From one war to another
Anarchism, Socialism, Paris Exhibition, Dreyfus, Revolutionary syndicalism – in progress
1871-1914
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Rue du Cherche-Midi
Arrondissement 6
Numbers: 37, 38, 39, 44, 47, 91
Named in 1832 after a shop sign showing a painted mediaeval sun dial with people looking for midday at 2 pm in the afternoon, the road brought together three shorter streets.
The headquarter building of the Army War Council was at Nos. 37-39. As the daughter of a senior administrator to the Council, Adèle Foucher married Victor Hugo who lived there from 1822 to 1824, sharing with his in-laws. Hugo had lived as a child at No. 44 in 1813-1814 and was where he first got to know Adèle.
The Cherche-Midi military prison on the opposite side of the road at No. 38 (at the angle with 54 Boulevard Raspail) had originally been the convent of the Daughters of the Good Shepherd (built on land sequestrated from a Calvinist by Louis XIV in 1688. The sisters’ religious order, whose mission aimed to house and rehabilitate up to 200 ‘fallen’ but penitent women, was suppressed at the Revolution in 1790. It then became a factory making army uniforms and then a supply depot for troops based in Paris.
It was largely demolished in 1847 although the trials of many of those arrested in the workers’ uprising of June 1848 still took place there.
A new army prison with 200 individual cells was built there in 1853. Prisoners were forced to work in silence during the day and were isolated in their cells at night. On May 30 1871 several Communard prisoners were murdered in the cellars there during the Bloody Week suppression of the Paris Commune. Those killed were mainly soldiers and foreigners who had fought for the Commune.
The Cherche-Midi Prison was also where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned for four months in solitary confinement from his arrest on October 15 1894 to February 20 1895 when he was deported.
The French Army’s War Council used to meet on the other side of the street at No. 37 and this was where on December 22 1894 after a three day trail held in secret before the Army Council unanimously found Dreyfus guilty of treason. Since he refused to confess any guilt, the Army then ordered a public spectacle of his degrading to be held outside the École militaire on January 5 1895.
On November 11 1940 the students arrested at the Armistice Day demonstration at the Place de l’Étoile were imprisoned here by the Germans who had taken the prison over.
In a bad state of repairs it stopped being used for military prisoners in 1947, after which it was only used for military tribunals. On 22 September 1949 a demonstration outside the prison took place in support of the 16 court-martialed and jailed conscientious objectors, who refused to fight in the French army.
On September 5 1960 the court martial took place here of six Algerian FLN fighters and 18 members of the Jeanson French support network.
The prison was finally demolished in 1966 and the Human Sciences building finished in 1970, which it now shares with the School for Advanced Studies in Social Science.
Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx moved into No. 47 on December 1 1868 soon after their marriage. Karl spent six days with them in July 1869 under the false identity of Alan Williams. This address was where the couple committed suicide together in 1911.
When she arrived in Paris in 1861 from Brittany, Nathalie Le Mel worked at the Angel Entreprise at No. 91. She was one of the first women to join the International Workingmen’s Association.
Plus d’informations
PLACES
Rue de la Clef / Sainte-Pélagie prison
Arrondissement 5
Number 56, site of Sainte-Pélagie prison
In 1821 the songwriter and pamphleteer Pierre-Jean de Béranger spent three months at Sainte-Pélagie for an oblique political criticism of Louis XVIII. In 1832 Honoré Daumier is placed there. With cholera appearing in the prison a revolt organised by prisoners from the secret Society of the Friends of the People (Société des amis du people) that year led to one death. Hazan (WTP) writes that ‘under the Restoration and the July monarchy… all the opposition leaders passed’ through this prison.
Hazan (IOP) explains that when another prison to accommodate debtors was built in 1826 in the Rue de Clichy in the 9th arrondissement, ‘Creditors who requested the incarceration of a debtor were required to pay thirty francs a month for the prisoner’s maintenance’.
Honoré Daumier spent six months there in 1832 for his political caricatures attacking the new king Louis-Philippe.
164 arrests of republicans were made after the riots that followed the rue Transonain massacre of April 1834. Among those jailed at Sainte-Pélagie were Arago, Victor Schoelcher, Barbès and Godefroy de Cavaignac. Barbès organised an escape by 28 of them through a tunnel in July 1835.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a political prisoner held there from 1849 to 1852. After first fleeing to Belgium he returned to marry Euphrasie Piégard while still in jail.
Elisée Reclus was held there after the 1871 Paris Commune on his way to deportation. Gustave Courbet was jailed there from June 1871 to March 1872 after he was arrested at his hiding place in the Rue St Gilles.
Auguste Blanqui was held there in 1831, 1832 and 1836 and again from 1861 to 1865 when he escaped and went into exile in Belgium until the end of the Second Empire.
Jules Guesde was held there in 1878 in the section of the prison called Pavillion des Princes, entered through 2-14 rue due Puits de l’Érmite (roughly where 3-15 rue Lacépède is today).
On 30 July 1891 Paul Lafargue lost his appeal against a year’s imprisonment for an ‘inflammatory’ speech made after the killing of 10 demonstrators by troops on a May Day march in the Northern textile town, Fourmies.
From the Concièrgerie, where he was held initially, Lafargue was finally sent to Sainte-Pélagie. This was to his great relief, since it was still a political prison. He had access to books and newspapers, and hot and cold water for washing and taking baths.
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.
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.
PLACES
Socialism
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.
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