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 de Bretagne

Arrondissement 3

Numbers: 14, 39, 49, 62, 71

The road was named ‘Brittany’ after a never completed project of Henry IV to build a great square into which several streets would run, each with the name of a different province. After two streets were merged in 1851 the road is nearly half a kilometre in length. The even-numbered side of the road was demolished in 1920 to widen the road to its present width.

No. 14 was where the first issue of the centre-left newspaper Libération was prepared and published on April 18 1973.

The oldest covered market in Paris at No. 39, the Market of the Red Children (Le marché des Enfants Rouges), was established in 1628 near an orphanage whose children were dressed in red, the colour of charity). During the ‘Bloody week’ at the end of the Paris Commune in May 1871 the market was fortified and defended.

On January 2 1910 Lenin attended a revolutionary ‘goguette‘ – a kind of drinking + sing-song / poetry-and-literature dinner with roughly 20 people – organised by La Muse Rouge in a room on the first floor of No. 49. We don’t know if he was accompanied by Krupskaya or Inessa.

No 49

The venue (shown in the photograph taken in the 1910s) was the Third arrondissement’s communal building. At the time there were hundreds of these goguette events being organised regularly in Paris. The Muse Rouge theatre group was expelled by the PCF in 1925.

By 1921 the building included the office of the Paris Federation of the SFIO (Socialists) and this was where Breton and Aragon came to apply to join the new French Section of the Communist International, less than a week after the majority of socialists had voted at the Tours Congress to affiliate to the Third International.

In 1922 the cooperative workers’ restaurant and café La Famille Nouvelle based at No. 49 was visited by many leftists including Ho Chi Minh. Many left events took place, including monthly dinners of the Revolutionary Esperantists, who were entertained by the Socialist Federation’s choir.

On September 1 1939 Palmiro Togliatti was arrested by the French police and taken to the Police Station at No. 62. They didn’t find out his true identity and he was jailed only for holding false papers and finally released in February 1940.

In the bloody week of May 1871 a barricade across the road at No. 71 defended by the 86th National Guard battalion mounted strong resistance to the Versaillais troops. This was also the address where Sylvain Maréchal, who drafted the Equality Manifesto of April 1796 is supposed to have lived.

PLACES

Boulevard des Capucines

Arrondissements 2, 9

Numbers: 2, 11, 12, 13, 22

Dividing the 2nd and 9th arrondissement, the Boulevard gets its name from the Capucine Monastery, whose gardens used to lie along the south side of the road.

The Vaudeville Theatre at No. 2 organised a benefit show by the Art Theatre for Gauguin, Flora Tristan‘s grandson, and Verlaine on May 21 1891.

Lenin also showed up there on January 12 1910 to see a play called ‘The Barricade‘ by the catholic reactionary Paul Bourget.

During the Paris Commune‘s final days on May 22 1871 a barricade with 12 canon crossed the road at the Place de L’Opéra.

The first Pan African Congress was held at the Grand-Hôtel de la Paix at No. 12 on February 19 1919. Fifty black representatives who had been excluded from the Versailles Peace Conference met together, closely watched by the police. The American William du Bois and Senegalese Blaise Diagne were its joint chair persons.

The Café de la Paix on the ground floor of the hotel on the northwest corner of the junction between the Boulevard meets the Opera Square opened on June 30 1862. On July 14 1937 it was attacked by striking waiters.

Throughout the German occupation a notice was displayed saying: Jews not allowed (Interdit aux juifs).

The radical democratic German poet Georg Herwegh put up Marx and Jenny von Westphalen at No. 13 when the couple first arrived in Paris on October 12 1843.

The victorious Austrian Emperor Francis 1 stayed at the Colonnade private mansion at Nos. 37 to 43 in 1814 and again in 1815, when it became the Foreign Ministry. It stayed that until 1853.

On September 7 1831 a demonstration outside the Hotel de la Colonnade, the Foreign Ministry at Nos. 37-43, was dispersed violently by the army. The demonstrators shouted: ‘Long Live Poland, Down with the Ministers’.

In the early evening of February 23 1848 another demonstration outside the Ministry sparked the 1848 Revolution. The 14th Line Regiment, protecting the sacked reactionary prime minister Guizot, fired directly into the crowd killing 52 people and wounded many more.

After 52 demonstrators are killed outside the Foreign Ministry on February 23 1848 the call for revenge leads to revolution rather than reform

The bodies of those murdered were then paraded throughout Paris and by the morning most arms shops had been looted and some 1,500 barricades erected.

A big meeting room at No. 39 saw several political meetings at the end of the Second Empire in 1870 and 1871. On September 22 1889 Louise Michel and Maxime Lisbonne, known as the d’Artagnan of the Commune, organised a meeting there in that year’s election campaign. Lisbonne’s manifesto stated:

‘ENTERTAINER I am! ENTERTAINER I remain! Give me your votes to swell the numbers of those who dare to say the same, and you will see that if I hesitate, like a real entertainer, the words on the paper that will come out of the hat will be ‘DEMOCRATIC SOCIAL REVOLUTION’.

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Le Champ-de-Mars

Arrondissement: 7

The Champ de Mars lies between Marshal Foch in front of the École Militaire (since 1939) and the Eiffel Tower erected in 1889.

Before the Military School (École Militaire) was built (1752 to 1760) the boggy area that today lies South of the Eiffel Tower was used for growing vegetables. In 1765 it was decided to use this mainly flat ground to practise manoeuvres, and to name it the ‘God of War Field’ (Champ-de-Mars).

During the French Revolution the area was renamed ‘The meeting field” (Champ de la Réunion). It was surrounded by a ditch and given an ornate entrance and used for national celebrations. The first, on September 20 1790, was to commemorate those killed by the mutineers and those who died in putting down a mutiny that had taken place at Nancy between August 5 and August 31 1790.

The mutineers had imprisoned their officers when they held back some of their wages for alleged expenses they had incurred for laundry and shoes. When they surrendered, 22 were hung, 41 were condemned to 30 years as galley slaves and 72 put in prison. One was the last to be tortured to death in France using a wheel.

The biggest event in the Champ de Mars took place on July 14 1790.

The 1790 etching shows some of the nearly half a million people who heard La Fayette read the Constitution and Louis XVI swear to uphold it, exactly one year after the storming of the Bastille. A huge national alter was built In the middle of the parade ground where the oath was sworn..

Just over a year later, after Louis XVI’s abortive escape bid, it was where people were asked to come to sign the petition calling for the King’s abdication. And so on July 17 1791 it where the Mayor of Paris, Bailly, and La Fayette carried out the orders of the constitutional monarchists who controlled the Constituent Assembly. These were to disperse the crowd. The soldiers opened fire and then the cavalry dispersed everyone else.

On December 30 1793 a celebration of the retaking of Toulon from the English and the Spanish was held there, organised by the regicide painter Jacques-Louis David.

He organised an even bigger event in the Champ de Mars on June 8 1794, the Festival of the Supreme Being. This was Robespierre’s pet dream of replacing Christianity with a more egalitarian and rational religion.

Robespierre’s friend and supporter, the painter David, organised the anti-atheist Festival of the Supreme Being to inaugurate a new state religion. This festival took place just two months before Robespierre was himself guillotined. On the alter stood the tree of liberty, and in the foreground is the plaster statue of LIberty that was usually in the centre of the Place de la Revolution (Concorde).

From September 18 to September 22 1798 the Directorate organised the first exhibition of the products of French industry at the Champ de Mars. This was the precursor of the 19th and 20th century universal exhibitions that took place in 1867, 1878, 1889 (when Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley spent 6 weeks there), 1900 and 1937.

One of the jobs given to those enrolled in the 1848 National Workshops was to create flatten the terraces and plant trees on the Champ de Mars.

A March 1848 engraving of the work being done at the Champs de Mars show several hundred men working, resting and discussing how the job should be done, with red flags (not tricolours) behind them

On April 16 1848 a march of National Workshop workers on the Town Hall assembled there to demand a second postponement of the national elections after their success on March 17. This time they also sought a change of the provisional government to put Louis Blanc in charge. They were dispersed by the national guard on the orders of Ledru-Rollin.

The area was also used during the ten days from Louis-Napoléon’s December 2 1851 Coup d’État to execute prisoners. On just the one night of December 4 336 were shot without trial.

On May 21 1871 the National Guardsmen defending the canons parked in the Champs de Mars fought hard against superior numbers of Versaillais troops. Finally overrun, many (perhaps up to 1,500) captured defenders of the Commune were then shot.

In May 1905, Lenin travelled back from the London Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party through Paris and with several other delegates visited the Eiffel Tower.

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PLACES

Rue Danton

Arrondissement 6

Numbers: 8, 10

The 1896 Congress of the Feminist International took place in the recently completed Hôtel des sociétés savantes (elite Knowledge Societies – ranging from Sociology to Zoology and Astronomy) at No. 8.

This was also the venue for a thousand-strong meeting to hear Trotsky speak on December 6 1907 about ‘The stages of the Russian Revolution and the Current Political Situation‘.

Lenin spoke more than once at the Knowledge Societies meeting hall. On May 12 1908 he spoke there on ‘Our Tasks’ and on November 29 1909, just after he came to live in Paris, he spoke on ‘Counter-Revolutionary Liberal Ideology’. He gave a lecture on Leon Tolstoy who had died two months earlier on 18 January 1911, and in June that year spoke on’ Stolypin and the Revolution’.

The Italian socialist Pietro Nenni spoke there at an advanced Socialist school on January 8 1935.

On 16 January 1955 Pierre Lambert and Marceau Pivert organised a meeting demanding the release of Messali Hadj in the same huge meeting room.

The building was bought by the Sorbonne in 1985 and since 2005 is the Research Centre of Paris IV – Sorbonne university.

About where No. 10 now stands in 1865 was No 1 Rue Larrey, where Nathalie Le Mel lived with her three children and organised the cooperative kitchens of the Marmite association. This was also an address where the International Working Men’s Association continued to organise after it was banned by Napoleon III.

The short street was only built between 1888 and 1895 and was named after the French revolutionary Danton from the start.

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Rue des Écoles

Arrondissement 5

Numbers 2, 5, 34, 41, 45, 47

The rue des Écoles was the first of the broad streets driven through the Latin Quarter of Paris by Haussmann as a major East-West carriageway. It was given this name in 1852 since it crossed the Paris district with the highest concentration of universities/ colleges (Schools). Hazan reports (IOP) that the second, more successful attempt to create an East-West road on the left bank was the Boulevard Saint Germain. Its final section was only opened in 1877.

From 1816 until 1843 the Institute of Young Blind Persons was located at No. 2, on the site of a 13th century gate in the Philippe-August wall that was finally demolished in 1684. A plaque dating from 2002 records this as the address where Louis Braille (1809-1852) developed what became the braille reading system.

On 7 September 1870, after Napoleon III‘s defeat and capture at Sedan on September 2 in the Franco-Prussian war, Blanqui published the first edition of a daily, La Patrie en danger (‘The country in danger’). Initially he supported the new Republican government, formed on September 4. The daily’s editorial offices were based then at No. 34, but the paper only published for five days until September 12.

On May 24 1871 during the Paris Commune the Versaillais installed a canon inside the Café Soufflet to be able to fire on the communard barricade at the Collège de France.

The barricade at No. 45 was quickly destroyed and the defenders executed. Priority in the executions was given to soldiers who had supported the Commune, considered deserters from the Versaillais army, and foreign fighters.

As early as 1873, however, students who later included Jules Guesde began to discuss Marx’s ideas at the same Café Soufflet on the corner of the Rue des Écoles and Boulevard St-Michel.

The Café Soufflet, photographed here on the left looking west up the rue des Écoles from the Boulevard Saint Michel, was the centre of Parisian debate about scientific socialism and Marxism from the late 1870s

The poet Paul Verlaine lived at No.5 in the apartment belonging to Rachide Eymery in November 1886.

The offices of ‘La Vogue’ were at No. 41, Felix Fénéon became editor of the arts journal in 1885.

In 1902-3 Lenin gave three lectures on the Russian agrarian question to the Sorbonne University’s École pratique des Hautes études at No. 47 and at 16 rue de la Sorbonne, round the corner. Trotsky attended all three of them.

A secret printworks was placed in the basement of the Sorbonne’s Science Faculty at No. 47 in 1941. It printed the paper, Defence of France from September.

Hazan (IOP) adds: ‘Between the river and Rue des Écoles, a number of old bookshops-cum-publishers remain to remind you that until the end of the ancien régime, Rue Saint-Jacques had a virtual monopoly of printing – from the time that the three Gering brothers, who came from Konstanz, established their presses at the sign of the Soleil d’Or in 1473.’

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Rue de l’Estrapade

Arrondissement 5

Number 3

A print from 1633 of the torture used commonly across Europe the strappado (estrapade in French) by the medieval inquisition and several governments from the 12th to the 18th centuries.

The street finally took its current name in 1881. It roughly translates as ‘the street of torture’. The strappado is where the victim has their hands tied behind their back and they are dropped from a height, sometimes with weights added to the body to increase the pain. In English the word ‘estrapade’ has come to mean where a horse rears and plunges and kicks to try and unseat its rider. This is because it was the site of an ancient deep ditch dug outside Paris’ oldest medieval Wall that was constructed on Philippe Auguste’s order from 1190 to 1215.

Hazan (IOP) describes the Wall’s left-bank route as a ‘semi-eclipse that essentially encompasses the Latin Quarter. Starting at the Seine, where the Institute of France now stands, going up the rue Mazarine to the Porte de Buci, the old wall went along rue (formerly Fossés-) Monsieur-le-Prince up to the top of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève (now the Panthéon) where ‘the names of streets and squares still perpetuate its memory: Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Estrapade, Contrescarpe. It then descended towards the Seine in a straight line, following the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor (now Cardinal-Lemoine) and rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, reaching the river at the tower of La Tournelle.’

On June 24 1848, the workers’ barricade across the rue de l’Estrapade could be taken only after the Panthéon had been captured. To do this canons were placed in the rue Soufflot. Then soldiers who had got through to the square through a backdoor in the law school entered the Panthéon, where they took prisoners before executing them and then attacking and overwhelming the rue de l’Estrapade barricade.

Lenin and Krupskaya stayed here in 1902. The plaque on the wall in the photo isn’t about them.

Number 3, five minutes’ walk to the rue des Écoles where Lenin was lecturing, was where he and Krupskaya were put up by another Russian exile in 1902. The plaque on the wall confirms that Denis Diderot lived at the same address from 1747 to 1754 while he was publishing his enlightenment Encylopedia, whose aim was ‘change the way people think‘.

PLACES

Rue Favart

Arrondissement 2

Opéra Comique

The fin de sècle Comic Opera theatre in a street named after the early comic opera/vaudeville writer, Charles-Simon Favart, has a lengthy history. Lenin and Trotksy saw a show together there in 1902.

The Comic Opera, set up by Louis IV in 1714, had the first Favart Theatre built for it in 1783, when it was inaugurated in the presence of Marie-Antoinette. Charles-Simon Favart (1710-1792) was a popular playwright who helped inaugurate the comic opera vaudeville style.

Charles-Simon Favart began life as a pastry cook. Aged 24 he produced his first vaudeville theatre.

The first theatre in Rue Favart was destroyed by fire in 1838, and a new one built on the same site in 1840. The building was burnt down again in 1887 with nearly 100 people in the audience killed.

In 1898 the third Opéra Comique theatre was opened in Rue Favart in the presence of the French President, Félix Faure. It was the major work of architect, Louis Bernier (1845-1919).

Four years later Lenin loaned Trotsky a pair of respectable shoes so the two couples (Vladimir and Krupskaya, Natalya and Leon) could go along to a show, but Trotsky kept complaining the shoes were too tight.

PLACES

Rue de la Gaîté

Arrondissement 14

Number 11bis, 20, 20bis, 21, 26, 31

Crammed full of smallish theatres since 1818, when the Montparnasse Theatre first opened its doors, the road ran along the outside of the Farmers’ General tax wall. This made it a good location to drink wine that was not subject to the Paris tax, and the numbers of music halls, theatres and restaurants that sprang up gave it its name. It was absorbed into Paris in 1863.

Sometimes political meetings were held in the cafés in the street. Gustave Courbet and many of Paris’ bohemian intellectuals and artists used to drink at the Café des Mille Colonnes, next to Bobino at No. 20bis, in the 1860s. On December 17 1904 all the Russian revolutionary groups in Paris met there together.

Bobino was the most famous music hall in the street. Lenin went often between 1909 and 1912. Edith Piaf sang there at the end of the 1930s and Georges Brassens had a five month residence there in 1976.

During 1870-1871 the dance hall, Bal du Jardin de Paris, at No. 21 was used to hold 30 public political meetings.

While Lenin was living in Paris in 1909-1912 he is recorded as seeing a friend, the singer-songwriter Montéhus appear at No. 26, the Théâtre de la Gaîté Montparnasse.

The Montparnasse Theatre you now see at No 31 was rebuilt in 1886 and is on the list of historic monuments. It staged the Paris premier of Berthold Brecht’s ‘Threepenny Opera’ (l’Opéra de Quat’sous) in 1928.

The writer Simone de Beauvoir spent the academic year of 1936-1937 based at the hotel then named Royal-Bretagne living there with Sartre when he was in Paris at No. 11bis. Today, this art-deco hotel has another name and looks more upmarket than it did in the 1930s.

The hotel where Simon de Beauvoir spent a year while teaching at the right-bank secondary school, the lycée Molière

Nearly opposite De Beauvoir’s hotel was the famous Bobino music hall at No. 20, sadly demolished in 1985 and turned into a Mercure hotel with a new Bobino now at the back. De Beauvoir and Sartre saw two singers there in 1932, singing anarchist and anti-militarist songs.

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PLACES

Avenue General Leclerc

Arrondissement 14

Numbers 5, 11, 19, 43, 70, 101, 110

Since 1948 the Avenue is now named after Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the first French general to arrive in Paris in August 1944 – in American-loaned tanks and armoured vehicles and wearing American helmets with the Croix de Lorraine painted on their sides. He died in a plane crash in 1947 just as he was about to argue the case for French withdrawal from Indochina – before the wars of national liberation in the region had really started.

From 1863 to 1948 the tree-lined avenue was called the Avenue d’Orléans, running from the Denfert-Rochereau Square to the southern ‘ entrance to Paris (Porte d’Orléans), at the huge roundabout now called the Place du 25 Aout 1944, commemorating the Liberation of Paris.

It is one of Paris’ oldest roads, down which pilgrims used to follow what the Pope officially called one of the three most important pilgrimages for Christians in 1492 to the cathedral of Saint Jacques de Compostelle in Spain. This pilgramage had begun as early as the 9th century AD.

In the days when it was still the Avenue d’Orléans Lenin was often seen in the Café du Lion at No. 5 , where he organised meetings of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian social democrats.

Lenin might well turn in his Moscow mausoleum. His old meeting place is now a McDonald’s with a tiny Lion tobacco shop adjoining it that still bears the name of the original Lion cafe.

The French police estimated there were around 25,000 Russians in Paris around 1910, of whom 1,000 were revolutionary socialists and 500 anarchists. They were being watched both by the French police and by the Czar’s secret police, the Okhrana. On one occasion an agent spying on them was chased by Lenin and other Bolsheviks along the pavement in front of No. 101.

In 1911 a meeting of the Bolshevik faction organised by Lenin in the first floor room at the Café Les Manilleurs at No. 11 saw a near physical fight between them and Anatoli Lunacharsky and other followers of his brother-in-law, Bogdanov in the Vpered faction.

In December 1908 Lenin opened a bank account at the Crédit Lyonnais bank branch at No. 19.

Lenin and Inessa Armand used to frequent the old Cafe d’Orleans at No. 43 in 1910-1912. This is the new one, even closer to Rue Marie-Rose where the lovers lived. And still good for a drink after a long walk.

During his time in the area, Lenin used occasionally to be seen at the music hall called the Fantaisies de Montrouge at No 70. It was converted from being a theatre to the Grand-Cinéma that re-opened there in September 1911. That building was knocked down and rebuilt in reinforced concrete in 1922 and then became the 1,300-seater cinema the Mistral. Gaumont finally closed it in July 2016 and sold it to a housing developer.

The headquarters of the Russian Social Democrats on the first floor and the printworks of the ‘Social Democrat’ paper in a office in the back of the yard, were at No 110. Among those regularly present between 1909 and 1912 were Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.

PLACES

Rue Marie Rose

Arrondissement 14

Numbers 2, 4, 7

The street was built in 1898 over an old quarry. It was named after an earlier owner of the land.

Inessa Armand lived at No. 2 from 1910 until she left France with her lover, Lenin, and Krupskaya for Switzerland in 1912 .

Inessa Armand lived at No. 2 Rue Marie Rose from 1910 to 1912

Number 4, the 48 square meter two-room second-floor flat was occupied by Lenin, Krupskaya and her mother from July 6 1909 to June 12 2012.

The flat was bought by the Communist Party in 1955 and opened as the Paris Lenin museum in 1955. On March 25 1960 it was visited by Krushchev along with Maurice Thorez. It was given the Russian Communist Party’s seal of approval a second time in 1985, when it was visited by Gorbachev and Georges Marchais.

In 2007, however, the PCF sold it when things were going downhill for its fortunes . The plaque outside the building was then taken down.

Lenin used to do repairs and maintenance on his bicycle in the street outside No. 4. When I passed by and took these photographs, all the windows on the second-floor had their shutters closed.

Father Corentin Cloarec (1894-1944), the Franciscan vicar of the nearby Saint-François monastery at No. 7 who was chaplain to the Denfert-Rochereau resistance group, was assassinated there by the Gestapo on June 28 1944. The brick monastery was built in 1935 and its remarkable chapel glass is now listed as a historic monument.

Franciscan monastery

PLACES

Rue Méchain

Arrondissment 14

Number 13

The site at No 13 rue Méchain of the famous left-wing Union print works from 1910 to 1990.

What was once the Ruelle des Capucins was renamed in 1806 soon after the death of the astrologist Pierre Méchain, due to its proximity to the Observatory that was founded in 1667.

Georgi Plekhanov, a founding figure of Russian marxism, used the Russian language Union print shop to print his Fundamental Marxist Questions in 1910

The Union printers, a Russian immigrant printing works, was set up here in 1910. Hazan (WTP) writes that it was supposedly used by Plekhanov and Lenin. It then moved in book printing, along with publications of the modernist movement.

In 1913 Monatte had the CGT paper, La Vie Ouvrière printed here.

Founder of surrealism Guillaume Apollinaire published his Calligrammes poems of peace and war in 1918 at the Union printshop

Shortly after his death in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes was also printed here. From 1930 to 1933 the Union also printed the Surrealist group’s periodical, Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution.

The printshop finally closed in 1990.

PLACES

Boulevard du Montparnasse

Arrondissements: 6, 14 and 15

Numbers 99, 102, 103, 108, 126, 132, 142, 159, 171

The terrace of Le Dôme reflects the Metro station and La Rotonde café on the uneven numbered side of the boulevard du Montparnasse

The boulevard du Montparnasse crosses three arrondissements. The odd numbers on the north side are all in the 6th; the even numbers from 2 to 66 are in the 15th; and from number 68 onwards the addresses are all in the 14th. It was named with reference to the Greek residence of the muses by 17th century students after a tiny hillock in the area.

One excellent source on the left in Paris, the website Parisrévolutionnaire suggests that both Lenin and Trotsky were at the Dôme in 1905. Hazan (IOP), however, insists the Dôme… should never have been allowed to call itself the café of Trotsky and Kertész.

What is certainly true is that in the early years of the 19th century, the Dôme at No 108 became a major intellectual centre, and attracted many left political and artistic people.

Pablo Picasso as well as Modigliani, Utrillo and Apollinaire all drank or ate at le Dôme (No. 108) and la Rotonde (No. 103). The owner of La Rotonde was denounced by Aragon on July 13 1923 for having been a police informer on Lenin before World War One. Other neighbouring well-frequented intellectual and artist cafes of the interwar years included la Coupole (No. 102-104) and le Select (No. 99) .

The wounded black Foreign Legion corporal, Eugene Bullard, is reported as having decided while at the Coupole in the Spring of 1916, to become a pilot in the French air force.

Simone De Beauvoir lived in a flat above the Rotonde for the first ten years of her life before the father’s family lost most of its wealth in World War 1.

Diego Rivera was also part of this leftish Montparnasse scene in the early 20th century.

Léon Blum moved to the group of artists studios and flats soon after it was built in 1908 at 126 boulevard Montparnasse.

Léon Blum saw himself primarily as a writer before 1914, moving into the artists’ block of flats and studios at No. 126 boulevard Montparnasse. Henri Matisse lived and worked at No. 132 in 1927.

From 1865 to 1866, after the publication of his first novel, Émile Zola lived in a room at No. 142.

In the 1920s Le Dôme became a meeting place for many English-language writers like Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Sylvia Beach. In 1924 John Dos Passos joined other American writers at No. 171 the La Closerie des Lilas bar.

La Closerie des Lilas used to be a cheapish outside bar with dancing visited by lots of poets, artists and philosophers from the first half of the 20th century is now a big pricey restaurant

At the eastern end of the Boulevard near the Port Royal, this famous restaurant is where in June 1941 Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre organised a clandestine ‘Socialism and Freedom’ meeting of about 50 intellectuals, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Yet in the face of increasing repression they did not do much more, and in September 1941 Sartre agreed to take the job of a secondary school teacher who had been fired for being Jewish.

Hemingway was also known to eat frequently in the years 1924-1926 at the Le Nègre de Toulouse restaurant at No 159.

Louis Aragon met Mayakovsky for the first time at the Coupole on November 5 1928. The Coupole was requisitioned between 1940 and 1944 for German-only events

Earlier, under the Second Empire that he satirised so brilliantly, Émile Zola lived at No 142 in 1865 to 1866.

PLACES

Rue Rambuteau

Arrondissements 1, 3, 4

Numbers: 19, 54, 102, 108

Rambuteau around 1900

The road runs West to East from the Sainte-Eustache church (shown above at 6 am in the morning in 1900 looking up the road from the northern edge of Les Halles) to the Rue des Archives.

Building began in 1838 and in 1839 it was formally named the Rue Rambuteau to honour the Seine department Prefect from 1833 to 1848. Claude-Philibert Barthelot de Rambuteau who initiated its construction with the widening of streets in central Paris to 13m.

The kilometre-long east-west was conceived after the 1832 cholera epidemic had proved the case made by the hygienists to pull down many of the Paris’ narrow medieval streets. Its tearing up a sizeable area of old Paris stimulated one of the first Parisian housing speculation spikes.

One of the original Rambuteau-prescribed street number tiles (white numbers on a blue background) is still above the door at No. 58

One of the streets knocked down and merged into the road was the Rue de la Chanverrerie where, at the junction with Rue Mondétour, at approximately No. 102 Rue Rambuteau, a barricade was built on June 6 1832. This was where Victor Hugo placed the Caberet Corinthe and the death of Enjoiras in Les Misérables.

Several other barricades appeared in the road in the early days of the February Revolution and again during the June days of 1848. Fighting also broke out on December 3 1851 as some tried to resist the seizure of power by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. 

The cafe on the corner with the Rue du Temple at No. 19 used to be a favourite restaurant of Russian Nihilist exiles in the late 19th century. Trotsky and Lenin met there early in 1903.

On April 28 1848, after the shift against radical republicanism, Armand Barbès held a meeting of the Club de la Revolution at No. 54, the home of Citizen Furet. Barbès had set up as a more ‘moderate’ alternative to Blanqui‘s more insurrectional Société républicaine centrale, and this meeting discussed the election results and set in motion the attempted insurrection of May 15.

A personal interest of mine is that No. 108 was built on the birthplace of the adventurer cum comic poet Jean-François Regnard. On August 10 1779 his name was given to the second shortest-street in Paris next to the newly-built Odéon Theatre. This street was where my father James Jefferys (1914-1996) lived nearly half his life.

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PLACES

Rue de Richelieu

Arrondissements 1, 2

Number: 58, 63, 64, 66, 102, 104, 110,

The near kilometre-long road stretching northwards from the centre of Paris was named in 1633 after Cardinal Richelieu’s Palace that runs down its east side. The palace became Palais-Royal and from 1793 to 1806 the road was called the Rue de la Loi (The Road of the Law).

The magnificent reading room of the National Library of France at No. 58 used by both Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg as well as many other socialists and communists..

Lenin got a reader’s ticket to No. 58 on the recommendation of a socialist member of parliament, Louis Roblin. Lenin visited the library regularly throughout his stay in Paris from 1909 to 1912. On one occasion the bicycle he used to journey from the 14th arrondissement was stolen according to police reports.

The bi-monthly La Revue indépendante created by Pierre Leroux, George Sand and Louis Viardot moved to No. 63 early in 1844. But as the journal became less political their involvement ended and they founded La Revue Sociale. In 1847, the bi-monthly became increasingly pro-republican again, just as it moved away from the Rue de Richelieu, but it didn’t survive the tumult of 1848.

The journal of the Internationalist Communist Party, French Section of the Fourth International, Workers’ Truth, that appeared from August 1952 to May 1962, was based at offices at No. 64. Michel Raptis (Pablo), based in Paris until De Gaulle’s 1958 Coup d’Etat was the 4th International’s secretary through this period.

In March 1848 the Fraternal Association of Linen Seamstresses, a women’s revolutionary club set up by Elisa Lemonnier and its president, Désirée Gay, used to meet at No. 66, the Hôtel de Brouilly.

On July 27 1830 the seizure of the presses at the printshop of the ‘Times’ ( Le Temps) at No. 102 was the trigger that set off the 1830 July Revolution against the increasing Bourbon repression under Charles X.

The first meeting of the radical republican Friends of the People club, attended by Pierre-Jean de Béranger and Étienne Cabet among others took place at No. 104 on July 30 1830.

The editorial offices of the socialist daily paper launched on April 18 1904 by Jean Jaurès, Anatole France, Octave Mirbeau and Aristide Briand and others, l’Humanité, were then at No. 110.

MAP

Rue du Temple

Arrondissements 3, 4

Numbers: 63, 79, 106, 158, 191

From the junction of Rue-du Temple and Rue de Turbigo looking at the Place de la Republique

One of Paris’ oldest streets it now runs for 1.3 km from the Rue Rivoli up the the Place de la Republique, with the Square du Temple garden created in 1857 leading off it at No. 158.

The name Rue du Temple comes from the Templars district, a large area of land given to the Knights Templar military religious order around 1170. In 1240 the 50 metre high keep was built within a walled enclosure. It initially housed the king’s treasure, and then became a prison. Its most famous occupants from August 13 1792 were Louis XVI and his family.

On December 18 1795 Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, their daughter, was the only Bourbon to leave the Tower alive and without a trip to the guillotine. Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21 1793. Marie-Antoinette on October 16 1793. Elisabeth, the king’s sister, on May 10 1794. Louis, the king’s son, died from tuberculosis in the keep on June 8 1795.

On June 29 2017 the Square’s name was changed to Square du Temple – Elie-Wiesel in honour of the human rights campaigner and Holocaust survivor.

In 2007 the incumbent Socialist mayor from a Jewish Polish family erected a Stele in the Square to commemorate the 85 Jewish children of the Third Arrondissement who, under the age of six, had been arrested by the French police and deported to Auschwitz, never to return.

The Templar Tower was knocked down by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1808 partly to prevent Royalist pilgrimages to the site and partly, some argue, to spare his future wife, the sight of her aunt’s last address. The garden and Square was one of 24 laid down under Haussmann’s plan for giving Parisians a little more air.

On February 27 1871 the Square at No 158 was the meeting point of the National Guardsmen on their way to the Champs-Élysées to try and stop the Prussians from entering Paris. Every Saturday during the Commune the band of the National Guard played there to raise funds for the widows and children of men who had died in the war.

Former soldiers who had joined the Commune and foreigners were the first to be executed in the Square on May 25 1871.

The statue by Amadee Doublemard of the popular anti-monarchist poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger that was placed in the Square at its inception was melted down in 1942, but replaced by one in stone by Henri Lagriffioul in 1953.

Women Communards such as Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Nathalie Le Mel used to meet in a women’s club at the Grand café de la Nation  at No. 79, the 17th century Hotel de Montmor. On International Women’s Day March 8 2007 under the recently elected Socialist Paris mayor, a small triangular square at the meeting point of the Rue du Temple and the Rue de Turbigo was named the Place Elisabeth Dmitrieff. It is just outside the entrance to the Temple metro station.

In October 1870 Blanqui was in hiding at No. 191. The flat belonged to Eugène Cléray, a clockmaker and follower of Blanqui who was deputy mayor of the Third arrondissement during the Siege of Paris. Blanqui stayed in the flat on October 31 before going to the Hotel de Ville to see how the insurrection against the new republican government’s indifferent handling of the war with Prussia was going.

Despite 15,000 demonstrating outside the Hotel de Ville for the resignation of the government and then occupying it, by the early hours of the next day it had failed. Blanqui then returned to No. 191.

Where the rue Rambuteau crosses the Rue du Temple at No. 63 there was a restaurant where the Russian Nihilists met in the late 19th century. Trotsky and Lenin also met there early in 1903.

During the occupation of Paris the Central Telephone Archives at No. 106, built in 1927-1928, was taken over by the Germans, and was one of their remaining strong-holds in August 1944.

Plus d’informations

MAP

Rue de Vaugirard

Arrondissements 6, 15

Numbers: 1-3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15-17, 36, 85, 86-88, 93, 102, 150, 393, 399

The Luxembourg Palace (Nos. 15-17) is the most well-known building in the old Roman road that is the longest street in Paris. The road now stretches 4.360 Km westwards from the Boulevard Saint Michel to the junction of the Boulevards Lefebvre and Victor on the inner ring-road called the ‘Petite Ceinture‘ on which route a small train used to run round Paris.

Rue Vaugirard is so well known that it also features as a possible building or hotel site in the French version of Monopoly.

The end of the road was where, at Nos. 393 and 399 barricades were built across the street in March 1871 to prevent the Versaillais troops from entering.

The road’s name comes from the ancient village of Vaugirard, called after the mid-13th century owner of the land there, ‘Val du Girard’.

Among the tens of thousands who have lived in this old road are some who we feature in Left in Paris, often living alongside forgotten bits of left history.

The Trianon-hôtel, for example, at No. 1- 3 witnessed one of the first attacks by the resistance against a hotel requisitioned by the German army. The bombing took place on 14 November 1942 organised by the largely foreigner and Jewish Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (Fighters and partisans – Migrant Workers) group.

At No. 4, then called the Hôtel Lisbonne, Paul Verlaine lived off and on between periods in hospital from 1889 to 1894.

Today the hotel boasts of its earlier desperately poor and severely ill guest, and calls itself the Hôtel Fontaines du Luxembourg.

From 1906 Jacques Prévert lived at No. 7 and went to the school next door, No. 9.

I’ve very fond memories of the Vaugirard school where my son Michael spent a happy four months when he was ten. The area has completely changed since then. The school was constantly complaining about the bourgeois dog owners who allowed their tiny animals to deposit all over the surrounding streets as they walked them to the Luxembourg Garden. The disappearance of less well off and younger residents has led the authorities to close the whole school down in 2019.

The only good news is that the building hasn’t been sold off to developers. In 2023 the school is being occupied by the Cité Audacieuse and the ground floor and playground of the school is being run four days a week as a cafe by a feminist collective.

Émile Zola lived in rooms at No 10 in 1866 with Alexandre Meley whom he married in 1870.

After the 5 metre high and 24km long tax wall was built under Louis XVI there were two customs posts across Rue Vaugirard. One was at No. 102 and another (la barrière du Maine) from Nos. 111-132. While unused during the Revolution, they were reinstated after the 1815 Restoration and only finally largely demolished in 1860 with the expansion of Paris to the Thiers walls, built in the early 1840s roughly 5km from the city centre.

Victor Hugo and his wife Adèle lived for the first three years of their marriage, from 1824-1827, at what was 90 rue de Vaugirard but is now numbered 86-88. This period of his life followed the anonymous publication of the 21-year-old’s first novel, Han d’Islande set in 17th century Norway.

While living there Hugo wrote and published his second romance novel, Bug Jarval, with a black slave insurrectionist in St Domingo as its hero who falls passionately in love with a white women.

Lenin sat for Naoum Aronson in his studio iat 93 rue Vaugirard on December 10 1904. The bust was subsequently displayed in the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris.

On December 10 1904 Lenin sat for the Russian sculptor, Naoum Aronson (1872-1943) at his studio in No. 93.

When she first arrived in Paris around 1860, the feminist bookbinder and Communard Nathalie le Mel mother of three worked at Pasquier et Vigneau’s bookbinding works at No. 150 (in the 15th arrondissement).

A long way along the road was also where Michel Foucault lived, at no. 289 from 1970 until his death in 1984.

French measurements of distance

MËtre Ètalon par Chalgrin

For the real historical nerds among us, in the wall at No. 85 is an early 18th century ‘half-league stone’. The Fleur de Lys on it was removed during the French Revolution. The marker (borne) indicates the first half-league (lieue) – that is 500 toises.

A toise was the distance between a man’s outstretched arms, approximately 6 feet) or 2 Km from the entrance to Notre-Dame cathedral. 1 lieue = 1,000 toises, or approximately 4 Km. A toise is the equivalent of the fathom in English, but in France it was used both on land and at sea.

At the French Revolution France still used hundreds of different weights and measures, originally derived from Roman units where the leuga (lieue/league) was the distance that a man can run in an hour. King Charlemagne (742-814) had added the pied du Roi (the King’s foot) and the toise. The pouce (inch) was the width of a human thumb, and was 1/12th of the pied du roi. The ligne (line) was 1/12th of a pouce, and the point (Truchet point in English) was 1/12th of a ligne.

After Charlemagne the fragmentation of France and of Europe accelerated. So distances varied from town to town, with the variation in 1 league (lieue) being from 3.268 km to 5.849.

On August 4 1789 a successful resolution from the Jacobin Club at the Constituent Assembly abolished all the privileges of the Crown, including its right to determine measures of distance and weight.

In 1790 Talleyrand proposed the drawing up of a Universal Measure, and the National Assembly proposed doing this jointly with the United Kingdom, who refused.

In 1791 a law established a Commission to establish the universal measure. They decided it should be based on a quarter of the length of a meridian and gave two geographers the task of measuring it exactly. They took seven years to measure the distance between Barcelona and Dunkerque.

This exercise was considered too long-winded for both military and political reasons. So on August 1 1793 the National Convention passed a decree determining the ‘provisional’ length of what in 1795 was named the metre. This was based on a millionth of the 1739-1740 distance measured by Lacaille from the North Pole to the Equator. It was exactly 3 pieds, 11 lignes and 44 hundredths of the principal toise then used in Paris.

Finally, on 7 April 1795, the new system of weights and measures adopted by the French National Convention were named: metres and grams. A metal metre-long yardstick embedded in marble was then placed in the wall at no. 36 rue de Vaugirard. And in a shop window at No. 215 there is an 1840 cast iron kilometer stone marking 3.5 km from the centre of Paris.

The old and new systems were used concurrently in France over the next half century. Metric leagues were used from 1812 to 1840 with one metric lieue = 4000 metres or 4 Km. The use of the old system was finally ended across the whole of France by the law of 1837.

But when in 1988 Joe, Joan and I bought a half-finished farm/barn in the Haute Savoie, and I had to finish off the plumbing, I can still remember the plumbing shop in Thonon-les-Bains where the width of copper pipes and joints were still in pouces (inches). In the UK metrication became government policy under Wilson in 1965 and in 1973, with accession to the European Economic Community, the UK was given 5 years to adopt metric units and by 1980 virtually no schools continued to teach in feet and inches.

PLACES

Avenue de Wagram

Arrondissements 8, 17

Number: 37/39

Looking up the Avenue to the Arc de Triomphe around 1900

One of 12 broad radial roads that leaves the Arc de Triomphe from what used to be called the ‘Square of the Star’ (Place de l’Étoile) and was renamed Place Charles-de-Gaulle in 1970. The road was first opened on January 16 1789 when the section of the Farmers’ tax wall was completed between the Etoile (Neuilly) and Roule (Ternes) customs posts. It became de Wagram on March 2 1864 during the Second Empire to honour Napoleon I’s significant victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram on July 6 1809.

The Salle Wagram at No. 37/39 witnessed some key meetings in the history of the Left in France. On the site of a guingette (open air café) run by a Napoleonic war veteran since 1812 on a country lane outside the city walls (and so providing cheap wine), under the restoration he developed it into dance hall, the Bal Dourlans.

In 1865 a new covered hall designed by Fleuret was inaugurated surrounded by two rings of seats. In 1899 the hall was given in a legacy to one of the five academies grouped within the Institut de France, which continued to run it as a dance hall, concert hal, exhibition halll and venue for political meetings.

Immediately after the 5th Congress of the Second Socialist International was held at the Salle Wagram from September 23 to 27 1900, leading to the establishment of a permanent international committee, an even more important development took place.

From September 28 to 30 1900 the Second Congress of French Socialist organisations took place at the Salle Wagram. Jules Guesde (P.O.F.), Jean Allemane, Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand were all present. During it Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier de France decided to leave the unity meeting.

The entrance that led to the Salle Wagram around 1900

On March 28 1910 Vera Figner presided at a fund-raising concert at the Salle Wagram to support Russian revolutionaries escape from prison. Among those who attended were Lenin and Maxime Gorky, although Lenin avoided meeting Gorky since he didn’t wish to have a political argument with him.

Shortly before Lenin left Paris he attended an event at the Salle Wagram on April 15 1912 to honour the centenary of the birth of Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian socialism.

On the third anniversary of the Russian Revolution, November 7 1920, Pierre Monatte, the anarchist Caroline Rémy and Boris Souvarine were among those who attended a celebration meeting at the Salle Wagram.

Caroline Remy, the anarchist journalist who joined the Communist Party in 1921 shown here painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

André Malraux attended at least two meetings organised by the Communist Party in the Salle Wagram. One in 1933 was support of ErnstThälmann, the jailed leader of the German Communist Party, and on December 23 1935 he spoke at the second anniversary of Dmitrov’s acquittal of setting fire to the Reichstag.

On July 30 1936 Malraux was given huge applause at the Salle Wagram when, returning from Spain, he spoke at the first major solidarity meeting with Republican Spain.

Under the Occupation the fascist French Popular Party mounted a ‘Bolshevism against Europe’ exhibition at the Salle Wagram that opened on March 1 1942. On March 8 three resistance fighters failed to set off a bomb in the exhibition. The Romanian-born Jew André Kirschen (aged 15 and a half), Karl Schoenhaar and Georges Tondelier were arrested. They were tortured and the two older men were executed. Kirschen was sent to a concentration camp because of his youth, and survived.

After the Second World War the Salle Wagram was hired by the extreme right on October 28 1948 to hold a meeting for ‘Peoples oppressed by the Bolsheviks’. A counter demonstration by 12,000 communists was attacked by the police, involving 1 death and 300 wounded.

After the war it was also the major Paris jazz venue, with musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Bud Powell and Django Reinhardt all playing there. Sidney Bechet performed his last concert there in 1958.

On September 1 1950 a communist meeting in support of the Vietnam liberation movement was held at the Salle Wagram. Its principal speaker was Léo Figuères, a resistance fighter who had visited Vietnam and whose arrest had been ordered by the military.

The Algerian liberation movement whose president was Messali Hadj, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques, held huge meetings at No. 37 on June 13 1950 and, in protest against police violence on May Day, on May 5 1951.

The Algerian war for independence that began in 1954 saw a joint protest meeting of the SFIO and Marceau Pivert‘s recently founded (June 1955) Mouvement pour la justice et les libertés outre-mer (Movement for Justice and Freedom in the Colonies) taking place at the Salle Wagram on October 7 1955. The meeting called on the government to stop sending military reinforcements to Algeria.

Communism

Communism as an international struggle for freedom. This 1951 socialist realist painting by Boris Taslitkzy shows French dockers fighting to stop arms going to French Indochina

What is shared between those who define themselves or are defined by others as ‘communist’? And how may ‘Communism’ be distinguished both from French anarchism and French socialism, with which it shared much common history and ground?

Babeuf was guillotined on 27 May 1797 as leader of the Conspiracy of Equals against the Directorate

Manifesto of Equals

The 1795 Paris revolutionary ‘Manifesto of Equals’ inspired by François-Noel Babeuf and rescued from oblivion by Philippe Buonarroti (1761-1837) summarised what remained (and remains) common to nearly all those who described themselves as communist across the following two hundred and some years:

We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses… We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities. Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.’

After agreeing to this general statement of belief, communists had much more to disagree with each other upon.  

We have divided the considerable history of Communism in France into five periods:

Communism 1830-1917

For nearly 80 years before the redefining of communism with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 1920 formation of the…

Communism 1918-1938

The Communist (Third) International was formed in Russia in 1919. The Soviet Communist Party directly dictated French Communist Party policy from…

Communism 1939-1947

From the shock of the 1939 non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin to holding ministries in the French government from 1945…

Communism 1978-to date

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the end of the Soviet Union, changes to its traditional working class constituency…