The Scarecrow on the Other Side of the Pond: The Paris Commune of 1871 in the Canadian Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It would be hard to imagine two more divergent projects in 19th-century state making than the Dominion of Canada and the Paris Commune. Yet they were products of the same historical moment, and, while the Communards no doubt paid little attention to transatlantic politics, Canadian newspapers viewed the developments in France through the spring of 1871 with some concern. The principles that animated the Parisian revolutionaries were antithetical to the cautious, less democratic precepts of the nation-building process then taking shape in Canada. Not surprisingly, Canadian commentators disliked what they saw, and their discourse about the Commune became part of their efforts to promote a different sense of liberal nationhood in the new dominion. Between 18 March and 28 May 1871, in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, a simultaneously socialist and republican insurrection occurred in Paris that gave rise to a veritable state within the state. Communards had their own elected government and resisted the assaults of the official French government before falling in late May. The last major insurrection of 19th-century France is not just a significant event in left history. It also had an impact across the Atlantic, as the overwhelming majority of Canadian newspapers made use of the Paris events to make sense of the new nation. For despite the lofty pronouncements and ringing bells of 1 July 1867, Canada found itself in a quest for a concrete legitimation of its existence and purpose. Socialism was an ideal scapegoat, as it allowed both Francophones research note / note de recherche
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".