The Last Communard
The Last Communard

Author: Gavin Bowd

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1784782858

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The story of an unexpected hero The Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story. In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was imprisoned for treason when the Commune fell and narrowly avoided execution for his role in the struggle for a new future. In later life, he immigrated to Soviet Russia, finding fame as a revolutionary icon. In his native country, he was vaunted as a hero, a touchstone of revolutions past during France’s interwar dramas. Abandoned by the Soviet regime, he languished, fortunes foundering, in Russia. Having led a long and extraordinary life, he died in Siberia in 1942 while fleeing Moscow as the Nazi armies swept across western Russia. It was another thirty years before he returned to Paris, his ashes coming to rest in the Communards’ plot of the Père Lachaise cemetery, on the centennial of the uprising, a symbol of France’s undying radical tradition. Gavin Bowd’s stunning narrative shows how an individual can be swept up in the fierce tides of history, and at the same time be defined by his own efforts to force those tides into a different, and better, course. Lejeune’s life captures war and revolution in a tumultuous period of European history.

The Last Communard
The Last Communard

Author: Gavin Bowd

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1784782882

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The story of an unexpected hero The Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story. In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was imprisoned for treason when the Commune fell and narrowly avoided execution for his role in the struggle for a new future. In later life, he immigrated to Soviet Russia, finding fame as a revolutionary icon. In his native country, he was vaunted as a hero, a touchstone of revolutions past during France’s interwar dramas. Abandoned by the Soviet regime, he languished, fortunes foundering, in Russia. Having led a long and extraordinary life, he died in Siberia in 1942 while fleeing Moscow as the Nazi armies swept across western Russia. It was another thirty years before he returned to Paris, his ashes coming to rest in the Communards’ plot of the Père Lachaise cemetery, on the centennial of the uprising, a symbol of France’s undying radical tradition. Gavin Bowd’s stunning narrative shows how an individual can be swept up in the fierce tides of history, and at the same time be defined by his own efforts to force those tides into a different, and better, course. Lejeune’s life captures war and revolution in a tumultuous period of European history.

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia
The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia

Author: Mary M. Talbot

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Published: 2016-06-14

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1506700896

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The creative partnership of acclaimed writer and academic Mary M. Talbot and graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot has produced some of the most challenging and entertaining graphic novels in recent memory, including 2012's Costa Award medalist Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia explores the life of revolutionary French feminist Louise Michel, a visionary teacher, poet, and radical who took up arms against a reactionary regime that executed thousands. Even deportation to a distant penal colony could not stop Michel from taking up the cause of the indigenous population against French colonial oppression.

Massacre
Massacre

Author: John M. Merriman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0300212909

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One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary government that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in ‘Bloody Week’ – the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government’s forces. By then, the city’s boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile – a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters. In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards – the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women – and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.

Communal Luxury
Communal Luxury

Author: Kristin Ross

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-11-22

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1784780545

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Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

The Civil War in France
The Civil War in France

Author: Karl Marx

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-05-29

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13:

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The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

The War Against Paris, 1871
The War Against Paris, 1871

Author: Robert Tombs

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1981-12-03

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521287845

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The Paris Commune of 1871 is one of the great romantic failures in revolutionary history. Yet very little is known about its enemies, and especially the army, which first fraternized with the revolutionaries and then, two months later, crushed them with the utmost violence. This book, based on extensive archival research, is the first serious study of the role of the army in the civil war. It examines its composition and organization, its weaknesses and their effect on government policy, the steps taken to improve morale and discipline, the state of mind of officers and men and, finally, the conduct of the army in battle and the causes of the final bloodshed, in which about 20,000 Parisians were killed in the fighting or executed afterwards. Its purpose is to cast new light on the policy of the government and the problems of using an army in a civil war, and to tell for the first time the full tragedy of the suppression of the Comune, one of the bloodiest and least understood social conflicts in the history of modern Europe.

Fascist Scotland
Fascist Scotland

Author: Gavin Bowd

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0857905686

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On 10 May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich, entered Scottish airspace in an ill-fated attempt to discuss peace with the Duke of Hamilton. For the Nazis, Hess was the victim of 'tragic hallucinations'. But how far had Hess really flown from reality? Although Fascism in Britain is normally associated with England, and especially the East End of London, and even then dismissed as a marginal political phenomenon, Fascism did find support in Scottish society. Scotland has provided its own cohort of idealists, fanatics and traitors for extreme racist, nationalist and authoritarian politics. From Dumfries to Alness, one of the main ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century found its standard-bearers. But when Fascism crossed the Cheviots, it found itself in a restless part of a multi-nation state, riven by sectarian hatreds. Rudolf Hess felt the natives looked at him 'in a compassionate way', but Scottish Fascism had to carve out a niche in a crowded market for bigotry. In this book Gavin Bowd relates a fascinating and little-known part of our history which reveals some uncomfortable truths which are bound to stimulate debate even now.