Maxime Vuillaume was born in Beauce in 1844.

When he was at the Ecole des Mines, he was with all the rebellious youth of the Latin Quarter.
These young people assiduously frequented the cafés and brasseries... Gambetta, Courbet, Vallès, Eudes and so many others. It was literary bohemia and revolutionary opposition to the Second Empire.

After all the events of 1870, Maxime Vuillaume donned a uniform like everyone else. He was a lieutenant in the battalion commanded by Charles Longuet (Marx's future son-in-law).

Vuillaume decided to revive the newspaper "Le Père Duchesne" of the 1st Republic with Vermersch and Alphonse Humbert. They took this decision in a small room that Baudelaire had occupied, on the very table where he had written "Les fleurs du mal".

"Le père Duchesne" was the newspaper of the sans-culottes during the French Revolution.
" Le père Duchesne" is a fictional character, a stove repairman in Paris, an eternal insurgent, always ready to denounce injustice.

Listen to what we had to say.
" The great anger of Father Duchêne against the scoundrels of financiers, grifters, monopolists, hoarders, who make a God of their safe, and who stir up disorder and plunder to make counter-revolution."

- That's what we need! they say

12 days before 18 March, the paper appeared.
This first issue called for a rent strike and harangued the capitulards.
On 10 March the censors were on the lookout. But they resisted.

The issue after the elections ...listen...
" Father Duchêne's great joy at finally being able to discuss the nation's affairs with the good patriots who have chased all the jean-foutres out of the Hôtel de Ville".

A print run of 60,000 copies was soon achieved.

After the bloody week, Maxime Vuillaume took refuge in Switzerland.
He worked as a mining engineer, building railway tunnels in the Alps and exploring the coal basin in Russia for a dynamite company. He wrote popular science books.

He returned to Paris for good in 1887 and devoted himself exclusively to journalism.
He continued his research into the Commune, tirelessly amassing evidence.

His first two accounts of the Commune failed to find any takers.
It was his friend Lucien Descaves, a writer and member of the Académie Goncourt, who took his manuscript to Charles Péguy. Very enthusiastic, Peguy unconditionally agreed to publication and came up with the title "Mes cahiers rouges" ("My Red Notebooks").

Ten notebooks tell the story; a link between the singular and the collective, dynamic, lively, factual and literary writing. He lets the witnesses speak. He gives us his correspondence with a large number of Communards.
A magnificent first-hand account of a Paris in revolt.

He said: "I wanted to write the history of those who have no history, I didn't want to be a partisan, I wanted to write the truth".

He returned to the hospice in 1924 and died there a year later at the age of 80.

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