Georeactor Blog

Two books which I thought would be good travel reading, and were both written by history professors. I'm reviewing the Asia book halfway through because it's a lot of content.

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (John Merriman, 2014)

A history of the short-lived socialist autonomous zone inside Paris in the spring of 1871. I expected this to be more about what and why the commune was, but the latter half of the book is firsthand accounts sewn into a block-by-block chronology of the Versailles army retaking Paris. I probably should have been reading this with a big map or with personal experience on level with the detail here.

After Napoleon III's army was captured by the Prussians, an international collection of socialists and the local National Guard decided to reject the weakened government in Versailles. The communards invited international socialists (many Poles) and took dozens of hostages, most famously the Catholic Archbishop Darboy. Reaction to the new government was mixed depending on neighborhood / class. As the army closed in, men on the street would be conscripted.
The army saw these Parisians as traitors and deserters, so was ruthless in shelling the city and executing survivors. The conscripts' uniforms and boots soon became a deadly marker of collaboration.
The book does a great job of highlighting women's role as supporters of the resistance, including their reputation as ferocious soldiers out for revenge, and legends of serial firestarters or poisoners.

The Commune would have a major effect on Marx's daughters. They and Marx's wife all have the first name 'Jenny' so I am going to use their Wikipedia names. Jenny Marx Longuet married a journalist from the Commune the following year. Eleanor Marx would co-write a history of the Commune, and began a relationship with an exiled activist.
This book further claims that "Karl Marx's daughter Jenny was in Paris during the Commune" and wrote a letter to him on May 12, 1871. I was puzzled by Wikipedia not picking this up. Then I could only find the English quote in this book and one blog post?
I found a letter on that date with matching French text, but it was from Marx's wife Jenny von Westphalen to Ludwig Kugelmann and from London.
The daughter most commonly known as 'Jenny', later Longuet, would write to her father about the Commune but it was in September 1871, saying that she, along with her sister (Laura Marx) and her brother-in-law (Paul Lafargue), "spent the months of June and July at Bagneres de Luchon" [on the French-Spanish border]. When discussing police interest in the party, Jenny mentions only one short visit to the Commune by Lafargue. So I suspect that the author lost track of Jennys?
A 2022 historical fiction imagines Karl and his daughter Jenny making a secret visit.

Ten years later, a more democratic French republic would rehabilitate the image of the Commune, and pardon prisoners and exilees.
In 1977, Paris was allowed to elect a mayor again.

The odd gap in "communist" parties between 1852–1917: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mmf77p/comment/n7xyh26/

A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955 (Ronald H. Spector, 2022)

In 2019, a Redditor brought a question to /r/AskHistorians:

Ever since I was a kid, my Grandfather has spoken about his time in Malaysia with the UK army - he spent about four years there (18–22) and talks about all these crazy experiences that include regular train hijackings, jungle warfare, and working with Gurkha's. As a kid, for many years, I thought this was a major war, that it was like our Vietnam War and never really bothered to look into it, thinking they'd teach me about it in secondary school sometime… but they never did.

To be honest this book has little about Malaysia, but this question opened up my interest to the hidden history of decolonization. The Japanese surrender was quickly followed by independence movements and civil wars, and this book covers that first decade.
In visiting Singapore, I learned how the collapse of the British forces during the Japanese invasion discredited the protectorate relationship, and the long recovery from war made the British Empire more vulnerable.

Points in the book which I've been thinking about:

• In the final months of the war, Japan backed independence and guerrilla movements to resist recapture by the European colonial powers. After the surrender, these popular movements and leaders assumed power (particularly in Indonesia and Vietnam) before the arrival of sufficient colonial officials. Many Japanese soldiers were kept on as police for the first months (deeply unpopular in US and among resistance in Korea). Some decided to stay in-country to advise the resistance.
• Much of the British colonial forces in Southeast Asia came from India, so their independence and support for other countries' independence movements limited British reaction.
• Collaboration with the Japanese, and the seizure and resale of collaborator property and wartime industries, made several fortunes and led to resentment of corrupt post-war officials.
• Stalin jumpstarting his diplomacy era - first atomic test in August 1949, a Stalin-Mao-Ho Chi Minh meeting in February 1950 (reportedly Ho was in attendance at this signing). And then Stalin would meet with Kim il-Sung two months later.
• I hadn't grasped the long history of American involvement in the Chinese Civil War. Post-war support was supposed to go exclusively to the Nationalists. Diplomats got Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek to meet on August 27, 1945. The Americans helped Nationalists land to reoccupy Manchuria but weren't fast enough to counteract Mao and Soviet strategies. After two years the Soviets began to believe in and support the Communists. Around the same time, the Americans lost confidence that Chiang Kai-shek could recoup military losses and regain popular support.
• I also didn't know much about the French in Vietnam beyond it being a prelude to the American war. A traditional emperor Bảo Đại was returned by the Japanese in the final days, and repeatedly sought by the French as an alternative, but he lacked local support and frequently left the country to enjoy Europe.

Much ado about the Truman administration focus on Japan, the Philippines, and a chain of other islands leaving Korea and Taiwan out of the picture. That strategy is criticized as short-sighted today... but it's a pretty clear reaction to the naval war in the Pacific and U-boat attacks in the Atlantic. The US got convinced to invest in Southeast Asia because of the Cold War but also rubber and tin trades.

This was the first clear history I've read for how the Nationalists lost mainland China and took over Taiwan.

This clarified points about the French Foreign Legion from past reads. The force in Vietnam did recruit soldiers from post-war Germany (including soldiers with Nazi medals). Only 1/4 of the troops were French, with many coming from North Africa (Al-Jazeera has a documentary about Moroccans in Vietnam), or local to Southeast Asia. From a military history perspective this also led to difficulties feeding a multicultural army.
The French also allied with the Khmer and other ethnic, tribal, and religious minorities. Communists targeted the religious leaders of a local Catholic-adjacent cult, Caodaism.

The Korean War sections reminded me of the Blowback podcast series from 2022, particularly by starting with the uprising on Jeju island. This history has only become more visible in Korea after inquiries in the 2000s.

I'm confused by the spelling choices (a chapter ends mentioning Jeju and the next uses "Cheju").

A section on Indonesia mentions that a commander "forgetting that 1949 was a leap year" attacked a day early and almost spoiled an attack on March 1st. But it wasn't a leap year? I also don't see any reference to early attacks in online articles? There is a Javanese calendar with leap years, and an Islamic calendar which changed months on Feb 28 / Mar 1 that year, but I don't think it adds up.

Previous Reads

On museums having too many screens

The creative rights background for this is unclear, but a movie based on Maybe Happy Ending will be released in Korea this fall

City of Boston posted about an e-bike program which extends to disabled riders

Wolfram on crackpot physics thought process and LLMs: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/08/i-have-a-theory-too-the-challenge-and-opportunity-of-avocational-science/

If you watched For Sama about the hospital in Aleppo Syria, I appreciated the "A View from a Bridge" interview with Sama's mom in June.

An article by a husband who arguably got a villain edit on Couples Therapy doesn't acknowledge that the couple appears to have split, and that he moved to join the libertarian project 'University of Austin'. This tracks with his complaints about moving from Montana to New Jersey, and a fear they will not find any suitable tomatoes.

A little insight into why Google's modular phone got canceled: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1n9rzxo/comment/ncpeuta/

An episode of "Chicago History Podcast" covers the Children's Fountain (commissioned by Jane Byrne, mothballed until 2005), Fountain Girl (stolen 1958, restored 2010), the false revolutionary monument, the metal from the 1871 fire, and other sculptures now in Lincoln Park: https://www.chicagohistorypod.com/episode-813-lincoln-parks-statues-sculptures-and-oddities/