Rue Cujas

Arrondissement 5

11, 16, 17, 22

Named after the 16th century lawyer, Jacques Cujas, who refused to take sides in the century’s religious wars, the road runs next to the Sorbonne’s law faculty. Close to the Pantheon it was the scene of barricades in June 1848 and of particularly fierce fighting around ones erected during the bloody week that ended the Paris commune of 1871.

During the first decade of the 20th century the French police archives record that many exiled Russian revolutionaries. particularly those from Georgia, used to hang out at the restaurant at No. 11.

In the early 19th century the painter Jacques-Louis David had a studio in the closed and ruined Cluny College (roughly number 16) where he painted Napoleon crowning himself in 1805 over the following two years.

On May 1 1898 Charles Péguy, Lucien Herr and Georges Bellais set up a socialist bookshop and publisher at No. 17. It became the headquarters of the Dreyfusard supporters. Within a year Herr had brought several other socialists together to form the Bookshop and Publishers New Society there. Those involved included Léon Blum, Hubert Bourgin, Albert Monot, Mario Roques, Désiré Roustan and François Simiand.

Today, No. 22 is a café, now called the Mad Maker. Back in 1830 it extended to the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and was called the Café Musain. This was where Auguste Blanqui organised the Société des Amis du peuple (The People’s Friends), the insurrectionary group that played a role in the July Revolution, les trois glorieueses.

When Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables, he used this revolutionary sect as a model for an equivalent group behind the 1832 insurrection, the Amis de l’ABC. Their initiative, to begin the insurrection by raising the red flag during the funeral procession of the liberal General Lamarque, on June 5 1832 saw several hundred killed in just a few hours.

1871-1914

From one war to another

The Dreyfus affair was the moment that redefined the French Left between the two wars against Germany

Anarchism, Socialism, Paris Exhibition, Dreyfus, Revolutionary syndicalism – in progress

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

Socialism

Accused of being drunkards in several areas of France the early SFIO campaigned against alcoholism as well as against capitalism

French socialism began to distinguish itself both from Proudhon’s anarchistic appeal to humanity’s moral responsibilities and from Blanqui’s insurrectionism in the 1890s. Founded by Blum, Jaures and Vaillant in 1905 in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, the SFIO united left reformist republicans and Marxist sectarians. The alliance broke up in 1920 when a majority at the Tours Conference voted to affiliate to the new Communist International.

Despite being a minority at that SFIO conference, the SFIO of left reformist socialism became the leading left political current through nearly all the interwar period. After the Communist Party ended Stalin’s ‘class against class’ propaganda against the Socialists and proposed a Popular Front alliance, Blum became prime minister in 1936.

Under the Fourth Republic its internal divisions over Algerian independence, with Mendes France and the challenge of the stronger Communist Party allowed De Gaulle to take power. In 1981 Mitterrand won a decisive majority on a left platform that he abandoned three years later. From then the Socialist Party became largely a party of elected national and local officials, without any real mass membership. In 2017, following five politically disastrous years under Hollande, the Socialist Party suffered a major defeat in both the presidential and National Assembly elections. A new left party, La France Insoumise (France untamed), did relatively well, with the Left Front’s presidential candidate getting 19.6% of the vote in the first round.

The vote for the La France Insoumise leader Mélenchon in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections shows stronger support in the less wealthy parts of Paris

Like the Socialists, though, Melonchon’s La France Insoumise has still virtually no local membership base. In the European elections of 2019, its share of the vote fell to 6%.

Work in progress