Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
by John MerrimanBasic Books, 2014The Paris Commune, which sprang up in the Spring of 1871 and existed as a more or less independent community-within-a-country for seventy-two days, is the subject of John Merriman's compactly-detailed and immensely readable new history, and it's damningly impossible to read the story without mentally drawing 21st-Century parallels. A large cross-section of ordinary Parisians citizens, as Merriman reminds with copious quotes from contemporary reactions, rose up and created the Commune in large part as an angry response to drastic political and economic disparities in the city - hence the socialist convictions of the Commune's founders and the social reforms they advocated.Merriman tells the story with a narrative zeal that grabs and holds the reading imagination. He populates the sequence of events with very effective pen-portraits of some of its most vibrant personalities, from martyred Archbishop Georges Darboy (shot down as a hostage of the Communards, and nearly as difficult to kill as Rasputin) to hack journalist and pamphleteer Maxime Vuillaume to the spoiled, childlike painter Gustave Courbet.Readers familiar with the tragic sequence of events that Spring will know what's coming, but even so, Merriman's dramatization of the "Bloody Week" that ended the Commune - when the provisional government in Versailles sent 130,000 troops rampaging through the city. The goal of the soldiers was to break up the Commune, but their practice was general destruction and looting, which left nearly 20,000 people - Communards and innocents alike - dead in their wake. Merriman makes the very smart decision to follow the progress of this violence street by street:
With rifle fire from the battle passing well over their heads, no cannon fire to fear, and only a single mitrailleuse to avoid, the Volunteers of the Seine reached Montmarte. They encountered a defended barricade on the rue Marcadet on the far side of the butte, but the curve of the street protected them. Soldiers entered the houses on both sides of the street to fire down on the defenders. Two cannons were brought up. The fire of the federes soon weakened, and then the communards abandoned the barricade. Albert Hans was amazed to find Montmarte, a traditional hotbed of radicalism, defended with so little organization, personnel, or energy.
The impulses of the Paris Commune obviously live on even now, 150 years after the experiment started and stopped. The Communards' outrage at the gap between rich and poor would be just as familiar to the squatters in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street as their anger at the perceived high-handedness of the central government would be familiar to the partisans of the Tea Party, and these would be far from the only resonances. Merriman has written a superbly comprehensive history of those fateful weeks in 1871 - but he's written a torn-from-the-headlines work of current affairs as well.
