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The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 | 
| Author: Sir Alistair Horne
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $8.50
You Save: $7.50 (47%)
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 165013
Media: Paperback
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0141030631
Dewey Decimal Number: 944
EAN: 9780141030630
ASIN: 0141030631
Publication Date: November 27, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Penguin (Non-Classics); 2007; 1.26 x 7.72 x 5.04 Inches; Paperback; Very Good+; Some rubbing to cover, otherwise book is pristine with tight binding and NO markings. Pasadena's premier independent new and used bookstore. France.; 480 Pages
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From Alistair Hornes grand trilogy on French historytwo magisterial works now back in print
In 1870, Paris was the center of Europe, the font of culture, fashion, and invention. Ten months later Paris had been broken by a long Prussian siege, its starving citizens reduced to eating dogs, cats, and rats, and France had been forced to accept the humiliating surrender terms dictated by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck. To many, the fall of Paris seemed to be the fall of civilization itself. Alistair Hornes history of the Siege and its aftermath is a tour de force of military and social history, rendered with the sweep and color of a great novel.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Great book! December 12, 2008
Beth A. Fanning
I purchased this book for my husband, and he hasn't been able to put it down.
Forgotten story remarkably told February 19, 2008
Andrew S. Rogers (Seattle, Washington)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I'm trying to think of a more elegant way to put it, but sometimes you've just gotta say: this is a really good book. "The Fall of Paris" is a remarkable job of storytelling, but it's also a primer of how a talented researcher and writer can synthesize an incredible amount of information from a diverse range of sources and turn it into a densely-packed, but still highly readable, narrative. The author balances broad-view scene-painting with an eye for personality and detail. In short, it's a very impressive work.
In an era when the sanguinary nature of the French Revolution is downplayed ("excesses") or fading from memory, the even more bloody life and death of the Paris Commune seem already long forgotten. For a number of reasons, that's not a good thing. The role of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune in stoking the fires of 75 years of German-French animosity is only the most obvious example. Less apparent, but just as important, is the example the Commune provided to future "leaders of the people" like Lenin and Stalin, and the way it transformed internal French politics.
This book is an excellent work in its own right, and deserves to be read simply on the merits of what it says about the events themselves. But the value of Horne's series of titles on Franco-German conflicts (of which this is the first of three books), and the influence these events had in their time and continue to have in ours, make an even stronger case for spending time in these pages.
 WAR AS THE MOTHER OF REVOLUTION June 19, 2007
Alfred Johnson (boston, ma)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Over the past year or so I have reviewed several books on the Paris Commune with an eye to looking at the political lessons that can be drawn from that experience. The book under review takes a slightly different look by emphasizing the relationship between war and revolution, although this is not necessarily the author's intent. Obviously every war does not necessarily generate a revolution, witness today's American adventure in Iraq, but it is more than a truism that war is the mother of revolution. The author here has made a very comprehensive study not only of the Commune but the key events that led up to it starting with the ill-fated Franco-Prussian War and subsequent siege of Paris by the victorious German armies.
Horne has done this by highlighting the various decisive military turning points. Those military events led to the downfall of Louis Bonaparte and his benighted Second Empire, the creation of another republic and eventually the Commune. The author moreover details the dramatic turns of military events that caused the fleeing Thiers government to abandon Paris to the Communards. The tensions in society, particularly between the capitalist class and the working class, that had been exacerbated by the siege reared up into a mini-civil war over the question of the disposition of the National Guard troops (and their cannon). From that point civil war turns to class war and we are all too familiar with the bloody results for the Communards.
If in one sense one cannot understand the Paris Commune without understanding the effects of the German siege on the class struggle in Paris that is not true of the military policy, or rather lack of it, which caused the Commune's bloody defeat at the hands of the Thiers government. In short, the Communards made, as it did in the realm of revolutionary politics, virtually every military mistake in the book. I have reviewed elsewhere some of those political problems so I will not repeat them here. On the military level the main strategic blunder was not to rapidly pursue the Thiers government when it fled to Versailles.
More than one commentator has noted that the defensive is the death of revolutionary struggle. This is particularly true in conditions of civil war. This reflected a certain provincialism but also a problem with the semi-autonomous structure of the National Guard units on which the Commune relied for defense. Those units did not want to leave Paris. Christ, they did not even want to leave their districts. The long and short of it is that they were satisfied with some concept of `socialism/republicanism' in one city. This passivity in the face of the myriad politico-military problems with the command structure as well as the diffusion of authority by many commissions, agents etc. spelled doom. In the Commune's short life the problems never were resolved and in the end contributed as much to defeat as Versailles' siege/subjugation policy. For those not familiar with the details of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune this is a well-thought out and interesting study, including use of on the spot commentary by such witnesses as the American Ambassador Washburne, the Parisian journalist Goncourt and the ex-National Guardsman Childs. Read on.
The Siege of Paris and the World's First Communist Revolution May 14, 2006
George Coppedge (Czech Republic)
Eating rats, cats, dogs, horses, and other domestic animals was just one unusual aspect of this most bizarre episode in French history. In the less than six months' time it took Bismarck's German armies to defeat Louis Napoleon's vaunted French army, the citizens of Paris went from living in the world's most glamorous, cosmopolitan, luxurious city to being reduced to eating their pets just to stay alive. The change was as startling as it was complete.
But beyond starvation and poverty, Paris was also wracked by bitter class divisions and hopelessly incompetent leadership. 'All that glitters is not gold,' as they say. Paris would not be held under one but two sieges, one by the Prussians and one by France itself. These sieges would long be remembered for both ingenuity and intrigue. While the swift, bloody recapture of Paris from the Commune forces would serve as an object lesson for both proletariat and elite alike. Prominent later Communists like Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky heeded the lesson that for Communists to succeed they would have to ruthlessly crush any and all opposition. Now in 2006, the French gov't takes the threat of Parisian insurrection in the form of student protests as a very real and extremely dangerous development.
Horne does an excellent job of bringing all the diverse and intriguing characters to life, from the ailing washed-up Louis Napoleon, to the confident successful Bismarck, to all the colorful rascals leading the Paris Commune. He retells of the hot-air balloon flights from Paris to beyond the Prussian lines of circumvallation, in one case all the way to Norway. Horne also relates the astoundingly poor fighting capacity of the Parisian National Guard units against the Germans, although they did fight better later against their own French bourgeois enemies.
This is a very good book, thoroughly researched and wonderfully written. The siege of Paris and the Paris Commune are fascinating, but little known chapters, in French history for non-Frenchmen. I warmly recommend this book.
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