The Paris Commune was the biggest and last popular revolution in western Europe - ending the cycle of revolutions that started in 1789. The Parisians, reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War set up their own revolutionary administration. Government troops eventually retook the city and took a terrible revenge: thousands died in the bloodbath that followed. The short-lived Commune and its repression cast a long shadow. It exposed deep divisions in French society and became a potent inspiration for the radical left. This stirring new study written with great zest, and a vivid sense of time and place lets the reader experience these tumultuous events at first hand and provides a comprehensive synthesis of recent research in both French and English.

At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France’s revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolution’s long wake, for others the first “successful” socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, keeping alive the revolution’s now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event. The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.

The classic history of the Paris Commune In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of beingexploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, theheroic battles fought in its defence, and the bloody massacre that ended the uprising. Its author,Lissagaray, was a young journalist who not only saw the events recounted here first-hand, butfought for the Commune on the barricades. He spent the next twenty-five years researching andwriting this history, which refutes the slanders levelled at the Communards by the ruling classesand is a vivid and valuable study in urban political revolution, one that retains its power to inspireto this day. This revised edition includes a foreword by the writer and publisher Eric Hazan.

"The Paris Commune or Fourth French Revolution (French: La Commune de Paris, IPA: [la kmyn d pai]) was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 (more formally, from March 28) to May 28, 1871. In a formal sense, it acted as the local authority, the city council (in French, the "commune"), which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871."--Wikipedia.