Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune par John Merriman (review)

Reviews 291 These registers record data from 156 different French Reform churches and are currently housed in Paris in the National Archives, the Library of French Protestantism, and the National Library, as well as in churches, regional archives, and city halls throughout France.A number of registers remain in private hands. Mentzer’s book is divided into two main sections—three “introductory” chapters (“L’organisation et le fonctionnement du consistoire réformé aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” “Archives et registres du consistoire,”and“Historiographie et voies de recherche”), followed by an inventory of manuscripts of consistory registers, which includes the location and contents of registers throughout France.As Mentzer notes, the organization and content of Reform consistory registers is inconsistent. His summary of differences in the content of specific registers will help guide historians to the most appropriate sources for their particular areas of interest. Mentzer’s chapters on the archives and registers, as well as a historiography of scholarship on consistories, include discerning suggestions for future research. In addition to providing valuable information on the functioning of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French Reform churches, many consistory registers include records that offer insights into the lives of women, the illiterate, and others less frequently represented in historical documents. Whereas most of the manuscripts of consistory registers must be consulted where they are housed, a few are currently available in print. It is Mentzer’s hope that in the future, additional registers will be discovered and identified, and that increasing numbers will be accessible in print. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Merriman, John. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune. New York: Basic, 2014. ISBN 978-0-465-02017-1. Pp. 360. $30. The Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871) has been well narrated, even overnarrated . Personal recollections abounded from the moment it began, of which the Goncourt journal is only the most famous. The Commune has recently been the object of excellent historical scholarship and also overtly political experimental filmmaking. Yet Merriman’s book, a chronological account that synthesizes much recent French and Anglophone scholarship, while also highlighting a range of primary sources, is welcome. Massacre could be used in undergraduate classrooms, but will also be an ideal introduction to this decisive episode for interested scholars and other readers. Even specialists are likely to learn from it. The great themes of Merriman’s book are the human fabric of urban life in Paris, with all its unevenness, and the violence of civil war, although he does not ignore major trends of recent scholarship, such as gender, anticlericalism, insurgent political practice, and memory. The prologue sets the scene with special attention to the city’s changing socioeconomic profile and the growing political conflicts of the last years of the Second Empire. Merriman then moves briskly but effectively through the debacle of the war,the grinding siege of Paris,the maneuvering in the immediate wake of the armistice, and the growing distance between Thiers’s government in Versailles and the Paris republicans: “With the uprising of March 18, the periphery had arguably conquered the beaux quartiers”(62). Those excluded from the pleasures of the Second Empire indeed became, at least for a time, masters of their own lives. That social revolution was a powerful motivating idea is clear, although Merriman never allows day-to-day economic issues to fall out of view; nor do the Commune’s carnivalesque elements escape him—the font of the Church of SaintEustache “full of tobacco instead of holy-water” (93). Loyalties were in the end not to a political abstraction but to one’s own neighborhood. As the situation became increasingly grim, Communards returned to defend their homes (158). As Versaillais troops executed prisoners, the neighborhood in which one was captured became a major variable in deciding one’s fate. Many personal recollections from the Bloody Week mention the sound of incessant rifle-volleys and the crackle of the mitrailleuse, which according to one government circular was to be used for executing groups of more than ten (246). Merriman tells the story in large measure by weaving together anecdotes drawn from personal narratives. Well-developed portraits of characters, such as Raoul...