The Paris Commune in Britain: Radicals, Refugees, and Revolutionaries after 1871

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Laura C. Forster (Lecturer in Modern History, Lecturer in Modern History, University of York)

The Paris Commune in Britain

Radicals, Refugees, and Revolutionaries after 1871

Laura C. Forster (Lecturer in Modern History, Lecturer in Modern History, University of York)

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English

Oxford University Press
21 August 2025

European history; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Social & cultural history; Historical geography; Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions

Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871, thousands of Commune militants fled France to avoid imprisonment, deportation, or death. As a result, and due in large part to Britain's liberal asylum policy, around 3500 refugees arrived in Britain in the early 1870s. These exiles, and the revolution they represented, generated a widening ripple that reverberated through British political cultureThe Paris Commune in Britain is a book about radical ideas, and the people and places that make them. It is about how ideas are forged, propagated, and lived, and the mechanisms by which past radicalisms are mobilised in new presents. The focus is the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged.

The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain. In exploring these different scales of influence, the book makes broader contributions to modern British, French, and European social, cultural, and intellectual history, as well as urban history and the history of exile and migration more generally.

By: Laura C. Forster (Lecturer in Modern History Lecturer in Modern History University of York)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 163mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 515g
ISBN: 9780198949435
ISBN 10: 019894943X
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 21 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1: Mapping the Commune 2: Making Friends 3: The Positivist Commune 4: Writing the Commune 5: Commemorating the Commune Epilogue

Laura C. Forster is a historian of ideas, political cultures, and political communities. She works primarily on modern Britain and France, but very much interested in the mobility of ideas and peoples across European borders and beyond. She is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York and completed her PhD at King's College London.