Paris Under the Commune: The Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege; with Numerous Illustrations, Sketches Taken on the Spot, and Portraits (from the Original Photographs)

Seventy-three days in the spring of 1871, Paris burned with the strangest fire Europe had ever seen. When Prussian siege guns surrounded the city and the French government fled to Versailles, the National Guard seized control and declared the first working-class government in modern history. John Leighton, writing from the immediate aftermath, captures the electricity of those weeks: barricades rising overnight, political clubs debating through gaslight, workers discovering they could govern themselves. The book opens on March 18, 1871, when Parisian insurgents executed two generals and seized the city, and follows the Commune's desperate attempt to rebuild society from the ashes of empire. Leighton witnessed the street fighting, the political prisoners, the doomed hope that Paris might transform not just France but the world. The Commune's bloody suppression in May remains one of history's most tragic confrontations between dream and power. This is eyewitness history at its rawest: not a textbook account but the account of a man who watched his city tear itself apart.