VIII.9. WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID

8.9. MENU: WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID 

AFTER THE WAR THE RIGHT COULD NO LONGER OPPOSE REFORMS: EVEN EVERYDAY PEOPLE HID, WERE IMPRISONED OR SHOT  

Then the left, which included many who had fought with the Resistance, put through the social laws that help French people still. 

Plaque next to railroad tracks in working-class Ménilmontant

Such memorials to fighters killed during the Liberation dot the city, except in the conservative west. 

In brief 

• "Better Hitler than Blum" (the Socialist leader of the 1930's)

• Conservatives who joined the Resistance

*    *    *

Next,

"Better Hitler than Blum" 

"BETTER HITLER THAN BLUM" (the Socialist leader of the 1930's)...

 

WAS THE SLOGAN OF THE RIGHT AFTER THE POPULAR FRONT, AN ALLIANCE OF THE LEFT, CAME TO POWER

(IN 1936)

  

Zoom

Photomontage with Socialist leader Leon Blum and Communist leader Maurice Thorez, 1936

It brought the 40-hour week, collective bargaining, two weeks of paid vacation...

                                                                                                                                 Zoom

Songs of Struggle and Hope

      Herodotus

...lasting gratitude...

Zoom

The Front Populaire métro station in Aubervilliers, a working-class suburb of Paris

...and fury. 

Simone de Beauvoir* describes the ambiance two months before the left's seismic victory:

*The writer and philosopher who described a café during the Occupation.

"The 'patriots' had wanted to give the funerals of Bainville [a royalist historian and journalist] the glow of national mourning. On coming back from the ceremony on the boulevard Saint-Germain they passed the car that was taking Léon Blum to the Chamber; they stopped it, molested the occupants, seriously wounding Blum before the police intervened. There were arrests; Maurras [leader of a far-right movement], who had written violent articles against Blum, was pursued for provoking murder and condemned to several months in  prison. The Popular Front organized a massive demonstration against Blum's aggressors [...]. Meetings, demonstrations [from the left] confirmed the imminence of victory... ."

-- The Prime of Life, 1960, 271-272 (my trans.)

# # #

Self-interest and racism motivated innumerable European collaborators, but France was the only occupied country to legally elect a puppet government.*

*Memories of the19th-century insurrections, especially La Commune, explain that difference.  

The messaging of the Vichy regime:

 

     "It's the Soviets who pull the strings of the POPULAR FRONT"

Newspaper excerpts from the Pas-de-Calais region in Normandy

For an enlarged picture and 10 other posters of the time, please click.

"The Popular Front, Bolshevism's henchman? Beware of Communist hypocrisy / Vote France / The real peril / How Communists are preparing the revolution in France / For or against the Popular Front"  

The puppet government's "National Revolution" compares a corrupt, internationalist left with an upstanding, family-oriented, patriotic right.

# # #

Collaboration protected France from the most extreme German demands, but... 

• Freed Nazi forces to dominate most of the rest of Europe.

• Facilitated deporting Jews and members of the Resistance.  

# # #

The Resistance came mainly from the left and after the invasion of the USSR (in June 1941), was largely Communist: They called themselves"the party of the 75,000 shot."  

Publication unknown (photo from loose magazine pages found at a flea market)

Communists leave prison for execution (in 1943).

An exaggeration, said de Gaulle,

but true enough to make Communists'

coming to power in Western Europe likely:

That is the reason for the Marshall Plan.

*    *    *
Next,
Conservatives who joined the Resistance

CONSERVATIVES WHO JOINED THE RESISTANCE

SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND UNIFIER OF THE MOUVEMENT JEAN MOULIN, ARE FAMOUS

Others rest in the cemetery reserved to descendants of nobles who were guillotined during the Revolution, with plaques that honor them:

The Picpus cemetery: please click and scroll down. 

But most are recalled by memories alone.

# # #

To be sure, the left-right alliance was ambiguous...* 

*De Gaulle is accused of betraying Communist fighters at the end of the war (Wikipedia, which follows the mainstream, says he only abandoned them). Conservative fighters had nothing to do with that drama, but they shared the Left's patriotism, not its vision of social justice. 

...and fighting alongside people with contrary values must have made the choice still harder.

By wrenching themselves away from the prejudices and interests 

of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect.

Plaque at the Picpus cemetery

Remember before God

Jean Marie Philibert Victurnien / Marquis de Laguiche / Croix de Guerre 14-18 / Knight of the Legion of Honneur / Born July 9 1889

Deported to Buchenwald and Neu-Strasstrier *

Killed by the SS at Shildau on April 17 1945

and his son

Claude Pascal Marie de la Guiche / Knight of the Legion of Honneur / S/L de la 1er R.M.S.M. de la Div. Leclerc * *

Fallen in Haute-Sarthe * * *

on August 11 1944 at age 22

*Salt mines: "...we left Buchenwald for a destination unknown to us, which turned out to be the salt mines of Neu-Strassfurt." Most of the 459 French prisoners who were sent there died.

-- Thanks to Michael Zwerger for this information

** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, at El-Alamein in 1943, landed in Normandy with the Leclerc Division in June '44 and fought on until the end of the war. 

-- Marc Ambrose-Rendu, military historian, personal communication

*** Haute-Sarthe: the Loire Valley

# # #

After the war, certain survivors from both sides became well-known politicians. They might meet for dinner in the private salon of a restaurant known for its discretion (please click and scroll down).

Sure not to appear together in the next day's press,  
they would recall the time 
when they were brothers in arms. 

-- Told me by the late gastronomical critic Henri Viard

*    *    *

Next and last,

IX.

"THE FUTURE SPRINGS UP FROM BEHIND"

IX. "THE FUTURE SPRINGS UP FROM BEHIND"

 

THE VIOLENT, TRAGIC AND FINALLY SUCCESSFUL STRUGGLES OF THE PAST EXPLAIN THE INFINITELY HAPPIER CITY NOW

"We've forgotten 1848, but we still hear the Commune's scream," a professor said in the 1960's. Militants of the Popular Front and members of the French Resistance looked back to it. 

 "The future is not what is in front of us, 

but springs up from behind." 

-- Rahel Levin

Heroines and songs of La Commune, under street art in the 13th.

Almost, but not quite,

the end of Blook I.

*     *     *

IX.x 

Epilogues

VIII.6.4. SILENT MOVIES IN THE PARK

City Hall

The festival movies are short films

 from the early 1900's.

*     *    *

Next,

8.6.5. 

Ethnic dancers

VII. THE OVERLOOKED 13TH, A COMMUNARD BASTION

MENU: 7. 13th: COMMUNARD BASTION

THE CITY'S SOUTHEASTERN FRINGE USED TO BE ITS POOREST AREA...  

Adapted from a Google map

In the east where prevailing winds blow pollution and on an outskirt where land was inexpensive, the 13th was next to the river and a railroad and became one of the most industrialized areas in France. 

Raw capitalism transformed it from an idyllic place to one of misery.

     Evocation toward 1820, anonymous (at today's Auberge Ethchegorry)

 

Paris, 4 place Pinel "Les Chiffonniers" [The Ragmen] by Eugène Atget, toward 1900 / for more photos from the National Library, zoom

The spot now: a statue of a doctor who helped the mentally handicapped, a poster in search of a man who needs urgent help, street art and posters for theater and the left...

Portrait of  Dr. Philippe Pinel (d. 1826), who worked at the Salpetrière hospital five minutes away. 

The little girl was roller skating and posed for this picture.

# # #

This section explores what seems to be gone. The next shows how the area's modern vitality derives from it.  

     Boulevard Auriol 

In brief

• The fight for the hilltop

• An epicenter of misery

• A Third-World revolutionaries' training ground

• A walk through an outskirt that used to be chilling

*    *    *

 

Next,

V.I.

The fight for the hilltop

VII.1. THE FIGHT FOR THE HILLTOP

 MENU: 7.1. The fight for the hilltop

BLOODY WEEK'S FIERCEST STRUGGLE

     The Last Day of the Commune, theater poster by Leon Choubrac, 1883 / zoom 

In brief

• Frenzied combat

• Communard fighters

• Conflicting signs and the Communard spirit

• Another panel does mention La Commune but...

*   *   *

Next,

7.1.1. 

Frenzied combat

VII.1.1. FRENZIED COMBAT

THE BUTTE-AUX-CAILLES ("QUAIL HILLTOP"), SITE OF THE REPRESSION'S WORST FIGHTING

Elsewhere Versaillais officers spared unreliable troops, but they could not let Communards control the height that dominates the left bank. Though their forces were six times more numerous, it took four attempts to seize the hill.

-- Lissagary

                                 The Observatory Seen from the Butte aux Cailles by Jean Millet, toward 1710 / zoom

"A perspective to delight 

the most blasé traveller [...]

The Panthéon's magnificent cupula, the drab and melancholy dome of the Val de Grâce, proudly dominate an entire town [...] From there, the proportions of the the two monuments appear gigantic [...] to the left, the Observatory seems a dark and gaunt spectre [...] then, from afar, the Invalides's elegant lantern flames between the Luxembourg's blue masses and the gray towers of Saint-Sulpice [...]" 

-- The Woman of Thirty by Balzac, 1842 

To avoid the barricade that guarded the 13th's entry,* they proceeded under fire along the islands of the now-covered-over Bièvre river:

* The site where the 13th begins is still Les Gobelins (best known as the site of tapestry production since the 17th century).

Zoom (please scroll down)

After passing through what is now an idyllic park their climb began...

Parc René Le Gall

The park is built on enlarged islands.

...crossed what then was a country road... 

Now boulevard Auguste Blanqui 

It linked the gate at the city's entrance with place d'Italie, site of City Hall and the prison where the monks would soon be killed.

...climbed the hill under heavy fire as the terrified residents heard the screams and gun shots...

           Engraving of the time, gone from the web

...finally taking the hill toward 4 pm. 

      Le jardin Brassai

The thousand surviving Communards 

retired to the right bank in good order, 

where they dispersed to defend their neighborhoods.  

 

*    *    *

Next, 

7.1.2. 

Communard fighters