THE INFERNO IN CONTEXT

THE COMMUNARDS SETTING FIRE TO A PART OF THE CITY IS THE MAIN TANGIBLE REASON FOR DECYING THEM. THE CALUMNY DESERVES 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 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

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:

• A magnificent site:

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

This photo and the next two by Pamela Spurdon

• Though not on the tourist circuits, initiates admire it. Woody Allen has the adventure of Midnight in Paris's protagonist begin at its 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

thank the Communards who preserved them. 

Now for a monument that La Commune 

 involuntarily inspired. 

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Next,

The sacred hilltop