"We shook off the empire as though it had been a nightmare," wrote the French radical journalist Juliette Adam, describing the handful of weeks in 1871 when the city of Paris ran itself at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The Paris Commune -- an idealistic interlude marked by the official separation of church and state, plans for universal education and workers' and women's rights -- haunted the late-19th-century lives that British historian Alex Butterworth recounts in "The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents." For some of these people -- idealistic anarchist radicals like the Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin -- the Commune represented a brief moment of possibility and promise. For others -- like Peter Rachkovsky, who ran Tsarist Russia's foreign intelligence service in Paris -- it was a nightmare whose return must be headed off at any cost.
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