Description: The collapse of France in 1870 had an overwhelming impact – on Paris, on France, and on the open-mouthed world.  People everywhere saw Paris as the centre of Europe, the hub of culture, fashion and invention.  And suddenly France, not least to the dismay and disbelief of her own citizens, was gripped in the vice of the Iron Chancellor’s armies, and forced to surrender on humiliating terms.  Almost immediately, Paris was convulsed by the savage self-destruction of the Commune.  In this new study of the Siege and its aftermath, the author evokes the high drama of those ten fantastic months. The reader is enabled to sense the agony, both spiritual and physical, which Paris and the Parisians were suffering in Mr Horne’s masterly narrative, into which are woven first-hand accounts left by official observers, private diarists and letter writers.  But these events are not described in vacuo. The author finds the causes of the collapse of France in the shallow brilliance and superficial prosperity of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire. The opening chapters portray this gas lit theatricality, moving as if upon a screen into the shock of the Siege and the tragedy of the Commune and, later, its brutal repression. The book closes by identifying the paths which led from the Siege to the First World War, from the Commune to Lenin’s Russian Revolution of 1917.