The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair HorneMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
In the late 19th century, a torpid, decadent France chose to boost its sagging prestige by declaring war on Prussia. Germany of the day was a loose federation of kingdoms led by Prussia's Kaiser Wilhem under the guidance of Bismarck. The Second Empire under Napoleon III assumed the conflict would be short and victorious.
However the French army was routed and the city of Paris besieged. The Second Empire fell, giving way to a republican government. Relying on accounts of those inside the city, Horne tells a tale of hope and patriotic bombast that gave way to starvation, eventual defeat, and the brief bloody rise of a predominately leftist government of Jacobins, Marxists, and other anti-Bonapartists. They were known as the Commune.
Following acceptance of Prussian peace terms, the republican government was forced to flee to Versaillies to escape the Commune's wrath. From there, the French government counter-attacked. With the support of the army, they now besieged Paris once again. The Commune dissolved into squabbling factions. Armed workers defended their neighborhoods as the military attempted to regain control over the fractious capital.
Hornes use of contemporaneous accounts allows the reader insights into what the inhabitants of Paris thought, ate—or didn't eat—felt, and desired. There's a great deal on the French use of balloons during the Prussian siege to communicate with unoccupied France and the rest of Europe. Less may've been more. The same goes for Horne's regular inclusion of French sentences minus translations. But the book tells the story well and notes the historical echoes that reverberated from the twin events of war and Commune.
Given the harsh peace treaty, the Franco-Prussian War planted the seeds for future, more devastating conflicts that saw France invaded in 1914 and invaded and conquered twenty-six years later. In addition, the lessons of the Commune were keenly absorbed by the Bolshevik Lenin. Fearing feckless factionalism, Lenin outmaneuvered and crushed his allies and ruthlessly butchered his foes. As Horne writes, "How much of the ferocious brutality with which the Russian Reds fought for survival was attributable to the ever-present memory of May 1871 . . . . (The date the Commune fell.)
"Fall" is part of a hat trick written by Horne on the Franco-German wars from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. He touches on the First World War in his chronicle of the 1916 battle of Verdun. The Second World War is covered in an account of France's rapid collapse in 1940.
History buffs will enjoy this.
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