Revolutionary failure and utopia: William Morris and the Paris Commune

What constitutes revolutionary failure, and how, if at all, can the utopian imagination reanimate unfulfilled revolutionary dreams and aspirations? In this essay I aim to demonstrate the inadequacy of commonly accepted accounts of revolutionary ‘success’ and ‘failure’, and to develop an original alternative account of revolution which foregrounds the role of utopian imagination in transmitting deferred or defeated revolutionary hopes from one generation to the next. I do so by means of close examination of selected works of utopian literature, social and political theory and an historical case study of an ostensibly ‘failed’ revolution. More specifically, I focus on the contested historical legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the English artist and socialist activist William Morris's political and literary responses to it. My argument is that Morris's artistically mediated response to the Commune is an exemplary case of how a grounded utopianism inspired and informed by history's ‘failures’ can help to reanimate, albeit not unproblematically, as-yet unfulfilled revolutionary dreams and aspirations.