1936-1940

From Popular Front to the Spanish Civil War and World War Two

Spanish Republic, International Brigade, Munich, Hitler-Stalin Pact, Phoney War – in progress

A Communist march in 1937 demands (unsuccessfully) that France supplies the Spanish Republic with guns and aircraft
Striking workers at the Samaritaine Department store in Paris at a meeting in June 1936

Rue Gabrielle

Arrondissement 18

Number: 17, 19, 32, 49

In 1919 , the 18-year-old André Malraux went to the home of the surrealist writer Max Jacob at No 17, the friend of Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Modigliani, and offered him a poem he had written.

Named in 1863 after the first name of a wife of one of the owners the road was first opened in 1840, initially being called the Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul and then in 1843 the Rue Bénédict.

Picasso lived at No. 49 with his friend Carlos Casagemas from October to December 1900. This was Picasso’s first studio in Paris, but after they returned to Spain for Christmas, Carlos returned on his own to Paris where he committed suicide early the next year. Another painter, an American or Bulgarian origins, Jules Pascin took over the studio there in 1909.

La Vie painted by Picasso in 1903 features his friend Carlos Casagemas who committed suicide in 1901 after falling into a deep depression due, it is believed, to his impotence.

Fifty years earlier Paul Verlaine first met his future wife, the 16-year-old Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville at No. 19.

The journal La Revue anarchiste that the exiled Élisée Reclus wrote for in 1893 was based at No. 32.

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PLACES

Rue Montalembert

Arrondissement 7

Number 7

The swish Hotel Pont Royal occupies much of this short street opened in 1913 off the Rue de Bac leading to the Pont Royal. It was given this name in 1924, after a theoretician of liberal Catholicism, Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870).

In October 1944 this hotel was where Lucie Aubrac was lodged with her children while a delegate to the National Consultative Assembly, before moving to the Rue Marbeuf in January when her husband Raymond was abruptly fired from his job as Commissioner of Marseilles because of his pronounced left leanings.

From the 1930s the basement bar at the Hotel Pont-Royal was used by Gaston Gallimard (1881-1975), head of the Gallimard publishing house as a discrete meeting place with intellectuals and writers such as Hemingway, Malraux, Gide, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sagan, Sartre and many more in the 1930s and 1950s.

in 1928 Gallimard purchased the effectively adjacent 5, Rue Sébastien-Bottin (at the time 43 Rue de Beaune) as his new headquarters. As managing editor of La Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) from, 1911 to 1940, Gallimard gave Gide the literary editorship and was the first publisher of Malraux and Sartre.

In June 1940 Gallimard moved to the South of France trying to please the Germans by leaving a writer, Drieu la Rochelle, who espoused ‘Socialist Fascism’ as Editor of the NRF. Accused by the Germans of employing Jews and communists La Rochelle fired them.

The Gallimard press was accused of collaborationism during the Occupation and La Rochelle committed suicide in March 1945.

In 2011, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Gallimard publishing house, the section of the street Rue Sébastien-Bottin that included No 5 was renamed Rue Gaston-Gallimard.

Two minutes from the Hotel Pont Royal is the publishing house Gallimard, now in a street named after its founder

PLACES

Rue Saint-Victor

Arrondissement 5

Numbers: 16, 24, 35

The now much shortened road was originally named after the nearby 11th century Saint Victor Abbey on the banks of the Seine whose walls it skirted. That was closed in 1790 during the French Revolution and then demolished and replaced by a huge wine market in 1811. the abbey site is now occupied by the Paris Global Natural Phenomena Institute (Institut de physique du globe de Paris) and by the Jussieu University campus.

Under Haussmann and the construction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Rue Monge and the Rue des Ecoles the original road lost 75% of its length, and as a result of successive rebuilding, the pavement in places now has two levels

Paul Verlaine was put up by his mistress, Eugénie Krantz, at her flat at No. 16 in 1895.

The conference centre, the Maison de la Mutualité, was built at No. 24 in art-deco style in 1931. From then to the present it has witnessed many significant left meetings.

The Internatlonal Youth Congress against war and fascism took place at the Maison de la Mutualite on May 26 1933. Organised by Paul Langevin and others it aimed to build a common front against fascism.

On July 24 1934 Jacques Prévert held the festival of French anti-militarist songs at La Mutualite. On October 23 1934 under the chair of André Gide there was report-back meeting from the Moscow International Writers congress, with speakers including André Malraux and Fernand Léger. Malraux, Gide, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, André Breton and Ilya Ehrenbourg were among the 230 participants from 38 countries who attended the International Writers Congress in the Defence of Culture there on June 21 1935.

After the Second World War around 1,500 Algerians were arrested on April 1 1951 when they went to a banned meeting about Algerian independence at No. 24, the ‘Mutu‘.

Simone de Beauvoir chaired a meeting there on 26 January 1971 with speakers including Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard and Marguerite Duras in support of the banned Maoist newspaper, la Cause du Peuple.

In 1860 Émile Zola was thrown out of No. 35 for not paying his rent after staying in a room under the roof for a few weeks. During that time his friend from Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne, visited him there.

A view Zola would have had of the St Nicolas du Chardonnet church before it got its1934 facade.

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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.

Literature

Twenty 19th century French writers, including George Sand, Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Émile Zola

Those referenced will include 20th century leftist writers (novelists, poets, song-writers, philosophers such as: Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Victor Serge, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Brassens, Marc Bloch, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Andre Gorz, Daniel Bensaid, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Benoite Groult, Andre Malraux as well as many 19th century republicans and socialists such as Victor Hugo, Daniel Stern, George Sand, Flora Tristan, Alphonse de Lamartine, Emile Zola, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme

Poems from the left