Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense

Chronicling the Commune’s returns across a surprisingly vast and visually striking archive of periodical poems and illustrations, panoramic spectacles, children’s adventure fiction, popular and canonical novels, political pamphlets, avant-garde theater productions, and radical pulp, this book argues that the Commune became, for writers and readers across virtually all classes and political persuasions, a critical locus for re-occupying both radical and mainstream memory of revolution and empire, a key site for negotiating post-bellum gender trouble and regional reconciliation, and a vital terrain for rethinking Paris—and what it meant to be an American there—in U.S. fiction and culture. For Americans felt Paris to be curiously their own long before the Moderns made it their hometown. This introductory chapter explores the key words at the heart of the book, and offers a taste of its material terrain. It concludes with an overview of its subsequent chapters.

Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction

This chapter charts the reconfiguration of the Commune’s domestic threat in American popular fiction in the 1890s. I show how America’s fin-de-siècle preoccupation with the revolution of 1871 consistently reframes Paris as a frontier of empire even as it critically reimagines it as a site where American tourists—or, more specifically, Gilded Age American men—might be said to “find” themselves. Setting Edward King’s 1895 boys’ book, Under the Red Flag, alongside G. A. Henty’s A Woman of the Commune, and two other immensely popular but virtually forgotten historical romances of the period, The Red Republic and An American in Paris, I argue that the 1890s were a particularly apt time to revisit the Commune because of the very real labor unrest plaguing the country, and more importantly because the “romance of the Commune” served to revise American conceptions of revolution at a moment when the U.S. was reimagining its role abroad and reevaluating its attitude towards empire.

Barricades Revisited – the Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS

This epilogue examines the Commune’s re-ignition in the 1960s. Returning to Endore’s likening of the uprising to a “free-for-all,” I argue that this conjuration—lacking the top down organization of a party, prone to spring up anywhere unannounced—would survive the reign of McCarthy and the crackdown that did so much to dissipate radical memory and, with it, 1871’s resonance in the U.S. I show how the story of the Commune that would survive the 1950s offered future radicals not so much a program as a promise—a memory of a revolutionary future that might be “vomited up” at any moment. I anchor my discussion in two pivotal eruptions of the Commune on campus: Mario Savio’s invocations of it during the Free Speech Movement demonstrations at UC Berkeley as a model of campus activism and taking “only what is ours,” and its more literal restaging five years later as student protestors at Columbia University turned to 1871 to make sense of their own cultural moment, dubbing themselves “Communards” as they reoccupied this once again vital and viral revolutionary past.

Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s

This concluding chapter turns from James’s multivalent spatial memory to a series of radical texts that unearth precisely that “other” Paris for the Popular Front by exploring Guy Endore’s 1933 bestseller, The Werewolf of Paris, a novel whose unlikely return to the Commune interrupts both its ostensible horror plot and its initial setting in 1920s Expat Paris. Reading Endore’s retelling of the Commune alongside both contemporary worker theater productions and agitprop that drew on the conventions of pulp fiction to reclaim 1871 for the American Left, I recover the way that radical pulp and radical theater in this period used the medium of horror to radically transform historical fiction and conventional histories of the Commune. Redeploying the sensational tropes so often mobilized in mainstream American narratives of the Commune so as to restage the horror of the Commune as its suppression rather than its existence, these texts escape the cul-de-sac of trauma by espousing what I term an “insurgent” rather than simply melancholic fixity on the past, refashioning the space of the Commune in Marxist thought and U.S. memory.

Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism

This chapter uncovers the spectacular afterlife of the Commune as the cornerstone of radical internationalism as a lived practice in the postbellum moment. Tracing the ways annual festivals and celebrations of the Commune, complete with oratory, tableaux-vivants, and dancing, united an array of American radicals, I show how these performances of memory drew on the audacious internationalism of the Commune uprising to create both a counter-calendar and a counter-memory of the Commune’s failure. Reading Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman’s writings on the Commune alongside and against both this cycle of leftist remembrance and the cycle of anxious reprinting these festivals received in mainstream U.S. newspapers makes, I argue, the remarkably vibrant and radically internationalist cultures of leftist memory in the long nineteenth century at once more visible and more audible, allowing us to hear beyond the limits of print as an archive of radical memory and lived feeling.

Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James’s Paris

This chapter moves from sights of Paris as a revolutionary underground to sites of Paris in ruin, from unexpected forms of imperial adventure or subterranean possibility to uncanny forms of affective possession. While The American Scene has been the privileged site to examine Henry James’s fascination with—and affective responses to—lost landmarks and newly minted ruins, I excavate the sights of and detours around the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his writings and contemporary periodical culture. Situating James’s attention to charred landscape and vanished tourist sights alongside their ongoing returns in U.S. print and visual culture, I suggest, crucially reconfigures James’s transformative and uncannily embodied “historic sense” even as it recovers the post-Commune ruinscape that came to function as an unexpectedly charged site of transnational memory in U.S. literary, visual and performance culture.

Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic

Both during the 1871 uprising and in the wake of the Commune’s fall, Americans encountered unsettling images of female Communards marching across the pages of illustrated periodicals. In turn, a variety of American sermons and editorials railed against the revolution and claimed its “overly emancipated” females might pose the most terrifying transatlantic threat of all. My opening chapter, “Framing the Pètroleuse,” recovers the drama of that postbellum gender panic and resituates post-bellum U.S. periodical poetry written in response to it. Reading Sarah M. B. Piatt’s 1872 periodical poem, “The Palace-Burner,” alongside both Harper’s Weekly’s pictorial coverage of the Commune and the subversive sentimentality of other post-bellum poetic returns to the fiery “Women of the Commune,” I argue that Piatt’s reworking of the figure of the Parisian petroleum-thrower relies on and resists the ways the so-called “man-women” of the Commune were pictured in the U.S. press. For in bringing the pétroleuse “into the parlor,” Piatt crucially re-imagines both the fiery Communardes and the specter of domestic firebrands they were so often used to portend.