Heather Cox Richardson | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Heather Cox Richardson | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune. By Philip M. Katz. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xii, 274 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-32348-3.)

In From Appomattox to Montmartre, Philip M. Katz contends that Americans used the Paris Commune to explore the post–Civil War identity of the United States. From March through May 1871, Parisians opposed to France's new government seized their city. Thanks to the rush of news through the new Atlantic telegraph cable, Americans watched as the Commune rose in haste, ruled in confusion, and ended in terror. Americans, Katz argues, first used their own Civil War as a model to understand the Commune as an expression of popular government, then gradually came to see the French event as a harbinger of impending class warfare. Katz's idea—that American interpretations of the Commune reflected confusion about the nation's postwar international role—is exciting. Was the postwar nation the great beacon of hope for the world that optimists thought, or was it just like the rest of the world, prone to poverty, class hierarchy, and labor unrest? Americans, Katz plausibly argues, used the Commune to test American exceptionalism. . . .

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