Sensational Internationalism

Front matter

EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN ATLANTIC LITERATURES AND CULTURES

SENSATIONAL ods RNATIONALISM

THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE REMAPPING OF AMERICAN MEMORY IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Series Editors’ Preface

Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense

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

Introduction

Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense

In light of recent events — in particular, scenes from Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 — the Paris Commune of 1871 no longer feels quite as distant from our own historical moment. On the morning of March 18 of that year, in a protest at once social, political, economic, and spatial, a mass of men, women, and children “occupied” a major urban center. Their move to seize it as their own and to question the social order of their day immediately puzzled and inflamed the press on both sides of the Atlantic and prompted swift action by displaced city officials and government forces. A mere seventy-two days later, the uprising that Engels would famously dub “the dictatorship of the proletariat” was brutally put down by the French army, even as the events in Paris and the name that came to stand in for them — “the Commune” — went viral, provoking at once transatlantic anxiety, international leftist solidarity, and ongoing coverage across a variety of mass-cultural media.'

That the Commune seems curiously new, when viewed from the rearview mirror of Occupy Wall Street, and that its legacy has come to feel tangibly vital can be evidenced not only by a spate of US and international newspaper articles that turned to the Commune’s defeat to make sense of Occupy Wall Street, but also by David Harvey’s recent account of Occupy in light of earlier urban uprisings, the Commune foremost among them, and by Occupy blogs from across the US that made readings of the Commune and its history more or less de rigueur for those who claimed they wanted to “occupy everything.”” Put a little differently, in the fall of 2011, and in the immediate aftermath of the razing of the Zuccotti Park encampment, the Paris Commune seemed to arise out of nowhere as the new objet trouvé of choice for the US leftist imaginary wrestling with the pangs of defeat, the politics of occupation, and both the promises and the perils of collective action. As Kristin Ross aptly puts it in Communal Luxury, her powerful recent book on the political imaginary of the Commune and its lasting influence on the development of both Marxist and anarchist European thought, “There are moments when a particular event or struggle enters vividly into the figurability of the present, and this seems to me to be the case with the Commune today.”*

In March 2012, for example, a guerrilla theater troupe, led by artist Zoe Beloff and wielding period costumes and cardboard cutout props, resurrected Bertolt Brecht’s 1949 play, The Days of the Commune, in Zuccotti Park, explicitly linking its staging to the politics and aspirations of Occupy, and suggesting the Commune’s ideas “are just as alive and urgent today as they were then.”* The following year, the investigative theater company, The Civilians, launched a bigger-budget return to the Commune in the form of a ninety-minute musical staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the ArtsEmerson theater in Boston. Both productions claimed not just to channel the Commune at a moment when it was most needed but rather to remind audiences of a past that, unlike 1789 or 1830, did not already have a Dickens novel like A Tale of Two Cities (or the recent blockbuster musical film, Les Misérables) to keep it in circulation. “The relatively low profile, at least in current cultural memory, of what happened in March of 1871 is part of what attracted Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman, the creators of ‘Paris Commune,’” suggested New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley in his glowing review of The Civilians’ show.’ Their aim was, then, to re-occupy a foreign past that seemed altogether long lost, and perhaps most crucially, to revivify a moment they figured to have had no previous currency in the US. While these productions echo wider claims often made about American historical memory — namely, that as a nation we have been most often prone to historical amnesia — they nevertheless bring into relief just how much we have forgotten about how radically transatlantic the experience of the Commune was, how much of a sensation it made in its own moment, and — most of all — how often, and to what cross-purposes, the Commune was fashioned anew over and again in US memory long before Occupy came onto the scene.‘

When the largest national strike in US history broke out a mere six years after the Communards’ failed revolt in France, headlines shrieked in 1877 that “the French Commune had suddenly been vomited over us.”’ American suffragists were instantly linked to the so-called “man-women” of the Commune in an array of Gilded Age sermons, editorials, and visual and literary texts, while in a variety of bestselling fin-de-siécle page-turners American boys become men by returning to the scene of — and, more to the point, witnessing the destruction of — that short-lived but not at all forgotten Parisian revolution. Postbellum pilgrimages were made time and again to the Commune’s spatial remainders, visits that generated magazine remembrances that, more often than not, mourned lost landmarks and damaged buildings as if they were bodies and condemned the insurgents whose “savage fingers” had torn them from the city’s landscape. Southern whites consistently mobilized anti-Communard rhetoric against African Americans in the postbellum period, while W. E. B. DuBois turned the tables by christening the South Carolina Reconstruction government the Black Commune. Turn-of-the-century American radicals looked to the Commune as an affective and material blueprint for revolution; mainstream audiences went to Coney Island, in 1891, to see its fiery demise at the hands of government troops restaged as a pyrotechnic spectacle, and two decades later, more than 7,000 “Reds” assembled to watch a two-hundredmember production of The Paris Commune on stage at Madison Square Garden. The Commune was, in other words, never far from reach in Gilded Age America, and, despite or perhaps because of its sensational afterlives in US literary, visual, and performance culture, it remained a vital touchstone of leftist internationalism well into the modernist period. While McCarthyism did much to efface the tangible traces of its presence and role in US memory - bringing an end to, among other things, the pamphlets and yearly commemorative pageants that had kept it in circulation for some five decades in the US leftist imaginary — the Commune nevertheless emerged once again in the 1960s, offering both a nomenclature and a model for student radicals such as Mario Savio and Mark Rudd, who, in re-occupying revolution and occupying public spaces, were reliving the future via that once again not so distant past.

Sensational Internationalism recovers this now largely forgotten story of the Paris Commune’s spectacular afterlife as specter and spectacle in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture. In so doing, it aims to remap the borders of transatlantic feeling and resituate the role of international memory in US culture in the long nineteenth century and beyond. In putting 1871 - and, more particularly, the Paris Commune’s “audacious internationalism” — on the map of American literary and cultural studies, this book contributes to the conversation begun by the seminal work of Michael Rogin and Larry J. Reynolds to recover the influence of the European uprisings of 1848 on the literary imagination of writers like Emerson and Melville and the literary history of the American Renaissance, as well as more recent work to trace what Anna Brickhouse has termed the lingering “Franco-Africanist shadow” on American literary and cultural history in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.® But this book offers another angle on that story of distant uprisings resounding at home: namely, how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. 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, my 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 postbellum gender trouble and regional reconciliation, and a vital terrain for rethinking Paris —- and what it meant to be an American there — in US fiction and culture. For Americans felt Paris to be curiously their own long before the Moderns made it their hometown.

Whereas scholars of memory in US literature and history have primarily focused on the domestic contours of events, centering their attention on, for example, the Alamo, the Civil War, Vietnam, and 9/11, Sensational Internationalism reveals the necessity of approaching cultural memory as a phenomenon within and beyond the nation and, in turn, rethinking various media — in particular, the newspaper, the panorama, and the novel — as crucial sites for the construction not simply of national but also of international — I am tempted to say extra-national — memory.’ For as I argue, the tenacity of the Commune’s second life does not simply attest to its continuing usefulness in American culture for making sense of revolutions past and future: it also crucially reverses the assumption that transnational circuits of memory — that memory without borders, as it were — are uniquely or definitively a product of our own hyper-mediated historical moment.

What little attention that has been paid to the Commune’s unexpected second life in America by historians has so far focused almost exclusively on the relationship between the events in Paris and anxieties about labor unrest at home, and these accounts suggest the

Commune’s presence begins to fade in the aftermath of the failure of the Great Strike of 1877.'' As Philip M. Katz elaborates in his compelling study of Americans and the Paris Commune, while “a lurid image of the Commune continued to haunt [the mainstream US] vision of domestic social unrest . . . even this image dimmed shortly after the Great Strike, as the image of the Commune ceased to be an active force in American culture,” and after 1877 only “foreign-born workers — and not even all of them” kept the Commune’s memory alive in the US." My book crucially revises this narrative by revealing the ways the Commune as spectacle and specter continued to garner a variety of literary and affective responses well into the 1930s, and always meant more than labor in US memory. It also contributes to recent work in American Studies on the global dimensions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US radicalisms by taking seriously the way the Commune’s sensational presence in print, visual, and performance culture offered pre-Popular Front radicals a foundational blueprint for action and touchstone for internationalist feeling.” In so doing, this book addresses a critical ongoing blind spot in American Studies by extending the borders of transatlantic affiliation beyond the confines of Anglo-American attachments.

In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American literary and cultural consciousness and a vital site of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic feeling, Sensational Internationalism intersects and complicates previous studies of Americans in Paris and the role of Paris in US literature. Modernist Paris has long been considered the prime time to be an American in Paris, and studies of that moment in US literature most often focus on the ways that American writers engage with the mythic rather than historical dimensions of the city.'* By contrast, I analyze the ways that the specter of the Commune took up residence in the US, haunting and electrifying even those writers and readers who never left home. My book thus draws attention to the way that, in the Gilded Age and beyond, Francophilia was as much a structure of feeling that shaped Americanness as was the Anglophilia to which Elisa Tamarkin’s work has directed our attention and that Americanist scholars have come to more commonly associate with this period. Like Tamarkin, I am interested in the “productive vertigo” of extra-national feelings, or more precisely, in how and why Americans “feel the deepest reality of attachment without the reality behind it.”' I draw on her reading of the ways in which we might be “the most national while lost in fantasies of belonging elsewhere” in order to understand the ways in which transatlantic feeling might equally work to complicate and counter our national attachments (and fantasies).'° I term this extra-national structure of feeling “sensational internationalism” rather than simply Francophilia to highlight both that flux in national feeling and the role of a variety of print and visual media in shaping the memory culture around Paris and the Commune that sustained it for over five decades.

Sensation and Solidarity

The keywords at the heart of this book require further elaboration, not least because the meanings of “internationalism” have shifted dramatically in the past century. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the radical, extra-national valence of the term — implying “a movement or doctrine advocating international proletarian revolution” — is now largely defunct, or as it puts it, “chiefly historical.”!’ Yet for nineteenth-century Americans the term provoked profound anxiety and affiliation in equal measure, for in the aftermath of the Communist Manifesto’s exhortation to cross-national working-class solidarity (“Workers of the World Unite!”), the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, the rise and fall of the Commune, the emerging international movement for an eight-hour work day, and the Haymarket bombing and execution of the Haymarket anarchists, internationalism was both the béte noire of American culture in the long nineteenth century and a radically embodied form of extra-national political identity and lived counter-cultural memory.

Yet post 1989 and 9/11, the term has largely come to be defined, on the one hand, by the erosion of national culture in the homogenizing, and seemingly ever-triumphant, face of global capitalism, and, on the other, by sensational media accounts of “radicalized” Muslims leaving their home countries to embrace a fight in faraway places to which religion rather than the nation-state connects them, a phenomenon often portrayed as a terrifying new form of transnational solidarity. This era (or iteration) of radicalism as jihad and internationalism as globalization has its roots in the Cold War “US internationalism” that sought to counter (not to mention vilify) the USSR’s Comintern global revolutionary solidarity with Marshall Plan-sponsored mass consumption efforts in Europe and an ever-expanding project of exporting both Fordist production and American consumerism abroad.'* At once occupying and co-opting the foundational term of leftist transnational solidarity — internationalism — this vision of internationalism “American-style” was deeply nationalistic and hegemonic in bent, directly identifying, as Bruce Robbins has pointed out, US national interests with those of global capitalism and vice versa." Such nationalist internationalism was, in turn, predicated on a new form of global imperialism, or what Paul Giles has aptly described as “a putative triumph over the coordinates of physical space, the replacement of an imperial design based on territorial possession by one driven instead by liberal internationalism, through which American economic and cultural ideas would penetrate overseas markets.””°

Recent scholarship on the culture of diaspora and Black radicalism has, however, recovered the ways that twentieth-century African American radicalism and artistic production were vitally animated by an altogether other vision of international belonging.’ As Brent Hayes Edwards, Robin D. G. Kelley, Cedric J. Robinson, Kate Baldwin, and Minkah Makalani have powerfully elaborated, this “Black Internationalism” was marked by its commitment to anti-colonial struggle, participation in transnational artistic and political movements, and, most of all, by its vision of Black identity and solidarity that superseded national affiliations. While these studies focus on the Bolshevik Revolution as the key catalyst of radical internationalism and most often locate the watershed moment of Black internationalist feeling and cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s, they nevertheless shed light on earlier cultural formations and affective modalities of leftist internationalism in the US. Building on this body of scholarship, as well as on recent work by Shelly Streeby to recover pre-Popular Front radical world movements and US internationalisms, Sensational Internationalism uncovers the Commune as a vital, if now largely forgotten, site for living and remembering within, as well as beyond, the nation-state in a radically anti-capitalist sense throughout the postbellum period and well beyond it.

Perhaps the most singular and least remembered aspect of the Commune uprising is, as Ross has recently pointed out, its “non-national” orientation:

an insurrection in the capital fought under the flag of the Universal Republic, the Commune as event and as political culture has always proved resistant to any seamless integration into [a French] national narrative. As one of its former members recalled years later, it was, above all else, “an audacious act of internationalism.”

Yet postbellum radicals like Victoria Woodhull and Wendell Phillips, who supported the Commune in the 1870s, celebrated its legacy precisely as a “universal republic” rather than simply a

Parisian event by way of marches and yearly gatherings that united spiritualists, socialists, and free-thinkers with Communard refugees, German immigrants, and Cuban revolutionaries. Turn-of-the-century supporters, such as the Los Angeles-based socialist organizer N. L. Griest, heralded the Commune’s memory — and annual celebration — as the cornerstone of radical internationalism as counter-cultural remembrance: “Other men may have their days, but to the American workingman the anniversary of the Paris Commune will be the greatest celebration in the calendar.”** But while remembering the Commune helped to consolidate leftist internationalism as an affective, material practice and counterpublic in the US in ways that have so far received scant critical attention, the injunction to remember the Commune was not simply a leftist pastime or structure of radical international feeling. Indeed, the desire to witness it, and the lingering sense of possession of its memory and the Paris it scarred, was also viscerally underwritten by an extra-national attachment to Paris and a form of internationalism that allows Americans to feel we possess places that are not ours and support state-backed violence when “civilization” is under threat.” (The New York Times insisted in 1871 that the Commune waged war “against civilization itself” and that claim was resoundingly echoed across the US press in the 1870s.”*) Both these versions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century internationalism — the radical and the reactive — were in turn facilitated by the Commune’s virality as a sensation circulating across US culture by way of ongoing newspaper coverage and literary representations, as well as spectacles and pageants.

If I invoke the term sensationalism in my title to signal the layering of memories of the Commune made possible by postbellum media technologies and the forms of international feeling enacted through them, I do so also to highlight the way the Commune itself marked the advent of revolution as instant media sensation. That the Commune entered the American news scene and public sphere as, in Russ Castronovo’s formulation, a “mass spectacle” had much to do with the rise of the illustrated weeklies and the recent laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, as well as Paris’s role as the “capital of modernity” in the nineteenth century.*® And as historian Samuel Bernstein points out,

No political or economic issue in the United States, save governmental corruption, received more headlines in the American press of the 1870s than did the Paris Commune ... Anarchy, assassination, slaughter, incendiarism, streets covered in human gore — such blood curdling scenes were monotonously reported in the news.”

But if I am interested here in the sensational as at once a spectacular genre and a narrative and visual-cultural media modality, so too am I concerned with reconnecting us with the sensory valence and somatic immediacy of that register: the way that ruins could be experienced as aftertastes or amputated limbs, and panoramas allowed viewers impossibly immediate sensations of the Commune years after its end.** The term thus points to a larger argument I make across this book about the sensational and the sensory modes working at once to mediate and produce cultural memory and international feeling.

My approach to the affective and material afterlife of the Paris Commune in US literature and to the study of cultural memory combines detailed reading of specific literary texts and performances with a wide-ranging engagement with transatlantic print and visual culture. By excavating the ways that representations of the Commune echoed and resurfaced across an array of periodicals — beginning life, for instance, as a periodical poem in a highbrow periodical like The Atlantic, immediately finding a second life alongside Marx’s Civil War in France in a radical publication like Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, and ultimately enjoying a final incarnation in the first “poems for workers” anthology in the late 1920s — Sensational Internationalism uncovers how circuits of remediation and reprinting reshaped the borders of international feeling within both radical and mainstream US culture and chronicles how America’s unexpectedly lasting fascination with the events in Paris crisscrossed rather than crystallized nineteenth-century social and mass cultural divides.” This book is not, in other words, about simply making leftist memory in the nineteenth century at once more audible and more visible in American literary studies; it is equally about the ways in which mainstream print and visual culture remembered the Commune even as they anxiously fixated on the radical cultures of memory embracing it in this period. As my book shows, remapping the borders of American memory requires us both to expand the print-cultural contact zones to which we attend and to rethink the margins we assign to radical cultural production in the long nineteenth century.

As historian Robert Tombs has recently pointed out, the “paradox” of the Commune lies in its vertiginous role in modern memory — at once famous and hardly known, for while it never lost its resonance for European Marxist thinkers, and received considerable attention from historians in the wake of its centenary in 1971, the Commune is both oft-written about and oft-forgotten.*° Yet much as it has acquired renewed visibility in the political sense on both sides of the Atlantic, it has also garnered significant renewed scholarly interest of late with the publication of Ross’s Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015), John Merriman’s Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (2014), and Alain Badiou’s Polemics (2014). In examining the Commune as at once a social revolution and an international sensation refracted through US mass culture, Sensational Internationalism draws on that body of scholarship but does so to excavate the relationship between literary forms and extra-national memories, and to uncover dimensions of the Commune overlooked in studies of the event that focus only on its cultural aftershocks in France. In particular, my book reveals how the Commune’s instant commodification and commemoration unexpectedly bring into relief the seismic epistemological shake-up that it represented in the nineteenth-century Franco-American imaginary, crucially unsettling the distinctions between metropole and periphery, domestic and anti-domestic figures, past and future, battlefield and home front, national and transnational memory. Sensational Internationalism thus adds to the conversation, begun by Gay Gullickson and Carolyn J. Eichner, on the gender politics of the event, but also crucially recontextualizes the degree to which the brutal reconquering of Paris by French troops should be understood as at once a civil war waged in France and a colonial war waged at home. For even as American novels in the 1890s surprisingly re-imagine Paris under the Commune as an imperial frontier where American boys might be made men, French writers vilifying the Commune in the 1870s had decried the spectacle of “Paris in the hands of Brutes and Negroes” and likened the Communards to “savages, a ring through their noses, tattooed in red, dancing a scalp dance on the smoking debris of society.” *!

Revolution Revisited: the Commune in ‘76

The Great Strike of 1877 is typically read as marking the watershed irruption of the Commune in postbellum US memory. In what follows, I turn instead to 1876, and the Paris Commune’s spectacular presence at the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, as a way not only of charting the instant commodification of the Commune in the US and exploring the archive of memory made possible by such spectacularizations, but also of opening up the larger material terrain of Sensational Internationalism.

The Centennial Exposition opened on May 10, 1876, in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia; by the end of its run that October, some ten million visitors had attended the fair, nearly one-fifth of the total US population.” While it most visibly commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Exposition most often stands out in scholarly memory for its menagerie of things — typewriters were introduced at the fair, along with a mechanical calculator, Bell’s telephone, Edison’s telegraph, Heinz ketchup, and Fleischman’s yeast — and its intricate controversies of exclusion: Frederick Douglass nearly barred from sitting on the platform on opening day; African American women’s groups raising funds for, but receiving no official place within, the Woman’s Pavilion; the “Southern Restaurant” that recreated life on the Old Plantation; and Native American participation limited to exhibits that showcased the “Vanishing American.” But while the specter of the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction hovered everywhere over the proceedings, there was another specter of revolution never too far from reach, the most spectacular example of which, “The Siege of Paris Cyclorama,” was located just outside the gates of the main exhibition hall and garnered over a thousand Centennial visitors a day (Fig. 1.1).” (The spectacle was such a success that it continued attracting crowds for twenty-six months straight, long after the Centennial itself had ended, before eventually moving onto Boston for an eight-month showing.)**

Indeed, in my reading, there were at least three Centennial sites spectacularly haunted by the Paris Commune: “The Siege of Paris” cyclorama, commissioned at the behest of an American for the Exposition; “Paris By Night,” a competing cycloramic view of Paris on display at the newly opened Colosseum building nearby; and the labor delegation that arrived from France to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its “sister republic.”

No American trade unions were allowed to participate in the Centennial festivities, but French trade unionists raised funds for an official visit to Philadelphia in July 1876. Although the suppression of the Commune — and the systematic repression that followed it — had done much to stifle the labor movement in France in the 1870s, reports of the delegation’s impending trip spurred fears that these trade unionists might infect American labor, bringing with them “Commune-istic” ideas. As historian Philip Foner explains it, “American authorities reasoned the delegates had probably been Communards and certainly were sympathetic to the Commune.”*° In April 1876, The New York Herald warned readers in no uncertain terms that French workers were “nearly addicted to Commune-istic ideas” — joining the chorus of American newspapers who suggested the French delegation might inspire Americans “to model themselves after the Commune.”*’ The irony, of course, was that a number of American radicals had already begun gathering yearly in cities like New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee to celebrate the Commune and keep its ideas alive. American labor, for its part, responded by appropriating that epithet to redirect the accusation: criticizing the vast numbers of immigrants employed in the construction of Exposition buildings in Fairmount Park during the deepening economic recession, the National Labor Tribune of Pittsburgh asked pointedly, “Are our authorities cultivating an American Commune?”**

The French delegation spent nearly twelve days touring the Centennial grounds, but they apparently made no stop at the Great Siege of Paris Building, perhaps purposefully missing out on the spectacle of the “Assassination of the Archbishop of Paris at the Hands of the Commune of 1871.” * If their presence catalyzed fears of an impending “Commune” in the US, however, the panoramic spectacle housed on Elm Avenue and Fortieth Street signaled the way those fears were always already imminent in the US in this moment, for the cyclorama also points to the way that Americans, throughout the 1870s, consumed the spectacle of the Commune by way of guidebooks to Paris, popular histories, melodramas, widely anthologized periodical poetry, Pinkerton tracts, editorials, sermons, and magazine “remembrances.”

But what was at stake in returning to this scene in 1876 by way of an immense, immersive visual spectacle, revisiting revolution at the same moment that the US was remembering its own?“ To relive a moment that could not properly be called one’s own, and further, to revisit a scene that one did not oneself live through, to inhabit — indeed, “try on” — someone else’s memories is a paradoxical desire for both an impossible immediacy and a virtual reality most often associated with our own hyper-mediated cultural moment. Although Alison Landsberg specifically identifies such “prosthetic memories” with the rise of film, “experiential museums,” and other more modern cultural technologies, I would argue the panoramic form similarly functioned as a technology that made available such experiential, embodied memory.*' For if we follow Angela Miller’s compelling suggestion that “the key to the panorama as a particular visual medium was a way of seeing — the panoramic,” we can infer that the “panoramic” experience brokers a new technology of remembering as well.”

The two cycloramas mounted for the Centennial, “The Siege of Paris” and “Paris By Night,” offered visitors, as their titles suggest, competing visions of Paris. Art historians such as Ralph Hyde have rightly noted this juxtaposition allowed viewers to glimpse a by then “old-fashioned panorama” alongside a cutting-edge version of the medium,” but in my reading these juxtaposing views did far more ideological and mnemonic work, for their opposing depictions of the city nevertheless proffered strikingly complementary visions of the Commune. Both spectacles notably billed themselves as intended to be especially of interest to Centennial visitors: “The Siege of Paris” was commissioned specifically for the event, while the Colosseum Hand Book details, “It was decided to place the ‘Paris by Night’ [rather than ‘London By Night’] on view during the Centennial season, as a work which would probably be most pleasing to the greater number of persons congregated in Philadelphia during this festival time.” *