Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926)

As the title suggests, A Short History of the Paris Commune is a roughly 75 page history of the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. If you've read about it already in a history survey but want to know more, without committing to a 500 page tomb, this is a good middle ground freely available. The Wikipedia article is also good for a quick overview.

Ernest Belfort Bax was a well known 19th century Socialist (SDF) and takes an unapologetic defense of the insurgents, and for that reason the book is worth reading to get a 19th centuries revolutionaries perspective (although he was not there). He even includes recommendations for future uprisings, in case one is looking for ideas :) He mostly keeps to the order of events and is a dramatic "novelistic" writer, in particular the climatic "Week of Blood". It's not difficult reading once the flow of events get started.

To really understand 1871 one can approach it a number of ways: first-hand witness accounts; accounts written within 20 years by Socialists, Republicans and other contemporary observers; and modern histories. This book falls into the second category. Given how many factions were involved there seems an endless number of ways to read about it. There are even a bunch of fictional treatments out there - just too bad Zola didn't write more about it beyond the ending of La Débâcle.

Read via Internet Archive, which has a fairly large library of books about the events of France 1870-71.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd… (meer)

The Peasants War in Germany was the largest popular uprising in European history (besides the French Revolution). Yet most modern history books devote a page or two at most. This is perhaps not surprising since the Peasants War is surrounded by racist and socialist scholarship - Friedrich Engels famously wrote about it in 1850 from a Communist/Socialist perspective, and the Nazi's had some special attachment to it for their own agendas - most historians today just give it a brief account in relation to the Reformation.

I wanted to learn more about the specifics of the events - the battles, the people involved, the stories. Although written in 1899, this old fashioned historical narrative written in the tradition of Gibbon is a pleasure to read. For the most part it sticks with a chronological narrative of events, the first chapter has historical interpretations that are largely in-line with modern ones.

I read it through Internet Archive's "Flip Book" feature online and it was actually very enjoyable, in particular with the old scrawl some early 20th C socialists revolutionary hurriedly underlined throughout, giving it added atmosphere.

For the first chapter, recommend reading the Wikipedia article on the Peasants War first as background to better understand.

Found online at Internet Archive

http://www.archive.org/details/peasantswaringer00baxeuoft… (meer)