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“Lessons from Paris”: The American Clergy Responds to the Paris Commune

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Philip M. Katz
Affiliation:
lecturer in the history department at Princeton University, Princeton,New Jersey.

Extract

Throughout the nation's history, Americans have used foreign events as a screen upon which to project their own domestic hopes and fears. European revolutions in particular have become the occasion for airing homespun anxieties about social (and religious) upheaval. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Red Scare of 1920 are simply the most prominent examples of how revolutions abroad can stir the fears of American conservatives. According to some historians, the American reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871 was just as swift and negative as the reaction to the French and Russian Revolutions. An examination of clerical response to the Commune, however, suggests a very different picture: that of a community of public spokesmen trying to make sense of a foreign upheaval for their American audience while offering hope that similar events were avoidable on this side of the Atlantic.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1994

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References

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2. Works that stress the reactionary side of the American response to the Commune include: Samuel Bernstein, “The American Press Views the Commune,” in his Essays in Political and Intellectual History (New York, 1955), pp. 169183;Google ScholarCherry, George L., “American Metropolitan Press Reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871,” Mid-America 32 (1950): 312;Google ScholarGargan, Edward T., “The American Conservative Response,” in Rougerie, Jacques, ed., 1871: Jalons pour une histoire de la Commune de Paris (Assen, The Netherlands, 1972), pp. 240249;Google ScholarHeale, M. J., American Anticommunism: Combating The Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 2130;Google ScholarLandy, A., “La Commune et les intellectuels américains,” Europe 70 (1951): 111126;Google Scholarand Recht, Jean-Jacques, “La Commune de Paris et les Etats-Unis,” La Penséeno. 164 (1972): 99120.Google Scholar

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21. New York World, 23 May 1871. Msgr. Georges Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, was executed by a Commune firing-squad on 24 May 1871.Google Scholar

22. Christian Union, 24 May 1871, p. 329. Various parts of Thompson's sermon were published in the New York Times, 29 May 1871 (from which he is quoted); New York World, 29 May 1871; and The [New York] Independent, 1 June 1871.Google ScholarA few years later, Thompson, added to his argument that “The Paris commune did not represent the true democracy of France” (“The Drift of Europe, Christian and Social” [1878], in his American Comments on European Questions, International and Religious [Boston, 1884], p. 19).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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27. Ibid. Curiously enough, this article was published next to a large portrait of Karl Marx, the subject of another article on the same page.

28. According to one snide observer, public supporters of American labor and the Commune all tended to be “ex-clergymen” (The Independent, 18 May 1871). Yet active clergy were also among those ranks; for example, see the New York World, 5 June 1871,Google Scholarand Dombrowski, James, The Early Years of Christian Socialism in America (New York, 1936), pp. 7778.Google Scholar

29. I have found the following works particularly useful in thinking about the missionary impulse as a response to the reinforcing fears of blacks, Indians, and workingmen as sources of unrest in the postbellum period: Davis, Lawrence B., Immigrants, Baptists, and the Protestant Mind in America (Urbana, Ill., 1973);Google ScholarMardock, Robert W., The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia, Mo., 1971);Google ScholarPrucha, Francis P., American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman, Okla., 1976);Google ScholarSlotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

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31. Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (1872; enlarged 3rd ed., New York, 1880), p. 97.Google ScholarHere I am largely following Slotkin, Fatal Environment, pp. 310–311, who quotes the same passage.Google Scholar

32. Brace, Dangerous Classes, pp. 29–30 (quotes), 25–26, 130–131; “The Nether Classes,” The Nation, 10 October 1872, pp. 237–238; Cleveland Leader, 15 November 1871; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, p. 310.Google Scholar

33. Clark, Clifford E., Jr., Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (Urbana, 111., 1978), p. 197.Google ScholarBeecher was the scion of a particularly distinguished American family: his sisters were the feminist Catherine Beecher and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his father and brothers were all prominent churchmen. His popularity sprang less from his family ties, however, than from his ability to articulate middle-class hopes and fears and to epitomize the middle-class “respectability” of the age. For that very reason, his moral influence, though not his fame, severely declined after the scandalous Beecher-Tilton adultery trial of the mid-1870s;Google Scholarsee Waller, Altina L., Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst, Mass., 1982).Google Scholar

34. Clifford, Henry Ward Beecher, p. 190; see also Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton, pp. 12–37.Google Scholar

35. The sermon was reported in many newspapers, but the text as quoted is from Beecher, Henry Ward, The Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Sixth Series (New York, 1872), pp. 235248.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 235–236, 238–239, 241.

37. Ibid., pp. 236–239.

38. Ibid., 239–242.

39. Ibid., pp. 249; compare pp. 248 (the closing words of the sermon).

40. Ibid., pp. 236, 242.

41. Ibid., pp. 242—246. Note that not every clergyman was so sanguine about the influence of the press; the (Episcopal?) Bishop of Western New York, for example, wondered “If journalism is so powerful, who shall save us from such journalism as made the Commune possible in Paris?” (quoted in Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 [New York, 1873], xix).Google Scholar

42. Beecher, The Sermons, p. 236.Google Scholar