F., ‘Revue Musicale’, Revue des deux mondes 8 (15 March 1875), 479 Google Scholar.

³⁶ See Furet, François, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.