Canonical event in the revolutionary imaginary! The urban insurrection to inspire all others! Touchstone for Marxist strategy! In Laura Forster’s hands, we are given an image of the Paris Commune where the contours of what it means, and to whom, is a little less predictable. She traces the impact of the Commune between its immediate aftermath, when the first of 3,500 refugees began to arrive in London, and its incorporation into the culture of the nascent socialist groupings in Britain a decade later. The result is an interesting, albeit slightly uneven, read. It successfully reanimates a sense of why the Commune matters at different scales while also enhancing a broader understanding of how revolutionary events ricochet through time and space.

The first two chapters are tightly interrelated. The Communards who fled to Britain almost unanimously settled in a small part of central London, reaching east to the reading room of the British Museum, south to Soho and north to Euston Road. There, on the fringes of the established French communities, they were welcomed into a range of clubs, discussion groups, cafés and restaurants that catered to a heterodox milieux of radicalisms. The intellectual framing for these chapters is astute. The spatiality of this history is brought to the fore, showing how these cheap and unassuming places cultivated cultures of idealism that were, by necessity, ideologically porous. We are urged to take friendship seriously, to trace the flow of revolutionary ideas outside, beyond and perhaps even in contradiction to the histories of the organized Left and its parties, unions and manifestos. This small slice of the city became a fermentation barrel, allowing French and British radicalisms to mingle (alongside a host of other varied influences). These early chapters deftly fuse geographical theory (Doreen Massey) to foreground the importance of social space and anarchist historiography (Constance Bantman) as an invitation to practise a form of social-geographical history where canonical ideology or institutional certainty is eclipsed by inter-personal networks, influences and spaces of encounter.

The following chapters take us in a different direction (and that sense of theoretical-spatial tightness dissipates slightly in the process). Now we follow the Commune as it was represented by non-socialists. The English Positivists get a whole chapter, in which Forster suggests that their key intellectuals – Frederic Harrison and Edward Spencer Beesley in particular – were early sympathizers with the Commune, doing more than anyone else to dispel negative propaganda in the British press. Interestingly, Forster claims that they anticipated the twentieth-century reinterpretation (from the likes of Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists) of the Commune as a spatial revolution, against centralization and displacement, allowing her to claim that our inherited wisdom of the Commune ‘perhaps does not have its origins where we thought it did’ (p. 113). Broadly speaking, this is a convincing argument, but it is never fully proven because the book does not show us how (or even if) the English Positivists’ words were engaged with by subsequent generations of radicals in France. They anticipated future analysis, but did they influence it, and how? We get some hints (Marx, while heavily criticizing the Positivists, evidently appropriated many of their words and ideas), but answering that question fully is beyond the scope of this book.

Christian and Patriotic interpretations of the Commune are highlighted to emphasize the notion of the Commune as ‘endlessly malleable’ (p. 189) before the socialist revival of the early 1880s, the focus of the final chapter. Forster shows, adeptly, that invocations of the Commune were normalized at commemorative events across Britain but began to signify more than solidarity with the actually existing Paris Commune. Cries of ‘vive la commune!’ internalized the Commune as a shared claim on the past, but were inherently forward looking. There is plenty of fascinating material here, including the degree to which celebration of the Commune annually united increasingly divided factions of the Left at home while incubating an internationalist sensibility, providing a ritual to ground the ideal of proletarian solidarity. Sections on how the Irish, the Scots and women adopted the Commune all add nuance to the argument that it was received in a myriad ways, but are a little too brief to balance the London focus of most of the book.

This is an iconoclastic and enjoyable read that is of evident interest to historians of British socialism and the Paris Commune. It is also a stark reminder that social spaces matter to the fermentation of political ideas as much as migration does, and in the ever-more expensive, sanitized and securitized cities of the UK, surrounded by an increasingly hostile border regime, it is hard to see how the legacy of the Commune will continue to grow. But if Forster’s book teaches us anything, it is that it might not be where or how we would expect.