Although it is a long time since anyone bar the neoliberal right believed that history was on their side, it is always nice to feel that you have a usable past. For much of the left, this has been a difficult matter. The 20th-century experiences of “really existing socialism” are understandably rather forbidding, and those of social democracy, though often fondly recalled, are just a little too conformist and mainstream. If there is a rock on which the fissile contemporary left might all agree to build itself on, it is the two-month-long Paris Commune of 1871, that bloodily suppressed, chaotic and radically democratic experiment in municipal anarcho-communism.

In the geography of David Harvey, the philosophy of Alain Badiou or the revolutionary heritage guidebooks of Eric Hazan, the Commune is the culmination of the French revolution, a “Universal Republic” whose ambitions were as expansive as its existence was brief. Kristin Ross’s recent Communal Luxury, for instance, tried to wrest the Commune out of the history of communism or the French left, instead tracing an unusual, intriguing line from the ideas of the Commune’s self-educated artisans, to those of figures such as William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, who were inspired by their acts to reassess their entire approach to art, nature and politics. According to Ross, “the world of the communards” – migratory lives, precarious work, insecure housing – “is much closer to us than that of our parents”. These two books about celebrated communards, however, deal in myths and legends.

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia is the latest in a series of graphic books by the artist Bryan Talbot and the historian Mary M Talbot, and it joins the likes of Paul Buhle’s A Full Life, on James Connolly, and Kate Evans’s Red Rosa, on Rosa Luxemburg, in a peculiar subgenre of radical biography. It creates a ripping yarn out of the life of Louise Michel, schoolteacher, active communard, exile and anarchist thinker. The framing device consists of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, on a 1905 visit to Paris, chancing on Michel’s militantly attended funeral, and then being told her life story by a fictional communard’s daughter. The tale begins on the eve of the Commune, as young Louise agitates among the Parisian workers, goes through her experience of the brief, violent revolutionary moment, her exile in New Caledonia, and a brief switchback to her childhood as the daughter of domestic servants, in Montmartre. Nicknamed the “red virgin” already in the 1870s, Michel has always been considered a saintly figure, and so she appears here, even lending her red scarf to the indigenous residents of New Caledonia as they rise in revolt against the French, in a gesture connecting the Commune and anti-colonial revolt.

Michel also appears as an enthusiast for technology, contrasting the pomposity of Sacré Coeur, the cathedral built to expiate the Commune’s sins atop her native Montmartre, with the optimistic, lightweight elegance of the Eiffel Tower, herald of the utopia she thought possible in the 20th century. So saintly and polymathic is this Louise Michel that The Red Virgin often reads like hagiography, though copious footnotes make clear just how much of it is based on real events, and point out the few occasions when literary licence has been taken. The artwork is warm, nostalgic and a little too cute; landscapes, such as a memorably slummy, almost rural Montmartre, smoky railway stations lined with red flags for Michel’s funeral, and a bouncy retro-futurist ideal city to illustrate one of Michel’s utopian reveries, are more convincing than the angelic, childlike figures.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration from The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia. Illustration: Bryan Talbot

Gavin Bowd’s The Last Communard is about a lesser-known revolutionary, Adrien Lejeune, the purported last fighter of the Commune to die, in the improbable location of Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1942. A life spanning the Commune, the French Communist party and honoured exile in the USSR made him an exemplar of the official story of the Commune sustained by the communist movement across the 20th century, as the great precursor of the Soviet socialist state. Bowd’s book explodes this myth with great ruthlessness. Beginning with a quote from the communard Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s (recently republished) History of the Paris Commune, warning against “false revolutionary legends”, it turns those legends inside out. Lejeune, a herbalist from Bagnolet, just outside Paris, claimed to have fought to the end as Versailles troops bombarded the revolutionary capital, and to have avoided summary execution out of sheer luck; looking back on his life in his dotage, he expressed his joy that the dreams of the Commune had been fulfilled in the happy life of the USSR, sad only that France had not yet made the leap into Stalinist socialism. He died a celebrated citizen of the USSR, and later his body was transported to the Père Lachaise cemetery to be buried by the Mur des Fédérés, where thousands of communards were massacred.

Bowd’s trawl through the French and Russian documents tells a less romantic tale. Lejeune, though part of the freethinking artisan milieu that produced the Commune, was a reluctant fighter, and very probably deserted near the end. In his trial, he denied responsibility, and was imprisoned in a fortress off the Breton coast largely because citizens of Bagnolet remembered him as an atheist and radical. Compared with Michel, who used her trial to denounce the bourgeoisie and to demand she be shot (she wasn’t), this was poor stuff, though cowardice did save him from otherwise certain death. His later life is even more shadowy – never a writer, Lejeune’s short and clearly ghosted 1931 autobiography bore only the vaguest resemblance to the truth. Initially, he was well treated by his Soviet hosts after he emigrated there in 1930, kept on a regular income from his stocks in L’Humanité and served with ready supplies of chocolate and wine. Most of his correspondence appears to have been about money. By the end of his life, Lejeune, though rushed out of Moscow to safety in Siberia, lived in much the same penury as any other pensioner during the darkest months of the “great patriotic war”. His few friends in the USSR, mostly French and Spanish communists, kept his memory alive, before he was rediscovered by the French Communist party in their preparations to celebrate the Commune’s anniversary. His exhumed corpse, transported from Novosibirsk to Paris, was a useful way of wresting control of the Commune’s memory from the Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists to their left, who saw 1968, not 1917, as the Commune’s successor, with equal improbability.

It is a sad story: a man’s willing collaboration in the erasure of his real life and its replacement by a heroic yet tall tale. Lejeune himself remains a blank – rather than a great tribune such as Michel, he was the sort of ordinary rank and file radical every movement relies on, thrown into prominence simply through his longevity. That wasn’t good enough, so his story had to be embroidered. Bowd’s tersely empirical tale ends by interviewing the communists who for decades governed Lejeune’s native Bagnolet, who wonder with incomprehension at how their history, once so carefully massaged, managed to disappear, leaving little but some street names and gravestones. Bowd, a one-time Communist party of Great Britain activist, chanced on Lejeune’s grave in 1989 as Soviet “communism” collapsed, and for him uncovering the shabby reality behind this revolutionary life seems to have offered a certain closure. Equally, though, it firmly slams shut one story of the Commune – one where it served as little more than a failed rehearsal for the USSR – and in doing so, makes others possible.

• Landscapes of Communism by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane. To order The Red Virgin for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) and The Last Communard for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.