Description
Book SynopsisAt 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.
Trade Review"This compelling account of the Paris Commune makes a complicated event understandable and vivid. Eichner’s rich portraits bring to life the freedom and empowerment the Communards experienced, juxtaposed with the bloody repression of its final days."— Sarah Fishman, author of From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
Like the Commune itself, Eichner’s history is brief, complex, and full of drama. A fresh and compelling account for scholars and students of 1871 and its legacies.— Roxanne Panchasi, author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars
New Books Network: New Books in French Studies: An interview with Carolyn J. Eichner— New Books Network: New Books in French Studies
New Books Network: New Books in French Studies: An interview with Carolyn J. Eichner— New Books Network: New Books in French Studies
Like the Commune itself, Eichner’s history is brief, complex, and full of drama. A fresh and compelling account for scholars and students of 1871 and its legacies.— Roxanne Panchasi, author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars
"This compelling account of the Paris Commune makes a complicated event understandable and vivid. Eichner’s rich portraits bring to life the freedom and empowerment the Communards experienced, juxtaposed with the bloody repression of its final days."— Sarah Fishman, author of From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
"Eichner’s narrative weaves together many aspects–religious secularism, economic policies, cooperative economics and property rights, education, culture, and the arts–precisely because the Commune affected all of it.
The Paris Commune is an enjoyable, brilliant, scholarly, and readable adventure."— Capital & Class
"[An] informative and moving new history."— David A. Bell, The Nation
Table of Contents1. Illumination
2. Fluorescence
3. Explosion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
