Paul Signac

1863 – 1935 • France

ArtAnarchism • Anti-fascism

Like several other intellectuals in the 1880s, Signac broke with bourgeois attitudes, and by 1896 was collaborating closely with Jean Grave and the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux. Unlike Kropotkin and Grave, however, Signac opposed World War 1 and in 1934 opposed the fascists.

Signac was commission to paint this picture for the House of the People in Brussels between 1893 and 1895. His initial title was ‘Under Anarchy’ (Au temps de l’anarchie), but because of the bombings and arrests and executions in France he called it ‘Under Harmony’ (Au temps d’harmonie).
From 1902-1914 the influential anarchist review, ‘Les Temps nouveaux’ (New Times) was edited at No. 4 rue Édouard Quenu. Among those actively supporting the journal were Monatte, Signac, Pissarro and Luce.

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Maurice Thorez

1900-1964 • France

Communist • PCF General Secretary 1930-1964

Maurice Thorez was the working class General Secretary of the French Communist Party from 1930 to 1964. Throughout this period he closely followed the twists and turns of the Russian Communist Party.

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This insightful and critical biography is the place to go to understand both the twists and turns of French Communist policy and how otherwise decent individuals can get trapped by a personality cult

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Albert Treint

1889-1971 • France

Communism • Trotskyism

Albert Treint was one of the first speakers at the Tours 1920 Congress of French Socialists (SFIO) to propose French affiliation to the Communist Third International and proposed the formation of the SFIC (Section Française de l’Internationale Communiste). At 31, he was then head of the Paris Federation of the SFIO. 

The son of a Parisian bus conductor, at 17 Treint won a three-year scholarship to train as a primary school. He then did two years’ military service before teaching for three years near Nanterre from 1910 to 1913. He joined the SFIO in 1914, the year he was called up. In the 21st Infantry regiment he was promoted captain.

Wounded in the Somme in both 1915 and 1917, in 1919 he was teaching again at Belleville’s rue Ramponeau boys’ primary school. From outside the school there is an amazing view all over Paris. Treint did not enjoy it for long.

The view over Paris from the school where Albert Treint taught in 1919-1921 before being fired for his active role in the formation of the French Communist Party

Shortly after his December 30 1920 election to the steering committee of the brand new SFIC he was first arrested in May for a speech calling on French soldiers to disobey orders to fight in Russia, and then fired from his teaching post in September 1921.

A key participant in the internal Communist faction fights between those like Monatte, arguing for greater unity with other revolutionary syndicalists, and those defending the Third International’s anti-unity and disciplinary positions, Treint’s hard-line faction won.

In November-December 1922 at the first enlarged executive meeting of the Third International he defended the United Front in these terms:

We get closer to and then further away from (reformist leaders) alternating in the same way as the hand gets closer to and further away from the chicken it is plucking.

Albert Treint 1922

In 1923-24, on behalf of his left faction he shared the General Secretaryship of the PCF with a centrist, first Frossard (who left the PCF on January 1 1924) and then Sellier.  He then spent four months in jail with Gaston Monmousseau (1883-1960) and others for having attended a conference with German communists calling for opposition to the French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923.

Albert Treint successfully defended himself in May 1923 after being charged with calling on soldiers to mutiny. He is pictured here with a lawyer advising him.

In Moscow representing the PCF from 1924 to 1927, he transited politically from supporting Stalin to supporting Trotsky and Zinoviev and the Left Opposition. In 1928 he returned to live in Belleville. He was expelled from the Central Committee of the PCF and then from the PCF itself. For the next ten years Treint tried to build left opposition groups in France, before adopting the view of a tiny minority fringe of the communist left that saw the Soviet Union as a form of ‘state capitalism’ rather than as the Trotskyist sects did, as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’.

Treint rejoined the SFIO after the threat of a fascist coup d’etat in February 1934. As a virulent anti-Stalinist he opposed the Popular Front between the SFIO and PCF. Yet with the return of the 1936 Popular Front government headed by Léon Blum, he was reinstated in his teaching post by Jean Zay, the new Jewish minister of Education and Culture.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the PCF was dissolved by the Daladier government on September 26 1939 for supporting the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. 317 town councils controlled by the PCF were shut down. 2,800 councillors were declared illegal. 620 trade union branches were immediately closed by the now right-wing majority controlling what had been a reunited CGT since 1934.
On 18 November 1939 the government adopted a decree allowing internment of anyone considered dangerous to national defence or public safety. Treint aged 50, was fired again along with tens of thousands of other communists and those suspected of communist leanings.
Treint sought safety about 100 miles south of Paris, and probably (although this is uncertain) joined the resistance. After the war he played no part in political life, dying at the age of 82 in 1971.
Expelled from the giant French Communist Party; far too left-wing for the French Socialists (SFIO and PS); too troublesome for the Trotksyist sects; suspected of allowing three anarchists to be killed while they were trying to break up an early PCF meeting; married with one son born in 1914… it’s perhaps not surprising I can’t much about where this Parisian lived in Paris, except that in 1928, when he was expelled from the PCF he was living at 3, rue Carducci.
But it is a pity that so many socialists who spent their lives trying their best to change the world and achieve international workers’ unity are largely unremembered. So for them, this beautiful red poppy photographed by Ivor Penn in 1968 (and then photographed by me in another Paris museum).

Ivor Penn photographed this wilting red poppy in 1968. It is still beautiful today.

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Flora Tristan

1803-1844 • France

Feminism • Divorce rights • SocialismTrade unionism

In 1843, at the time the young Karl Marx was living in Paris, Flora Tristan published a small pamphlet called ‘The Workers’ Union’ (L’Union ouvrière). 

In it the 40-year-old Parisian woman made the case that workers were a single social class. Workers must organise themselves as such. She aimed to bring all men and women workers into a giant working class party, the Workers’ Union.
She was totally original at the time: she focused on the working class, all who worked without any property other than their labour power, and stressed the need for men and women workers as well as national and foreign workers to come together in a common project of social change. 

Flora Tristan drawn in the 1830s when she was shot by her husband as she campaigned for a woman’s right to demand a divorce


Tristan was also a determined feminist.

In the booklet’s section called ‘Why I mention women’, Tristan denounced the way women were either ignored or treated as persona non grata by the Church and all political parties. Only if male workers recognized the need for unity could they share their different experiences and create real common objectives.


‘Workers, without women, you are nothing!’, she explained.

And, just as subversively, Tristan stressed that only if workers organised work themselves could they ever win liberty.
After the Workers’ Union pamphlet was published she set off on a national tour to promote local committees of the Union. Between April and November 1844 Flora Tristan criss-crossed France selling her pamphlet and holding meetings. 

‘With my union project in my hand, from town to town, from one end of France to the other, to talk to the workers who do not know how to read and to those who do not have the time to read….I will go find them in their workshops; in their garrets and even, if needed, in their taverns.’


The campaign effectively killed her. She died in Bordeaux, probably of typhoid, just 41 years old. 

Tristan’s memorial stone in Bordeaux has a copy of her book the Workers’ Union at the top


Eight thousand people attended her funeral in Bordeaux. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, workers throughout France gave donations to erect a monument to Flora Tristan. It was inaugurated on 22 October 1848 in the Bordeaux Cimitière de la Chartreuse. The monument, a broken column, circled by a garland of oak and ivy, has a copy of her most important book, The Workers’ Union, at its top.


She was an extraordinary woman. Brought up by a mother widowed when Flora was four, the pair eventually had to live in one of the Restoration’s worst Paris slums in the Latin quarter’s Maubert area. Tristan lived in the Rue du Fouarre from 1815 to 1821.

She started work as an engraver and porcelaine painter. In 1821, aged 17, she married her employer, the painter and lithographer André François Chazal. Four years later, pregnant with Aline, and already mother of two children, she moved out of Paris back to her mother’s, near the Jardins du Roi (now the Jardins des Plantes), and began a life-long struggle for the right to divorce.
She lived working as a maid and lady’s companion, experiencing this as humiliation, but enabling her to visit England.

She visited London in 1826 and again in 1839, where she heard about the Grand National Consolidated Union and the Tolpuddle martyrs of 1834. In Paris, she became influenced by the Christian socialism of Saint Simone and others. She became a committed feminist socialist. and writer.

She criticised George Sand for hypocrisy. While applauding her use of ‘the novel as a medium to call attention to the harm done to women by our laws’, nonetheless Sand ‘has signed her works with the name of a man. How effective can accusations be when they are disguised as fiction?’ Tristan wanted to know. 

In 1838, after she published a denunciation of her abusive marriage and a call for the right to divorce her violent husband stalked, and then shot her. Only then did the wounded Tristan get a legal separation, while the ex-husband got a 20-year prison sentence.

Tristan’s early death during her campaign for working class unity meant she could play no part when radical feminists put up a woman candidate in the 1849 male-only suffrage presidential election under the Second French Republic. And we will never know what she would have thought about the first Socialist president of the Fifth French Republic creating a Flora Tristan stamp in 1984.

In 1984 under France’s first socialist president Mitterrand a memorial stamp was issued with Flora Tristan featured


But we can be pretty certain she would still be fighting for Socialism and Feminism. She would also be quite surprised and probably particularly upset that an 1892 painting titled ‘When will you marry?’ by her grandson, Aline’s son, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), would fetch prices of over £200m in 2017.

The grandson Flora Tristan never knew painted ‘When will you marry?’ half a century after her early death

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Leon Trotsky (Bronstein)

1879 – 1940 • Russia

Communism • Trotskyism • Fourth International

Trotsky (the alias Lev Davidovitch Bronstein adopted to replace his earlier one of Pero in 1902) first stayed in Paris for a few months in the Autumn of 1902 after his solo escape from Siberia on his way to London. This was where he first met the Ukrainian Natalya Sedova, three years his junior.

Trotsky photographed about the time he escaped from Siberiai and first arrived in Paris in 1902

He had been exiled to Siberia with Alexandra Sokolovskaïa (1872-1938), whom he married in a Moscow jail in 1899 when he was 20 and she 27. Already a Marxist she was one of the leaders of the Southern Russian Workers’ Trade Union that Trotsky had worked with. In Siberia the couple had two daughters, Zinaida Volkova (1901-1933) and Nina Nevelson (1902-1928).

Trotsky and Natalia Sedova his companion from 1902 until his assassination in Mexico

In 1902, the Russians living in Paris associated with Iskra, the occasional paper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, used to meet in the flat rented by Natalya Sedova at 4 Rue Lalande, near the Montparnasse Cemetery in the 14th arrondissement.

In Autumn 1902 the 21-year-old Natalya was asked to find a flat for an incoming revolutionary from Vienna, whom she had not met and whose name she was not told.

That revolutionary was Lev Bronstein. And they spent many hours walking Paris together before living together in 1903.

Lenin was also lecturing in Paris in 1902-3 accompanied by Nadezhda Krupskaya. In December 1902 the two couples went to see a show at the Comic Opera in Rue Favart. Lenin lent Trotsky a pair of shoes for the occasion since his were not presentable. Trotsky later complained they were too small:

I suffered awfully, and Lenin kept making fun of me the whole time.

Shortly afterwards, Leon and Natalya moved to London to support and then break with Lenin, and then reunite and then…

In 1905, before leaving for Russia and the Revolution taking place there, Trotksy was again briefly in Paris and is supposed to have visited the Café Le Dôme  at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse.

The couple’s first son, Lev, was born while Trotsky was in jail in Moscow after the 1905 Russian Revolution. Escaping from exile to Siberia in 1907 Trotsky spent seven years in Austria and Germany, with perhaps a visit to Paris to meet Lenin in 1910.

This meeting took place at a Montmartre artists’ café where it is suggested they also may encountered the poet Guillaume Apollinaire

The police informer who ran the Café de la Rotonde on the other side of the Boulevard also reported Lenin and Trotksy meeting with other Russian exiles there in 1910.

That same year, another report suggests Lenin was playing chess with Trotsky and with Apollinaire at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant cum corner street café at the Port Royal/eastern end of the boulevard du Montparnasse.

Trotksy and Lenin and Apollinaire were reported as playing chess together here at No. 171 boulevard du Montparnasse in 1910

Trotsky was back in Paris from 1914 until his deportation in 1916. He was then
editing an internationalist socialist paper, ‘Our Word’ (Nashe Slovo) whose editorial offices were at 17 rue des Feuillantines. He also met many French anti-war activists such as Pierre Monatte at the revolutionary syndicalist bookshop located at 96 Quai de Jemmapes.

Inside the Hotel d’Odessa Stephen Marks photographed this plaque commemorating Trotsky’s stay there in 1933. Other sources suggest he was also stayed there in 1914.

While in Paris this time he lived for several months at the Hotel d’Odessa at 28 Rue d’Odessa which now has the only semi-public plaque to Trotsky in Paris (next to the reception) and met Diego Rivera at the nearby Café de la Rotonde.

He then moved to 23 Rue de l’Amiral Mouchez and invited Natalya and his family to join him before moving to 27 Rue Oudry. The French police used to spy on Trotsky from the cafe Le Petit Bar at 57 Boulevard St Marcel.

Trotksy with his 13-year-old daughter Nina photographed in Paris in 1915

On March 31 1916 Trotsky was arrested at Rue Oudry and taken by the police to the Spanish border, from where he was deported to the US. He got back to Russia in May 1917… and despite being white-washed out of the official Soviet history under Stalin, became, arguably, the second most important leader of the Russian Revolution after Lenin until his death in 1924.

The next time Trotsky was in Paris was 1933. This was the year that began with Hitler being nominated Chancellor of Germany. It also saw Trotsky’s eldest daughter, Zina, both of whose two husbands would soon be executed in Stalin’s Great Purges, committing suicide in Berlin aged 32. His youngest daughter, Nina, had already died from tuberculosis in Russia in 1928.

On December 30 1933, while in hiding at Simone Weil‘s parents’ third-floor flat in the Rue Auguste Comte Trotsky made the absurdly unrealistic decision to launch a ‘Fourth International’ – because, logically he considered, something had to be done to mobilise against the fascists. It was not because there were real people out there wanting or waiting for his leadership.

After leaving Simone Weil’s flat Trotksy stayed at the Carlton Hotel at 207 Boulevard Raspail.

Both of Trotsky and Natalia’s two sons were killed on Stalin’s orders. Their youngest son, Sergei, was killed in 1937 in Russia. His first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaïa, was executed in 1938 during Stalin’s Great Purges.

Natalia and Leon’s eldest son, Lev Sedov, was advised (by one of Stalin’s agents acting as his secretary) to go to a private Clinique Mirabeau at 7, rue Narcisse-Diaz for appendicitis. Shortly after the operation, carried out by an incompetent doctor and an anaesthetist who also worked for Stalin, he died of complications in 1938.

After breaking the heart-rending news to Natalya, Trotsky wrote: ‘Everything that was young in us died with our son’. Lev had been looking after Zinaida’s son, Vsevolod (Sieva), who, accompanied by Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, then joined his grandfather in Mexico in 1939, aged 13. Sieva was present at one failed assassination attempt on his grandfather. Trotsky was finally assassinated there in 1940.

Natalya, who broke with the Fourth International in 1951 because its leadership insisted on still seeing Stalin’s Russia as a ‘workers’ state’, lived on until 1962 in France. She died in Corbeil-Essonnes, part of what was then the municipal Communist ‘red belt’ just South-East of Paris. The last Communist mayor there was defeated by the reactionary industrialist Dassault in 1995. 

In October 2016, walking south between the two halves of the Montparnasse Cemetery towards 46 rue Gassendi, where in 1902 the 20-year-old Natalya had found the 27-year-old Trotsky a Paris room to rent, and they became lovers, I counted six homeless tent shelters attached to the trees and cemetery wall. It was rather sad to see after so many people had fought and died and loved over the previous hundred years for a world that wouldn’t treat people out like that.

Homeless shelters and tents dotted the Rue Emile Richard on October 6 2016 when I walked south towards the 1902 meeting place of Leon and Natalya

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Simone Weil

1909-1943 • France

SocialismAnarchism • Philosopher • Anti-fascist

A brilliant student of philosophy and committed revolutionary pacifist and anti-colonialist, she welcomed the workers’ occupations of 1936 but criticised the timidity of the Popular Front government.

The New Left Review introduced one of her essays it published with this brief (edited by me) biography:

Of the three most remarkable women thinkers born in the last century, Simone Weil (1909–43) was a year younger than Simone de Beauvoir, herself a little over a year younger than Hannah Arendt. From a secularized Jewish family in Paris, she declared herself a Bolshevik at the age of ten, and proved a brilliant student, first at the elite Lycee Henri IV and then at the École normale supérieure.

She wanted to teach in an industrial town but was dispatched instead to Le Puy, a rural backwater. There, nevertheless, she was soon active in solidarity work with the local trade unions and writing in La Révolution prolétarienne, a libertarian journal of the left edited by militants expelled from the Communist Party.

In 1932 she made a trip to Germany on the eve of the Nazi takeover, and on her return composed a ten-part report on the political situation in the country. In condemning the passivity of the spd and the sectarian blindness of the kpd in the face of the rise of fascism, her judgement of it corresponded closely to Trotsky’s warnings of the time, but was more clear-sighted in questioning the notion that Hitler was little more than a tool of big capital, and doubting whether the German working class was still in a position to resist his seizure of power, a fait accompli by the time her last instalment appeared in late February 1933.

Six months later she published a pessimistic balance-sheet of the prospects for proletarian politics at large. Capital had reached the limits of its reproduction. But the Russian Revolution had given birth to a bureaucratic regime that had nothing to do with Socialism, Nazism was triumphant in Germany, and the New Deal in America offered no more than a technocratic variant of authoritarian capitalism. To a friend, she had written after returning from Berlin: ‘Insurrections on the order of the Commune are admirable, but they fail (true, the proletariat is much stronger than it was then; but so is the bourgeoisie). Insurrections of the October 1917 type succeed, but all they do is reinforce the bureaucratic, military and police apparatus. And at this moment nonviolence à la Gandhi seems simply a rather hypocritical species of reformism. And we do not yet know any fourth type of action.’

Now she concluded: ‘No workers’ state has ever yet existed on the earth’s surface, except for a few weeks in Paris in 1871, and perhaps for a few months in Russia in 1917 and 1918. On the other hand, for nearly fifteen years now, over one sixth of the globe, there has reigned a state as oppressive as any other, which is neither a capitalist nor a workers’ state. Certainly, Marx never foresaw anything of this kind. But not even Marx is more precious to us than the truth.’

Yet she continued to give classes in Marxism at the nearest Trade Union offices even as Trotsky denounced her for regression to an individualistic liberalism, attacking the ‘revolutionary melancholics’ among whom she had now to be numbered. Weil took no offence, arranging two months later for Trotsky to hold a secret meeting in the Paris flat in the Rue Auguste Comte owned by her parents, at which the two continued to argue fiercely. Trotsky nevertheless told the Weils on his departure: ‘You can say that the Fourth International was founded in your home.’

An admirer of Rosa Luxemburg, Weil had never shared her confidence in the spontaneity of the proletariat, and by 1934 had ceased to believe that the trade unions she had helped were sources of much hope. Deciding to withdraw from all political activity, she took leave from her teaching to become a factory worker, not only in order to experience the proletarian condition at first hand, but to see if there were other ways than those tried hitherto in which it could be transformed.

Before doing so, she composed the long essay she would ironically call her testament, ‘Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, conceived as a critical balance-sheet of Marx’s theory of history and the movements it had inspired, as well as a theory of struggles for power, not simply for property, which he had neglected, and of contemporary tyrannies of bureaucracy and technology that he could not have foreseen. She was just 25.

The turn to factory work left her disappointed, and the advent of a Popular Front government in 1936 politically cold. But when the great wave of factory occupations exploded a few months later, she was filled with joy, reporting from the Renault plant where she had been employed and kept a journal. In the summer, she joined the cnt militia in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident was invalided out.

Back in France, she attacked her country’s colonial record in Indochina, Madagascar, North Africa as almost no one on the left cared to do at that time. In the last years before the Second World War, grappling with the growing threat of the Third Reich she first adopted and then relinquished a pacifism that, after Munich, could no longer be grounded in the lessons of 1914. When the Wehrmacht entered Paris in 1940, she escaped with her parents to the south, finding precarious refuge in Marseille.

While working as a farmhand, and later for the Resistance, her intellectual energies now turned to questions of religion—not only Christian, but Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist texts—and philosophy, where as an accomplished Hellenist her range extended from the pre-Socratics to Plato, not to speak of Homer and Pythagoras; alongside an aversion to Judaism—did the Old Testament not celebrate the extermination of the Amalekites and others?—that would be a thorn to her posthumous admirers.

In the spring of 1942, she and her parents got visas to the US, arriving in New York via Casablanca in July. There she fretted till the autumn, impatient to join Free French operations in England, a wish she achieved in November with the help of Maurice Schumann, an old classmate from the Lycee Henri IV, future Prime Minister and progenitor of European integration. In London she served in the exile equivalent of the Interior Ministry, under the Socialist André Philip, generating summaries of reports from France and drafting political proposals for its future after Liberation, constitutional schemes including a spirited critique of the ideology of human rights that was just coming into fashion. Working round the clock, at home and in the office, in four months Weil produced a prodigious volume of writing before expiring at the age of 34—from tuberculosis or anorexia?—in the summer of 1943. All but a handful of her texts lay unpublished when she died.

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Jean Zay

1904-1944

Radical • Education • Popular Front • Assassination

There are 126 schools in France named after Jean Zay. But few now know much about the 40-year-old Radical Party Jewish deputy who became Minister of Education and Fine Arts in Blum‘s Popular Front government of 1936, and kept that position until 1939.

First elected a deputy to the National Assembly for his home town of Orleans in 1931, from 1934 to 1937 Zay lived in the Rue de Verneuil, and then, in the Rue de Bourgogne until his resignation to join the Army on September 2 1939.

After four years a prisoner of the Petain government, he was murdered by revengeful score-settling anti-Semitic Petainist French uniformed Milice exactly two weeks after D-Day in June 1944.

His body was eventually found in 1946 in a ravine where the Milice had shot and hid him. From 1948 to 2015 he was buried in Orléans cemetery and then, under the Hollande presidency, his remains were placed in the Pantheon with three others who had opposed the Vichy Government.

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Émile Zola

1840-1902 France

SocialismLiterature • Novelist • Dreyfus

In 1898 Émile Zola, the pre-eminent 19th century social realist novelist, helped change the course of French history when he took up the cause of Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer framed for treason.

From that moment onwards the republicans divided between those on the left who were internationalist and opposed racism and sought to improve the conditions of the vast majority of French people, and those on the political right who sided with the monarchists and Bonapartists and unconditionally supported the army and ‘strong government’.

Unlike most significant left figures in French history, Zola’s magnificent literary output followed by his premature death meant he has three plaques to him around Paris as well as an avenue named after him.

One plaque confirms his place of birth on the fourth floor of 10 Rue St Joseph, even though the family moved away when he was three years old.

Most Parisians rented their homes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Like them, Zola moved around a great deal when he first arrived in Paris to study for a Bac diploma in science (following in his father’s footsteps), staying primarily in the cheap Latin Quarter.

In 1858 to 1859, Zola lived first at 63 Rue Monsieur le Prince and then moved a short distance to 241 Rue St Jacques. After failing to get a Bac in science he gets a job as a clerc on the docks for two months before moving again in 1860 to 35 Rue St Victor. Evicted from there for non-payment of his rent his next move was to 4 Rue Rollin and then to 11 Rue Soufflot – all within a short distance of each other.

On March 1 1862 Zola starts a job at the Hachette bookshop thanks to an offer by its owner, Louis, and on October 31 1862 is naturalised French.

He is then living at what is now 7 Impasse Royer-Collard. Still employed at the bookshop, after a short stay with his mother at 5 Rue des Feuillantines, he then moves back to Rue St Jacques, this time to No. 278. This is where he was living in 1864 when his first novel was published, Contes à Ninon (Stories from Ninon).

In late 1864 Zola started a relationship with Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley, a seamstress also called Gabrielle, whom he married in 1870. The couple first lived together in 1866 in a sixth floor room with a view of the Luxembourg Garden from the terrace of 10 Rue de Vaugirard.

On 12 January 1898 Zola wrotej’acccuse, a letter to the French President, Felix Faure, at his marital home since 1889 at 21 Rue de Bruxelles. He then took it to the offices of the ‘Aurore’ newspaper edited by Georges Clemenceau at 144 Rue Montmartre, now remembered by a plaque. It was published the following day.

Zola’s letter to President Faure was published on January 13 1898. It led to him being put on trial and to the discloure of evidence proving the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus.

Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning from an alleged faulty heater in September 1902.

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Places associated with Émile Zola