The Wall of the Paris Commune
Personal Essay by Xujun Eberlein
(Published in Divide )

It was my elderly father who reminded me of it.  The day my family left for our Paris vacation in June, I phoned from Boston to my parents in China. My mother asked me – not without envy – to send photos. My father, 78 years old and normally quiet on the phone, interrupted in a serious tone:

“Pay respect to the Wall of the Paris Commune for us.”

I paused before saying “okay” – I hadn’t thought of that. I had forgotten the once sacred name of my childhood that symbolized the beginning of Communism, like an ex-Christian forgetting the Crucifixion.  

*
I told Bob about my father’s wish. My American husband said, “Interesting notion. What is it?”

His words caught me completely by surprise. “You don’t know about the Paris Commune?” This seemed improbable, given that Bob is well read and had studied Karl Marx when he did his Ph.D. in economics, and the Paris Commune was rudimentary knowledge for every single person in China, from elementary school children to white-haired grandmothers.

“I’ve heard about a commune in England,” he said.

As irrelevant as wind, horse and cow (so goes the Chinese adage).

I began to educate my husband and daughter, but Sonya blurted out her teen-jargon: “That’s so random. I don’t want to see it.”

I told her we had to see it for Grandpa, who’s old and in China, unlikely to have the opportunity that he had pined for since his youth. My daughter, 15 years old and tall like her dad, made a moue of discontent, “Whatever floats your boat…”

My boat. When I was her age, I had been struggling to stay on the boat of “qualified revolutionary successors,” otherwise I would have drowned.  Sonya doesn’t see how fortunate she is, born with the freedom to not be on any boat.

*
Toward the end of our busy week in Paris, on Friday afternoon, after the Louvre, the Champs-Elysees, and the Eiffel Tower we went to Père Lachaise Cemetery to look for the Wall of the Paris Commune. When we arrived, it was already 6:00 p.m. Our sweet-talk with the door guard, in both English and broken French, received only impatient, incomprehensible French yelling, and the heavy gate was closed in my face. Sonya, who was studying French in high school, had dallied aside and said nothing at first; now she turned toward the Metro station with a grunt.

I stood there and didn’t want to leave. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to convince my daughter to come again the next day, which would be the last day of our stay and was fully scheduled, a big disappointment suddenly jammed my chest. Later I would ask myself why this visit had such a sudden importance and urgency to me. It was not because the Cemetery includes such famous graves as Balzac’s and Chopin’s. It was not really because of my father either – I had frequently made fun of the old man’s blind fealty. So it must have been me, myself. I had to see the Wall that I worshipped in my childhood, and part of my youth. But the imperishable revolutionary belief possessed by my father was the result of him, as an adult, seeking it out before liberation, while it was imposed on me as a child by him (and society).  It was only logical that I abandon such belief on growing up. So why, really?  Might this be analogous to an atheist being attracted to evidence of Jesus?

The gate opened a crack and a string of tourists came out. I stopped a young couple and asked in English if they knew where the Wall of the Paris Commune was. Both shook their heads with an apologetic smile. Bob tried to ask the guard the same question and received only a stern face.

The Wall, or the Paris Commune for that matter, was not mentioned in any of our tour guide books, which was another surprise to me, but I remembered a Chinese friend who had said that the Wall is actually outside of the cemetery. So I dragged Bob and Sonya along, scouring the perimeter of the cemetery, unsure if I would be able to recognize the Wall when I saw it. I had a vague memory of a picture - a relief sculpture of a group of figures on a huge wall.

Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest and most famous in Paris, with some 105 acres. After 20 minutes of walking counter-clockwise along its southeast wall and seeing nothing close to what I was looking for, Sonya’s miserable face eventually stopped me. I had asked several people along the way, passers-by, shop workers, hotel receptionists and the like; no one knew about such a wall. No one had even heard about the Paris Commune. One woman asked me if that was a restaurant’s name. How strange, I thought, a whole country of Chinese people had worshipped a thing that did not really exist?

*
On Saturday morning, our last day in Paris, I took the train to Père Lachaise Cemetery again, this time alone. For this I had to give up the Orsay Museum, an Impressionist exhibition my daughter insisted on seeing, that I would have very much liked to accompany her to. Instead I asked Bob to take her there.

The same southwest gate of the cemetery, on Boulevard de Ménilmontant, was now open wide. Under the bright June sun, a tall man in a red-collared winter jacket was selling the cemetery maps for two Euros. I bought one and scanned the list of monuments. Again I did not find the Wall of the Paris Commune. I turned around and asked the map seller who spoke unexpectedly fluent English.

“Most Chinese come to see this wall, outside,” he smiled at me knowingly, pointing to a red mark “24” on the map; “And this wall, inside,” his fingers moved up to the northeast corner of the map, stopping at a red “17” in Division 76.
“This is a beautiful monument,” he added, his fingers quickly sliding back to monument 24.

My relief turned into confusion. Two walls? Not just one? And they were so far apart? I read the names of the two monuments on the map. Neither mentioned the Paris Commune:

17: Murdes Fédérés
24: Victimes des révolutions

*
“Victimes des révolutions” is located on Avenue Gambetta, in a belt shaped public garden bordering the west wall of the cemetery. Had we walked clockwise from where we started the scouring yesterday, we would have reached it in two minutes – it might have saved me today’s trip, or so I thought.

I ran into no one on the peaceful garden path, except a man calmly urinating on the sidewalk near the entrance. And I recognized the relief sculpture right away: a goddess like woman, being shot in the chest, falling backward with open arms, protecting the men behind her from bullets. The picture aroused my remote childhood memory with such clarity that I was perplexed, one thing wasn’t right: the wall, a piece separate from and parallel to the cemetery wall, was small, not huge as I remembered. A thin bouquet of blue lavender flowers lay in front. An artistic-looking man came with a complex camera. He took photos of the woman on the relief from several angles. I asked him if this monument was for the Paris Commune.

“No, no,” he said in crude English, “it is for victims of revolutions. No Paris Commune.”

The way he said it, it was unclear if he even knew about the Paris Commune. I remembered my father’s request and took a photo of the sculpture as well before going into the cemetery for the other wall.

After a 15-minute stroll on cobblestone paths crisscrossing fields of tombstones, I reached Monument 17 in a triangular corner. A large sign on the inside surface of the cemetery wall read:

AUX MORTS
DE LA COMMMUNE
21-28 MAI 1871

Nothing there other than this plain sign – so simple it was almost disappointing. No flowers either.

But the dates erased any doubt in my mind: the foul wind and rain of blood in that May week 133 years ago played between the lines of Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France, a book forever standing on my father’s shelf in a small study in southwest China. After France’s defeat and subsequent surrender in the war with Prussia, the new government in Versailles led by Thiers set out to disarm the National Guards in Paris as the patriotic Parisians refused Prussia’s victory. An international war turned into a civil war, and the uprising working class, many of whom were the National Guards, took decisions into their own hands. “On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of ‘Vive la Commune!’" Marx wrote (a passionate line teachers had read many times during my school years in China. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, my older sister, born on March 18, 1953, seriously considered changing her name to the Chinese equivalent of “Paris Commune” to mark her birthday). The Paris Commune, the first government of the working class, held out against Versailles for two months. But on May 21, the Versailles troops entered Paris. There followed a week of bloody street fighting and 30,000 Parisians were killed, far more than the casualties in the French-Prussian war.  The last battle, before the Commune’s complete collapse on May 28, took place in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where about 200 Commune members fought hand to hand in the mud while heavy rain pounded the tombs. A third died in the fighting and those who survived were executed against a wall in the eastern corner of the cemetery.

So this was the actual Wall. But why, for so many years, had we been told it was the other one, the sculpted wall? Because an effective propaganda needs pretty decoration and evocative images?

I stared at the plain sign. A middle-aged French couple walked by, their eyes followed my eyes, and they stopped beside me. The man asked me a question in French. From his expression I gathered the question must have been either “What do you think this is for?” or “Why are you so interested in this?”

“Paris Commune,” I said in discrete English, “Karl Marx. Communism.”

The man and woman looked at each other in a baffled expression, and both shook their heads. Then the man protested in mixed French and English:

“This is no Communism! No Karl Marx! This is the Fédérés!”

Without speaking French, I didn’t know how to explain that the Paris Commune, according to Chinese textbooks, was the first “proletarian dictatorship” governmental power in the world, the pioneer of all Communist countries. Karl Marx himself drafted the Commune’s proclamation.

“It was the start,” I wrote the word “start” on my map and showed it to the man, “start of Communism.”

They kept saying “No.” There was no way to continue the conversation with their halting English and my stillborn French. So after I repeated my claim two more times I said goodbye.  A few steps away I looked back, they smiled at me, still shaking their heads, but a bit more reluctantly now.

*
Back at the hotel, Bob and Sonya were waiting for me. I told Bob about the cemetery and he opened the map I bought. On the back of the map he found a short introduction in 5 languages: French, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese, that I had overlooked earlier. The very end of the introduction read:

“The visitor will surely be moved by the memory of the ‘Fédérés’ of the Paris Commune (1871), whose graves are on the spot where they were actually shot. In this little corner of history one can almost hear the message of their faith in the future.”

This was yet another surprise: the Paris Commune was so emotionally, emphatically introduced by the official guide of Père Lachaise Cemetery, however no one living or working around it heard about it.

I wondered what to tell my father. That almost no French person I talked to knew about the Paris Commune, the cornerstone of his revolutionary belief? That the wall he knew the picture of was a stealthy replacement of the actual, plain wall, and the famous sculpture has nothing to do with the Commune? That for the few people who happened to notice the actual Wall, the Paris Commune had nothing to do with Communism?

I did not know.

*
Upon returning to Boston, my research on the sculpture “Victimes des révolutions” found that it was designed by Paul Moreau-Vauthier (1871-1936) in 1900, and was built in 1909.  Several resources noted an inscription at the bottom of the sculpture, though I did not see it when I was there:

What We Want of the Future
What We Want of It Is Justice -
That Is Not Vengeance.
             - Victor Hugo

Interestingly, the website of the University of New South Wales in Australia, www.arts.unsw.edu.au/pariscommune claimed that though “today the wall named Le Mur des Fédérés in Division 76 at Père-Lachaise Cemetery remains the site of numerous pilgrimages, it has only a symbolic relation to the actual incident and can in no way be the actual wall of the time since it was built after the Commune. Pauper's corner where the last 147 federalists were shot was razed when Avenue Gambetta was built. A monument built with the stones of the old wall stands on the exact place where the mass execution had taken place. The monument's moving sculpture (was) designed by Paul Moreau-Vauthier.”
This claim, however, contradicts not only the statement on Père-Lachaise Cemetery’s official map, but also its own argument, as the monument designed by Paul Moreau-Vauthier was built after the Commune as well, in fact 38 years after.

Because my research in English uncovered little more information than this, I performed an internet search in Chinese. The result: someone else had worked this puzzle, though with a different motivation.

In the fall of 1972, a Chinese scholar and French expert Shen Dali (now a professor of Beijing Foreign Language Institute) visited Paris and Père-Lachaise Cemetery for the first time. For him, as it had been for me, the sculpted wall with the goddess-like woman was the symbol of the Paris Commune. However, standing in front of the revered wall, the plural word “revolutions” in the title of the sculpture made him suspicious. A closer look at the figures behind the woman on the sculpture increased his suspicion: some of the figures seemed to dress like the soldiers of Versailles (how amazing Professor Shen could tell this!). And, unlike me, he saw the inscribed lines of Hugo’s poem, and frowned at the refusal of vengeance which he thought inconsistent with the Commune’s spirit.

Shen subsequently spent considerable time in libraries and the town hall of Paris researching this sculpture and its artist. His conclusion: Paul Moreau-Vauthier was a “fanatical Chauvinist.” Though a son of a Commune member, Moreau-Vauthier’s opinions had nothing in common with the Paris Commune. His sculpture was designed for all killed in each and every revolution.

In a conversation with Jean Braire, then Secretary-General of the Association of Friends of the Paris Commune, Shen was told the sculptor reconciled all deaths without distinguishing revolutionary from reactionary, including all Parisians and Versailles killed in the engagement, and that the survivors of the Commune always refused this sculpted wall. Jean Braire, believing this wall an insult to the Commune, also told Shen that the Soviet Union and many other countries mistook this monument as the actual Commune’s Wall. Poland even printed it on their new currency note. “I wrote to the Poland Consular in France and requested a timely correction,” Braire was quoted as saying. It is unclear when this conversation had taken place.

As it turned out, when I asked, none of my Chinese friends had heard about Shen’s discovery 32 years ago.

*
I found all kinds of excuses to delay the phone call to China, until ten days after my return from Paris. My mother answered the phone, and as always she shouted at my father to pick up another receiver, so they could both talk with me.  In the middle of my chat with my mother about how beautiful the Provence rural area was, my quiet father stepped in and asked if I had seen the Wall of the Paris Commune.

“Yes,” I said without providing details, and quite unwisely, I added in an attempt to branch off the conversation, “not only that, I have seen the graves of Balzac and Chopin.” The truth is, I didn’t have the time to find Chopin’s grave.
My father said, “What have Balzac or Chopin to do with the Paris Commune?”

It took me a few moments to realize my father had thought the entire Père Lachaise Cemetery was devoted to the Commune members. After all, 30,000 of them were killed in the bloodstained May of 1871. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given my own false impression of a huge, sculpted cemetery wall. But I was.

I explained to my father the place where the Commune members fought to their death was already a cemetery long before the revolution. I didn’t know if he understood, or was willing to understand, because he said nothing. After some silence he asked, “What did you feel there?”

He meant the Wall. All the while as I was talking to him, my mind had focused on the picture of the plain sign, the simple, real Wall. At his questioning, the picture flashed back to the beautiful sculpture. I said, “I liked it very much.”

“Like?”

Apparently I had used the wrong verb. I could almost hear the churning heart of my short, old father, to whom the Wall of the Paris Commune remained a sacred place.

In the end, I did not tell him what I’d found. #

(Published in Divide, Art and Politics Issue, Fall 2005)

[Top]





Murdes Fédérésimage

Victimes des Révoluntionsimage