VI.2.4. RUINS. REVENGE. EVOLUTION

MENU: 6.2.4. Ruins. Revenge. Evolution.  

THE URBAN IMPACT OF LA COMMUNE AND HOW IT CHANGED 

Rubble covers a third of the city. A monstrous church hovers over town. A subtle evolution when strikes replace revolts.

 

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In brief

• Emphasis on Communard destruction 

• The real Communard fires

• The inferno in context

• The sacred hilltop

• The "Acropolis of the revolution" 

• The church of vengeance

• Changed threat, changed city

• The Sacré-Cœur frightens, Sainte-Anne heals

• "The chocolate facade"

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Emphasis on Communard destruction

EMPHASIS ON COMMUNARD DESTRUCTION

 

MOST NARRATIVES FOCUS ON THE RUINS LA COMMUNE LEFT, FORGETING THOSE OF THE ARMY

For example...

 

• The National Library introduces documents of La Commune by a photo of City Hall in ruins. It is true that it was deliberately burned by Ferré's order, but the army's destruction was as terrible.

• The anchor of a popular television series states that Communards burned the chateau of Saint-Cloud  —  six months before La Commune even existed.

-- Secrets d'histoire with Stéphane Bern:

" Madame de Barry, coup de foudre à Versailles" (2016), gone from the web.

      View from horseback of the chateau and parc of Saint-Cloud by Étienne Allegrain, toward 1675 / zoom

         Le Château en flames, lithograph, 1874 /zoom

October 13. 1870: The Government of National Defense bombards the château. 

March 27, 1871: La Commune is proclaimed.

• More destruction from the French army, as it makes its way to western Paris from Versailles.

Le Point du Jour [a western outskirt] après le passage de l'armée de Versailles en mai 1871 (1871-1876) / zoom

    -- Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited 

# # #

Army officers, who did not trust their troops... 

• Preferred bombardment to combat, and army shells caused the first fires. As well, they tore down houses to skirt barricades rather than attack head on:

The postcard sent in 1908 shows the lasting memory.

 

• That officially-sanctioned destruction was new. In Les Misérables Victor Hugo explicitly states that the army fought barricade defenders face to face, as illustrations confirm. 

Destruction at Rue de Rivoli Facing Louvre, "Illustrated London News"

 

• As well, owners, who presumably backed Versailles, burned buildings themselves:

"We will never know how many crooked speculators, merchants at the end of their resources, men facing bankruptcy, used the fires to erase their situation crying, Death to the incendiaries!, when they had just lit the fire [themselves]."

A man is sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for burning his house to collect damages.

-- Lissangary, Appendix XXI 

 

Knowing which side destroyed most

is impossible.

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The real Communard fires

THE REAL COMMUNARD FIRES

COMMUNARDS BURN SYMBOLIC BUILDINGS BUT SPARE CHURCHES AND HOMES OF "THE RICH" (THIERS'S EXCEPTED)

Firemen come from as far as Brussels.

-- Victor Hugo, Choses vues ("Things seen," his journal), May 25,  1871

   Insurrectionary Paris, exhibit at City Hall, 2011

Since rebuilding took place in the style imposed only 15 years before, one rarely feels the copy: "The reconstructed monuments have taken on the lovely gray dress that gives them an air of tranquil and respectable age... »

-- Vuillaume

Exceptions: 

• City Hall

Prise de l'Hôtel de Ville: le pont d'Arcole (detail) by Amédée Bourgeois, 1830 / zoom

        John Orbigny Immobilier (gone from web)

The building adapts the 16th-century original, but no one would mistake it for it.

• The Tuileries palace could have been restored.

      Parade militaire au Tuileries en 1810 by Hippolyte Bellangé, 1862 / zoom

Zoom

Ruines du palais des Tuileries par Ernest Meissonnier, 1870's / zoom

But leaders of the fragile new republic did not want to resurrect that symbol of monarchy, and now one walks through a void:

# # #

The ruins were tourist sites for 20 years.

New York poster of 1891 sold on the web

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The inferno in context

THE INFERNO IN CONTEXT

THE COMMUNARDS ARE BLAMED FOR THE FIRES THAT DESTROYED A THIRD OF THE CITY

They should be put in context.

# # #   

Fire, an arm of war 

Napoleon at the Burning of Moscow, unknown German artist, 1820's / zoom. (Notice the white horse.)

• Russians burned Moscow. 

• The English, Washington. 

• The French, Algerian villages. 

• In 1934 the agitation that led to the victory of the French Popular Front began when rioters lit fires around a bastion to protect it from police.

• In 2022 residents of Kiev prepared barricades of fire when expecting a Russian attack.

# # #

The patrimony, a recent concern

• The cost of demolition alone saved Notre-Dame Cathedral and Versailles, until The Hunchback of Notre-Dame changed ideas on the Middle Ages and Louis-Philippe made the palace a museum (destroying much of its decor).

• The Baron Haussmann tore down blue-collar neighborhoods' medieval churches.

• Westerners have tried to protect their patrimony only since the 1960's, and still lose much of it to developers. 

# # #

The Communard fires were practical in part: Burning City Hall and the police headquarters destroyed records and flames were barriers protecting retreat.

           Italian account of La Commune, source of painting not said /  zoom (please scroll all the way down) 

# # #

But also, many Communards "were mad with despair and nothing would stop them." They set explosives under the Panthéon and meant to blow up its neighbors, the Sainte-Geneviève library with its 12th-century manuscripts and the 15th-century church of Saint-Etienne du Mont.*

               -- Account of Jules Vallès

Far from the left-bank arteries that Haussmann built, it survived his destructions. 

 

• Legend has Saint Genevieve's prayers save Paris from the Huns. As this church harbors her tomb, it was the site from which medieval processions to save the city from calamities began:

• The church:

                 Interior of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont by Emile-Antoine-François Herson, 1864 / zoom

 This photo and those that follow are by Pamela Spurdon

 

• Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris begins there.

 

# # #

Vallès, the mayor and others saved those edifices, and other Communards saved the Louvre:

"You think you'll terrify the hicks, but you'll really terrify our own people. That's when old ladies will call you brigands!

We had to keep repeating that, holding on to a button of their tunics..."

-- Narrative of Jules Vallès (in French)

 

# # #

We who can still benefit from these remarkable sites thank the Communards who preserved them. 

Now for a monument that La Commune 

 involuntarily inspired. 

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The sacred hilltop

THE SACRED HILLTOP

  

HEIGHTS ARE OFTEN VENERATED AND MONTMARTRE*, HILLTOP OF DRUIDS AND ROMAN GODS, IS THE SITE OF FRANCE'S FOUNDING LEGEND 

*"Mount of Martyrs" 

Full painting at end of page.

There Romans decapitated the first Christian missionaries:

Their bishop, Denis, is usually shown holding his head in his hands...

     Facade of Notre-Dame Cathedral /zoom 

Bodemuseum (Berlin), 1460-70 / zoom

French illuminated manuscript, end 15th century / zoom 

Church window in Champagne / Internet, no more information

La Crucifixion du Parliament de Paris, unknown master, mid-15th century / zoom

# # # 

That summit, the highest of the Paris region, is associated with Calvary and a convent was built there 

    Piéta of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (detail), 16th century / zoom

It was destroyed during the Revolution. Secular buildings sprang up, but its 12th century church, of the right size for the 600 villagers, remained:

Zoom (please scroll down)

The Montmartre hilltop toward 1820

Richard Nahem

Saint-Pierre de Montmartre

Even before the armistice with Prussia right-wing Catholics planned an infinitely larger church there. It would be, they said, atonement for the anticlericalism that was responsible for the looming French defeat.

Then came La Commune.

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Next,

The "Acropolis of revolution"

"THE ACROPOLIS OF REVOLUTION" (Louise Michel)

THE CHAIN OF EVENTS THAT LEAD TO LA COMMUNE CULMINATE AT THE HILLTOP, WHICH BECOMES A SITE OF MARTYRDOM 

Histoire de la Révolution de 1870-1871 by Jules Claretie, 1872

"Paris après le siege - le parc d'artillerie  de Montmartre"

 

• Distant, hard to reach and poverty stricken, Montmartre is part of the city that at the end of the war the humble control. So 171 of the cannons seized in advance of the Prussian march are deposited on the empty space at the top of the hill.

• Guards establish their headquarters a few steps away to protect them. 

• So that is where the arrested officers are locked up. Their lynching takes place in the courtyard. 

Versailles's goal: neutralize the cannons and punish 

• Instead of marching along the arteries toward the communard bastions of the east, on entering Paris and committing the first massacres the army climbs the hill.  As there are no shells for the cannons, the Communards fighters are elsewhere. There is no resistance.  

• Forty-seven residents seized at random, taken to the site where the generals were lynched and ordered to kneel. A woman holding a baby cries, "let us show these miserable people that we know how to die standing up!" 

Le Cri du peuple by Jacques Tardi (Castermann 2004), YouTube

• More residents on the following days, force them to look at the wall for a long time, and shot.   

 -- Lissagary, text and Appendix XVIII

# # #

The ordeal of Eugène Varlin

The son of a poor peasant, a bookbinder who reads the books he produces, member of the First International, organizer of the first union to accept women and a rare Communard to contest the practice of paying women less, co-founder of a cooperative restaurant that provided 8000 meals, he becomes a member of the Central Committee, then deputy to La Commune.

He assumes the humble tasks that lets La Commune function, opposes violence, tries to prevent the shooting of the rue Haxo and fights on the barricades. 

-- Biography: 

Eugène Varlin by Jacques Rougerie (in French)

• The legend 

When the last barricade falls he lies down on a bench, exhausted. A priest recognizes and denounces him. He is hauled up the hill followed by a huge crowd, "for at least an hour, under a hail of insults and punches [...] he became a mass of flesh, one eye hanging out of the orbit."

-- Lissagary

• The reality

The streets are too narrow for a crowd of more than 50, and soldiers protect Varlin to keep violence in official hands. But a mob follows the cortège, screaming insults, prolonging the misery and applauding when he is shot. 

-- Vuillaume, Mes Cahiers rouges : la mort de Varlin 
Vuillaume walks the route and examines the different accounts,

including that of a witness.

• "He died bravely," a right-wing journalist wrote.

-- Lissagary, Appendix XVIII

# # #

The outbreak of La Commune, the woman with the baby, the next martyrs and Varlin's nightmare make the hilltop a Communard symbol. 

 

Maximilian Luce, an anarchist painter who admired Varlin, 

painted his execution several times. He put the hill in the background to link his martyrdom with that of Saint Denis:

Varlin's Execution, between 1914 and 1917 / zoom

 Then the hill becomes a symbol

for the victors too.

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Next,
The church of vengeance