Rue Cadet

Arrondissement 9

Numbers: 12, 16

In the 17th century it was called ‘The rubbish dump path’ (chemin de la Voirie), but when in the 18th century it graduated to being a road it was given the name of the Cadet family who owned some of the land it crossed.

In 1820 the road also housed the Bazar francais, a shop that served as a meeting place for several disgruntled army officers who planned unsuccessfully to overthrow the Bourbons and bring Napoleon’s son to the French imperial throne.

On March 15 1917 the first issue of a new literary review founded by Pierre Reverdy appeared in Paris called ‘North-South‘. Its title indicated a rapprochement between the artistic and literary colonies in the Montmartre and Montparnasse areas, connected directly by the metro.

The review’s first office was at No. 12, and virtually all the later surrealists and Dadaists wrote for and/or attended meetings there: Aragon, Breton, Éluard, Tzara and Duchamp. Georges Braque and Fernand Leger also produced drawings for it.

An illustration by Fernand Leger in 1918 for the Nord-Sud review

The Lodge of France’s oldest, traditional liberal Masonic order, the Grand Orient of France, was based at No. 16. This was where many political events took place. These included the founding of the League for the Rights of Man in 1888 and the first show in 1933 of the October Group’s play supporting the Scottsborough Boys, the young black men wrongly found guilty of rape in 1931.

Rue Cadet no 16 Masonic grand order

French Masonic orders were banned in 1940 under the German Occupation , and the offices of the Grad Orient taken over by the French police’s intelligence unit tracking down secret societies. One hundred agents worked there under the direction of the Gestapo. On August 11 1941 a second law was added to permit the seizure and sale of all Masonic temples and goods belonging to individual Masons. The photo of the entrance to the Lodge above was taken in 1941.

After Jules Vallès gave a lecture on Balzac at the Casino Hall at No. 18 on January 15 1865, Vallès was fired from his job in the Vaugirard Town Hall for having criticised the Second Empire.

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Rue du Faubourg St Denis

Arrondissement 10

Numbers: 23, 58, 60, 83, 107, 122, 125

This is the old royal road into Paris that linked the Saint-Denis basilica in the north to the Rue Saint-Denis in the South. Whenever the Bourbons and earlier kings entered Paris this is how they got directly to first their fortified palace on the island of the Cité , and later to their Louvre Palace in the heart of Paris.

In 1849, No. 23 was the location of the People’s Bank experiment set up by Proudhon to allow ordinary people to exchange work and goods. It only lasted four months.

From 1862 until 1871 this address was where Fortuné Henry, a supporter of Fourier who lived with his aunt, before becoming a well-known member of the Commune.

After Fortuné Henry’s death the portrait of him by the anarchist sympathising Swiss-born artist by Félix Vallotton was published in 1897 in La Revue Blanche edited by Félix Féneon

Paul Éluard lived in 1909 to 1909 No. 58 (then taking the name of his grandmother, Grindel).

The house at No. 60 was the birthplace in 1804 of Victor Schoelcher, who from wealthy origins became a lifelong campaigner against slavery as well as a left republican.

Maurice Feld, one of the first young communists to be shot for attacks on the Germans on August 22 1942, was aged just 17. He lived at No 83 and is remembered by a plaque there.

The St Lazare prison was at No. 107. The barricade across the road was taken from behind by the Versaillais troops in May 1871. Seventeen Communards who were captured after refusing to surrender were put up against the prison wall and shot on 25 May 1871.

Louise Saumoneau, the seamstress turned feminist and pacifist journalist was jailed at Lazare for making anti-war propaganda on October 2 1915.

A rare Communist Party demonstration took place under the German occupation at No 122, on the corner with the Boulevard Magenta on 1 July 1944.

On June 23 1848 a barricade was put up across the road at No. 125 where it meets the Rue de Chabrol. This was one of the three major centres of the workers’ uprising in Paris and the last to be crushed on June 25.

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Quai des Grands Augustins

Arrondissement 6

Numbers: 21, 35, 51, 53bis, 55

This quay was Paris’ first. It was built to prevent continuous flooding by the Paris merchants on the orders of King Philippe and finished in 1389.

George Sand lived on the fifth floor at No. 21 when she first arrived in Paris in 1831.

No. 35 (at the time No. 40) is the site of the bar run by Pierre Leroux‘s parents and where the future first author of the word ‘socialism‘ was born on April 7 1797.

In 1871 the Communard delegates from the Police Headquarters used to meet at the Lapérouse restaurant at No. 51 that dates from 1766 and had been a favourite haunt of Victor Hugo before he went into exile in 1851.

The Communist poet, Paul Éluard spent part of the German occupation of Paris in hiding in the flat belonging to Michel Leiris at No. 53 bis. The flat was also where Picasso‘s surrealist farce, ‘Desire caught by the Tail‘ was first performed on March 19 1944, with the parts being read by de Beauvoir, Sartre, Queneau and Picasso, while being directed by Camus.

In 1828 the young Proudhon was working briefly at the Gauthier printworks in No. 55, the site of the old Augustin monastery that gave the quay its name. This was where Proudhon met Charles Fourier and became aware of his ideas.

The entrance to No. 55, within which in 1828 Proudhon worked briefly as a proof reader and typesetter

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PLACES

Panthéon, La Place du

Arrondissement 5

Place du Panthéon: 9, 10, 12, 17

The Panthéon dome (actually three in one like a Russian doll) is one of Paris’ landmarks. Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Church of Saint-Genevieve  on the hill to the South of the River Seine was built on a grand scale between 1755 and 1790 – and being completed only shortly after the French Revolution began.

Pantheon

Almost immediately the National Constituent Assembly decided to use the model of the Roman Pantheon and to install statues of great Frenchmen in it.

The slogan, ‘A grateful nation honours its great men‘, was put over the entrance and on April 4 1791 Mirabeau became its first brief resident (his ashes were taken away on November 25 1793), followed by Voltaire (July 11 1791), Rousseau (October 11 1794) and then several executed revolutionaries, including Jean-Paul Marat (September 21 1794 – and then thrown into the gutters by the Muscadins on February 26 1795).

Rousseau’s statue in the square put up in 1889 was destroyed under the German Occupation in 1942.

Under Napoleon Bonaparte who gave it back to the Catholic Church, its crypt was stuffed with 41 mainly military figures. After the July Revolution it reverted to being a secular Pantheon on August 26 1830, but no more ‘great men’ were inserted there under Louis-Philippe who kept the crypt closed.

The square in front of the Panthéon became the meeting place for hundreds of demonstrations and pitched battles in the 19th and 20th centuries. One riot under a black flag started there on 21 December 1830 in protest against the light sentences given to the reactionary government ministers of Charles X.

On 22 February 1848 a student demonstration against the banning of university courses by Quinet and Michelet left from there for the Madeleine. Soon after the Panthéon was renamed ‘The Temple of Humanity’, with the intention of turning it into a monument to human progress. The Law School at No. 12 hosted the revolutionary Soufflot Club in March 1848.

On June 22 1848 the square was the meeting place of thousands of workers protesting the closure of the National Workshops who then organised the building of barricades and the call for an armed insurrection. It was one of the three main centres of resistance, with the barricade at the Rue d’Ulm being one of the most important.

The National Guard used canon to burst through the doors of the Panthéon on 25 June 1848 to dislodge the workers inside.

Following Louis Napoleon’s 1852 coup-d’état  the building was returned to the Church again, now the ‘National Basilica’, and the surviving bits of the nun Genevieve’s 1,350-year-old corpse stuck together in a new tomb.

From September 4 1870 the Town Hall of the 5th Arrondissement at No. 21 became the recruiting office for the National Guard defending Paris. with 12 separate offices interviewing recruits. Between 200 and 300 summary executions of Communards took place there on 24 May 1871.

The Panthéon itself was shelled during the Franco-Prussian war and became the scene of a major battle between the Communards and the Versaillais army. On 31 March 1871 a red flag was attached to the sawn off wooden cross that had been erected on top of the building on the orders of Napoleon III. Jean Allemane spoke on the steps supporting the raising of the red flag.

The Law School at No. 12 was where the ‘Democ-Socs‘, the 5th arrondissement’s Democratic-Socialist Club was based in 1870-1871. Many were massacred here on May 24 1871 as the Army burst through to attack those defending the Panthéon via a side door.

Before the ‘Bloody Week’ of the Commune a communist and atheist newspaper l’Éducation républicaine was published at No. 9, being used by a revolutionary club called ‘The Democratic Association of Masters of Study‘.

The Panthéon finally returned to its role as resting place for the ‘great men’ of France on June 1 1885, after the government inserted Victor Hugo‘s body into the crypt.

On June 4 1908 Alfred Dreyfus was wounded in an attack on him when he attended the ceremony installing Émile Zola‘s body into the Panthéon.

The Ste Geneviève Library where Lenin researched ‘Materialism and Empiro Criticism’ in 1908, was based at No. 10.

The Hôtel des Grands Hommes at No. 17 saw André Breton with Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard and others launch the Surrealist movement there on September 17 1919.

In 1920, as part of the celebration of the German defeat, Sicard was commissioned to produce an altar dedicated to the National Convention that declared the First Republic in 1792.

The space for the intended religious altar in the centre of the Panthéon was finally filled in 1920 by Sicard’s secular monument to the glory of the National Convention

On July 16 1942 the Police Station based in the Town Hall at No. 21 was used at a primary collection point for Jews being arrested for deportation by the Paris police in the entirely French-run exercise called ‘The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup‘ (Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver).

In some form of recompense, on May 27 2015, Jean Zay‘s remains were transferred to the Pantheon, along with the resistance fighter Pierre Brossolette, and soli from the graves of two women heros of the Resistance who survived the occupation, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, and Germaine Tillion.

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PLACES

Père Lachaise Cemetery

Arrondissement 20

East Cemetery

Opened in 1804 this world famous cemetery gets its name from Louis XIV’s Jesuit priest confessor from 1675 to 1709, François d’Aix de La Chaize. This was the period when the Sun King, having decided that anyone who was not a Catholic was the ‘enemy within’, revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes that had tolerated protestants. While discriminatory measures took off from 1661, persecutions intensified from 1679 leading up to the 1685 revocation in the Edict of Fontainebleau. One per cent of the population, some 200,000 Huguenots were then forced out of France.

The Jesuits bought the land on the Mont-aux-Vignes hill to the North-East of Paris in the 16th century. After the young King Louis XIV had spent a few hours there the hill was renamed the Mont-Louis, and this was where Louis’ confessor, Father La Chaise, lived and died.

In 1780, finally, all cemeteries within the city walls were closed. As Consul Napoleon decreed that cemeteries should be open to all faiths and to the poor as well as the rich. In 1803 the land on the hill was acquired by the Prefect of the Seine department and the design of the cemetery entrusted to Alexandre-Theodore Brongiart.

The Père La Chaise opened for its first burial on June 4 1804. That year there were only 13 tombs. In 1815 still only 2,000. In 1830 there were 33,000 and after several expansions some 70,000 in 2014.

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