Unvarnished Tale of the Commune

The outstanding quality of this book is its clear-sighted realism: a quality derived from the author’s adherence wherever possible to the use of eye-witness accounts from impartial sources. Since few Frenchmen of the time were or could be impartial, he has relied heavily on the numerous Americans and Britons who were present in Paris and its environs during the tragic months of the Siege and the Commune, some of whom kept more or less complete diaries and nearly all of whom had a fortunate habit of writing descriptive letters which Mr. Horne’s diligent research has brought to light. He has followed Ruskin’s precept that “the only history worth reading is that written at the time of which it treats, the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw.”

By using factual accounts as the basis for shrewd analysis, Mr. Horne has been able to sweep aside the smokescreen of opposing myths by which the facts have long been obscured. His blunt assertion that at its birth in March 1871, “the Commune had nothing to do with Communism” came as a surprise to this reviewer, as it will to many readers; his explanation, which he documents irrefutably, is that “for their own dialectic purposes, the Marxists have distorted the Commune to create a myth portraying something that never was.”

GE

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George Fielding Eliot

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The outstanding quality of this book is its clear-sighted realism: a quality derived from the author’s adherence wherever possible to the use of eye-witness accounts from impartial sources. Since few Frenchmen of the time were or could be impartial, he has relied heavily on the numerous Americans and Britons who were present in Paris and its environs during the tragic months of the Siege and the Commune, some of whom kept more or less complete diaries and nearly all of whom had a fortunate habit of writing descriptive letters which Mr. Horne’s diligent research has brought to light. He has followed Ruskin’s precept that “the only history worth reading is that written at the time of which it treats, the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw.”

By using factual accounts as the basis for shrewd analysis, Mr. Horne has been able to sweep aside the smokescreen of opposing myths by which the facts have long been obscured. His blunt assertion that at its birth in March 1871, “the Commune had nothing to do with Communism” came as a surprise to this reviewer, as it will to many readers; his explanation, which he documents irrefutably, is that “for their own dialectic purposes, the Marxists have distorted the Commune to create a myth portraying something that never was.”