Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000?
It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism. So for martyrdom’s sake it is better to put the number ‘slaughtered’ at 40,000 rather than 10,000. And historians go to great lengths to adduce statistical evidence in one direction or another.
In the 1960s demographers revealed that the Soviet government stopped publishing its statistics on life expectancy because they were not progressing as fast as in the West.
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