ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the relation between politics and private life, as revealed through various letters of the Allemane family. They centre on the political career of Jean Allemane an active participant in the Commune, who was sentenced to hard labour for life and deported to New Caledonia. Amnestied in 1880, he returned to play an important role both in the printing union federation and in the development of the socialist parties of the early Third Republic, but it is on the decade from 1870 to 1880 that the evidence is concentrated, before he became prominent in politics. The surviving correspondence of the Allemane family falls into two broad categories. Firstly, there are letters preserved in the official archives of the authorities. The second chief source is the large number of private manuscript letters deposited by various members of the family at different times in different archive collections, most of them in Saint-Denis.
