IV.4.1. STREET ART AND OFFICIAL VERSION CLASH

MENU: 4.4.1. Street art and official version clash

ONE SIGN SAID "PLACE DE LA COMMUNE," THE OTHER, ABOUT THE PAST, IGNORED IT:

(UNTIL 2023)

 

The association Friends of the Commune put up the Commune sign in 2015. The panel on the past was not been changed.

Names few readers would recognize, a balloon and idealized rag pickers replaced a civil war:

History of Paris

La Butte-aux-Cailles

Pierre Caille [useless erudition] purchases a vine-covered hillside dominating the Bièvre in 1543. He leaves his name to the small agricultural terrain, whose history is hardly affected by the forced landing of the first hot-air balloon carrying the marquis d'Arlauder and Pilâtre de Rozier in 1783 [useless erudition]. The hilltop is crowned by windmills. One of them remains on this small opening until the 1860's. It also provides stones and clay. Between the Révolution of 1848 and World War I, the Butte aux Cailles is colonized by ragpickers and leather workers. The village without a church is populated by farms, workshops and shops in a spirit of conviviality and freedom. [Idyllic]

At last it was removed and "Place de la Commune" given a more prominent site:

(In 2024)

In brief 

• Murals contest the official spirit

• Frenzied combat

• Communard fighters

• La Commune is finally mentioned but...

*    *    *

Next,

Murals contest the official spirit

MURALS CONTEST THE OFFICIAL SPIRIT

"LIBERTY FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS!"

 

"Nationalists not welcome"

 

That spirit continues along the street: 

Léo Ferré, poet and singer beloved on the left

Louise Michel

The paintings have changed many times

since photographed in 2017,

but their spirit remains the same.

*     *     *

Next,
Frenzied combat

FRENZIED COMBAT

TAKING THE HILLTOP* THAT OVERLOOKED THE LEFT BANK WHEN HOUSES WERE LOW OR NONEXISTANT, WAS THE ARMY'S TOUGHTEST FIGHT

*The Butte-aux-Cailles ("Quail hilltop")

Sparing unreliable troops at other times shows the hill's importance: Versaillais forces were six times more numerous,

but it took five attempts to take 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 Val de Grâce, proudly look over 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 barricades at the Gobelins manufactory the army advanced over islands on the Bièvre River, although that route obliged climbing the steep hill:

  Zoom (please scroll down) 

There it began its climb...

Parc René Le Gall

The park is built on enlarged islands.

...taking this path...

...crossing a track... 

Boulevard Auguste Blanqui 

...that linked the porte d'Italie gate with place d'Italie, site of City Hall and of the prison where the monks would soon be killed.

...and heading up the hill, which they took toward 4 p.m.

The thousand surviving Communards retired to the right bank in good order, where they dispersed to defend their neighborhoods.  

# # #

That summit is five minutes

from place de la Commune...

The Brassai garden

...from which the terrified residents

heard the screams and gun shots 

from the fighting.

*    *    *

Next, 

Communard fighters

COMMUNARD FIGHTERS

"RAGE ALONE COMMANDS THOSE DEMONS:" THE LEGENDARY 101st BATALLION

"All are of the 13th or Mouffetard* undisciplined, hoarse, with torn clothes and banner, who mutiny if they rest and as soon as

they have been withdrawn from battle, must be plunged into it again."

  -- Lissagary

*Where Hemingway hears Communard memories

The hilltop battle lost, their general, Walery Wroblewsky, refuses the command of the remaining Communard troops, and fights on as an ordinary soldier:

     Mosaic outside the seat of Friends of the Commune

A young Polish nobleman exiled for participating in the insurrection of 1863, he survives in Paris by lighting street lamps, then by becoming a typographer.

La Commune defeated, he manages to escape Paris and flees to England. With the help of Marx, Engels and Polish refugees he founds a printing establishment and publishes Lissagary's account. He returns to Paris in 1885. He he dies poverty-stricken there (in 1908). 

-- Unsigned article in a publication of Friends of the Commune, n° 33, 2008 (in French) 

Serizier, the battalion's commander 

       Cover photo,

            Elements for a history of the Commune in the 13th district by Gérard Conte, 1989

 

Marie Jean-Baptiste Sérizier wears his cap boldly to the side and looks intensely into the camera as he leans against his sword.  

A Communist tanner

and militant in the workers' associations of the 13th,

he blusters, drinks, beats his wife,

and is an extremely brave and effective soldier.

*     *     *

Next,

La Commune is finally mentioned but...

LA COMMUNE IS FINALLY MENTIONED BUT...

 

ELEMENTARY ERRORS, IRRELEVANT DATA AND BEING HIDDEN AWAY CANCEL THAT RELATIVE HONESTY  

The hilltop fight

History of Paris

Communards on the Butte-aux-Cailles

"After the seige of Paris the government that has taken refuge in Versailles tries to restore order [misstatement *] in Paris held by the Commune. The Butte aux Cailles, then sparsely inhabited and whose steep slopes dominate the Bievre river, is the theater of a bloody battle on May 25. The guards have their headquarters there [error *] 

Their leader, Wroblewski, protects its access by ambushes and light artillery fire.

[...] The Versaillais are pushed back several times, but at the end of the day hold place d'Italie — then place Émil Duval, counselor and Communard general shot in April [irrelevant ***] — and the hill, while numerous insurgents retreat to the right bank of the Seine.  

* Restore order: A euphemism for taking control. Paris was exceptionally calm.

** Their headquarters were the Gobelins manufactory. Wanting to avoid its barricades explains using the Bièvre via its islands, and so climbing the hill.

*** Emil Duval: Information that has nothing to do with the fight for the hill.  

# # #

The panel is so placed as to be imperceptible:

• If it were on the street as most panels are, one would see it...

• ...but it is placed inside the passage that leads to the hill instead:
  
  

Ignorance and irrelevance as elsewhere,

plus invisibility. 

End of this section.

*    *    * 

Next section,

IV.4.2. 

An epicenter of misery