"La Commune": the humiliation French soldiers had experienced at German hands helped to fuel the Versaillais’ terrible vengeance

‘Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune,” by John Merriman

By Mary McAuliffe 

MASSACRE

The Life and Death of the Paris Commune

By John Merriman

The uprising that Victor Hugo so vividly commemorated and romanticized in “Les Misérables” was in fact a small affair, overshadowed by other eruptions that shook the City of Light during the 19th century. The last of these, the Commune uprising of 1871, was by far the bloodiest and the most dramatic. Yet despite the deaths of thousands of Communards and their supporters, this bloodbath has slipped into the shadows of history. John Merriman, the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University, impressively rescues this revolution from obscurity in “Massacre,” his devastating account of the Commune uprising.

Merriman, whose many books include the classic “A History of Modern Europe” and the more recent “The Dynamite Club,” featuring turn-of-the-century French anarchists, provides the reader with welcome context, from the ignominy of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War to the miseries of everyday life for Parisian workers. By the time the Commune uprising broke out, Paris and Parisians had suffered enormously, and those who suffered the most were, as always, the poor.

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