Product Description

From Alistair Horne’s grand trilogy on French history—two magisterial works now back in print

In 1870, Paris was the center of Europe, the font of culture, fashion, and invention. Ten months later Paris had been broken by a long Prussian siege, its starving citizens reduced to eating dogs, cats, and rats, and France had been forced to accept the humiliating surrender terms dictated by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck. To many, the fall of Paris seemed to be the fall of civilization itself. Alistair Horne’s history of the Siege and its aftermath is a tour de force of military and social history, rendered with the sweep and color of a great novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217161 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780141030630
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
“This classic work . . . is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the civil war that still stirs the soul of France.”
—Evening Standard, London

About the Author
Sir Alistair Horne, one of Britain’s greatest historians and commander of the British Empire, is the author of several works on French history, including Seven Ages of Paris and A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962.

Customer Reviews

Forgotten story remarkably told
I'm trying to think of a more elegant way to put it, but sometimes you've just gotta say: this is a really good book. "The Fall of Paris" is a remarkable job of storytelling, but it's also a primer of how a talented researcher and writer can synthesize an incredible amount of information from a diverse range of sources and turn it into a densely-packed, but still highly readable, narrative. The author balances broad-view scene-painting with an eye for personality and detail. In short, it's a very impressive work.

In an era when the sanguinary nature of the French Revolution is downplayed ("excesses") or fading from memory, the even more bloody life and death of the Paris Commune seem already long forgotten. For a number of reasons, that's not a good thing. The role of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune in stoking the fires of 75 years of German-French animosity is only the most obvious example. Less apparent, but just as important, is the example the Commune provided to future "leaders of the people" like Lenin and Stalin, and the way it transformed internal French politics.

This book is an excellent work in its own right, and deserves to be read simply on the merits of what it says about the events themselves. But the value of Horne's series of titles on Franco-German conflicts (of which this is the first of three books), and the influence these events had in their time and continue to have in ours, make an even stronger case for spending time in these pages.

Captures the excitement of the period
Horne's style makes the story of the Paris siege and commune every bit as compelling, fast-moving and vivid as the best fiction. You get a real sense of the various characters of the period, the opportunistic, the proud, the inept, the comical and the horrific. Brings this exciting, tumultuous time to life with poetic language and insightful observations. I am looking forward to reading more books by this author.

Great narrative of a fascinating period of French history
Horne has written a wonderful narrative of the events preceding and the events of the Siege of Paris in 1870-71. Horne's style is captivating and I found that I could not put the book down. The complex relationships that 'good' historical narratives need to develop are very well constructed by Horne. The attention to minute detail is a strong point of this book.

A throughly researched and emminently readable account. Highly recommended.