The Last Communard: Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary

Adrien LeJeune died in Siberia, 1942, fleeing Moscow from the invading Nazis. It was not until 1971 that his ashes were finally returned to Paris and laid to rest at the Communard’s burial ground in Pere LaChaise cemetery. One hundred years beforehand, Lejeune had stood on the barricades of the Paris Commune, fighting for liberation of the city and a new future. He only just avoided execution when the uprising was eventually defeated. The Last Communard tells the story of LeJeune’s life from that moment of youthful rebellion. It shows how it intertwined with the global history of revolution. First imprisoned for his treason, he was later celebrated in Soviet Russia, made a hero within the dramas of interwar France, abandoned in the storms leading up to the Second World War. Gavin Bowd’s stunning narrative shows how an individual life can be swept up in the fierce tides of history.

Reviews of The Last Communard: Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary

"Finally, a non-fiction book that I greatly look forward to: The Last Communard by Gavin Bowd, Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews. Nonfiction, but this story of a man who fought in the Paris Commune in 1871 and died in Siberia in 1942, sounds as if it should be stranger than fact" Allan Massie, Scotsman