A Very Political Landscape, Part Deux

Café Rendez-vous, Place Denfert Rochereau, Paris, 14 juillet—Beyond the table in front of me, beyond my poached salmon and glass of Sancerre, are camouflage-painted tanks, guns at the ready, rolling down the Avenue du Général Leclerc. Later, when I get back to my Paris home-for-the-summer, a television special will combine patriotic songs (by no means limited to “The Marseillaise”) with film clips of France’s newest contributions to military technology, including the latest in the pilotless, unstaffed bombers called predator drones.

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the Fête Nationale—July 14, France’s National Holiday, which the rest of the world calls Bastille Day. It commemorates the July 14, 1789, storming of the royal prison called the Bastille that marks the start of the French Revolution. Amazingly, the Fête Nationale vastly outdoes the U.S. Fourth of July in celebrating military might—in this case, of course, France’s.

I’m in this café conducting my own celebration. I’m toasting both a different French revolution and what turned out to be the perfect observance of my first Quatorze Juillet.

I’ve never before been in France in mid-July. I’ve celebrated aspects of Bastille Day in New York, although not the guns and tanks and drones. I got up this morning thinking about how to observe the day without joining the military hoop-la tonight at the Eiffel Tower.

I went for a walk. In the course of it, by sheerest accident, I discovered another monument to the world’s first socialist-anarchist revolution, the Paris Commune (see “A Very Political Landscape,” June 9.

I’ve visited the Mur des Fédérés—the Wall of the Communards—at Père Lachaise Cemetery every time I’ve come to Paris. My mother told me to, on the occasion of my first visit here. Go to the Louvre, she said, and see the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo—and go to Père Lachaise and see the Mur des Fédérés. (If she had known that Eugène Pottier, the poet who wrote the words to the communist-anarchist anthem, “The Internationale,” was also buried there, she’d have told me to see his tomb as well. I come from a long line of leftists.)

Living in Paris this summer, I’ve also dropped in occasionally at the Montparnasse Cemetery, the final resting place of two of France’s great political philosophers of the Left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I stopped to say hello to them today for Quatorze Juillet, then turned to leave the cemetery—

And came face to face with a map I had never seen before that informed me I was yards away from the “Monument de Fédérés.”

It’s smaller than the wall at Père Lachaise, and the inscription on it is a little worn and hard to see. Also, it wasn’t exactly where the map placed it.

Finally I found it. I took a few pictures. Then (I was quite alone there) I lifted my fist in the communist salute and sang one chorus of “The Internationale,” for Quatorze Juillet and in memory of my mother.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009