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The Commune marked a decisive moment in America's historical and political consciousness and in her image of her own revolutionary tradition. The impact of the Commune is best appreciated when the response it evoked is placed in the context of America's reaction to France's revolutionary efforts from the summer of 1789 to the spring of 1968. In these two centuries the prevailing attitude in the United States shifted steadily from an openness toward the necessity of revolutions to a position of fear and dread of this historical action. Americans at all times used the French experience as a mirror to examine their own conflicts and contradictions, their greatest expectations, their gravest anxieties, their receptivity to innovation, and their hostility to change. Each crisis in France polarized opinion in the United States and on some occasions such as the Commune the resulting tensions concretely influenced the course of the nation's history.

When albert camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he was honored for the quality of his writing and as a representative of the generation that had come of age between the two world wars. Camus did not hesitate to identify himself with this generation. He was willing to be a witness for those who had been helplessly thrust into "twenty years of absolutely insane history." This was the generation, he said at Stockholm, that had learned to endure in an age when history was dominated by "the death instinct at work."

InThePreface to her account of her father's formative years Clara Misch Dilthey wrote, "My father often told me that everything that he had produced was nothing but the execution of thoughts and projects conceived in his youth." Unlike Dilthey, Tocqueville did not have a child to whom he could confide the story of his intellectual life. Yet, if Tocqueville had had such a daughter, he might have made the same profession of indebtedness to the germinal ideas of his youth.