Rue Feutrier

Arrondissement 18

Number 21

The street leads up to the garden deliberately renamed Square Louise-Michel just below her antithetical Sacré Coeur (built to celebrate the massacres of the Communards). It is an old winding street leading up Montmartre Hill.

Rosa Luxemburg lived at No. 21 when she first came to Paris in 1893 to start researching her doctorate and to edit the Polish Social Democratic party newspaper, The Workers’ Cause.

Adolf Warski, leader of the Polish Communist Party murdered by Stalin in 1937

Aged 23, she stayed initially in Paris with the 26-year-old Adolf Warski (Warszawski) and his wife. Warski was the theoretician of Polish communism and founder of the Polish Communist Party (KPP) from 1918.

In 1929, with Marshal Piłsudski’s dictatorship tightening, Warski left Poland for Moscow. A critic of Stalinisation, he was arrested and executed the same day, August 21 1937.

A plaque was put on No 21 rue Feutrier on International Women’s Day 2010. Luxemburg could not study in Poland because she was Jewish and she was in Paris to research Polish industrialisation

A memorial plaque to Rosa Luxemburg was erected on the house on International Women’s Day 2010 with the support of the Socialist majority on the Paris City Council.

Ironically, the road these revolutionaries lived in was named after the rich bishop of Beauvais, Jean-François-Hyacinthe Feutrier (1785-1830). He had owned the land on which the road was first built in 1835 and was also a curé at the church of the Madeleine.

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