This hefty volume of over 700 pages is Dennis Bos's wide-ranging treatment of the 1871 Paris Commune. The book is explicitly not meant to be a history of the fateful 72 days that shook the world, but rather of its “afterlife”: the global memory and commemoration of the Commune in socialist circles since 1871. Bos's central concern is “the question of how the international socialist movement kept the memory of the Paris Commune alive, why it chose to do so and how collective remembrance […] moulded a transnational battle culture” (p. 18, all translations are mine). Bos claims that the Commune was so central to the development of socialism that it became a kind of litmus test. In all major ideological and practical discussions within socialism (social movement vs political party, authority vs autonomy, mass vs vanguard, federalism vs centralism, reformism vs revolution, etc.), the commune has been invoked as the final argument to separate “true” from “false” socialists. As Bos astutely remarks, the legend of the commune succeeded where the revolution itself had miserably failed.

The book falls into two parts. The first eight chapters deal with the origin, development, and international dissemination of a socialist remembrance culture, mainly in nineteenth-century Europe and the US. In these chapters Bos sets out the main causes behind the rapid spread of the legend of the Commune: the prominent role of foreigners in the Paris events of 1871, the network of the First International and the role of Marx, the post factum diaspora of surviving Communards and the dissemination of the Commune legend among French, German, Dutch, Belgian, and American socialists. The subsequent seven chapters delve into the memory topoi of the Commune up to the Centenary in 1971, with examples from outside Europe and the US as well. Here Bos focuses on hope and inspiration, eroticism, the cult of death, and revenge in the ways socialists commemorated 1871.

The best sections of this book are written in an engaging style, have a compelling narrative momentum, and give insight into the larger picture while doing justice to individual human experience. I especially enjoyed the fourth chapter on the vicissitudes within the General Council of the First International. Bos describes Marx and Engels as stalling for time while the revolution was in full swing, not extending support towards the Communards even after explicit calls for help from Paris. The fourteenth chapter on Père Lachaise and the monuments erected in the cemetery is equally enthralling. The book contains several insightful chapters like these.

In a way, this summary does not do justice to the incredible richness of the materials gathered by Bos, because he also digresses into topics as diverse as socialist eccentricity (e.g. the adventurers drawn in by the Commune revolution); the role of prostitution during the Commune; American precursors of free love; children in Commune mythography, etc. Moreover, he also chronicles the bourgeois counter-imagery of the Commune. These digressions are always very intriguing and original, but they also hint at a central weakness of the book: the main gist is sometimes lost in a wealth of details. Overall, the text has a rather meandering character and could have done with extra text-editing to make the narrative crisper and to separate the central message of the book more radically from the many (admittedly interesting) details. Symptomatically, illustrations are scattered throughout the text without any explanatory titles, often without any reference to them in the running text. This is in no way helped by the lack of a general conclusion to the book. The last chapter merely discusses the centenary celebrations of 1971.

Part of my criticism stems from the dual nature of this book. On the one hand, it is the result of a research project supervised by Henk te Velde at the universities of Groningen and Leiden. On the other hand, it is published by Wereldbibliotheek, a general-reader publishing house. As a result some uneasy compromises seem to have been made between readability and academic depth. This is reflected in the short introduction which sheds little light on the choices, theories, concepts, and historiography underpinning Bos's analysis. The book contains some excursions outside the West to the USSR, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, but why these are included rather than Latin American or African examples is not clear. What, for instance, was the more general role of the Commune legend in post-World-War-II decolonization struggles? The lack of theoretical grounding especially struck me in the chapter on eroticism, which offers a pop-psychological, “phallic” reading of the Commune and its aftermath without referring to the conceptual debates behind it.

Hardly any mention is made of the vast research on collective memory and public remembrance. The equally expansive literature on the Commune is briefly summarized in the introduction. Consequently, it is often hard for the reader to discern which parts of Bos's reading are original vis-à-vis the existing scholarly consensus. A more conceptually and theoretically infused analysis could have substantiated some of Bos's central contentions. For example, he claims a “remarkably uniform” (p. 146) and relatively stable Commune memory throughout the years. According to Bos, this is mainly due to the classic status of Marx's and Hippolyte Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray's early histories, respectively The Civil War in France (1871) and Histoire de la commune de 1871 (1876). Relatively little attention is paid to diachronic and synchronic variations within the Commune memory.

For instance, how did the commemoration fare when 1 May gradually became the main annual moment of socialist celebration? What happened to the revolutionary imagery when reformism, Organisationspatriotismus and “revolutionary attentism” started to gain ground within social democracy during the belle époque? In Belgium, an example Bos often refers to, the Commune cult was already overshadowed by 1 May celebrations in the 1890s. Another neglected question is whether the Commune imagery might have become “nationalized”, especially in an era when “inter-nationalism”, social patriotism, and oppositional patriotism were on the rise.

Generally, Bos reflects too little on the social functions of commemoration. In the introduction he claims that “there is no reason to fear that the long second life of the Commune will soon come to an end and that the memory of the Commune will pass into oblivion” (p. 18). Past myths can only survive when they are linked to present-day concerns and interests. So the question is which useful social function the Commune can still have for contemporary socialists, also outside the West. All in all this is a great feat of scholarly research. Bos's mastery of languages and sources is impressive, but the book could have used some extra editorial and analytical rigour.