Commune

In the spring of 1871, workers and dreamers seized Paris and held it for seventy-two luminous, terrifying days. Louise Michel, the teacher known as the Virgin of the Commune, lived every moment. She took up arms when theVersailles forces came. She was there in the final slaughter, watching the city burn. This memoir, written nearly three decades later, is not distant history but living flame: a passionate, unsentimental account of what it means to believe in revolution enough to die for it. Michel writes of camaraderie and betrayal, of the hope that the world might be remade, and of the blood that drowned that hope. She does not soften the idealism or the horror. This is what it looked like from inside the inferno, from a woman who refused to look away.