Rue Soufflot

Arrondissement 5

Numbers: 1-2, 11

One of the three barricades defending the Panthéon on May 24 1871 was across the neck of the road from No. 1 to No. 2. It was here that Jean Allemane fought until the barricade was overcome. The 400 Fédérés (Communards belonging to the Paris National Guard) who were captured were then shot after the barricade battles ended.

Another brief stay for Émile Zola as the young man moved around the Latin Quarter in the early 1860s was at No. 11, where he found a room over the winter of 1861-1862.

On June 23 and June 24 1848 violent battles took place at the barricade across the road at No. 12, as the government’s troops attacked the workers who had risen up in defence of the National Workshops.

The day after the June fighting ended, on June 25 1848 a National Guard corporal called Raguinard and another fighter on the barricade across the Rue d’Ulm were summarily executed outside No. 22, then at a corner with Rue St Hyacinthe, a road that disappeared entirely in the 1860s rebuilding under Haussmann.

The painting by Horace Vernet of a barricade battle in Rue Soufflot on June 24 1848

The third barricade defending the Panthéon on May 24 1871 was across the road at No. 23, just where it joins the Boulevard St Michel – a site now occupied by a McDonald’s.

The road gets its name from the main architect of the Panthéon, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who died shortly before then Sainte-Geneviève church was finished.

A 1790 plan shows the then Rue du Panthéon Français leading only as far as the Rue St Jacques, and how its extension involved the final demolition of the Jacobin Monastery where the revolutionaries meeting in its dining room during the French Revoltuion were given the political name Jacobins.

The first part of the road was built during the building of the Law School and the Church in the 1770s and called the Rue du Panthéon Français  in 1790.

The road was renamed Soufflot in 1807 and work begun in 1859 finally led it to be straightened and extended to its present form and name in 1876.

On the day he was invested as French President, 21 May 1981, Mitterrand walked up Rue Soufflot to the Panthéon to put roses on the tombs there of three of its 19th and 20th century residents, Jean Moulin, Victor Schoelcher and Jean Jaures.

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PLACES

Rue de la Sourdière

Arrondissement 1

Number: 18

The short, narrow road existed already in 1640 when it was named after a Monsieur Sage from La Sourdière, whose house and gardens it ran by.

Daniel Stern (Countess Marie d’Agoult) and Franz Liszt first lived together in this narrow Paris road in 1833.

18 Rue de la Sourdiere

In February 1935 Aragon and ElsaTriolet moved into No. 18. They lived in one of the flats off the still-existing courtyard there until Aragon was called up as a medical reservist in September 1939.

As the political disagreements between Breton and Aragon deepened from 1929 onwards an emergency meeting of the organisers of the International Writers Conference took place there that brought them to a head. Breton had smacked Ilya Ehrenburg across the face for having written that all surrealists were ‘pedarists’, and the Conference committee on June 14 1935 decided to exclude Breton from the official speakers.

PLACES

Rue de Stockholm

Arrondissements 8

Number 10

Rue de Stockholm cut short by the Gare Saint-Lazare

Built in 1831 near the place de l’Europe, the original long road was almost entirely eaten by the Saint-Lazare railway station when it was built in 1859.

No 10 rue de Stockholm was where the French police first found out where Nguyen Tat Thanh was living in Paris

Ho Chi Minh lived in more than 16 known addresses in Paris between 1917 or 1919 and 1927. Police records only began in 1919 and show that he stayed briefly at No 10 rue de Stockholm in June 1919, when he was a member of the socialist party, the SFIO. He then signed himself Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the patriot) in the call for an independent Indochina he signed that was presented to the Versailles Peace Conference.

PLACES

Rue Taitbout

Arrondissement 9

Numbers: 2, 80

Cafe Tortini
Cafe Tortini at no 2. Louis Blanc lived above it in the 1840s

Named after the three generations of the Taitbout family who successively became Clerks to the Paris Town Office from 1698 to 1775, the road was opened in 1773.

Louis Blanc lived 1842 to 1848 above the Tortini café at No. 2 that was founded by a Venetian migrant initially called Velloni as a cafe and ice-cream parlour in 1804 (sketched above in 1888). It was there that Blanc and his supporters, Louis Greppo, Théophile Thoré and Hippolyte Detours, met on May 14 1848 and decided not to participate in the following day’s protest demonstration against the new government’s refusal to support the Polish revolutionaries.

Many writers, musicians and artists lived at a creative colony of separate houses at No. 80 that was known first as the Cité des Trois-Frères and then as the Square d’Orléans. Rebuilt in classical style and finished in 1841, from 1842 to 1849 Frédéric Chopin lived in No. 9, while George Sand lived on the first floor of No. 5 from 1842 to 1847. The lovers were both visited by many of the period’s celebrities, including Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Heinrich Heine, Eugène Delacroix, François Arago and the actress Marie Dorval.

PLACES

Rue du Temple

Arrondissements 3, 4

Numbers: 63, 79, 106, 158, 191

From the junction of Rue-du Temple and Rue de Turbigo looking at the Place de la Republique

One of Paris’ oldest streets it now runs for 1.3 km from the Rue Rivoli up the the Place de la Republique, with the Square du Temple garden created in 1857 leading off it at No. 158.

The name Rue du Temple comes from the Templars district, a large area of land given to the Knights Templar military religious order around 1170. In 1240 the 50 metre high keep was built within a walled enclosure. It initially housed the king’s treasure, and then became a prison. Its most famous occupants from August 13 1792 were Louis XVI and his family.

On December 18 1795 Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, their daughter, was the only Bourbon to leave the Tower alive and without a trip to the guillotine. Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21 1793. Marie-Antoinette on October 16 1793. Elisabeth, the king’s sister, on May 10 1794. Louis, the king’s son, died from tuberculosis in the keep on June 8 1795.

On June 29 2017 the Square’s name was changed to Square du Temple – Elie-Wiesel in honour of the human rights campaigner and Holocaust survivor.

In 2007 the incumbent Socialist mayor from a Jewish Polish family erected a Stele in the Square to commemorate the 85 Jewish children of the Third Arrondissement who, under the age of six, had been arrested by the French police and deported to Auschwitz, never to return.

The Templar Tower was knocked down by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1808 partly to prevent Royalist pilgrimages to the site and partly, some argue, to spare his future wife, the sight of her aunt’s last address. The garden and Square was one of 24 laid down under Haussmann’s plan for giving Parisians a little more air.

On February 27 1871 the Square at No 158 was the meeting point of the National Guardsmen on their way to the Champs-Élysées to try and stop the Prussians from entering Paris. Every Saturday during the Commune the band of the National Guard played there to raise funds for the widows and children of men who had died in the war.

Former soldiers who had joined the Commune and foreigners were the first to be executed in the Square on May 25 1871.

The statue by Amadee Doublemard of the popular anti-monarchist poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger that was placed in the Square at its inception was melted down in 1942, but replaced by one in stone by Henri Lagriffioul in 1953.

Women Communards such as Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Nathalie Le Mel used to meet in a women’s club at the Grand café de la Nation  at No. 79, the 17th century Hotel de Montmor. On International Women’s Day March 8 2007 under the recently elected Socialist Paris mayor, a small triangular square at the meeting point of the Rue du Temple and the Rue de Turbigo was named the Place Elisabeth Dmitrieff. It is just outside the entrance to the Temple metro station.

In October 1870 Blanqui was in hiding at No. 191. The flat belonged to Eugène Cléray, a clockmaker and follower of Blanqui who was deputy mayor of the Third arrondissement during the Siege of Paris. Blanqui stayed in the flat on October 31 before going to the Hotel de Ville to see how the insurrection against the new republican government’s indifferent handling of the war with Prussia was going.

Despite 15,000 demonstrating outside the Hotel de Ville for the resignation of the government and then occupying it, by the early hours of the next day it had failed. Blanqui then returned to No. 191.

Where the rue Rambuteau crosses the Rue du Temple at No. 63 there was a restaurant where the Russian Nihilists met in the late 19th century. Trotsky and Lenin also met there early in 1903.

During the occupation of Paris the Central Telephone Archives at No. 106, built in 1927-1928, was taken over by the Germans, and was one of their remaining strong-holds in August 1944.

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Villa de la Tour

Arrondissement 16

Number 96

Jean Jaurès lived at 96 bis villa de la Tour from 1899 until his assassination in July 1914

Built in 1874 as an offshoot to the Rue de Tour (part of the old rue du Moulin de la Tour at Passy), where he lived briefly at No. 8, Jean Jaurès lived at 96 bis, villa de la Tour from 1899 until his assassination ion 31 July 1914. His body was brought back there that same evening.

PLACES

Rue de Tournon

Arrondissement 6

Numbers 4, 5, 6, 10, 19, 33

This Paris street widens as you walk up it towards the Luxembourg Palace in the Rue Vaugirard. It was once the home of several of France’s wealthiest people who built small palaces outside the confines of the inner Paris wall.

But it also has a left history. André Gide lived at No. 2 for eight years, from 1875-1883.

Ledru-Rollin lived at the Hotel de Montmorocy in June 1848. Alphonse de Lamartine stayed in the same mansion.

Next door, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin at the Hôtel de Montmorency at No. 4, was followed to his home from the assembly on June 24 1848 and threatened with death after he was denounced for being too supportive of the workers’ insurrection. Sharing the same address at the time was Lamartine, another leading campaigner for the extension of the suffrage.

Jacques Prévert moved to the fifth floor of No. 5 for a year in the winter of 1910 when he was ten years old. Fifteen years later he married Simone Dienne, three years younger than him, whose family lived on the ground floor in 1910.

In 1840 Charles Fourier, the early utopian socialist, edited the revue in the offices of La Phalange (sucessor paper to the Phalanstère) at No 6.

During the 1848 revolution, the anarchist Bakunin stayed at the Republican Guard barracks at No. 10.

In May 1871 the barracks offered a different menu: it was where some Communards fighting in Paris’ National Guard were court-martialed during the bloody week.

The Foyot Restaurant at 33 Rue de Tournon before its demolition in 1938 was a favourite haunt of senators and Parisian personalities. It had been bombed in 1894 with the damage visible in the Rue de Condé on the other side of the restaurant shown in this photograph.

The Foyot restaurant that was bombed in 1894 where Laurent Tailhade, ironically a supporter of the ‘propaganda by the deed’ anarchist movement, lost an eye was also used by the painter Gustave Courbet and other Commune supporters in 1871.

A scandal broke out at Foyot shortly before Verlaine died when in rags he was invited to dine there by a symbolist poet and dandy.

The Communist and writer Louis Aragon was hidden during the German occupation by the bookseller Lucien Scheler in his flat at No. 19 in 1943.

Initially bits of the boggy land on a narrow country lane through Abbey land were sold by Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey to builders, and it was called the Saint Sulpice lane in 1517. The road was soon renamed Rue de Tournon in 1541, after Cardinal François de Tournon (1489-1562) who ran the abbey.

Under the Second Republic in 1849 the government decided to allow the road to take its current unique bell-shaped dimensions, running from 13.5 meters wide up to double that when opening up to the Luxembourg Palace.

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PLACES

Avenue Trudaine

Arrondissement 9

Number 12

A broad tree-lined road just to the south of the Farmers’ general tax wall, it was opened by a royal decree in 1833, and named after an early 18th century peer of the realm who had a rare reputation for honesty in his post as Prévôt des marchands de Paris (Paris’ Prefect for Commerce, the equivalent of today’s Mayor of Paris).

Its most remarkable building is a huge, historic secondary school, the Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour, where Lucie Aubrac was nominated to teach in 1946.

The Collège-Lycée Jacques-Decour viewed from the North, with the Boulevard des Batignolles in front of it and the Avenue Trudaine on the other side.

The school was originally founded in the 15th century as the Sainte-Barbe college of Paris University. Its current building was moved there by Haussmann and constructed between 1867 and 1876 on the site of the old Montmartre abattoir.

The name was changed in 1944 from Rollin (the name of an 18th century historian) to Jacques Decour, the resistance pseudonym of Daniel Decourdemanche (1910-1942), who had taught German at the Lycée since 1937.

Decourdemanche had joined the Young Communists and then Communist Party. His first book called Philisterburg after teaching in 1932-33 in Germany denounced the risks of nationalism and racism.

He was 32 when he was shot in May 1942 after the French police who arrested him passed him over to the Germans for his role in the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers that had been headed by Louis Aragon.

Every year his goodbye letter to his parents is read in the school where his parting words were:

I consider myself a little like a leaf that falls from a tree to help become soil. The quality of the soil depends on that of the leaves. I am talking about French young people.

Daniel Decourdemanche’s headstone in Montmatre Cemetery

PLACES

Jardin des Tuileries

Arrondissement 1

Tuileries Palace in 1615
The Tuileries Garden shown in the foreground of this 1615 map. The Salle de Menage whose location today is on the Rue Rivoli is at the bottom left.

Like the Tuileries Palace (built in 1564) the garden was named after the tile-making factories that were established there in 1372 next to the 15-20 (300-bed) Quinze-Vingt hospice on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Its blind pensioners’ principal job was to pray for the souls of the donating royals.

The Tuileries Palace photographed in 1850 from the courtyard of the Louvre before it was burnt down in 1871 and the ruins removed in 1883. The Arc du Carrousel (1808) is in front of it and the Arc du Triomphe in the distance

Paris’ oldest and largest garden was established by Catherine de Médicis after she had ordered the building of the Tuileries Palace. Redesigned by André Le Nôtre in 1664 it was opened to ‘good people’ by Louis XIV.

Effectively abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles from 1672, the Palace was used only briefly by Louis XV from 1716 to 1722, so much of the garden has been used as a public space for over 350 years.

On Sunday July 12 1789 Paris learned that Louis XVI had dismissed his finance minister, the constitutional monarchist banker Jacques Necker. Within hours the king’s Swiss Guard were ordered to disperse a demonstration in the Tuileries Garden.

The storming of the Bastille is triggered by the charge of the dragoons on people in the Tuileries Garden, painted here in 1789-1790 by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand

The grand basin in the Garden was the setting for Robespierre to torch a floating monster called Atheism on June 8 1794 to reveal the statue of Wisdom at the start of the Festival of the Supreme Being. During the French Revolution the Garden was called ‘The National Garden’.

Before his coup d’ État overthrowing the Directorate on November 9 1799 (18 Brumaire an 8) Napoléon Bonaparte bivouacked his troops in the garden. This was also where the Austrian and Russian occupying troops set up their encampment in 1814.

Beneath the South side of the garden running parallel to the Seine, what is now the Terrasse du Bord de l’Eau, there were tunnels beneath the Palace. This was where prisoners were murdered both during the suppression of the June 24 1848 uprising and again after Louis Napoléon’s coup d’ État of December 4 1851.

On May 15 1871 during the Paris Commune a battalion of 2,000 armed women paraded through the garden.

On May 23 1871 the Communards carried out the threat they had made to set fire to several historic buildings in Paris if the Versaillais troops continued their advance. 12 men set the Tuileries Palace, Napoléon III’s Paris base and the location for the National Convention in 1793, on fire. Using petroleum and liquid tar it didn’t take long to burn down. The Flore pavilion on the right partly survived and is now a part of the Louvre museum. The remains of the Palace were finally removed in 1882.

Several defenders of the Commune were then killed on the Terrace next to the river on May 24.

During the Second World War the Jeu de Paume museum was used by the Germans as a storage depot for seized artworks. Between November 1940 and November 1942 Göring visited the museum 20 times to pick and choose paintings. On July 29 1943 the Germans burnt around 600 paintings seized from Jewish families on the Tuileries terrace.

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Rue d’Ulm

Arrondissement 5

Number: 45,

The Ecole Normal Superieure in 1905

The Rue d’Ulm, going south from the Panthéon, was opened on January 6 1807. It was named after the crushing defeat of the Austrian army by Napoléon at the Battle of Ulm between October 15 and 20 1805.

It is largely known because since November 4 1847 it hosted France’s most prestigious higher education selective university, the École normale supérieure (ENS) at No. 45. This special institution was initiated by Napoléon on March 17 1808 when he created a ‘standard boarding school’ (Pensionnat normal) within Paris university to train arts and science teachers. The students had to follow military rules and wear uniforms and were chosen from those who performed best in the secondary schools.

Louis Pasteur‘s laboratory was based there from 1864 to 1888, and was where he discovered a vaccine for rabies. The photgraph above shows the ENS in 1905.

From 1888 to 1926 the socialist Lucien Herr was the director of the ENS general library, with one of the students he influenced being Léon Blum. Herr also convinced Jaures there in 1898 of the innocence of Captain Dreyfus.

Students who studied at ENS included Maurice Halbwachs (who died at Buchenwald), Marc Bloch (executed by the Gestapo on June 16 1944), Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Weil, Georges Pompidou, Aimé Césaire, and Alain Touraine.

Perhaps the ENS’ most well-known left resident was Louis Althusser. He entered the ENS in 1945. Having passed the final exams with the highest marks, he began to work there from 1948, living in a staff flat provided by the ENS. This was where in 1980 in a fit of manic depression Althusser strangled his partner of 54 years.

In the aftermath of 1968 the Maoist group, La Gauche Prolétarienne (The Proletarian Left), held regular meetings in the Cavaillès lecture theatre. Among their leaders was Benny Levy. On October 21 1970 they used the ENS building to make Molotov cocktails.

PLACES

Rue Vaneau

Arrondissement 7

Numbers 1b, 22, 23, 26, 38

A 12 metre-wide street originally built in 1826 under a royal decree, it was initially named rue Mademoiselle because of its proximity to the building that became the Matignon Palace/Hôtel , now the official residence of France’s prime ministers. The owner of the huge Hôtel at 55 rue de Varenne at that time was Mademoiselle Louise-Eugenie, the younger sister of Louis-Philippe. The name was changed to rue Vanneau (with two nn’s) in the initial democratic phase of King Louis-Philippe in October 1830.

The street was again renamed in 1873, as the right-wing Republican government sought to use name changes to reinforce its shaky legitimacy. So from rue Vanneau it became rue Vaneau (with one n) in honour of a student killed attacking the Babylone barracks during the Glorious Revolution on July 29 1830.

Although Karl Marx lived at both No. 38 and No. 23 in 1843-1844 and his first daughter, Jenny (who later married Charles Longuet), was born at No. 38 there is no commemorative plaque on either address. The offices of the review that had brought Marx to Paris, Annales franco-allemandes, were at No. 22.

Another left literary figure to have lived in the road was Félix Fénéon. He was still living with his parents at No. 26 when he got his first job at the Ministry of War in 1881 and soon afterwards began writing art criticism, book summaries, short stories and even a first draft of a psychological novel for a monthly journal that ran from October 1883 to March 1884.

The photograph above is from 1905, some 60 years after the Marx family lived a little further down the street.

You will see a plaque on 1b, rue Vaneau, where André Gide lived on the sixth floor from 1928 and died in 1951, and where he hid Albert Camus in another flat in the building in 1944.

PLACES

Rue de Varenne

Arrondissement 7

Numbers 12, 24, 56, 57, 77

This street is best known for No. 57, the Matignon Palace. The hôtel Matignon has been the official home of French prime ministers since 1922. In 1914, then the Austrian Embassy, it had been sequestered by the government who then bought it and what was Paris’ largest private garden in 1922.

The left’s prime ministers are few in numbers: only Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, Michel Rocard reported on in Left in Paris spent a few years there.

Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet rented a flat at No. 56, the Hôtel Gouffier de Thoix, from 1960 until Aragon’s death in 1982. The town house was built for the sister of the mistress of England’s Charles II between 1719 and 1727. Nationalised as the goods of foreigners during the French revolution, and then rented out, today it is used by the prime minister’s office.

From 1960 Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet used their flat in the Hôtel Gouffier de Thoix at No. 56 as their Paris base, while spending much of their time at the old Villeneuve watermill that Aragon bought for Elsa in 1953 in the ancient Rambouillet forest to the West of Paris.

Under the Occupation, the German Military Court was based at No. 12.

The painter Eugène Delacroix lived at No. 24 in 1820.

Nearly a kilometer long this street is filled with huge 18th century private houses that have become government buildings, embassies and the house at No. 77, now a museum, where Rodin lived, in the hôtel Biron. This was built for a former wig-maker who became a housing speculator in 1727-1728, and was sold to the hero of the 1745 battle of Fontenoy, the General Biron in 1753. His nephew ended up on the guillotine in 1793.

Under the restoration the building was given to the catholic girls school, the Ladies of the Sacré-Cœur, and then taken back by the state in 1905. By then it was nearly falling down and scheduled for demolition.

77 rue de Varenne around 1900,. It was then a convent school. This was shortly before it was returned to the French state after the 1905 legal separation of the Church from Government.

Several artists then moved in temporarily, including Matisse and Jean Cocteau, as well as Isadora Duncan’s Dance School.

In 1908 Auguste Rodin moved in. In 1916, the year before his death, he promised to give his entire works to the state if it transformed the building into the Musée Rodin, and this was then voted on by the National Assembly and by the Senate. Rodin died in 1917.

Most probably the street’s Varenne name comes from a corruption of the French word garenne meaning a hunting reserve, suggested also by the nearby Rue de Bellechasse (the ‘great hunting’ street. In the 16th century the area was part of the forest attached to the Louvre Palace. it was originally cut through in the early 17th century, got its name in 1651 and was extended to its present length in 1850.

PLACES

Rue de Vaugirard

Arrondissements 6, 15

Numbers: 1-3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15-17, 36, 85, 86-88, 93, 102, 150, 393, 399

The Luxembourg Palace (Nos. 15-17) is the most well-known building in the old Roman road that is the longest street in Paris. The road now stretches 4.360 Km westwards from the Boulevard Saint Michel to the junction of the Boulevards Lefebvre and Victor on the inner ring-road called the ‘Petite Ceinture‘ on which route a small train used to run round Paris.

Rue Vaugirard is so well known that it also features as a possible building or hotel site in the French version of Monopoly.

The end of the road was where, at Nos. 393 and 399 barricades were built across the street in March 1871 to prevent the Versaillais troops from entering.

The road’s name comes from the ancient village of Vaugirard, called after the mid-13th century owner of the land there, ‘Val du Girard’.

Among the tens of thousands who have lived in this old road are some who we feature in Left in Paris, often living alongside forgotten bits of left history.

The Trianon-hôtel, for example, at No. 1- 3 witnessed one of the first attacks by the resistance against a hotel requisitioned by the German army. The bombing took place on 14 November 1942 organised by the largely foreigner and Jewish Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (Fighters and partisans – Migrant Workers) group.

At No. 4, then called the Hôtel Lisbonne, Paul Verlaine lived off and on between periods in hospital from 1889 to 1894.

Today the hotel boasts of its earlier desperately poor and severely ill guest, and calls itself the Hôtel Fontaines du Luxembourg.

From 1906 Jacques Prévert lived at No. 7 and went to the school next door, No. 9.

I’ve very fond memories of the Vaugirard school where my son Michael spent a happy four months when he was ten. The area has completely changed since then. The school was constantly complaining about the bourgeois dog owners who allowed their tiny animals to deposit all over the surrounding streets as they walked them to the Luxembourg Garden. The disappearance of less well off and younger residents has led the authorities to close the whole school down in 2019.

The only good news is that the building hasn’t been sold off to developers. In 2023 the school is being occupied by the Cité Audacieuse and the ground floor and playground of the school is being run four days a week as a cafe by a feminist collective.

Émile Zola lived in rooms at No 10 in 1866 with Alexandre Meley whom he married in 1870.

After the 5 metre high and 24km long tax wall was built under Louis XVI there were two customs posts across Rue Vaugirard. One was at No. 102 and another (la barrière du Maine) from Nos. 111-132. While unused during the Revolution, they were reinstated after the 1815 Restoration and only finally largely demolished in 1860 with the expansion of Paris to the Thiers walls, built in the early 1840s roughly 5km from the city centre.

Victor Hugo and his wife Adèle lived for the first three years of their marriage, from 1824-1827, at what was 90 rue de Vaugirard but is now numbered 86-88. This period of his life followed the anonymous publication of the 21-year-old’s first novel, Han d’Islande set in 17th century Norway.

While living there Hugo wrote and published his second romance novel, Bug Jarval, with a black slave insurrectionist in St Domingo as its hero who falls passionately in love with a white women.

Lenin sat for Naoum Aronson in his studio iat 93 rue Vaugirard on December 10 1904. The bust was subsequently displayed in the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris.

On December 10 1904 Lenin sat for the Russian sculptor, Naoum Aronson (1872-1943) at his studio in No. 93.

When she first arrived in Paris around 1860, the feminist bookbinder and Communard Nathalie le Mel mother of three worked at Pasquier et Vigneau’s bookbinding works at No. 150 (in the 15th arrondissement).

A long way along the road was also where Michel Foucault lived, at no. 289 from 1970 until his death in 1984.

French measurements of distance

MËtre Ètalon par Chalgrin

For the real historical nerds among us, in the wall at No. 85 is an early 18th century ‘half-league stone’. The Fleur de Lys on it was removed during the French Revolution. The marker (borne) indicates the first half-league (lieue) – that is 500 toises.

A toise was the distance between a man’s outstretched arms, approximately 6 feet) or 2 Km from the entrance to Notre-Dame cathedral. 1 lieue = 1,000 toises, or approximately 4 Km. A toise is the equivalent of the fathom in English, but in France it was used both on land and at sea.

At the French Revolution France still used hundreds of different weights and measures, originally derived from Roman units where the leuga (lieue/league) was the distance that a man can run in an hour. King Charlemagne (742-814) had added the pied du Roi (the King’s foot) and the toise. The pouce (inch) was the width of a human thumb, and was 1/12th of the pied du roi. The ligne (line) was 1/12th of a pouce, and the point (Truchet point in English) was 1/12th of a ligne.

After Charlemagne the fragmentation of France and of Europe accelerated. So distances varied from town to town, with the variation in 1 league (lieue) being from 3.268 km to 5.849.

On August 4 1789 a successful resolution from the Jacobin Club at the Constituent Assembly abolished all the privileges of the Crown, including its right to determine measures of distance and weight.

In 1790 Talleyrand proposed the drawing up of a Universal Measure, and the National Assembly proposed doing this jointly with the United Kingdom, who refused.

In 1791 a law established a Commission to establish the universal measure. They decided it should be based on a quarter of the length of a meridian and gave two geographers the task of measuring it exactly. They took seven years to measure the distance between Barcelona and Dunkerque.

This exercise was considered too long-winded for both military and political reasons. So on August 1 1793 the National Convention passed a decree determining the ‘provisional’ length of what in 1795 was named the metre. This was based on a millionth of the 1739-1740 distance measured by Lacaille from the North Pole to the Equator. It was exactly 3 pieds, 11 lignes and 44 hundredths of the principal toise then used in Paris.

Finally, on 7 April 1795, the new system of weights and measures adopted by the French National Convention were named: metres and grams. A metal metre-long yardstick embedded in marble was then placed in the wall at no. 36 rue de Vaugirard. And in a shop window at No. 215 there is an 1840 cast iron kilometer stone marking 3.5 km from the centre of Paris.

The old and new systems were used concurrently in France over the next half century. Metric leagues were used from 1812 to 1840 with one metric lieue = 4000 metres or 4 Km. The use of the old system was finally ended across the whole of France by the law of 1837.

But when in 1988 Joe, Joan and I bought a half-finished farm/barn in the Haute Savoie, and I had to finish off the plumbing, I can still remember the plumbing shop in Thonon-les-Bains where the width of copper pipes and joints were still in pouces (inches). In the UK metrication became government policy under Wilson in 1965 and in 1973, with accession to the European Economic Community, the UK was given 5 years to adopt metric units and by 1980 virtually no schools continued to teach in feet and inches.

PLACES

Rue Vavin

Arrondissement 6

Numbers 10, 16-17, 21, 26, 45, 50

Built in 1831 on an old path called the ‘Passage de l’Ouest‘ and owned by Alexis Vavin, a lawyer who became a politician and moved from being a liberal in the 1840s to becoming a monarchist in 1849, the street now runs from the Luxembourg Gardens to cut across the Boulevard Raspail and end on the Boulevard du Montparnasse.

An architectural draughtsman, Eugène Chemalé (1838-?), a mutualist and supporter of Proudhon, lived at No. 10. He was elected to the Paris committee of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) established in France in January 1865. At its first 1866 congress held in Geneva, he successfully opposed giving the State authority to educate children, unless their father could not do it. In February 1868 he was arrested and fined for participating in an illegal organisation.

During the Bloody Week of May 1871 a barricade was built and defended for two days against the Versaillais troops between Nos. 16 and 17. On 23 May, when forced to reteat, the Communards blew up their stock of ammunition.

Living in the Hotel Danemark in an exceptionally cold winter in 1940-41 gave more heat than Simone de Beauvoir’s grandmother’s flat.

After Sartre was called up in October 1939, Simone de Beauvoir moved to the Denmark Hotel at No. 21. Along with many other Parisians she fled the city in June 1940 and, after spending July to September back in her grandmother’s flat in the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, she returned to the Danemark there during the harsh winter of 1940-41 because it provided a little heat.

This 1941 photograph shows the original step-like 1926 building at No 26 Rue Vavin that was declared an Historical Monument in 1975. It was designed by Charles Sarasin and Henri Sauvage, the leading art nouveau and modernist architect..

One of the few Communards with extensive military experience, the Polish General Jaroslaw Dombrowski (1836-1871) who was mortally wounded on the Rue Myrha barricade on May 23, lived at No 45. He too was a member of the IWMA. He had been given command over the Commune’s defences on the right bank.

The American leftist feminist and journalist, Louise Bryant, who married John Reed in 1916, and covered the Russian Revolution and aftermath, died in No 50. on January 6 1936.

PLACES

Place Vendôme

Arrondissement 1

Numbers: 1-2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11-13, 23-26

On May 16 1871 Gustave Courbet endorsed the proposal by Félix Pyat to demolish the column in the centre of the Vendome Square and to melt down the bronze to use in making canon.

The statue of Napoleon had become the symbol of Napoleonic imperialism. It was first put up on August 15 1810 and was then taken down in 1814, replaced in 1831, thrown into the Seine in 1848 and finally restored by Napoleon III.

The column had been decorated in bronze melted down from the canons captured at the battle of Austerlitz. Its crowning figure, Napoleon, had not survived the Bourbon restorations of 1814-1815. Louis XVIII replaced it with the white Bourbon flag and then with the Fleur de Lys. He melted down Napoleon’s statue on top of the column to create the horse-backed Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, on the Pont Neuf where it crosses the Island of the Cité.

Citizen Courbet pushing over the Vendome column as seen at the time by the latest version of the revolutionary satirical paper Le Pere Duchesne

During the defence of the Paris Commune in May 1871 a barricade defending the Headquarters of the National Guard at Nos. 11-17 was put up from No. 1 to No. 2 and across the Rue St. Honoré. The Versaillais troops took the barricades from the back by getting through the Hotel du Rhin at No. 4.

Félix Lepeletier, an aristocratic revolutionary, lived at No. 6 and allowed Babeuf, Buonarroti and others involved in leading the Conspiracy of Equals to meet there in March 1796. Félix’s older brother, Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, had cast the deciding vote on the execution of Louis XVI, and that same evening, 20 January 1793, he was stabbed with a sword by one of the king’s former bodyguards.

Louis-Michel Le Peletier died soon after at his family house at No. 8 Place Vendôme. and his body was then draped over the pedestal of Louis XIV’s statue that had been pulled down in 1792. Louis XVI was guillotined the following morning.

The Jacobin painter, Jacques-Louis David, painted LePeletier on his death bed, and one of his students then produced this lithograph print of it. The sword pierces a piece of paper on which is written “I vote the death of the tyrant”, and as a tribute at the bottom right of the picture David placed the inscription “David to Le Peletier. 20 January 1793′

On 18 March 1871, when the Versaillais troops tried and failed to capture the canons stored on the Montmartre and Belleville hills, four battalions of National Guardsmen from Batignolles and Montmartre marched on the National Guard Headquarters at No. 7 and threw out the commanding officer put in place there on March 5, and installed their own commanders.

Jaroslaw Dombrowski, the Polish commanding National Guard General at its headquarters in the Ministry of Justice in Nos. 11-13, was mortally wounded on May 23 1871, when all the defenders were summarily killed.

One of the only 18 Paris barricades in May 1871 that was fortified with canons crossed from Nos. 23 to 26, the Barricade of the Rue de la Paix. It was defended by the 88th, 113th and 182nd National Guard battalions. Very few of the more than one thousand defenders survived the battle.

Chopin, the former lover of George Sand, died in his first floor flat overlooking the court at No. 12 in 1849.

The Ritz Hotel at No. 15, the former Hôtel de Gramont, was colonised by senior Germans and Vichy collaborators under the Occupation and its bar was famously liberated by Ernest Hemingway on August 26 1944, when he gave some American rifles to the arriving FTP. This was also where Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed had their last meal together on August 31 1997.

MAP

Rue de Verneuil

Arrondissement 7

Numbers: 46

The road was named after the Duke Henri de Bourbon-Verneuil, a son of Henry IV who was Abbott of the nearby St Germain-des-Pres abbey in 1640 when the road was first opened.

Jean Zay lived in a flat at No. 46 from 1934. His eldest daughter was born there in 1936, the year he became Minister of Education and Culture in the Blum Popular Front government.

There is now a rare plaque to a leftist on the wall outside the flat.

After facing increasing threats from La Cagoule, the undergorund fascist organisation, the Zay family moved to the Rue de Bourgogne.

PLACES

Rue Victor Cousin

Arrondissement 5

Numbers: 1, 14

This is a street that has witnessed many barricade battles. With the Sorbonne University at No. 1, it was the site of confrontations between the police and students in 1968 and 2006.

After the Sorbonne was forcibly evacuated by the police in May 1968
The remains of the barricade across Rue Victor Cousin where it crosses Rue Cujas. On the right of the street the Pantheon Cinema was showing Albert Finney, Billie Whitelaw and Liza Minnelli in Charlie Bubbles.

In March 2006, after Sarkozy’s government introduced a law to force those under 26 to take whatever job they were offered and over the following two years, if they were dismissed by their employer, they would have no entitlement to unemployment benefit. University and secondary school students mobilised massively against the law, with demonstrations beginning at the Sorbonne. The law was withdrawn by the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin in April.

After dislodging students occupying the Sorbonne from March 10 to March 10 2006, fighting took place in the nearby streets. The riot police then closed off the Rue Victor Cousin, the Sorbonne Square and several other streets until April 24. A key symbol for the opponents of the new employment contract, during this period the police were attacked several times, with railings and molotov cocktails.

Further up the street, after it crosses the rue de Cujas is the independent Cinéma du Panthéon (there since 1907). It is opposite the nursery school at No. 14 where Lucie Bernard/Aubrac worked part-time in 1936.

An uninspiring facade and French and European flags outside the school at No. 14 where in the 1930s Lucie Aubrac taught in the nursery school

Originally called the rue de Cluny after an ancient abbey, in 1864 the short street south of the Rue de la Sorbonne was renamed in honour of the educational reformer, Victor Cousin (1792 – 1867). Forced into exile in 1821 for his liberalism, he became a Professor at the Sorbonne University after the 1830 Revolution.

Cousin helped structure French education in the 1840s inserting the history of philosophy into the French secondary school curriculum. This is still taught to all French school students up to the age of 18.

Cousin’s philosophy of eclecticism, merging British empiricism with French idealism, dominated mainstream philosophy from the 1830s to the 1880s. But it was not without its critics.

In his 1839 ‘Refutation of EclecticismPierre Leroux wrote: ‘M Cousin is an excellent translator of phrases, but a dreadful translator of ideas‘. Bakunin in 1882 wrote that ‘This superficial pedant, without a single original idea… this illustrious philosopher has cleverly prepared for the the use of the student youth of France, a metaphysical dish whose consumption, made compulsory in all the schools of the State has condemned several successive generations to indigestion of the brain

Much earlier, in 1741, a much more serious contributor to French philosophy and left thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, lived at the St Quentin hotel (finally demolished in 1892) that was on the present location of 7 rue Victor Cousin, but was then 14 rue des Cordiers. In 1744-45 Rousseau stays there again, marrying his mistress, Thérèse Levasseur.

You won’t find this hotel because the rue des Cordiers used to link the rue Victor Cousin and the rue St Jacques but was built over by the southern section of the Sorbonne.

PLACES

Avenue Victor Hugo

Arrondissement 16

Numbers: 14, 60, 69, 72, 124

This, the second longest of the twelve roads leading out from what is since 1970 the Place Charles-de-Gaulle (previously the place de l’Étoile), was renamed three times before Victor Hugo moved and died there. In 1840 it was simply called Departmental Road 64, and then after land speculators took over in 1850 it was the avenue de Saint-Cloud and subsequently, at the time Victor Hugo moved in, the Avenue d’Eylau. This name dated from the Third Empire and was its attempt to associate itself with Napoleon I’s military successes, even including the inconclusive Battle of Eylau of 1807.

As a continuation of the same attempt to weaken the anti-Republican monarchists and Bonapartists by celebrating France’s biggest-ever Republican celebrity, the road’s present name was adopted on Victor Hugo‘s 79th birthday in 1881.

Number 14 was where Guy de Maupassant, the author of Boule de Suif (The Dumpling), lived from 1889-1890.

The office organising the recruitment of French citizens into the Waffen SS was based at No. 60. Pierre Laval signed the decree, which led to some 2,740 French joining up by 1944. Laval was one of just three French men executed by the French High Court in 1945.

In August 1940 Laval ordered the arrest of Georges Mandel, who had lived at No. 69. A Radical Party deputy in the National Assembly he had opposed the Vichy regime and was deported to Buchenwald. Returned to Paris as a hostage in 1944 he was seized by the French Milice and shot in the Fontainbleau Forest on July 7 1944. The Milice’s leader, Joseph Darnand, was tried and executed in 1945. Thousands of other Milice members were never caught or tried.

The former fascist founder of the resistance Hector escape network and the Civil and Military Organisation, Jacques Arthuys, lived and was arrested at No. 72. He was killed in December 1941 at the Hinzert concentration camp.

Hugo on the lintel above 124 avenue Victor Hugo, sculpted by Marcel Fonquergne from a photograph

The building at No. 124 was built in 1907 on the site of the previous home of Hugo and Juliette Drouet, who moved there together in 1878. This was where Juliette died on May 11 1883.

On February 28 1882, on the initiative of a journalist and political exile from 1871 to 1877, Edmond Bazire, a huge 600,000 strong celebration of Hugo’s 80th birthday took place outside his home. Victor Hugo died there on 22 May 1885.

Parisrevolutionnaire

PLACES

Rue Victor Massé

Arrondissement 9

Numbers: 6, 9, 25

In 1817 under the Restoration the Rue Ferrand (after the landowner on which it was built in 1777) was renamed the Rue Laval after the 71-year-old aristocrat Abbess of Montmartre (Marie-Louise de Laval-Montmorency) executed on July 24 1794. In 1887 it took its present name to honour the composer and music teacher Victor Massé who had died three years earlier.

In the 1920s and 1930s, No. 6 housed the People’s Bookshop (Librairie Populaire) run by the Communist Party. You could buy not just books and pamphlets there, but also busts of great people, badges, red flags and also red liberty caps (Phrygian bonnets).

9 Rue Victor Masse
No. 9 Rue Victor Massé

No. 9 was a key address for French socialists. On April 11 1918 Léon Blum, Jean Longuet and Paul Faure published the first daily issue of the evening paper, Le Populaire, from there.

The offices of Le Populaire and of the French Socialist Party were at No. 9 through the interwar years

After the majority of the French Socialists voted in 1920 to affiliate to the Communist Third International, the Populaire became the principal offices of the SFIO Socialist Party.

Close to Montmartre several artists had workshops and/or lived in the road. Edouard Manet had studied at Thomas Couture’s workshop at No. 23 in 1850. Pierre Bonnard lived at No. 18 in 1890. During his second stay in Paris Vincent van Gogh lived with his brother at No. 25 in March 1886. Berthe Weill had a gallery at that address too, where in 1901 she held a joint exhibition of paintings by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse. This was also where Diego Rivera opened his first solo exhibition on April 21 1914.

Maurice Ravel also lived in the street between 1880 and 1886 at No. 29, while Edgar Degas lived at No 37 from 1890 to 1912 with his workshop in the attic.

PLACES

Rue Victor Schoelcher

Arrondissement 14

Number 11bis

The street was opened in 1894 when part of the land owned by the Montparnasse Cemetery was sold by Paris for housing development. It was named in honour of the republican campaigner against slavery who died in 1893. Schoelcher drafted the abolitionist decree of April 27 1848 and then lived in exile throughout the Second Empire.

In 1913 Picasso moved in to No. 5bis, next to the No. 5, now a building classified as an official historical monument. Picasso lived there until 1916. No. 5 is now the Giacometti Institute in Paris, including a recreation of the Swiss sculptor’s studio.

From 1913 to 1916 Pablo Picasso lived in No 5bis. The building next door, No 5 is classified as a Historical Monument and from 2018 hosts the Giacometti Institute.

In 1955, shortly after winning the Concourt prize for literature with her 1954 book, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir moved in to a ground floor flat at No. 11bis with Claude Lanzmann, the left Jewish editor of Les Temps Modernes and film-maker 18 years younger than her. She fell in love with him when he was in his late 20s, and lived there with him until her death in 1986.

The street overlooking the Montparnasse Cemetery only has odd numbers, including No. 11 shown on the right
The plaque honouring Simone de Beauvoir on the wall at 11bis Rue Victor Schoelcher, close to where she and Sartre lie together in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

PLACES

Rue Vieille-du-Temple

Arrondissements 3, 4

Numbers: 87, 131

The road dates back to 1250 when it led from the north towards the gardens of the Knights Templar fort and its tower on the inside of the Philippe-August wall. After the Charles V wall was built both parts of the road, inside and outside the old wall became the Old Temple Road.

Like many during the workers’ insurrection of June 1848, the road was barricaded without anyone today knowing its exact location.

On December 2 1851 the workers in the National Printworks at No. 87 were forced by the army supporting Louis-Napoleon’s Coup d’Etat to print the poster announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly.

The 1705 Rohan Private Mansion on the left was nationalised under the French Revolution and turned into the National Printworks by Napoleon in 1808. This use by the state ended in 1924, and after being used by the National Archives for many years at the time of writing (2020) its interior is being restored to 18th century style.

On March 18 1871 the tables were turned. The 86th battalion of the National Guard took over the National Printworks to defend the Paris Commune and Louis Debock, a typesetter, took over the directorship at No. 87.

The Worker Albert was arrested at his home in No. 131 in January 1841 following police enquiries into the assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe on 15 October 1840. Finding communist pamphlets at the house he was jailed for a month for belonging to a Communist club.

Parisrevolutionnaire

PLACES

Avenue de Villars

Arrondissement 7

Number: 11bis

11bis Avenue de Villars

A short but very wide road close to the Military School it was opened around 1780 and named after the 18th century duke and French Marshal Claude-Louis-Hector de Villars.

It is noteworthy here solely because it was where Louis Aragon‘s mother gave birth to him at No. 11bis, being ‘modernised’ in the Google Street picture of 2019 shown above, but still looking quite ‘posh’.

It is quite probable that Louis’ 57-year-old politically important father, the politician, prefect and deputy judge, Louis Andrieux, paid for the 24-year-old Marguerite Toucas to live there in 1898 to give birth to his illegitimate son.

PLACES

Hôtel de Ville / Paris Town Hall

Arrondissement 4

Number 10 Place de l’Hôtel de Ville

Jean-Victor Schnetz‘s painting of the July 28 1830 battle outside the symbolic Paris Town Hall shows both the Tricolor and a Red flag – with the words’ ‘Long Live the Charter’ on it. The July Revolution was about restoring a semblance of democratic bourgeois rights, with the threat of workers’ rights behind it.

Lamartine rejecting the red flag on 25 February 1848 in favour of the Tricolor representing the Bourbons (white), the Empire (blue) and the Republic (red).

At the next successful insurrection on February 25 1848, Henri Philippoteaux painted the republican Lamartine outside the Town Hall rejecting the Red flag and endorsing the Tricolor.

Citizens, for me, the red flag, I am not adopting it, and I’ll tell you why I’m against with all the strength of my patriotism. It’s that the tricolor has toured the world with the Republic and the Empire with your freedoms and your glory, and the red flag was that around the Champ-de-Mars, dragged into the people’s blood.

Alphonse Lamartine

On March 22 1848 a delegation of women activists from the ‘Women’s voice’ group went to the Town Hall to demand women have full citizens’ rights including the right to vote.

On May 15 1848 demonstrators against French intervention in Poland, including Blanqui, the worker Albert, Blanc, Cabet, Leroux and Raspail occupied the Town Hall and declared a new provisional government before being arrested.

Lamartine went on to order the brutal suppression of the June 1848 workers’ insurrection sparked by the government’s closing of the world’s first unemployment system with national workshops offering work paid by the state.

On September 4 1870, after Napoleon III’s capture at the battle of Sedan, Léon Gambetta stood on the Town Hall balcony and announced the end of the Second Empire and proclaimed the creation of a new Republic.

On 31 October Blanqui and others demonstrated in front of the Town Hall demanding more action against the Prussian army from the new government led by Jules Favre. A supporter on the inside unlocked the doors and the demonstrators occupied it.

On January 22 1871 Louise Michel was one of many who protested outside the Town Hall at the government’s inertia in face of the Prussian siege of Paris. the demonstrators were fired on and Louise Michel later wrote that this was the first occasion that she had fired back with her rifle.

On March 18 1871 the Thiers government first placed a regiment loyal to to it into the Town Hall overnight, and then attempted to seize all the canons in Paris. These events sparked the creation of the Paris Commune by the Central Committee of the National Guard on March 29 1871.

Retreating before the murdering Versaillais troops the Communards carried out their warning that they would burn down several of Paris’ historic buildings, including the Hotel de Ville

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PLACES

Quai Voltaire

Arrondissements 7

Number 29, 27, 7

In 1791 the owner of the huge house at No. 27, the Marquis de Villette, a gay friend of the enlightenment philosopher and writer who had died there in 1778 , renamed the street Quai Voltaire. Villette had supported the 1789 Revolution and renounced his nobility. Elected to the Convention in 1792, Charles Villette argued for the banishment of Louis XVI, but died of what was then described as ‘melancholia’ (langeur) aged 57 in July 1793.

Alongside the plaque on No. 27 remembering Voltaire is another recalling the meetings that took place there of the leaders of the national and local police groups of Résistance Libération-Nord. This was initially the name of a clandestine newspaper, established after SFIO and non-Communist CGT trade unionists signed the Declaration of Twelve opposing the Vichy regime and the dissolution of the trade unions on November 15 1940. It became a resistance organisation in November 1941 and in 1943 was one of the eight resistance movements represented on the National Resistance Council.

29, Quai Voltaire is where Daniel Stern (Marie d’Agoult) lived in the Hôtel de Mailly-Nesle after her 1839 breakup with Franz Liszt. She ran a republican literary salon there, and in 1844 Karl Marx used to attend.

No 7 Quai Voltaire is another well-plaqued house (three). It was the home of Hubert de Lagarde, founder and head of the Resistance Eleuthère network of the Forces Françaises Combattantes . A plaque tells how he was arrested by the Gestapo on June 15 1944. This was only a few days after he had protested against the appointment of a Communist to head up the now merged FFI (French Forces of the Interior). He was tortured and then deported to Buchenwald before dying of dysentery on January 25 1945.

PLACES

Place des Vosges / Place Royale

Arrondissement 4

Numbers: 6, 14

When this impressive square was first built under Henri IV between 1605 and 1612 in the then fashionable aristocratic Marais part of Paris, it was called la Place Royale. The King’s mansion on the south side and the Queen’s on the north (although they never lived in them) were higher than the 36 private mansions around the rest of the square . All of the other houses had similarly designed fronts.

During the French Revolution the square was renamed several times. The names changed from the Fédérés  square (after the 1790 Federation celebration on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille), to « place du Parc-d’Artillerie and then Place de la Fabrication-des-Armes, and then Place de l’Indivisibilité (referring to the administrative unification of four Paris districts in 1795).

Finally, in 1800 it was given its current name Place des Vosges in honour of the French Vosges Department that had been the first in 1792 to send the taxes it owed to the republican government. During the Restoration (1815-1830) and under Louis-Napoléon’s Second Empire (1852-1870) the name went back to Place Royale, and from March 20 1848 until 1852 it was known as the Place de la République.

In February 1871 several canon were moved for safe-keeping by the National Guard into the square. On March 11 1871 Jean Allemane persuaded the National Guard not to allow the Versailles troops to take the artillery back under their control. The same thing happened again on March 14 and on March 16.

Victor Hugo lived at No. 6, now a fascinating museum, from October 1832 until 1848. The American author with an amazing knowledge of Paris, Cara Black, reproduces a common error concerning Hugo. In her opening tour of Paris novels, Murder in the Marais, her super impressive detective Aimée Leduc hides in the museum at No. 6. Black writes: ‘The (dining) room captured his essence, dark and narcissistic. The only touch that could be called socialist was the heavy peasant glassware on a mahogany sideboard’. Hugo was actually a royalist who converted to becoming a principled republican. His wife Adèle Foucher (1803-1868) lived at No. 6 with him. On February 16 1833 he began a life-long relationship with Juliette Drouet (1806-1883).

The town hall (from 1793 to 1860) at No. 14 of what was in 1848 the 8th arrondissement was taken over by the insurrectionaries on February 24 1848, supported by the local National guard. They disarmed the municipal police.

Four months later, on June 23 during the workers’ insurrection against the closure of the National Workshops, the insurrectionaries again took over the Town Hall and raised a Red Flag over it. Some 350 regular soldiers put down their weapons.

My father, whose dying wish was to for me to get him a copy of a late Georges Simenon novel that had finally appeared in paperback, probably didn’t know that before the Second World War when Simenon had lived at No. 21 (first on the ground and then on the first floor), his neighbour was called Maigret.

On June 8 1942 two members of the Second Jewish Section of the FTP-M.O.I, Léon Pakin and Élie Wallach, were arrested in the Square as they prepared to sabotage a furrier’s workshop who was supplying the German army. Pakin and Wallach were shot on July 27 at the Mont-Valérien prison fort.

Plus d’informations

PLACES

Avenue de Wagram

Arrondissements 8, 17

Number: 37/39

Looking up the Avenue to the Arc de Triomphe around 1900

One of 12 broad radial roads that leaves the Arc de Triomphe from what used to be called the ‘Square of the Star’ (Place de l’Étoile) and was renamed Place Charles-de-Gaulle in 1970. The road was first opened on January 16 1789 when the section of the Farmers’ tax wall was completed between the Etoile (Neuilly) and Roule (Ternes) customs posts. It became de Wagram on March 2 1864 during the Second Empire to honour Napoleon I’s significant victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram on July 6 1809.

The Salle Wagram at No. 37/39 witnessed some key meetings in the history of the Left in France. On the site of a guingette (open air café) run by a Napoleonic war veteran since 1812 on a country lane outside the city walls (and so providing cheap wine), under the restoration he developed it into dance hall, the Bal Dourlans.

In 1865 a new covered hall designed by Fleuret was inaugurated surrounded by two rings of seats. In 1899 the hall was given in a legacy to one of the five academies grouped within the Institut de France, which continued to run it as a dance hall, concert hal, exhibition halll and venue for political meetings.

Immediately after the 5th Congress of the Second Socialist International was held at the Salle Wagram from September 23 to 27 1900, leading to the establishment of a permanent international committee, an even more important development took place.

From September 28 to 30 1900 the Second Congress of French Socialist organisations took place at the Salle Wagram. Jules Guesde (P.O.F.), Jean Allemane, Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand were all present. During it Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier de France decided to leave the unity meeting.

The entrance that led to the Salle Wagram around 1900

On March 28 1910 Vera Figner presided at a fund-raising concert at the Salle Wagram to support Russian revolutionaries escape from prison. Among those who attended were Lenin and Maxime Gorky, although Lenin avoided meeting Gorky since he didn’t wish to have a political argument with him.

Shortly before Lenin left Paris he attended an event at the Salle Wagram on April 15 1912 to honour the centenary of the birth of Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian socialism.

On the third anniversary of the Russian Revolution, November 7 1920, Pierre Monatte, the anarchist Caroline Rémy and Boris Souvarine were among those who attended a celebration meeting at the Salle Wagram.

Caroline Remy, the anarchist journalist who joined the Communist Party in 1921 shown here painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

André Malraux attended at least two meetings organised by the Communist Party in the Salle Wagram. One in 1933 was support of ErnstThälmann, the jailed leader of the German Communist Party, and on December 23 1935 he spoke at the second anniversary of Dmitrov’s acquittal of setting fire to the Reichstag.

On July 30 1936 Malraux was given huge applause at the Salle Wagram when, returning from Spain, he spoke at the first major solidarity meeting with Republican Spain.

Under the Occupation the fascist French Popular Party mounted a ‘Bolshevism against Europe’ exhibition at the Salle Wagram that opened on March 1 1942. On March 8 three resistance fighters failed to set off a bomb in the exhibition. The Romanian-born Jew André Kirschen (aged 15 and a half), Karl Schoenhaar and Georges Tondelier were arrested. They were tortured and the two older men were executed. Kirschen was sent to a concentration camp because of his youth, and survived.

After the Second World War the Salle Wagram was hired by the extreme right on October 28 1948 to hold a meeting for ‘Peoples oppressed by the Bolsheviks’. A counter demonstration by 12,000 communists was attacked by the police, involving 1 death and 300 wounded.

After the war it was also the major Paris jazz venue, with musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Bud Powell and Django Reinhardt all playing there. Sidney Bechet performed his last concert there in 1958.

On September 1 1950 a communist meeting in support of the Vietnam liberation movement was held at the Salle Wagram. Its principal speaker was Léo Figuères, a resistance fighter who had visited Vietnam and whose arrest had been ordered by the military.

The Algerian liberation movement whose president was Messali Hadj, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques, held huge meetings at No. 37 on June 13 1950 and, in protest against police violence on May Day, on May 5 1951.

The Algerian war for independence that began in 1954 saw a joint protest meeting of the SFIO and Marceau Pivert‘s recently founded (June 1955) Mouvement pour la justice et les libertés outre-mer (Movement for Justice and Freedom in the Colonies) taking place at the Salle Wagram on October 7 1955. The meeting called on the government to stop sending military reinforcements to Algeria.

Anarchism

While anarchism may contain extreme individualism, in France it emerged as a bottom-up collective ideology alongside communist thought as a major mutualist strand within early French socialism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that ensuring freedom was a key moral obligation on the organisation of society

Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) suggested anarchism emerged out of the ‘naturalist philosophy’ of the enlightenment.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) considered that in putting individual human rights at the legal heart of the social order, the French Revolution itself was the start of doing everything differently. Justice became possible in political, economic and social life within a peaceful transition to an anarchist world he described as ‘Anarchy is Order Without Power’.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon aged about 30

Proudhon, who many see as the ‘father’ of anarchism, regarded property as a means of exercising authority. He rejected it, god and government – whether elected or imposed by revolutionaries. He opposed both reformists and utopians.

For Proudhon, only the workers themselves could achieve freedom. And they could only do so through exercising direct control over their daily work.

Proudhon, Perry Anderson (The New Old World) reminds us, also believed in a European confederation of federations – a bottom-up association of mutually supportive workshops.

A postcard of the founding meeting of the First International Workingmen’s Association in London in 1864 attended by Marx and many French Proudhonists

In the 1850s and 1860s Proudhon’s writings reached a wide audience among the growing numbers of skilled French workers, who often found themselves in workshops alongside their working employer. The French delegates to the First International, founded in London in 1864, were largely Proudhonist, without their belonging to a specific anarchist organisation.

The suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune killed (literally) the Proudhonist collective bottom-up dynamic.

It took the return of the amnestied Communards in 1879 and 1880 for anarchism to re-emerge. But its form was then quite different.

Louise Michel led an unemployed demonstration in 1883 wearing a black veil. This became the anarchist colour

The now-marginalised Proudhonists increasingly wished to differentiate themselves from the socialists.  In 1882 Louise Michel (1830-1905) argued ‘

No more flags dyed red with the blood of our soldiers. I will carry the black flag to mourn our dead and all illusions.

In 1884 in a regular meeting place, the Salle de la Réunion, at 8, Rue de Lévis, the anarchist grouplet, the ‘Batignolles Panther‘ (la Panthère des Batignolles) held one/two meetings that ended in street battles with the police and monarchists. This was a period of rising monarchist agitation. Either on 23 November or 7 December 1884, or on both dates, the meetings included speakers such as Louise Michel, Jules Favre, Henri Rochefort and Léon Gambetta.

The Panther of the Batignolles anarchist group was set up in October 1882. A police spy reported that they had ‘quiet’ meetings with a lot of reading of scientific books on how to make explosives

Propaganda by the deed

Many anarchists reflected their frustration with the conservatism of the strongly liberal and anti-socialist Third Republic by turning to what became called ‘Propaganda by the Deed’.

Breaking with Proudhon’s moderation as well as with Mikhail Bakunin’s (1814-1876) anti-authoritarianism, the new generation of libertarians increasingly considered that a social revolution could only occur if sparked by insurrectional acts.

At the right moment, the ‘spirit of revolt’ inherent in the working masses would spontaneously lead to a revolution.

This ideology justified violence directed against individual capitalists and their supporters on the grounds that capitalism itself was founded on violence. ‘Individual seizures’ of bourgeois goods and possessions were justified as helping to destabilise the bourgeois order.

A lithograph of the moment of the explosion at the Restaurant Foyot, 36 Rue de Condé on April 4 1894

The ‘propaganda by the deed’ anarchists denounced attempts to create lasting organisations, as well as strikes (reforming the system) and any joint work with the socialists.

Their public presence grew, as their ideas attracted many intellectuals and artists who detested the authoritarianism and conformity of 1880s French society.

Felix Fénéon (1861-1944) and some of his artistic and literary friends like Maximilien Luce started attending anarchist meetings. Anarchism also attracted younger workers angry at continuing massive poverty and inequality.

Anarchist papers were selling 20,000 copies a week in Paris by the mid-1880s. The papers edited by Jean Grave (1854-1939), successively le Révolté, La révolte and Les Temps nouveaux (New Times) and supported by Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, were the most influential.

Bombings

On May Day 1891 nine demonstrators for the 8-hour day were shot dead by police at Fourmies near the Belgian border.

On the same day at another demonstration at Clichy in Paris three anarchists were arrested and badly beaten up after the police decided to seize the red flag at the march’s head.  Gunfire was exchanged. One anarchist and some police slightly wounded.

Two of the anarchists were jailed by the judges for five and three years.

As an individual act of reprisal for this injustice, the 32-year-old François (Koenigstein) Ravachol then bombed the homes of two judges involved in the Clichy trial. He was caught and guillotined on 11 July 1892.

Émile Henry was captured close by the Café Terminus after his February 1894 bombing

On November 8 1892, five days after the end of the 10-week Carmaux miners’ strike in the south of France, Émile Henry, the 20-year-old son of a Spanish communard, planted a time-bomb at the Carmaux company’s Paris office. It was found and taken to a police station where it exploded killing five gendarmes.

On 9 December 1893 August Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies from the public gallery in protest against political corruption. It wounded 20 deputies and Vaillant was guillotined on 3 February 1894.

Nine days after Vaillant’s execution, the 22-year-old Henry carried out a revenge bombing at the Café Terminus at the Paris Gare St Lazare. It killed one man and wounded another 19. Henry was caught at the scene and guillotined on 21 May 1894.

On 24 June 1894 an Italian 20-year-old anarchist knifed the French president in Lyon. Sadi Carnot died a day later and Caserio was tried and guillotined in August.

Felix Fénéon at the Mazas Prison opposite the Gare du Lyon in 1894 sketched by Maximillien Luce

Under new anti-anarchist laws passed in December 1893, 426 anarchists were rounded-up in April 1894 of whom 30, including Fénéon, the anarchist journalists Jean Grave and Émile Pouget (1860-1931), and a burglar, Philippe Léon Ortix, were also put on trial in August 1894 for ‘criminal conspiracy’.

The prosecution aimed to prove that the anarchist anti-capitalists were working closely with known criminals. After Fénéon’s brilliant appearance in the dock, and Bernard Lazare ‘s committed legal defence, only three were finally jailed.

Later in 1894 a few anarchists, including Bernard Lazare and Fénéon, were among the first to denounce the silence on the left in front of the national anti-Semitic lynch mob atmosphere after Captain Dreyfus was arrested for alleged treason on October 29.

Earlier that year Lazare had published Anti-Semitism, its History and Causes, and Lazare became the key figure in exposing the framing of Dreyfus with a pamphlet published in November 1896.

Direct action

Criticism of the ‘propaganda by the deed’ ideology, the repression targeting anarchist newspapers and individuals, as well as the clear failure of these terrorist acts to stimulate revolution, led many anarchist sympathisers to turn towards trade union and socialist alternatives.

As early as 1893 Michel, Kropotkin and others in the Avant-Garde group of anarchists began to argue against the individualist-isolationism of ‘propaganda by the deed’ and for a return for anarchism to the workers’ movement as a component of socialism.

Their object, inside the trade unions and socialist sects, was to attack the advocates of state socialism through parliament and to argue for extra-parliamentary action, particularly the general strike as a means of achieving emancipation. Entering unions that were only legalized in 1884 and working with the socialists there would end the isolation fueled by the failures of ‘propaganda by the deed’.

It would also dovetail with the understandings of the very small numbers of trade unionists. They rationalised their minority status in relationship to their fellow workers as proving their responsibility was to lead by example. If a minority took direct action on an important issue, then the majority might join in.

Direct action and the General Strike as opposed to political action were adoped by the founding conference of the CGT in 1895

‘Direct action’ was thus democratic – it offered workers the possibility of participating in their own liberation – and it did not involve a dependency upon either the state or the employers. Neither party politics nor collective bargaining could be relied on to improve workers’ conditions; workers could only rely on what was gained through direct action.

In September 1895, albeit paradoxically, the founding conference of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) trade union centre at Limoges voted to ‘stay outside of all political schools’. The paradox is that this apolitical stance was adopted by the majority of delegates made up of Jean Allemane supporters, anarchists and Blanquists in order to scupper the influence of Jules Guesde‘s French Workers’ Party.

Revolutionary syndicalism

‘Revolutionary syndicalist’ trade unionism tended to place a greater emphasis upon the ‘general strike’ for longer-term goals of social transformation and internationalism, and to stress the importance of generalising actions against the employing class as a whole. It took a deep hold on the unskilled worker activists whose uncertain, irregular and very low paid work meant they were effectively excluded from the widespread state-supervised mutual savings societies (mutualités) with the requirement of regular payments before benefits could be accrued.

Revolutionary syndicalists were sometimes politically close to the still sizeable body of anarchists. They often came from smaller firms and trades where the prospects of reactionary paternalist employers ever agreeing to trade union recognition and collective bargaining were highly remote.

They defended direct action, confrontation with the employers, the General Strike and sabotage such as ‘go slows’. In the CGT’s 1906 agitation for the Eight Hour Day, it therefore called neither for legislation on working time nor for negotiations: its aim was to have enough workers take strike action to convince everyone to simply impose the eight hour day on the employers.

The anarchist Émile Pouget (1860-1931), author of Le Sabotage (1898), became Joint-General Secretary of the CGT from 1901 to 1908. In 1906 he helped draft the Amiens Charter that is still a cornerstone of much French trade unionism with the cobbler, Victor Griffuelhes (1874-1922).

It was largely thanks to Griffuelhes’ organizational talents as General Secretary that the CGT grew from around 100,000 members in 1901 to the near 500,000 claimed when he was forced by the 1908 reformist coup to resign.

World War 1

50 years after the start of World War 1 French anarchists were still dealing with the reality that many leading anarchists supported their countries in the war

Anarchism, like the whole revolutionary left, took a big hit in 1914. All belief that class interests would trump national interest crashed. Worse still for the anarchists than for the social democrats who wanted to win state power, and had already seen some former socialists move into ministerial positions, Kropotkin and Grave and a handful of other leading anarchists argued that workers should support the Entente alliance against the greater evil of German militarism.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was experienced by the revolutionary syndicalists as an emotional roller-coaster. Revolutionary inspiration turned quickly to the sad confirmation of their greatest fears and predictions about the consequences of a single party state.

Anarchist insistence that workers could and would seize a revolutionary opportunity to overthrow the state was shattered. The defeat of the 1919 German revolution and the arrival of the successful fascist counter-revolution in Italy added to their demoralisation.

The shrinking numbers of anarchists began to see anarchism as first needing to educate the masses and even to organise to ensure this happens.

In 1936 Spanish anarchism briefly appeared to demonstrate that anarcho-communism from below was possible

The ‘anarchist summer’ of 1936 in France and particularly in Spain, with agricultural collectives being formed bottom-up across whole regions, and with revolutionary syndicalists dominant in the trade union refuelled the anarchist belief that they could make history and not just be subjected to it.

Yet by November 1936 the choice between making the revolution and defending the Spanish Republic had to be made: the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade union confederation decided to enter the Spanish Republican government and was backed by the Iberian Federation of Anarchists (FAI).

After World War Two

In the 1940s and 1950s some French libertarians tried to resuscitate anarchism from its identification with violence by renaming it ‘libertarian socialism’ or ‘libertarian humanism’. Most kept defending the earlier anti-state mantra, and failed to support growing anti-colonial struggles.

George Brassens was a leading anti-authoritarian rebel in the 1950s and 1960s

The most prominent sympathisers in this period, like the surrealist André Breton (1896-1966) and poet/singer George Brassens (1921-1981), remained individualist rather than collectivist. Brassens was one of the editorial collective behind the revival of Le Libertaire, which resumed production in December 1944 and came out on a weekly basis until 1956, when the fragmenting anarchist movement suspended its production.

A libertarian renaissance started in the early 1960s, inspired partly by the experiments in self-organisation in Tito’s Yugoslavia and in Ben Bella’s (1916-2012) Algeria.

May 1968

In May 1968 the Odéon Theatre was occupied by the students and next to the banner saying ‘Odeon is Open’ a Black anarchist flag flew alongside a Red one

May 1968 saw an explosion of radical libertarianism. Spontaneous and anti-authoritarian it denounced the bureaucratised trade unions and Communist Party.

For a time a black flag was raised over the Odéon Theatre. This was occupied by the students, and became a centre of debate about the future of the movement. My step-mother recalled how the teargas used by police in 1968 to end the occupation wafted up into the flat 50 metres from the theatre that I’m now lucky enough to be able to use to follow the footsteps of the French Parisian left.

May 1968 generated a new mass feminist movement in France. It relaunched the ecology environmental movement. It led to the formation of hundreds of experimental self-governing collectives and a large squatting movement.

Direct Action

Among those radicalised by 1968 were many French anarchists. A journal, Camarades, was launched in 1974. It was influenced both by increasingly the militaristic Italian ‘Autonomous Workers’ organization (of whom many members fled to France in 1979) and by Spanish anti-Franco activists in the Groupes d’action révolutionnaires internationalistes (GARI) who believed it necessary to continue an armed struggle against the state.

In 1976, Jean Bilski, an anarchist acting alone, murdered the chief executive of the giant Credit Lyonnais bank, and then killed himself.  In 1977 a group of Maoists belonging to the Armed Units for Mass Self-organisation (Noyaux armés pour l’autonomie populaire) carried out 7 bombings on their own and another series of attacks on nuclear targets with anarchists belonging to GARI.

The first ‘General meeting of Parisian self-organised groups’ (Assemblée générale parisienne des groupes autonomes –  AGPGA) is held in October 1977, after the July 31 brutal police attacks on the anti-nuclear demonstration in the ‘Battle of Malville’. Some of those there created a loose ‘internal armed political coordination network’ within the wider group.

A month later on the night of 19 November 1977, 23 coordinated attacks (bombings, Molotov cocktails) on the French electricity company (EDF) and the nuclear industry took place across France.

The leaders of Directe Action were tracked down to a farmhouse and arrested in 1987

While most French anarchists considered the time was not ripe for mounting similar attacks and robberies to those associated with the Red Brigades in Italy from 1975 to 1979, a tiny minority clearly did.

Some of them formed Action Directe, borrowing the name from the revolutionary syndicalists. This group’s first action was on May Day 1979. They machine-gunned the headquarter offices of the Patronat (the largest French employers’ organization, then called the Conseil national du patronat français).

The group followed this up with another 80 bombings, bank robberies, acts of sabotage, machine-gunning and assassinations over a nine-year period. In 1987 its four remaining leaders were jailed for life. The last one, Jean-Marc Rouillan, aged 66 was released in May 2018 after spending 28 years in prison, of which ten were in isolation, and then published his account of Ten years of Direct Action.

21st century

Most ‘new’ anarchists resumed involvement in the major struggles of the late 20th century – against racism, for equality, against unjust laws, and even for workers’ rights. In the 1970s and 1980s a ‘workers’ control’ movement appeared.

Many are involved in ‘alternative world’ movements, often working closely with radical environmentalists. Eco-anarchists, following Élisee Reclus, generally argue that mankind should stop attempting to dominate nature.

Some are involved in the small revolutionary syndicalist organisations. A small trade union exists called the CNT (Confédération Nationale du Travail) française. Still smaller groups are l’Union des Anarcho-Syndicalistes (UAS),  le Syndicat intercorporatif anarchosyndicaliste (SIA) et le Groupement d’Action et de Réflexion AnarchoSyndicaliste (GARAS).

These groups usually stress key libertarian themes such as direct democracy, task rotation, anti-authoritarianism, solidarity and federalism.

A march against the Macron trade union reforms on 19 April 2018 was hijacked by 250 young men under a black-red flag wanting to confront police eager to tear gas them

The black and red flag of French anarchism is now mainly carried by a few hundred young men at the margins of demonstrations. They are often primarily interested, it would seem, only in confronting the police or in being attacked by them.

Yet the conviction that a radically different way of organizing economic and social relations to contemporary capitalism is both possible and necessary remains alive and kicking. And French anarchism reminds us that this cannot be achieved without also ensuring individual freedom.

ALSO IN …

Art

Gustave Courbet sketched this self-portrait at Sainte-Pélagie prison after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. He was one of many artists who supported the Commune and is in a line of socialist, anarchist and communist artists who lived and/or worked in Paris and contributed their visions of a world transformed

References to include: Eugène Delacroix

In 1895 Toulouse-Lautrec painted one of a series he had begun in 1889 commissioned by the Moulin Rouge at the Place Blanche. In it he inserted (bottom right) tributes to the editor of La Revue Blanche, Félix Fénéon, and to his friend, Oscar Wilde (second bottom left), whom he had met and painted in London the day before Wilde was jailed for indecency.
Portrait of Felix Feneon by his former fellow political prisoner charged with anarchist sympathies Maximilien Luce. This was pained in 1901

Communism

Communism as an international struggle for freedom. This 1951 socialist realist painting by Boris Taslitkzy shows French dockers fighting to stop arms going to French Indochina

What is shared between those who define themselves or are defined by others as ‘communist’? And how may ‘Communism’ be distinguished both from French anarchism and French socialism, with which it shared much common history and ground?

Babeuf was guillotined on 27 May 1797 as leader of the Conspiracy of Equals against the Directorate

Manifesto of Equals

The 1795 Paris revolutionary ‘Manifesto of Equals’ inspired by François-Noel Babeuf and rescued from oblivion by Philippe Buonarroti (1761-1837) summarised what remained (and remains) common to nearly all those who described themselves as communist across the following two hundred and some years:

We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses… We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities. Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.’

After agreeing to this general statement of belief, communists had much more to disagree with each other upon.  

We have divided the considerable history of Communism in France into five periods:

Communism 1830-1917

For nearly 80 years before the redefining of communism with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 1920 formation of the…

Communism 1918-1938

The Communist (Third) International was formed in Russia in 1919. The Soviet Communist Party directly dictated French Communist Party policy from…

Communism 1939-1947

From the shock of the 1939 non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin to holding ministries in the French government from 1945…

Communism 1978-to date

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the end of the Soviet Union, changes to its traditional working class constituency…

Communism 1830-1917

From setting an example and insurrections to state communism

Early French intra-communist debates were primarily around ‘How to achieve communism?’ Some 19th century French communists answered: By example and education. Some: By a revolution to destroy state power. And others: By seizing state power and using it

1. Exemplary communism 

The example of communism could lead others to follow. Society could be transformed by establishing ideal communities within the existing order. Utopian communist ideas and projects flourished during the first half of the 19th century. Many built upon egalitarian Christian beliefs to give them wider legitimacy, often looking to messianic figures to offer leadership. 

Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) initiated the most influential of these experiments with his ‘Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria’, popularised in a French translation as Voyage en Icarie in 1840. It was Cabet whose pamphlet ‘Le crédo communiste’ first drew the word communist into the political vocabulary. 

Cabet founded the Icarian colony at Nauvoo in 1849 but died in 1856. The last Icarian group dissolved itself in 1898

By the mid-1840s Icarian communist groups existed in several French cities as well as in Paris. After trials for conspiracy in 1847, Cabet argued his supporters should emigrate to Texas to establish communist communities: 

The community suppresses egoism, individualism, privilege, domination, opulence, idleness and domesticity, transforming divided personal property into indivisible and social or common property. It modifies all commerce and industry. Therefore the establishment of the community is the greatest reform or revolution that humanity has ever attempted. 

2. Insurrectionary communism 

Other 19th century communists considered the revolutionary insurrection itself to be the principal way of preparing for a new society. It would overthrow private property and the state. Once the old power structures were removed the new world could be built by the working classes themselves. 

For insurrectionary communists the barricade was the way the state would be defeated. This 1871 photograph is of the barricade in the rue de Charonne

Barricades appeared in Paris for 3 days in 1830, 2 days in 1832, 1 night in 1834, a few hours in 1839, 2 days in February 1848, three days in June 1848, one day in December 1851 and for a week in May 1871. 

Eric Hazan’s History of the Barricade begins by pointing out: 

We could say that this is only a succession of defeats – some immediate, on the ground, others delayed – in which the forces of domination end up reversing the gains of an ephemeral victory. But thanks to Baudelaire, Blanqui, Hugo and Lissagaray, this is a history that is still living, a source of inspiration for those unresigned to the perpetuation of the existing order. 

After the bloody suppression of the 1871 Commune the next Parisian barricades were only erected in 1944 and 1968, but the inspirational idea of a great event-led transition remained embedded in left French thought. 

Direct action and the General Strike as opposed to political action were adoped by the founding conference of the CGT in 1895. This photograph is of the 1906 campaign for a general strike to bring about the 8-hour day

During the third quarter of the 19th century the barricade was gradually replaced by the General Strike as the hoped-for transformative event that would ensure the transition to a communist society.

The term ‘anarcho-communist’ covers those who held, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) and Victor Griffuelhes (1874-1922), that after the great event and the overthrow of the national government, the state and authority of the employers, the existing workers’ organisations would be able to democratically run society. 

3. State communism 

The third way of achieving communism borrowed from Babeuf and Robespierre in seeing the role of the state as key to achieving a new world. 

Drawn to Babeuf’s ideas by Buonarroti, Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) aimed to seize state power and use it to suppress the ruling elite. All the decisions on behalf of the Parisian workers and the French provinces should be taken by a handful of dedicated revolutionaries. 

A proclamation was read on the steps of the Paris Town Hall on May 12 1839 in the names of the ‘Provisional Government’ including Blanqui (who was named ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the republican army) and Armand Barbès (1809-1870). 

Their self-constituted Provisional Government called for support from Parisian workers to:

‘Perish finally the exploitation, and may equality sit in triumph on the mingled ruins of royalty and aristocracy’. 

On May 15 1848 in the aftermath of a protest march against the new government’s lack of support for the Polish revolution, Barbès announced a new government from the steps of the Town Hall. 15 men and were tried in July 1849. Barbès and Alexandre Martin /Albert (1815-1895) were sentenced to deportation, Blanqui to ten years and the republican scientist François-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878) to six. Louis Blanc (1811-1882) was acquitted. 

The 15 arrested after the May 1848 protests against government inaction over the Polish revolt against the Russian colonisers included insurrectionary revolutionaries like Barbes and Blanqui alongside socialist republicans like Blanc and Raspail.

The Blanquists wished to seize state power without any democratic mandate from the workers who they believed would then follow the revolutionary leadership. 

Marx’s influence 

In the third quarter of the 19th century the political meaning of ‘communist’ and ‘communism’ in France shifted to specifically highlight the need for the whole working class (and not a handful of conspirators) to capture and use state power to rule on behalf of their class and so ensure a transition to a better world. 

This evolution was to a large extent due the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Their Communist Manifesto was published in German in February 1848. 

Its first French translation appeared in Paris just before the June 1848 workers’ uprising. Yet hardly anyone read the Manifesto or knew it existed in Paris in 1848. 

Although both Marx and Engels had already lived some time in Paris before 1848, the small influence they did have on the dominant Proudhonian anarcho-communism in France only began to appear from the late 1860s. Two of Marx’s daughters, Laura in 1868 and Jenny in 1873, married French socialists who had come to London to learn from Marx, Paul Lafargue (1842-1911) and Charles Longuet (1839-1903). 

Engels and Marx with Jenny, Eleanor and Laura photographed about 1865

The next French version of the Communist Manifesto only appeared after the defeat of the Commune in 1872 in a New York-based French-language paper, Le Socialiste. Volume 1 of Capital was translated under Marx’s direction and published in Paris in 48 sections between 1872 and 1875. 

Marx’s view of working-class rule involved rule of the whole class rather than of a few revolutionaries. Friedrich Engels specifically attacked the Blanquist understanding of ‘dictatorship’ in 1874: 

From the fact that Blanqui conceives of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, what follows of itself is the necessity of dictatorship after its success – the dictatorship, please note, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who made the coup de main and who themselves are organized beforehand under the dictatorship of one person or a few. One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation. 

Hal Draper’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat also quotes Marx in 1875 as arguing that:

‘Freedom consists in transforming the state from an organ set above society into one thoroughly subordinated to it’. 

From the mid-1870s, after the return of the thousands of those deported and jailed after the Commune, Marx’s ideas, challenging both Blanquism and Proudhon, began to get a wider French audience. 

Marxist-influenced parties 

Jules Guesde (1845-1922), the founder with Lafargue of the small Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvrier) sect in 1882, was introduced to Marxism in student discussions at the Café Soufflet on the corner of the rue des Écoles with the Boulevard St-Michel after returning from exile in 1876. 

In 1880 Guesde and Lafargue travelled to London, where Marx drafted the preamble to the Workers’ Party programme, and Guesde and Lafargue detailed its specific political and economic sections. 

The French Workers Party was very small but it was the first to claim to be Marxist

It was not long before Marx fell out with Guesde and Lafargue (as he did with many others). In response to their ‘revolutionary phrase-mongering’ he wrote: ‘What’s certain (if that is Marxism), is that I’m no Marxist’. 

In the 1890s after 20 years of economic depression and rising inequalities, Marx’s ideas spread rapidly and widely on the French socialist left. 

His scientific analysis of the instability of emerging capitalism and acute political observations on 1848 and the rise of Louis Napoléon as well as of the Paris Commune made him a key point of reference for 

many leading socialists such as Jean Allemane (1843-1935), Edouard Vaillant, Georges Sorel, Charles Andler and Jean Jaurès (1859-1914). 

The founding of the French Section of the Workers’ International in 1905 to create the SFIO brought together France’s more rhetorically revolutionary groups like Guesde’s Parti Socialist de France and the more reformist groups and independent socialists such as Jaurès. 

Within ten years, however, Jaurès had been assassinated by a pro-World War 1 French nationalist and Guesde was Minister without Portfolio in the National Unity (Union Sacré) Government. 

World War 1 

August 2 1914 outside the Gare de l’Est saw a popular mass mobilisation for the war against Germany

Nearly the entire French ‘Marxist’ left supported the war effort arguing that aggressive German military imperialism was the biggest threat to French workers. Three days after Jaurès’ murder, Vaillant argued he was ‘For the Country, for the Republic and for the Revolution’. 

Unlike several British and Russian socialists, on August 4 1914 every single French SFIO National Assembly deputy voted in favour of war credits. They included Marx’s grandson, Jean Longuet (1876-1938). And, unlike the situation in Germany, Russia and Britain, a government of National Unity (Union sacrée) was established the same day. Socialists and radicals were incorporated in the war effort from the very start. 

Virtually the whole CGT (Confederation générale du travail) leadership also supported the war. Opposition to World War 1 was at first limited largely to a handful of revolutionary-syndicalists. 

Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) of the CGT’s La Vie Ouvrière monthly, Alphonse Merrheim of the metalworkers’ federation and Alfred Rosmer (1877-1964) met Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) in a left bookshop on the Quai de Jemmapes near the CGT’s offices to plan their anti-war campaign. This was soon after Trotsky was deported to France from Austria in November 1914. 

Zimmerwald Conference 

Half of those attending the September 1915 Zimmerwald Conference called on the initiative of the Italian Socialist Party

In 1915 Merrheim attended the September 1915 Zimmerwald conference. With Lenin and 16 other delegates he signed the final compromise Manifesto drafted by Trotsky: 

Workers of Europe… Since the outbreak of the war you have put your energies, your courage, your steadfastness at the service of the ruling classes. Now the task is to enter the lists for your own cause, for the sacred aims of Socialism, for the salvation of the oppressed nations and the enslaved classes, by means of the irreconcilable working-class struggle. It is the task and the duty of the Socialists of the belligerent countries to begin this struggle with all their power… 

Never in the history of the world has there been a more urgent, a more noble, a more sublime task, the fulfilment of which must be our common work. No sacrifice is too great, no burden too heavy, to attain this end: the establishment of peace between the nations. 

Working men and women! Mothers and fathers! Widows and orphans! Wounded and crippled! To all who are suffering from the war or in consequence of the war, we cry out over the frontiers, over the smoking battlefields, over the devastated cities and hamlets: “Workers of all countries unite” 

This call fell largely on deaf ears in France where the pacifist opposition to World War 1 grew very slowly. The anti-war trade unionists linked up with Louise Saumoneau (1875-1950) and Hélène Brion (1882-1962) campaigning for working women’s rights. 

In January 1916 Merrheim and Saumoneau set up the Committee for restoring International Relations (le Comité pour la reprise des relations internationals – CRRI). 

Women sewing machinists striking in Paris in 1917 were supported by the growing numbers opposing the war and its slaughter

Russian Revolution 

Following the first 1917 Russian Revolution the Committee published a leaflet calling for support for a May Day strike and a Russian call to ‘The Proletarians of all countries’ to unite against the War. 

Conscious of growing support for the Russian soviets, in December 1917 the CGT congress passed a resolution nearly unanimously that welcomed both President Wilson’s April decision that the US would enter the War as an ally, and the Russian Revolution. 

The anti-war movement grew in 1917, but it was still a minority. In June 1918, when Gaston Monmousseau (1883-1960), a member of the CRRI, moved a motion at the CGT Railway workers’ conference denouncing the ‘union sacrée’ and calling for the ‘energetic pursuit of the class struggle’, he rallied just one third of the votes. 

French communism, by 1917, was a very broad spectrum. It included the followers of Marx, of Proudhon, of Blanqui, and of the handful of revolutionary syndicalists who had opposed World War 1, as well as socialist pacifists, feminists, anarchists and anti-authoritarian writers and artists. 

The only communist tendency that had disappeared since 1830 were the utopian communists. 


Over the next 70 years French communism would be transformed. It would be reshaped and reorganised into a generally monolithic force driven largely by the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution.