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I'm John Thatcher with Sebastian Smee. His new book is Paris and Ruins.

It is March 1871.

A gathering of revolutionaries with no real vivid memory of the revolution of 1889.

But with a lot of spirit, the class warfare of Paris is about to be resolved on the basis of out with the bourgeois

and the royalists, in with the communards.

The word sounds like communism.

It wasn't at the time.

Communism was a theory Karl Marx watching from London.

This was a gathering who seemed of men and women who want a city, a city to stand by itself.

In other words, a metropolitan republic, not a French republic.

And yet they were violent right away.

Why was that, Sebastian?

What did our heroes make of the violence that the communards visited immediately by arresting religious figures?

Why?

Well, you know, I think you can look at so much of the chumult that happened all through the French 19th century

as one attempt after another to kind of relitigate the French

revolution, you know, which it had achieved so much and it was obviously so influential on

all of history, including American history, but it had suffered one reversal after another.

...