THE FALL OF PARIS : The Siege and the Commune, 1870 -1871 by Horne, Alistair

New York 1965, St Martin's Pr, US 1st edition , hard bound w/dj, 6x9, VG/VG condition,( small prev. owners name stamp on front end papers) xiii, 458 pages, maps, notes, index. ---------------------------Louis Napoleon's Empire seemed to have reached a new peak of splendor when the Great Exhibition opened in Paris in April 1867. Glittering with pride, Paris preened herself before the admiring gaze of visitors from all corners of the globe. Yet within three years she was a city besieged: Bismarck's Prussians at her gates, the Emperor disgraced and in exile, his Empire little more than a dim memory. La Ville lumiere no longer sparkled, her lights extinguished from lack of fuel, her epicurean populace reduced to eating rats to keep from starving. When capitulation came it brought with it the harshest peace settlement ever imposed by one European state upon another.But worse was to come. There followed in March 1871 the bloody civil war forever to be associated with the name of the Commune de Paris. Before it ended, twenty thousand Parisians had been slaughtered by their fellow citizens.Alistair Horne, author of the best-selling The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, has brilliantly re-created this unhappy period of French history. He has based his story not only on first-hand accounts of Parisians such as the Goncourts, but also on despatches of the neutral British journalists who were present, and on the official reports of the shrewd and levelheaded American minister in Paris, Elihu Washburn.The result is a vivid immediacy which carries the reader back to the starving and blood-soaked Paris of almost a hundred years ago.