THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

French Vautrin, 1989winner of the Prix Goncourt, debuts here with a sweeping epic tale of Paris under the 1871 Commune.

After France’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia, the Second Empire collapsed into civil war and insurrection. Chaos reigned in Paris, where bloody riots were suppressed only after a yearlong siege. Our primary guide through this tempest is Horace Grondin, deputy head of the Imperial Sûreté. Known for his unimpeachable probity, Horace hides a dark secret: He was once a convict himself, sent to Devil’s Island 16 years earlier on charges of murder (they were false). After escaping, he assumed a new identity and entered the Sûreté partly as a way of tracking down Antoine Tarpagnan, whom he believed to have been the true killer. Antoine had become a captain in the National Guard during the intervening years, but with the fall of the Empire he went over to the Communards, who had declared Paris a Free Republic and organized the defense of the city against royalist and Prussian armies. The day the Commune was proclaimed, Antoine met and fell in love with Gabriella Pucci, a back-alley prostitute “owned” by the vicious pimp Edmond Trocard. Gabriella loves Antoine but is heavily in debt to Trocard, who refuses to let her go and threatens to kill Antoine if he comes near her. As Antoine searches through the Paris underworld for Gabriella, he is himself pursued by Horace, who’s using his own informers to find the captain. It’s a risky investigation, however, for policemen were not well liked by the Communards, and Horace is in danger of lynching by the mob if he’s recognized. With three armies encircling Paris and firing squads executing hundreds each day, the odds are short that Horace, Antoine, and Gabriella will all make it out alive.

Unabashedly in the tradition of Hugo: an old-fashioned narrative that builds up a head of steam quickly and has plentiful enough action to make up for the thinness of its leading players.