The Last Communard
Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The story of an unexpected hero
The Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story.
In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was imprisoned for treason when the Commune fell and narrowly avoided execution for his role in the struggle for a new future. In later life, he immigrated to Soviet Russia, finding fame as a revolutionary icon. In his native country, he was vaunted as a hero, a touchstone of revolutions past during France’s interwar dramas.
Abandoned by the Soviet regime, he languished, fortunes foundering, in Russia. Having led a long and extraordinary life, he died in Siberia in 1942 while fleeing Moscow as the Nazi armies swept across western Russia. It was another thirty years before he returned to Paris, his ashes coming to rest in the Communards’ plot of the Père Lachaise cemetery, on the centennial of the uprising, a symbol of France’s undying radical tradition.
Gavin Bowd’s stunning narrative shows how an individual can be swept up in the fierce tides of history, and at the same time be defined by his own efforts to force those tides into a different, and better, course. Lejeune’s life captures war and revolution in a tumultuous period of European history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bowd (Fascist Scotland), senior lecturer in French at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, schools readers in the uncertainties and abuses of history through this account of the life of Adrien Lejeune (1847 1942), the last surviving participant in the Paris Commune. Marx called the Commune a "glorious harbinger of a new society" and nearly every 20th-century Marxist organization attempted to claim descent from the Communards. Lejeune, himself an undistinguished rural pharmacist, became implicated in these questions of legacy. Thus, any serious inquiry into Lejeune's life is complicated by historical revisionism. Lejeune was said to have defended the barricades of the Rue des Pyr n es on the Commune's final day; saved from the firing squad, he was imprisoned and later sent to a New Caledonian labor camp. Bowd suggests that Lejeune's true contribution and punishment were more modest. When Lejeune decamped to the U.S.S.R. in 1930, he became a living symbol of revolution and link to a revolutionary past. Yet Bowd finds him a lonely geriatric, isolated and needy as war breaks out around him. The unembellished facts of Lejeune's life prove underwhelming, which is perhaps why Bowd supplements his book with intricacies of Communist history, but this chronicle has merit as Lejeune's story, is now inextricable from that of the Commune.
