Horne's account of Paris's agony in 1870-1, first published in 1965, turned out to be the first of a French historical trilogy; the second work dealt with the battle of Verdun and the third with France's collapse in 1940. Louis-Napoleon, ill and prematurely ageing and with an infirm grip on events, had allowed himself to slide into war with Prussia, something which suited Bismarck's book though he did not - as is often misleadingly stated - deliberately provoke the conflict. After quickly mopping up French armies in the field and taking the Emperor prisoner, the Prussians under Moltke surrounded and laid siege to Paris which was virtually starved into surrender. During the siege, however, the colourful southern politician Gambetta escaped by balloon and roused the provinces, who raised new armies but were defeated in turn. Paris's second agony then began when Leftist republicans in the capital rose spontaneously, rejected the surrender terms, elected their own government and proclaimed the famous Commune - in effect, a separate city-state. Once again it came under siege, but this time from French troops under the new conservative Government of Thiers; the fratricidal fighting killed about 30,000 people, many or most of them shot in reprisals after Marshal MacMahon had finally taken the city by storm. The last desperate stand in this saga of heroic lunacy was made by the Communards in Montmartre, where today the church of Sacre Coeur commemorates the internecine bloodshed and its ending. The Commune is a grim chapter in French history, compounded of class hatreds, inept leadership, ideological fanaticism and icy opportunism. It left a legacy which dogged and divided France down into Hitler's time and virtually the only person to profit was Marx, who used it to create a Leftist martyrology that proved particularly potent during the Russian Revolution. Alistair Horne's account still reads very well, and is certainly salutary.
Brian Fallon