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Massacre
The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
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$29.99Price
$34.50 CADFormat
Format:
- Hardcover $29.99 $34.50 CAD
- ebook $20.99 $26.99 CAD
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 9, 2014. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
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The Paris Commune lasted for only 64 days in 1871, but during that short time it gave rise to some of the grandest political dreams of the nineteenth century — before culminating in horrific violence.
Following the disastrous French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, hungry and politically disenchanted Parisians took up arms against their government in the name of a more just society. They expelled loyalists and soldiers and erected barricades in the streets. In Massacre, John Merriman introduces a cast of inimitable Communards — from les péoleuses (female incendiaries) to the painter Gustave Courbet — whose idealism fueled a revolution. And he vividly recreates the Commune’s chaotic and bloody end when 30,000 troops stormed the city, burning half of Paris and executing captured Communards en masse.
A stirring evocation of the spring when Paris was ablaze with cannon fire and its citizens were their own masters, Massacre reveals how the indomitable spirit of the Commune shook the very foundations of Europe.
Genre:
- "A story of incandescent ideals, stunning violence, and extraordinary people."—Maya Jasanoff, author of Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- "Massacre is an absorbing and very moving read. John Merriman has found exactly the right unemotional tone and mastery of detail--including many new stories heretofore unpublished--to produce the best popular history of the Commune, in English or French, in a generation."—Steven Englund, author of Napoleon: A Political Life
- "A rigorous, vivid book that brings to life the idealism, the horror, and--particularly--the people of the Paris Commune. Massacre fills a gap and will draw new readers to this timely topic."—Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Swan Thieves and The Historian
- "Excellent.... Riveting."—Wall Street Journal
- "John Merriman's vivid account of the Commune follows a life's work of richly detailed studies of nineteenth-century French social conditions and movements."—Robert O. Paxton, New York Review of Books
- "Merriman's nearly blow-by-blow account of the street fighting is vivid.... [His] sobering chronicle of just how far an allegedly democratic state was prepared to go to protect itself against its own people has grim resonance today."—Los Angeles Times
- "Merriman's account forces the reader to ponder which is bloodier, violence in the name of the state or violence in the name of the people.... [Merriman] is a rare academic, informing general readers without sacrificing his scholarship. His book is a good combatant against today's prevalent historical amnesia and, particularly, American ignorance of French history."—America
- "[A]n eloquent, frequently moving and disturbing account.... [A] fine recounting of an episode that hung over and haunted Europe for subsequent decades."—Booklist
- "Merriman relates the story of the Commune's brief rise and brutal fall in tight detail, with hour-by-hour intensity, and draws all the drama out of the tale."—New Yorker
- "The author handles a dramatic story with verve and moral outrage, weaving together a blow-by-blow account of the Commune's demise with its larger backstory."
—Maclean's
- On Sale
- Dec 9, 2014
- Page Count
- 360 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780465020171
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