Becoming an American in Paris: the Romance of the Commune in the 1890s

In the late 1990s, prestonspeed publications began reissuing the adventure fiction of popular fin-de-siècle British boys' writer G. A. Henty for an American homeschooling audience. Several more small presses followed suit, and soon the "smashing success" of Henty's sales in the homeschooling market began to garner attention in such prominent publications as The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times even as the books themselves became the centerpiece of the popular "Robinson Curriculum" for homeschoolers (Oppenheimer). ¹ This resurgence of Henty mania in America was itself marketed as and fueled by an investment in déjà vu: publishers like Robinson Books and Lost Classics take pains to remind parents that these boys' books were wildly popular with U.S. readers at the turn of the twentieth century, while Evangelical ministry websites like Vision Forum, as if taking a page from Theodore Roosevelt, aim to "rebuild a culture of courageous boyhood" through, among other things, the reading of Henty ("All-American"). ²

But Henty's appeal for U.S. homeschoolers also has its roots in the successful packaging of his formulaic historical fictions as history; indeed, as one publisher puts it, they altogether "alleviate the need for [history] textbooks"—a claim that itself rehashes Henty's own turn-of-the-century marketing schemes (Cothran). ³ Although much critical work remains to be done on Henty's renewed purchase for American boys, the case of cultural déjà vu surrounding his fictions runs still deeper, for as a rising generation of homeschoolers turn to Henty to learn about history, we seem to be revisiting many of the debates about democracy and revolution, manliness and empire, that originally framed the popularity of—and often were explicitly enacted within—the genre of historical romance and boys' adventure fiction in the U.S. in the 1890s. ⁴

In the following essay, I read Henty's recently reissued but altogether critically overlooked 1895 title, A Woman of the Commune, alongside several now forgotten American bestsellers of the period, Edward King's boys' book, Under the Red Flag: Or, the Adventures of Two American Boys During the Paris Commune (1895), Robert W. Chambers' The Red Republic: A Romance of the Commune (1895), and Eugene Savidge's The American in Paris: The Siege and Commune of Paris from an American Stand-point (1896). My interest in Henty's boys' book is, then, not simply that it garnered a significant fin-de-siècle American audience, and is increasingly popular today. Instead, I will focus on the way in which A Woman of the Commune sheds light on another, little remembered U.S. literary resurgence: namely, the unlikely afterlife of the Paris Commune of 1871 in American fiction of the 1890s. ⁵ For Henty's choice of subjects was far from anomalous. In fact, by tracing the transnational historical context for his work to its origins, we find an array of popular adventure fiction revisiting precisely the same scene. Indeed, although now virtually forgotten, the U.S. literary resurgence of interest in the Commune was one of particular intensity, prompting one Literary World reviewer to lament, in 1896, "we have had the Commune from the perspective of the novelist ad nauseum" even as America's appetite for yet another "story of the Commune" continued unabated ("History" 84). In what follows, Henty's boys' book serves as a crucial counterpoint to the romance of revolution that American fictions of the Commune packaged for U.S. readers because it dispels its own fears about the Commune by embodying them within an American who "falls" for the Commune in precisely the manner that the American romances render altogether invisible or impossible, even as it showcases a strikingly similar imperial template for re-emplotting Paris.

Replotting the Romance of Paris

Thomas Gold Appleton famously suggested in the 1850s that "good Americans, when they die, go to Paris" (qtd. in Holmes 128). But by the turn of the twentieth century, it was already a commonplace that most Americans needn't die to go...