Panthéonisations: Six of the Best

Tags

Brossolette, commemoration, Curie, de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Dumas, France, Hugo, Moulin, Panthéon, Panthéonisation, Paris, resistance, Tillion, Zay, Zola

Last year I wrote about the decision by French president François Hollande to select four people associated with the Resistance – two men and two women – for entry to the Panthéon in Paris in 2015. Tomorrow evening, the four – Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay – will be interred in the Panthéon. Today (26 May) the people of Paris are invited to attend ceremonies in the 5^th arrondissement, culminating in an event at the Sorbonne this evening. (Full details and a timetable for the two days’ events can be found on the Mairie de Paris website here.

Tomorrow’s Panthéonisation will be the largest (in terms of people entered into the Panthéon’s crypt) since August 1889, when four men – the revolutionary military figures Carnot, Marceau and La Tour d’Auvergne-Corret, plus the politician Baudin – were inhumed as part of the centenary celebrations of the French Revolution. (Baudin, for what it’s worth, was actually a man of the Second French Republic rather than the First. He died in December 1851 during Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, shot down on a barricade on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Efforts to commemorate Baudin during the later years of the Second Empire were somewhat a cause célèbre among many of the republicans who would later assume positions of power during the Third Republic.)

As the plan for today and tomorrow shows, the commemorative and ceremonial events surrounding this Panthéonisation emphasise the act of ‘resistance’, as well as the importance of republican education – this focus on education reiterates one of the elements emphasised by François Hollande in his inaugural speech in 2012 as a theme for his presidency.

Only two of the coffins processing through the cinquième today and tomorrow actually contain remains. It was announced earlier this month that Tillion and de Gaulle-Anthonioz’s families had requested that their bodies not be exhumed from their current graves. Instead, their ‘coffins’ will contain soil from their final resting places. This approach is not unusual in Panthéonisation history. Nicolas de Condorcet, inhumed in 1989 as part of the Revolution’s bicentenary, isn’t really in the Panthéon at all. Following his death in prison in 1794 he was buried in a communal grave, so it was impossible to locate his remains. Questions also remain about whether the remains interred in 1964 as ‘Jean Moulin’ are really those of the résistant. Such cases reiterate the importance of Panthéonisation as a symbolic gesture. Indeed, the French government has argued that those commemorated in the Panthéon with a plaque or a memorial, but not actually inhumed there, should be considered equal ‘Panthéonisees’ (this may not actually be a word). This was last seen in 2011, when the poet and politician Aimé Césaire was commemorated with a plaque due to his family’s wish that he remain buried in his beloved Martinique.

Every Panthéonisation is different. My anticipation of today and tomorrow’s events is partially due to my fascination with the symbolic politics of French republicanism, partially because of my work on commemoration and memory, and partially because I’m keen to see how this ceremony compares to those of previous years. With this in mind, I feel the time is right for a run-down of some Panthéonisation highlights since 1885. Cue the Top of the Pops music…

1 June 1885 – Victor Hugo

The Panthéon’s current status as a secular temple to the ‘great men’ (and women!) of the Republic is down to the author of Les Misérables. He was the first secular Panthéonisee for 74 years, following the Panthéon’s usage as a church during the Restoration and then the Second Empire. Following his death on 22 May 1885, committee tasked with planning Hugo’s state funeral proposed that he be buried not in Père-Lachaise Cemetery, as might have been expected, but in the Panthéon. Following legislation passed by Jules Grévy, president of the Republic, the process of transforming the Church of Saint-Geneviève into a secular temple began. Hugo’s funeral was witnessed by two million people. His (slightly over-the-top) catafalque, for what it’s worth, was designed by Charles Garnier – architect of the Paris Opéra.

Crowds on the Rue Soufflot during the funeral of Victor Hugo, 1 June 1885. © Roger-Viollet. Source: Parisienne de Photographie

4 June 1908 – Emile Zola

Emile Zola died in 1902 from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a poorly ventilated chimney. At the time, some suggested that Zola’s death was suspicious – an act of vengeance, perhaps, for Zola’s role in publicising the cause of Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was originally buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre in a frankly rather naff tomb. In 1906, however, the campaign began to have him reinterred at the Panthéon. In spite of fierce opposition from the conservative right, the support of Georges Clemenceau and Jean Jaurès secured Zola’s Panthéonisation. The event in the summer of 1908 was tense, to say the least, and culminated in an assassination attempt on Dreyfus (his would-be assassin was later acquitted). Zola now rests in Caveau XXIV, with Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père.

The remains of Emile Zola arrive at the Panthéon, 4 June 1908.

20 May 1949 – Victor Schoelcher and Félix Éboué

A real personal favourite for research reasons, this one. Traditionally, revolutionary anniversaries are accompanied by Panthéonisations, and this double inhumation in May 1949 was intended to mark the centenary of the 1848 Revolution. The choice of Victor Schoelcher in and of itself says a great deal about how the commemorative committee in 1948 wanted 1848 to be seen and understood a century on, and emphasises the importance of the post-World War Two context for understanding this centenary. It was hugely symbolic that Victor Schoelcher, the apparent hero in the abolition of slavery in April 1848, was chosen for the honour rather than one of the Second Republic’s more prominent political figures. The decision to simultaneously Panthéonise Félix Éboué, governor of Chad and an early supporter of the Free French, reiterated this Panthéonisation as one designed to speak to the citizens of the new départements et térritoires d’outre-mer – the former French colonies, granted new status in 1946 – as much as to those of the métropole.

It’s also worth noting that although this was officially a double Panthéonisation, three people were actually inhumed – Éboué, Schoelcher, and Schoelcher’s father Marc, in order to respect his wish that they be buried together.

The remains of Victor Schoelcher and Félix Éboué are brought to the Panthéon, 20 May 1949. From a commemorative booklet published to mark the occasion.

19 December 1964 – Jean Moulin

It was perhaps fitting that the first Panthéonisee of the Fifth Republic should be a member of the Resistance. Moulin’s inhumation was intended to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation, and in many ways this ceremony was a perfect representation of the centrality of the ‘Resistance myth’ to Fifth Republic France. Moulin’s coffin was brought to the Panthéon accompanied by a torchlit procession, a reference to his role in the ‘army of shadows’, and the ceremony on 19 December was marked by a lengthy speech by André Malraux – himself Panthéonised in 1996 – that placed Moulin in a heroic lineage stretching back through Jean Jaurès and Hugo to Carnot and the ‘soldiers of the Year II’.

You can watch the ceremony and Malraux’s speech here:

20 April 1995 – Pierre and Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Marie Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to enter the Panthéon in her own right, alongside her husband Pierre. The ceremony in April 1995, like the events of today and tomorrow, emphasised education and, naturally, science. Each coffin was carried by six students of physics and chemistry from Université Paris-VI. The Curies were accompanied on their final journey up the rue Soufflot by a group of schoolchildren carrying scientific symbols. Speeches were given by François Mitterrand, the French Nobel physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, and – in recognition of Marie Curie’s Polish nationality – Lech Wałesa. Marie Curie’s coffin was lead-lined, due to the risk of radiation from her body.

News report on the ceremony:

30 November 2002: Alexandre Dumas père

Jacques Chirac decided to Panthéonise the author of the Three Musketeers in March 2002. I’ve included this Panthéonisation to round off this little selection for one main reason: it’s easily one of the barmiest there’s ever been. Dumas’s coffin was covered with a blue cloth inscribed with Tous pour un; un pour tous – or, for English-speaking fans of the Musketeers, ‘All for one and one for all’. The evening ceremony saw Dumas’s remains brought up the rue Soufflot accompanied by people dressed as characters from his books. (I have yet to ascertain whether anyone dressed up as the various people guillotined during the Revolution in La Femme au collier de velours or the stories in Les Mille et un fantômes; this could have been just a tad awkward.) Four men dressed as D’Artagnan and the Musketeers carried the coffin to the Panthéon. Just in case this wasn’t quite enough, a woman dressed as Marianne led the procession, seated on a white horse.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

See? Barmy (but brilliant).

No love lost on love-locks

Tags

dublin, France, gustave flaubert, ha'penny bridge, love locks, oscar wilde, Paris, pere lachaise, pont des arts, tourism, vandalism

At long last, the city authorities in Paris have announced that they are taking concrete steps to put an end to the ugly phenomenon of ‘love-locks’ that have blighted the city’s bridges and railings since the mid-2000s. Not wanting to seem overly harsh, the city has decided to encourage people to share ‘romantic’ photos of themselves on social media and to create what it has called a ‘social wall’. The urgency of dealing with the love-lock problem was starkly highlighted in June of this year, when a section of the nineteenth-century Pont des Arts – perhaps the structure most afflicted by love-locks – fell away after being damaged by the weight and corrosion from several hundred of these ‘romantic’ padlocks.

Locks on the Pont des Arts in Paris. By Disdero (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I am unashamed to state outright that I despise love-locks. When I lived in Paris I tended to avoid the Pont des Arts, because it was simply too irritating to see couples adding their own padlock to the thousands that were already slowly corroding and damaging the structure of the bridge. Then the Pont de l’Archevêché, behind Notre-Dame, began to suffer. Then, when space on both of these bridges became tight, locks appeared on those typically Parisian railings in the vicinity of both bridges and beyond. If it’s a railing, and it’s near the Seine, you can bet there’s probably a rusty love-lock attached to it.

The phenomenon is not Parisian in origin, of course, and has spread beyond the City of Light. It has been suggested that it originated in Hungary, but it can now be seen in almost every city. In Dublin, people started to attach locks to the Ha’penny Bridge – though Dublin City Council have now announced plans to remove the locks once a fortnight. This may be a losing battle, however, as the Evening Herald has also reported that people are beginning to place love-locks on the newly opened Rosie Hackett Bridge. In Newcastle, the beautiful (and only recently restored) High Level Bridge, designed by railway pioneer Robert Stephenson, is also blighted by the phenomenon. A few months ago I was startled (and horrified) to see love-locks appearing on the ornate city crests on Sunderland’s Wearmouth Bridge. These disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, however.

Perhaps I seem like a killjoy, miserably tutting at loved-up couples as I made my way around Paris. But to me, love-locks have always been a pox on the urban landscape, an unwanted and destructive intervention into a city. Everyone wants to leave some kind of mark, it seems – and this is the motivation behind the Paris city council’s attempt to get people to take selfies, accompanied by the hashtag ‘#lovewithoutlocks’.

For those who are part of the love-lock phenomenon, the idea of leaving a padlock (sometimes specially engraved with the lovers’ names; sometimes hastily scrawled with names in permanent marker) to rust away on a Parisian bridge while you get on with your life in New York or Shanghai or Rome or Ballyhaunis is a deeply romantic one. And leaving one’s mark on a monument or tourist attraction is nothing new. Think of the graffiti one sees scrawled into the stone walls of medieval castles by generation after generation of visitors. In 1851, during his visit to Egypt with his friend Maxime du Camp, the writer Gustave Flaubert was disgusted by the graffiti he found atop the Great Pyramid of Giza: ‘One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere: on top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 Rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters; an English fan of [the soprano] Jenny Lind’s has written her name; there is also a pear, representing [French king] Louis-Philippe.’

I feel that Flaubert would have shared my irritation at the love-lock phenomenon. In spite of the ‘romance’ attached to them, they reveal a certain – albeit unwitting – disrespect for the city and its monuments, bridges, or basic street furniture. Whether they realise it or not, those who insist on attaching their clunky padlocks to the Pont des Arts see it not as a beautiful, functional structure in and of itself, which does not need embellishment by several thousand hunks of metal – but rather, as a structure that is there for their own use, intended to accommodate their personal romantic notions. What matter that the Pont des Arts or the Pont de l’Archevêché was there before they were, is used by thousands of other people, and will be there long after these tourists are gone? (Unless, of course, the bridges finally collapse under the weight of all those padlocks.)

In Paris, examples of this rather self-centred approach to tourism exist beyond the love-locks. Oscar Wilde’s tomb in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise is a case in point. Wilde’s tomb is marked by a large limestone sculpture by Jacob Epstein, completed in 1914. At some point in the recent past – possibly in the 1990s, though the phenomenon intensified in the 2000s – visitors to Wilde’s grave began to plant kisses on it, thus leaving the sculpture coated in a greasy, smeared film of oil and pigment. The tomb was also marked with graffiti, ranging from the adulatory (‘We love you Oscar’, that kind of thing) to the downright bizarre (a heart-shaped potato, accompanied by the words ‘Jon Bon Jovi’ – see below).

A heart-shaped potato and a tribute to Jon Bon Jovi: graffiti on Oscar Wilde’s tomb in October 2010

In 2011 a glass barrier – part funded by the Irish state – was erected around the tomb, intended to protect the monument from further damage. It has not stopped the lipstick brigade, who have simply transferred their affections to the glass.

Graffiti on the glass barrier at Oscar Wilde’s tomb, Père Lachaise, Paris – May 2012

The persistent graffiti at Wilde’s tomb, like the love-lock phenomenon, seems indicative of an extremely individualistic attitude to tourism and to the urban environment. What matters is not appreciating the city for itself, or paying one’s respect to a writer by simply visiting his grave and taking a photo, but rather leaving a physical, literal mark – a rusty, corroding, greasy mark at that – on the urban environment. Such an attitude seems strange to me in a city like Paris, which is not exactly lacking in ‘romantic’ things to see and do that don’t compromise or damage the city. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much this approach can be curbed. The expensive glass barrier has done little to spare Epstein’s sculpture from the kisses of Oscar Wilde’s devoted ‘fans’, and it remains to be seen how effective the city of Paris’s campaign for ‘love without locks’ will be.

 

Vive le Tour!

Tags

cycling, France, history, Mont St Michel, Paris, tour de france

I love the Tour de France. It can get a hard time, not least because there’s always someone willing to pipe up that ‘they’re all on drugs anyway’, but such sniping is easy to ignore when there’s regular live coverage and nightly highlights on multiple channels. Those who find it hard to understand how anyone could happily sit and watch several hours of people cycling are missing out on the vaguely Zen experience of live Tour coverage, one that is interrupted from time to time by a dramatic breakaway or a nasty crash. When you finally get to see the Tour in the flesh, you come to realise that it is a full-on spectacle, a massive circus that rolls into town with countless team buses, cars, and trucks before there’s even the faintest whiff of cycling action. As you wait for the flash of brightly coloured Lycra and the whoosh of bikes going at top speed, you are entertained by the arrival of the legendary publicity caravan, a gaggle of ludicrous floats and decorated vehicles promoting the Tour’s myriad of sponsors. They hand out free tshirts, pens, caps and giant foam hands to a delighted crowd. Sometimes one wonders quite what the more surreal participants in the caravan have to do with cycling, but the caravan is now an essential (and popular) part of the modern Tour.

Inside the publicity caravan: cars promoting washing liquid…

…and cars made of baguettes.

The first Tour de France bicycle race took place in 1903, organised by Henri Desgrange in a bid to promote his sports newspaper L’Auto. Though Desgrange is seen as the ‘father of the Tour’ – to the point where his initials appear on the yellow jersey worn by the race leader – the actual idea for the Tour came from one of Desgrange’s journalists. The notion of a ‘Tour de France’ has much older roots, however. The annual journey of the cyclists around France (and frequently beyond French borders) recalls the ‘Tour de France’ made by apprentice artisan journeymen since the Middle Ages. As members of guild-type associations called compagnonnages, young trainees were expected to spend several years completing the tour de France des compagnons. Moving from town to town across France, they worked under master craftsmen until they had developed and honed their skills to a level where they too could open workshops approved by their compagnonnage and the local guilds. The organisation of each compagnonnage ensured that the apprentices would have food and lodgings in each town.

As Christopher Thompson notes in his cultural history of the Tour de France, this connection between the epic bicycle race and the ancient route of the journeymen artisans was recognised by both the race’s organisers and its supporters. The first two editions of the Tour, in 1903 and 1904, visited the traditional major stop-offs on the compagnons’ route: Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, Toulouse, and Nantes. This memory of the origins of a tour de France, Thompson adds, continued into the twentieth century: in the late 1930s the mayor of Nantes, he notes, saw in the bicycle race a reminder of the three-year circuit he had completed as a young apprentice.

For those who had been educated in French schools during the Third Republic, however, the term ‘tour de France’ would also have recalled a well-worn school textbook: Le Tour de France par deux enfants, written by Augustine Fouillée under the pseudonym G. Bruno. Intended as a primary school reader, the book remained in use from its publication in 1877 to the 1950s. Since disappearing from the school curriculum, Le Tour de France par deux enfants has been republished several times and remains in print. Such is its place in French culture and the national psyche that an article on the textbook by Jacques and Mona Ozouf featured alongside items as diverse as the Panthéon and the Marseillaise in Pierre Nora’s great work Les Lieux de mémoire (translated in English as Realms of Memory).

Le Tour de France par deux enfants tells the story of two children, André and Julien Volden, who set out from the town of Phalsbourg in Lorraine to seek out their uncle after the death of their father. That the two children come from eastern France is no coincidence: the book appeared just six years after the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Prussia under the terms of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. André and Julien’s departure from Lorraine acquires a further significance in that the story is set around October 1872, the deadline for residents of Alsace-Lorraine who wished to keep their French citizenship to leave the territories. In addition to teaching French children to read, therefore, the book also emphasised the idea that, despite the annexation, Alsace-Lorraine remained spiritually French. Their journey around France allows André and Julien to learn about various trades, skills and crafts but also to appreciate the geographic, linguistic and economic variety across the regions of the French republic. From the snow-covered heights of Mont Blanc to the busy port of Marseille, the children discover their country’s history and culture. Despite this great diversity, the children come to learn, France remains a unified whole under the umbrella of the Third Republic.

Illustrations of Mont Blanc and Marseille from ‘Le Tour de France par deux enfants’ (1878 reprint), © Gallica

On some level, the extensive coverage of today’s Tour de France still allows viewers to follow in the footsteps of André and Julien. Le Tour embraces and promotes the full geographic diversity of France (and beyond). A notable feature of most televised Tour coverage, especially in France, is the tendency of commentators to explain the various landmarks and features in the landscape as well as describe the race. French television coverage occasionally includes short filmed inserts that give the audience a more detailed insight into a particularly significant castle, church or chateau. In this, the hundredth edition of the race, this message is more prominent than ever. On the Tour’s official website it proclaims this year’s race to be ‘The Tour of the Beauties of France’, a ‘Tour of the whole of France, of every kind of France, of every French people too’. For the first time since its centenary ten years ago (i.e., the hundredth anniversary of the first Tour, as opposed to this year’s hundredth edition – it is a tad confusing), le Tour will not go beyond French borders. Its first stages were held on Corsica – the first time the race has ever visited the island. Other stages will be more picture-postcard than ever, with the cyclists finishing the eleventh stage at the foot of the remarkable Mont Saint Michel.

Mont St Michel: incredible place, delicious beurre salé biscuits, ludicrously expensive omelettes.

The final arrivée into Paris, held on a Sunday, is always a great occasion (fights for a good viewing spot on the rue de Rivoli aside), but this year it’s extra special. The riders depart from the palace of Versailles and arrive on the Champs-Elysées at dusk. They’ll even get to do laps around the Arc de Triomphe before finishing the final sprint.

I can’t produce any statistics proving exactly how French tourism benefits from this focus on regional diversity and on France’s many attractions in the coverage and promotion of the Tour de France. However, there’s no doubting – in my case, at least – that regular and consistent viewing of the Tour tends to make sure that France, or some idea of it, gets under your skin. Thanks to my dad’s love of it, TV coverage of the Tour – and, as a result, footage of the French landscape – was a permanent fixture in my childhood summers. The Sunday afternoon arrival into Paris was a particular highlight. I am not suggesting that I was some kind of odd child prodigy who, witnessing Stephen Roche winning yellow on the Champs-Elysées in 1987, pointed at the screen and announced that when I grew up I would be a historian of that glamorous-looking place. However, it is fairly safe to say that a healthy dose of the Tour de France ensured that France always seemed a bit special to me.

Perhaps le Tour has a lot to answer for.

‘Elle n’est pas morte!’: the persistent power of the Paris Commune

Tags

1871, commemoration, France, memory, Paris, paris commune, revolution

18 March marks the anniversary of the start of the 72-day lifespan of the Paris Commune of 1871. On the morning of 18 March 1871, groups of Parisian National Guards, women and children joined forces to prevent the seizure of cannon – which they believed belonged to the National Guard, having been paid for by subscriptions from the people of Paris – by soldiers acting on the orders of Adolphe Thiers, head of the government of the Third Republic, then based at Versailles. When the soldiers began to ‘fraternize’ with supporters of the National Guard, joining in the rebellion against the government of the republic, Thiers withdrew to Versailles with any remaining troops to regroup and plot their assault on Paris. The Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard took control of the city, immediately arranging for elections to a ‘Commune’ to be held on 26 March. On 28 March, the Commune de Paris – the Paris Commune – assumed power. They held it until the shocking violence of the ‘Bloody Week’, or Semaine sanglante, of 21 – 28 May 1871 wiped them out.

Communards pose on the barricade at the junction of the rue de Charonne and rue Basfroi in the 11th arrondissement of Paris (©Roger-Viollet)

In the late 1990s, Robert Tombs suggested that the Commune was no longer a politically contentious event. While the memory of the Commune may have lost the political power it wielded in the late nineteenth century and after, this does not mean that it has ceased to be remembered. Of all the major revolutionary events that occurred in France in the nineteenth century, the Commune occupies a position in popular memory, especially on the left in France and beyond, that the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 can only dream of. ‘The Commune’ is far better known than either of these revolutionary events. It is often spoken of in isolation from the revolutionary tradition and socialist movements that preceded and so clearly shaped it. The ‘official’ exhibition held by the Mairie de Paris at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris to mark the 140^th anniversary of the Commune in 2011 skipped breezily over the role of 1848, in particular, in influencing the Communards. The caption accompanying a set of photographs of the Commune’s main leaders (some of whom were veterans of 1848) informed visitors that the Commune’s main influences were the First Republic of 1792 and the First International, formed in 1864. ‘1848 – forgotten again’, I thought to myself. Last summer, I noticed graffiti in a Parisian street that read:

                                                            1871

                                                            1936

                                                            1945

                                                            1968

                                                            1981

                                                            ——-

                                                            2012

This genealogy of French socialism, culminating in the election of François Hollande on 6 May 2012, saw the Commune as its founding event – forgetting, in the process, the crucial developments in socialism and republicanism that had gone before. I took a photo and felt another bit of silent indignation on the part of the forgotten.

The Commune’s continuing power to fascinate is proven by the annual demonstrations organised in March and May by the group Amis de la Commune de Paris (Friends of the Paris Commune), whose headquarters are appropriately located near the ‘Place de la Commune de Paris’ in the Butte-aux-Cailles district of southern Paris. Each March the Amis mark the beginning of the Commune with events usually organised in the centre of Paris, and in May they process like so many before them to the Mur des fédérés in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where around 150 Communards were executed during the Semaine sanglante. In March 2011 I watched the commemorative events as they took place on the rain-soaked square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where the Commune had been based in 1871 (and which they burned to the ground as they retreated in May). Dressed in black and carrying red flags, members of the Amis recited poems, performed short tableaux, and belted out Eugène Pottier’s ‘Elle n’est pas morte’, a song about the memory of the Commune. At the time, its chorus – ‘In spite of all that, Nicolas/The Commune is not dead!’ – felt like a deliberately pointed jibe at the then-president of the French Republic.

Poster for March 2011 commemorations in Paris

The Amis were back on the streets of Paris this week. The 2013 commemorations to mark the beginning of the Commune consisted of a march from the Assemblée nationale to the French Senate at the Luxembourg Palace. The Amis’ website explained that this route was chosen in order to ask France’s elected representatives to respond to a petition demanding the ‘rehabilitation of the Commune and the Communards’.  The petition asks for three things: that the Commune be appropriately recognised in school programmes and curricula; that the Commune be included in the national programme of commemorations; and that the names of Communards be inscribed ‘on the walls of the ministries, mairies [town halls] and administrative buildings where they held positions of responsibility’. Thus far, the Amis say, over 10,000 people have signed the petition.

In the weeks prior to 18 March I happened to be working on the Commune with my students. In our classes it rapidly became apparent that, even outside of France, the event still had an immediate power to fascinate – and to get people talking. We discussed the Commune’s meaning, how ‘revolutionary’ or ‘socialist’ it really was, whether it was – as Karl Marx famously claimed in The Civil War in France – ‘essentially a working-class government’. But we also explored why the Commune’s memory remained so powerful (and occasionally controversial) when other nineteenth-century revolutions did not. Was it down to its duration: long enough to make some concrete changes, as one student pointed out, but short enough to avoid a kind of corruption? Does the Commune retain its allure as a ‘festival of the oppressed’? Or is it the violent and traumatic manner of its demise that continues to capture the imagination?

And what of the ‘rehabilitation’ of the Commune? If the event has lost its politically contentious qualities, surely rehabilitation is now possible (if it hasn’t already happened, to some extent). Discussing this topic in class highlighted the complexities of this demand. In particular, the idea was raised that rehabilitation and inclusion in ‘official’ history – be that in school curricula or national commemorations – might, from a left-wing perspective, actually do the Commune a disservice.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with his conclusions, in his recent downward revision of the death toll from the Semaine sanglante (£) Robert Tombs argues that, while work on the Commune’s memory has dominated recent historiography, many of the hard facts of the Commune have yet to be pinned down. On-going discussion of the Communards’ reputation and their ‘rehabilitation’ – whether on the streets of Paris or in a classroom – also proves that the place of the Commune in France’s ‘official’ historical narrative remains deeply problematic.