In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common.
So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture.That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary, what were the models for these images?
Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune.
In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and army out of the city, and then declared a socialist-style government, referred to as the Commune. After taking back several Paris neighborhoods throughout April and May, the French army began their final attack on the remaining Commune-controlled areas. There were vicious street battles, and fires broke out and burned much of the city.
According to the French press, female radicals, dubbed pétroleuses, had supposedly started many of these fires, using petroleum-filled vessels, sort of like Molotov cocktails. While historians have not found any evidence that pétroleuses actually existed, the contemporary press nonetheless depicted these women as the source of the fires that ravaged the city.
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