"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

# # #

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

# # #

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.

*     *     *

Next,
The church of vengeance