For a century and a half, almost anybody in Paris who had been anybody in life was laid to rest at Père Lachaise after death—along with many who had been nobody of note. Once, a hundred odd who had been less than nobody, who were of the canaille (“rabble,” “riffraff,” "mob,” sometimes “scum”), were slaughtered there.
Atop a hill in the 20th arrondissement of eastern Paris, Cimetiére Père Lachaise is named for a 17-th century priest who lived there before the cemetery was built. At 48 hectares (118.5 acres), it is the city’s largest cemetery. It holds the remains of more than 300,000 people, including the beloved French singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963), U.S. rocker-poet Jim Morrison (1943-1971), composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875); medieval lovers Héloïse (1101-1164) and Abelard (1079-1142); actor-spouses Simone Signoret (1921-1985) and Yves Montand (1921-1991); and writers Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Colette (1873-1954), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Under one monument, in the southeast corner of the cemetery, lie “a few of the ashes of the seven thousand French martyrs murdered by the Nazis at the camp of Neuengamme.”
Few tracts of real estate in the world are as politically charged as that corner. Within a few yards of the Neuengamme stone are monuments to the victims of half a dozen other concentration camps, to the French volunteers of the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic, and to the Central Committee of the French Communist party.
They’re not there by accident. Those memorials are directly across a narrow roadway from the Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Communards. Against that wall, on May 28, 1871, the French Army shot 147 defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first—albeit tragically short-lived—socialist-anarchist revolution.
The Commune was born out of dire circumstances. After the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, in the spring of 1871, the poor and hungry workers of Paris—including both socialists and anarchists—declared the city an independent political entity and held elections for a governing council, or commune. The existing government fled to Versailles; the Commune, flying the red flag of revolution rather than the French tricoleur, took office on March 28. It elected as its leader the jailed socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and rapidly instituted a series of laws and regulations meant to create political and economic equality, mandates that included a strong feminist component as well.
Blanqui never took office. The French government in Versailles sent the army out against the Commune. After weeks of skirmishes, the army re-occupied Paris. The last 147 defenders of the Commune were shot by a firing squad in Père Lachaise on May 28 at the end of what is still called la Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, which saw the summary executions by the French troops of tens of thousands of suspected communards.
One survivor, the poet Eugène Pottier (1816-1887), later wrote a poem that, set to music by composer Pierre De Geyter (1848-1932), became the anthem of socialists and anarchists around the world as “The Internationale.” It was sung for me once at the Mur des Fédérés, which remains a beacon for the hope for economic equality; French fighters for freedom and justice, including Blanqui and Pottier, have been buried or commemorated near it ever since.
The events of 1871 are also commemorated beyond the walls of Père Lachaise. A Parisian café is named for the Commune’s favorite song, “The Cherries of Springtime,” and a few miles south of the Mur des Fédérés, a boulevard in the Left Bank’s 13th arrondissement bears the name August Blanqui.
© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment