Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. By John Merriman. Yale University Press; 324 pages; $29.99 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHE crushing of the Paris Commune is still hard to comprehend. Over two days in May 1871, 130,000 troops from the regular French army entered Paris to suppress an improvised city government calling itself La Commune. Historians still dispute the figures, but seven days later the army had killed perhaps 10,000 defenders, unarmed helpers and hapless bystanders. Prisoners were shot out of hand. Of 36,000 people arrested, around 10,000 were executed, imprisoned or deported.In “Massacre”, John Merriman an historian at Yale University, combines two narrative tasks with considerable art: an overview of the tangled background and vivid close shots from the street. The collapse of France’s armies in an ill-chosen war with Prussia a year earlier...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1xVW5FX
No comments:
Post a Comment