The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871. Alastair Horne

I am going to assume that anyone landing here already has an interest in the subject. So... no rehash. This is a short book. I like that. Horne tells the tale with wit, charm, interesting tidbits, sweeping themes and all that other stuff you look for in a book (history or not). I hope to read all of Horne's histories of post revolutionary France all the way through to WWI. Its a subject that tells a great deal about emotional and intellectual underpinnings of Europe's secular, internationalist politics in our time. Great writer, highly recommended!

....if you take this gem of a book to bed with you. France loses a war. Paris is surrounded by the Prussian army. The government decamps to Versailles and agrees to a hobbling peace treaty with the enemy. The besieged Parisians refuse to accept defeat. They send up reconnaissance balloons and eat all the animals in the zoo. They set up their own Commune authority and declare war on the French government. Their Commune government quickly degenerates into madness, Lord of the Flies-style, murdering the archbishop, much of the clergy, and many others denounced as politically suspect. An episode far more murderous and traumatic than the Reign of Terror or the Occupation of the 1940s, and still deeply cherished, feared and argued about in France to this day.