Books in Brief: The Terrible Year

The Terrible Year. The Paris Commune, 1871, by Alistair Horne (Viking, 172 pages, $12.50). It was la semaine sanglante, when twenty or thirty thousand citizens were slaughtered by their fellow citizens in the City of Light, more than were killed in any single battle of the Franco-Prussian War, or in the Terror of the Great Revolution, or even in Lenin’s October Revolution in St. Petersburg in 1917. Author of The Fall of Paris, Mr. Horne is expert in his subject and here makes clear just what the Commune was— not really Communist or socialist or Marxist, but dominated by Jacobins and Blan quists, and a slogan—the 1968 student rebels shouted “Vive la Commune!” and hadn’t a whiff of a notion of what they meant by the words—signifying the demand for municipal independence for Paris. “They were madmen,” said Auguste Renoir, having narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Communards, “but they had in them that little flame which never dies.” The text of Mr. Horne’s fourth book on French history is clear, witty, reserved, but the best thing about it is its wealth of photographs, drawings, cartoons, color paintings and maps. I’ve a teen-age girl in mind who will have The Terrible Year as her birthday gift this month; history not made easy, but made ever so much more exciting than most of what she’ll be fed in high school this year.

DB

About the Author

D. J. C. Brudnoy

Featured Tags

The Terrible Year. The Paris Commune, 1871, by Alistair Horne (Viking, 172 pages, $12.50). It was la semaine sanglante, when twenty or thirty thousand citizens were slaughtered by their fellow citizens in the City of Light, more than were killed in any single battle of the Franco-Prussian War, or in the Terror of the Great Revolution, or even in Lenin’s October Revolution in St. Petersburg in 1917. Author of The Fall of Paris, Mr. Horne is expert in his subject and here makes clear just what the Commune was— not really Communist or socialist or Marxist, but dominated by Jacobins and Blan quists, and a slogan—the 1968 student rebels shouted “Vive la Commune!” and hadn’t a whiff of a notion of what they meant by the words—signifying the demand for municipal independence for Paris. “They were madmen,” said Auguste Renoir, having narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Communards, “but they had in them that little flame which never dies.” The text of Mr. Horne’s fourth book on French history is clear, witty, reserved, but the best thing about it is its wealth of photographs, drawings, cartoons, color paintings and maps. I’ve a teen-age girl in mind who will have The Terrible Year as her birthday gift this month; history not made easy, but made ever so much more exciting than most of what she’ll be fed in high school this year.