Laura C. Forster – författare

Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social change.Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape.The dissonance created by comparing societal expectations around friendship and a lonely reality, especially in the wake of an isolating global pandemic, is deeply alienating. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and is the antidote to capitalist despair.

Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871, thousands of Commune militants fled France to avoid imprisonment, deportation, or death. As a result, and due in large part to Britain's liberal asylum policy, around 3500 refugees arrived in Britain in the early 1870s. These exiles, and the revolution they represented, generated a widening ripple that reverberated through British political cultureThe Paris Commune in Britain is a book about radical ideas, and the people and places that make them. It is about how ideas are forged, propagated, and lived, and the mechanisms by which past radicalisms are mobilised in new presents. The focus is the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged. The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain. In exploring these different scales of influence, the book makes broader contributions to modern British, French, and European social, cultural, and intellectual history, as well as urban history and the history of exile and migration more generally.

Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871, thousands of Commune militants fled France to avoid imprisonment, deportation, or death. As a result, and due in large part to Britain's liberal asylum policy, around 3500 refugees arrived in Britain in the early 1870s. These exiles, and the revolution they represented, generated a widening ripple that reverberated through British political cultureThe Paris Commune in Britain is a book about radical ideas, and the people and places that make them. It is about how ideas are forged, propagated, and lived, and the mechanisms by which past radicalisms are mobilised in new presents. The focus is the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged. The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain. In exploring these different scales of influence, the book makes broader contributions to modern British, French, and European social, cultural, and intellectual history, as well as urban history and the history of exile and migration more generally.

Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871, thousands of Commune militants fled France to avoid imprisonment, deportation, or death. As a result, and due in large part to Britain's liberal asylum policy, around 3500 refugees arrived in Britain in the early 1870s. These exiles, and the revolution they represented, generated a widening ripple that reverberated through British political cultureThe Paris Commune in Britain is a book about radical ideas, and the people and places that make them. It is about how ideas are forged, propagated, and lived, and the mechanisms by which past radicalisms are mobilised in new presents. The focus is the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged. The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain. In exploring these different scales of influence, the book makes broader contributions to modern British, French, and European social, cultural, and intellectual history, as well as urban history and the history of exile and migration more generally.