Talking Location With … author Geoffrey Fox: PARIS COMMUNE

8th November 2021

#TalkingLocationWith… Geoffrey Fox, author of Rabble! – PARIS

For a lover of history and literature, Paris is inexhaustible. Besides its famous monuments and museums, one can visit the very streets, plazas and public buildings where world-changing political and cultural events have occurred, including the French Revolution of 1789, its aftershocks in 1830, 1848 and the Commune of 1871 —the first democratic and worker-controlled government that set the pattern for social revolutions from Russia in 1917 to our day, and the setting of my latest novel, Rabble!

While many critical sites of the 1871 uprising have undergone name-changes or new construction meant to obliterate the Commune’s history, other public spaces have been renamed to recover that history. Examples include the beautiful garden square at the foot of the Sacré-Coeur, now named after revolutionary fighter Louise Michel, and the Place de Nathalie Le Mel, co-founder of the cooperative workers’ restaurant La Marmite and of the Women’s Association for the Defense of the Commune. Her square is in the Marais district, near the Centre Pompidou.

One of the sites most critically connected to the beginning of the Commune is the top of Montmartre, in the northernmost 18^th arrondissement (district). Try to imagine it as it was before the monumental Sacré-Coeur basilica , a very controversial structure meant to appropriate and change the meaning of the site. Here was an artillery park with hundreds of cannons, paid for by subscriptions of the working people of Paris and used to defend the city against siege and bombardment during France’s disastrous war with Prussia, which had ended with the government’s surrender in January 1871. To appease the Prussians, in the early morning of 18 March the discredited French government sent its demoralized troops to seize those cannons by stealth. But the cries of early morning risers and the ringing of church bells alerted the population and masses of women, children and men rushed to the heights to stop them. The soldiers, confronted by so many civilians, refused to fire on them and in many cases ended up sharing breakfast with men of the National Guard, Paris’s civilian militia.

The debacle and embarrassment of the government was so great that it fled to Versailles, abandoning its former capital to the workers, artisans and small shopkeepers who made up the majority of the city’s population. This “rabble”, as the more privileged Parisians called them, then determined to govern themselves, running the city for nearly three months with a radical agenda including, among others, workplace democracy, free schooling and public access to cultural institutions, equal pay for men and women, and abolition of child labor.

You will also want to visit Belleville, on the hills of the northeastern 20^th arrondissement, which was home to some of the most fervent supporters of the Commune. Its streets, now full of cafés and open-air markets, were then full of little workshops producing shoes, clothing, leather goods, machine tools, and also bronze foundries making everything from kitchen sinks to cannons. The workers, many recent migrants from rural areas, had been active in the 1848 revolution and were again in defending the Commune. Somewhat gentrified but not overrun by tourists, Belleville today retains its reputation as the home of humble but proud working people, now including people from northern and southern Africa, southeast Asia and many other regions, as well as artists – the walls of Rue Denoyez are almost completely covered with street art, and Rue Sainte-Marthe is a quiet street lined with ateliers and international restaurants. Because of its hilly topography, the neighborhood has spots with stunning panoramic views of Paris. Nearby to the North, Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the 5^th largest Parisian Park, was, like Montmartre, an artillery park where people repelled the army that came to seize the cannons. Parc de Belville, high on a hill, is now a place where families go for picnics and youth dance to salsa in the summertime. A great place for lunch is the tiny restaurant Le Jourdain at 101 Rue des Couronnes, very near some of the last barricades to fall during the last “Week of Blood”.

Between 21 to 28 May 1871 the Commune finally succumbed to the massive assaults from the Versailles government, with the killing of tens of thousands of Parisians at their barricades. At Place Blanche was a famous one defended almost entirely by women. The Wall of the Fédérés (National Guards) in the famous cemetery Père Lachaise, where some of the last survivors were shot by Versailles troops, has become a major site for the annual commemoration of both the massacre and the accomplishments of the Commune, which continue to inspire activists around the globe.

Geoffrey Fox

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