of Protestantism in much of Europe.
An instance of the former was the conduct of Pope Paul IV at the time of Queen Elizabeth's accession in England (pp. 213ff). Elizabeth's religious convictions were loosely formed, and in Ranke's view she might well have been won to the Roman cause, which would then probably have prevailed in England, and Scotland as well. But Paul IV's inflexibility pushed Elizabeth away, and she finally moved firmly into the Protestant camp. Even more ambivalent was the earlier conduct of Paul III (pp. 174ff). At the moment when the Catholic Emperor Charles V seemed on the point of extinguishing Protestant power, the Pope became the Protestants' protector: he feared them less than he did the overbearing power of a triumphant Emperor.
Von Ranke's History of the Popes thus poses us a constant warning that patterns that look grand and inevitable from a distance are often, viewed close at hand, the result of complex interactions of individuals, their personal goals, and personal drives.
Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. Civil War in France: The Paris Commune. Rev. Ed. New York: International Publishers, 1988.
This is book full of irony, for it paints a picture of the beginning of a movement "Marxism Leninism" that dominated much of the twentieth century, almost at the time that the movement is collapsing. The book was published by a U.S. affiliate of Progress Publishers, an official Soviet agency, well into the Gorbachev era and only three years before the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.
The concern of the book is an earlier failed experiment in "Communism" the Paris Commune of 1871, a radical movement which briefly seized control of the French capital in the aftermath of the disasterous Franco Prussian War, and held it for a few weeks before it was put down with great bloodshed by regular French troops. The heart of the book is three contemporary...