The Last Communard

January 30, 2017
Bowd (Fascist Scotland), senior lecturer in French at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, schools readers in the uncertainties and abuses of history through this account of the life of Adrien Lejeune (1847–1942), the last surviving participant in the Paris Commune. Marx called the Commune a “glorious harbinger of a new society” and nearly every 20th-century Marxist organization attempted to claim descent from the Communards. Lejeune, himself an undistinguished rural pharmacist, became implicated in these questions of legacy. Thus, any serious inquiry into Lejeune’s life is complicated by historical revisionism. Lejeune was said to have defended the barricades of the Rue des Pyrénées on the Commune’s final day; saved from the firing squad, he was imprisoned and later sent to a New Caledonian labor camp. Bowd suggests that Lejeune’s true contribution and punishment were more modest. When Lejeune decamped to the U.S.S.R. in 1930, he became a living symbol of revolution and link to a revolutionary past. Yet Bowd finds him a lonely geriatric, isolated and needy as war breaks out around him. The unembellished facts of Lejeune’s life prove underwhelming, which is perhaps why Bowd supplements his book with intricacies of Communist history, but this chronicle has merit as Lejeune’s story, is now inextricable from that of the Commune.