The Communards pulled down the statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme. Photograph from Corbis

The Paris Commune of 1871 was one of the four great traumas that shaped modern France. It stands alongside the 1789 Revolution, the ascent of Vichy, in 1940, and (odd though it seems, given how nonviolent and small-scale they were) the Events of May, 1968. Other, more outward-bending crises—the Napoleonic campaigns, the two World Wars, the battle for Algeria—made as much noise and cost far more lives, but they now belong to the settled, archival past. That Napoleon was a bad man but a big figure, that the Great War was a valiant folly, that the war in Algeria could have ended only with Algerian independence: these are easy to assent to now. The four civic crises belong to the available, still contested past, the one that hangs around and starts living arguments. People ask whether the Revolution, with a little luck and better leadership, could have avoided the Terror and Bonaparte’s subsequent dictatorship, just as they argue over whether May of ’68 was a long-overdue assertion of liberty against hierarchy or the beginning of an infantile appeal to pleasure over value.

The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him. The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makes it a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.

Then, in February of 1871, new legislative elections were held throughout France, and a majority returned in favor of an as yet ill-defined form of republican royalism. The Assembly, led by the aging statesman Adolphe Thiers—a politician under the Second Republic, who had been don’t-poke-the-bear wise about the war with the Germans before it started—soon declared itself the Third Republic. The people of Paris, always farther to the left than the rest of France, feared that the new republic would be republican in name only, and began organizing their own, alternative regime in the capital. A confrontation between what remained of the regular French Army, the Versaillais, and Paris’s popular militia, known as the National Guard, ended with the death of two generals, and the royalist-minded government fled Paris for Versailles, the old seat of the French kings. In Paris, a left-wing Communard government, protected by the National Guard, rose up and seized power, and for about two months that spring tried to rule on radical principles. It made various feints at self-organization, and offered statements of purpose that still seem prophetically advanced—particularly the boldly feminist ones. It also insulted the clergy and the few remaining rich people, and committed mostly disorganized acts of looting and reprisal against its ancient political enemies, including tearing down Thiers’s house and toppling the Place Vendôme column with its statue of Napoleon. (It’s back.)

The Versaillais then invaded Paris and, with minimal military difficulty, though at maximal human cost, reconquered the city. The Communards, as they were crushed by the advancing and brutal Versaillais, set fire to much of the city, including the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground, though whether all the fires were the result of a deliberate nihilistic policy set by sinister female “pétroleuses,” proto-suicide bombers, or a largely accidental result of the general chaos and violence is one of the many things that are still, violently, debated.

“Massacre” (Basic) is the Yale historian John Merriman’s vivid account of all this, and it’s proof of just how passionately present the trauma remains that this new book could be among the most passionate accounts of a distant historical episode that the reader is likely to encounter from an American academic. Merriman, whose earlier books include an eye-opening study of nineteenth-century anarchist violence, “The Dynamite Club,” is pro-Communard, emphatically so, and this gives his book both its great virtues and its real faults.

Its greatest virtue is the way Merriman particularizes the people of the Commune. For almost the first time in the vast scholarly literature on the topic, they are complicated individuals who come alive, rather than set-piece proletarian heroes or mere faces in the “mob” or “rabble” of right-wing imagination. Two figures especially stand out. There is “the Red Virgin,” Louise Michel, of the working-class Eighteenth Arrondissement, a militant Communard (“I descended the Butte, my rifle under my coat, shouting: Treason! . . . Our deaths would free Paris”) and a staunch feminist, who welcomed even prostitutes into the corps of women nursing injured fighters (“Who has more right than these women, the most pitiful of the old order’s victims, to give their lives for the new?”). The feminist aspect of the Commune—Merriman’s work here draws on Carolyn Eichner’s “Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune” (2004)—is one of its most appealing features: women like Michel played a central role, building barricades and chairing committees and generally raising hell. One Citoyenne Destrée declared, “The social revolution will not be realized until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance of revolution.”

If Louise Michel represents the forward-looking aspect of the Commune, Raoul Rigault represents the backward-looking aspect—he is a kind of Danton reborn. A socialist polemicist of appetite and charm, he became, in effect, the head of the Commune’s police force. “In their free moments, they downed food, wine, and eau-de-vie, having moved one of their favorite brasseries from the Boulevard Saint-Michel into the prefecture of police,” Merriman writes. One day in May, Rigault breakfasted on Chateaubriand aux truffes; a few days later, the fare included bottles of Pommard, Veuve Clicquot, and Nuits-Saint-Georges. His taste for Burgundy and champagne was perhaps political in nature, Bordeaux presumably being judged too reactionary, especially given that the retreating Imperial government had gone there to give up. (This general taste for the good life among the Communards, though the material of Versaillais propaganda, is one of the things that make them so sympathetic.)

Merriman relates the story of the Commune’s brief rise and brutal fall in tight detail, with hour-by-hour intensity, and draws all the drama out of the tale—even though the story is unavoidably sad, because the practical ambitions of the Communards were so incoherent. There is something suicidal about it, an Occupy Paris movement destined to become an urban Masada in the middle of the Belle Époque. The Communards had no tactics for spreading the principles of the Commune, any more than members of the New Left in late-sixties America had a plan for how, exactly, the working class would convert to their politics. The most the Communards seemed to have was a vague hope that communal-syndicalist organization would spread outward from central Paris into the provinces. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, “an infirmity of the French mind”—that of “being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.”) The Communards could scarcely build a barricade in an organized military manner, and the barricades they did build were neatly circumvented by the Versaillais, who climbed the stairs of the surrounding buildings and fired down at the defenders.