The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71

By Alistair Horne

Book Overview

Alistair Horne's The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-71 is the first book of Alistair Horne's trilogy, which includes The Price of Glory and To Lose a Battle and tells the story of the great crises of the rivalry between France and Germany. The collapse of France in 1870 had an overwhelming impact - on Paris, on France and on the rest of the world. People everywhere saw Paris as the centre of Europe and the hub of culture, fashion and invention. But suddenly France, not least to the disbelief of her own citizens, was gripped in the vice of the Prussian armies and forced to surrender on humiliating terms. Almost immediately Paris was convulsed by the savage self-destruction of the newly formed Socialist government, the Commune. In this brilliant study of the Siege of Paris and its aftermath, Alistair Horne researches first-hand accounts left by official observers, private diarists and letter-writers to evoke the high drama of those ten tumultuous months and the spiritual and physical agony that Paris and the Parisians suffered as they lost the Franco-Prussian war. 'Compulsively readable' ??The Times 'The most enthralling historical work' ??Daily Telegraph 'Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the civil war that still stirs the soul of France' ??Evening Standard One of Britain's greatest historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the author of a trilogy on the rivalry between France and Germany, The Price of Glory, The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle, as well as a two-volume life of Harold Macmillan.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140052100
• ISBN13: 9780140052107
• Release Date: April 1981
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 1.0" x 1.0"

Customer Reviews

Forgotten story remarkably told

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.

Essential

Five years after our Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) devastated France (150,000 dead, 150,000 wounded), resulted in civic revolt (another 4,000 dead and 24,450 wounded), and exacted the largest war indemnity (and territorial surrender) of the time. In some respects, it was a laboratory for Bismarck/Germany to test what worked best in our war: strategic mobility, railroads, rapid logistical support, long range artillery (with percussion fuses and black powder), and civilian terrorism. Victorious German states celebrated unification under the Second Reich in, of all places, Versailles. Many apologists cite the post-WW1 Versailles Treaty (1919) as a punitive episode that victimized Germany and ensured WW2. This book proves them wrong. France, equally ravaged in the Franco-Prussian War, paid the indemnity early, recovered, and moved on. Forty three years later she was invaded again by the same enemy in WW1 (this time she would lose well over a million souls and many wounded). This work is lucid, comprehensive, and well worth reading

Debacle

Zola called the 1870 Battle of Sedan a "Debacle," and gave his fictionalized account of this event the same title. In that battle, which decimated the French Army and all but sealed Paris's fate, Emperor Napoleon III and the elan of the French infantry were simply no match for German generalship and Krupp cannon. Horne's "Fall of Paris" picks up from the Sedan debacle and explores what was, for most purposes, a much worse debacle, namely the ruinous siege of Paris, the capitulation and the subsequent civil unrest in which the Paris authorities refused to recognize the so-called "official" French government and instead instituted the Commune - a short-lived ultra-left government which itself was later suppressed by the reformed French Army. This is a tale virtually without large-scale heroes, yet which contains many indivisual acts of courage, notably in smuggling out news and keeping the population fed during the Siege. Horne writes with humanity; strange it is in this complex kaleidoscope of politics and motives that you can't even find the Prussians too villanous - even as they send trained falcons up to prey upon the carrier pigeons.

Captures the excitement of the period

Horne's style makes the story of the Paris siege and commune every bit as compelling, fast-moving and vivid as the best fiction. You get a real sense of the various characters of the period, the opportunistic, the proud, the inept, the comical and the horrific. Brings this exciting, tumultuous time to life with poetic language and insightful observations. I am looking forward to reading more books by this author.