PARIS LA ROUGE

From the Commune until today, why and how Paris has harbored so many revolutionaries within its walls.

Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, and Trotsky; Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Ho Chi Minh; Messali Hajj the father of Algerian nationalism, Pol Pot, the jihadists of Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan: the capital was the city of their apprenticeship, their initiation into politics, conspiracies and terrorism. For some it was the place of their death, natural or not.
No less amazing, other foreigners have taken the same Parisian route from revolt to revolution and exile: the Slovak Eugen Fried, Moscow's eye on the French Communist Party; the Romanian Boris Holban, head of the foreign communist resistance fighters of the Affiche rouge group; Henri Curiel, the Egyptian Third World advocate assassinated in the Latin Quarter in 1978; Carlos, the sinister Venezuelan; Palestinian, Iranian and Lebanese terrorist networks; Abu Nidal's gunmen who struck on the Rue des Rosiers; the Irishmen of Vincennes; the Italian Red Brigades who killed policemen on the Avenue Trudaine. And, finally, also revolutionary in their own way, the jihadists of today, born among us but resolutely foreign enemies.
A gifted narrator and meticulous historian, Rémi Kauffer tells their stories in a series of thrilling chapters.

A journalist and member of the editorial board of the magazine Historia, RÉMI KAUFFER is the author of twenty books including, published by Perrin, Le Siècle des quatre empereurs (The Century of the Four Emperors,2014), licenced in Taiwan, and Histoire mondiale des services secrets de l'Antiquité à nos jours (World History of the Secret Services from Antiquity to the Present)(2015).