A FOUNTAIN WHERE THE EMPEROR CRUSHES SOCIALISM

THE VOID OF PLACE SAINT-MICHEL LETS AN ARMY ASSEMBLE, TO FIGHT ON THE SPOT OR GO ON TO THE WORKING-CLASS SOUTH

It is much larger than traffic demands:   

The space divides to frame the monumental fountain...

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...emphasizing its message of Socialism's defeat: The saint represents the Second Empire, Satan Socialism and the monsters its false doctrines, tamed and inoffensive.

-- Place Saint-Michel by Grégoire Allessandri, 2012 (in French)

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Pamela Spurdon

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The work celebrates crushing the workers' insurrection of 1848 and is inaugurated on Napoleon III's saint's day.

(In 1860)

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A public that has not heard of that upheaval

cannot grasp the reason for the void

or understand the fountain's message.

But while noticing that the void

 is much too big for traffic should be easy,

almost no one does.

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Next,

The new arteries' military purpose