Communards' Wall
코뮌 전사의 벽
A stretch of the south-eastern wall of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. At the end of Bloody Week in May 1871, 147 Commune fighters captured in the cemetery were shot in front of it by the Versailles army and buried in a pit at its foot. Since 1880 the organisations of the left have marched there every year at the end of May, and it has become the labour movement's symbol of the Commune.
In depth
In the last days of Bloody Week the remaining Commune fighters held out in Belleville and in the Père Lachaise cemetery. In the afternoon the army climbed the unfortified cemetery wall and fought hand to hand among the tombs; having taken the cemetery towards evening, it lined the 147 survivors up against the wall, shot them and buried them in a pit dug at its foot. About twenty officers of the National Guard captured elsewhere and sentenced to death by military tribunals were brought there and buried in the same grave. Over the following days hundreds of bodies of people shot elsewhere were carted in and buried with them. French sources date the shooting to the evening of 27 May, English sources to the 28th.
In his 1891 introduction Engels wrote that the wall where the last mass murder took place still stood as a mute but eloquent witness to the frenzy of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the proletariat dares to stand up for its rights. The number of victims of Bloody Week as a whole is still disputed, with recent estimates between ten and twenty thousand.
On 23 May 1880, two months before the amnesty of the Communards, 25,000 people answering Jules Guesde's call marched past the wall for the first time, red roses in their buttonholes, in defiance of the police. The "climb to the wall" became a yearly event in the last week of May; Jean Jaurès marched there several times with Édouard Vaillant. Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx were buried opposite the wall in 1911, and on 24 May 1936, just after the Popular Front's victory, 600,000 people marched there behind Léon Blum and Maurice Thorez. The wall was listed as a historic monument in 1983 and bears a marble plaque reading "To the dead of the Commune, 21–28 May 1871". The present wall was rebuilt, partly with the original stones, when the whole cemetery wall was reconstructed.