V.3. RUINS, REVENGE AND EVOLUTION

MENU: 5.3.1. 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.

 

Zoom

Insurrection yields to unionization

• Emphasis on Communard destruction 

• The 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  burned City Hall. 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 existed.

-- Secrets of History with Stéphane Bern:

" Madame de Barry, Love at First Sight at Versailles" (2016)

The Château in Flames, lithograph, 1874 /zoom

The Government of National Defense bombarded it on October 13. 1870; La Commune was proclaimed on March 27, 1871.

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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 how long the memory lasted.

• 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 »

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As well, owners, who presumably backed Versailles, burned buildings to collect insurance. 

"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 Communard fires

THE COMMUNARD FIRES

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

Firemen come from as far as Brussels.

-- Victor Hugo, 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

Taking City Hall: the Arcole Bridge (detail) by Amédée Bourgeois, 1830 / zoom

   John Orbigny Immobilier (good photos from the past, this one gone

• The Tuileries palace...

Military Parade at the Tuileries in 1810 by Hippolyte Bellangé, 1862 / zoom

Zoom

...could have been restored... 

Ruins of the Tuileries Palace by 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:

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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

A BROADER LOOK

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.

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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. 

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The Communard fires were practical in part: Burning City Hall and the police headquarters destroyed records, and the flames in themselves created barriers behind which to retreat.

         Zoom (source not said): please click all the way down

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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

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

• 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:

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This photo and the next two by Pamela Spurdon

• In Midnight in Paris, the adventure of Woody Allen's protagonist begins at the church's stairs. 

 

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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)

 

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We who can still benefit 

from these remarkable sites

and others including the Louvre,

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 THE MONTMARTRE* SUMMIT, LINKED TO 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

The Crucifixion of the Parliament of Paris, unknown master, mid-15th century / zoom

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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 it 

as atonement for the left-wing sins that,

they said, had brought the French defeat.

La Commune made the emphasis on atonement

infinitely more dramatic.

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The "Acropolis of revolution" 

"THE ACROPOLIS OF REVOLUTION" (Louise Michel)

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

Claretie

Paris after the siege - the artillery park of Montmartre

 

• Distant, abrupt and poverty stricken, Montmartre is part of the city that the underclass controls. So 171 of the cannons seized before the Prussian march are deposited on the empty space.

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

• So the arrested officers are shut up there, and the lynching takes place in the courtyard. 

The army's immediate goal: neutralize the cannons and punish

• Instead of marching toward the center and the arteries that lead to the communard bastions, the soldiers climb the hill. As there are no shells for the cannons, the Communards fighters are elsewhere. There is no resistance.  

• They seize 47 residents at random, take them to the site where the generals were lynched and order them to kneel. A woman holding a baby cries, "let us show these miserable people that we know how to die standing up!" 

The Cry of the People by Jacques Tardi (Castermann 2004), YouTube (in French)

• They arrest more residents on the following days, force them to look for a long them at the wall, and shoot them.   

 -- Lissagary, text and Appendix XVIII

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The ordeal of Eugène Varlin

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

He assumes the humble tasks that let it 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, My Red Notebooks: Varlin's Death 
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

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The outbreak of La Commune, the woman with the baby, the other 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