THE LEGENDARY 101st BATALLION: "RAGE ALONE COMMANDS THOSE DEMONS...
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they have been withdrawn from battle, must be plunged into it again."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 as 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 (in French)
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.
* * *
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