Tour of French Tombs Part Deux

If you'll permit me one more fugue on Parisian markers of the dead, I spent the afternoon in Pere Lachaise cemetery, the most visited such place in the world (if wikipedia can be trusted). If today's crowds are representative, the bulk of the visitors have travelled to see the modest marker of Jim Morrison's grave (with Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf running a distant second). The cemetary was built by Napoleon Bonaparte, then far outside of city limits, and thus safe from the presumed health hazards of the decaying dead.

At the beginning of 1870, there were only months left in the Second Empire of Napoleon III (Napoleon I's nephew). Napoleon III (at left below) had spend the last 18 years as a dictator with the weapon of popular support (via universal suffrage). Some have called him a proto-fascist, and he used the reigns of undivided state power both to brutally suppress dissent and radically redesign Paris. The so-called "Hausmannization" of Paris (after his Prefect of the Seine Baron Haussman) made the city I visit today, with its wide, straight boulevards, gaslights, public parks and monuments (and of course the famous sewers, where the legend of the Phantom of the Opera was born). Even public urinals were created with statuesque elegance. The new city was reclaimed for the well-to-do: the movement of capital was secured, and the urban flaneur (bourgeois wanderer) could stroll and be entertained. But the new city was also seemingly safer from revolution (Paris had already experienced 4 or 5 since the big one in 1789). The wide boulevards could not be defended by barricades, and the homes of the poor in particular were mercilessly bulldozed - after all, the threat of revolution emerged most in the spaces of the disenfranchised. Many of these workers were relocated to areas like Montmartre, safely outside of current city limits, where spies of the police state followed any attempt to organize or criticize.

Napoleon's support was drying up by 1870, and his attempts to liberalize his Empire, as a last ditch effort at presenting himself as a man of the people, only allowed more voices of discontent to surface. Socialists and Republicans alike detested his heavy hand. This was the situation when his cousin Pierre picked a fight with a critical newspaper. A journalist named Victor Noir presented himself to Pierre, responding to his invitation to duel, and Pierre pulled a revolver and shot him on the spot. When he was acquitted by the judiciary (largely in the pocket of his cousin the Emperor), the public outrage resulted in a funeral procession 100,000 strong.

Victor Noir's grave at Pere Lachaise (left) portrays him holding his top hat, as if he had just fallen. You may see noticable...um...wear on his johnson. This is due to the fact that his grave quickly became a fertility symbol - leaving flowers in his hat or rubbing his crotch presumably guaranteed erections and babies. Something that Félix de Beaujour could have used (whoever he was) judging by his ridiculous memorial (at right).

Is the virtue of a person inversely proportional to the size of their tomb? The marker of Adolphe Thiers (at left), the man who would briefly lead the new government (the Third Republic) which succeeded Napoleon III's second empire, would support this conclusion. Marx once called Thiers a "monstrous gnome," and this gnome wanted a war to start his new government. If you really want a war, it isn't all that hard to get one - just ask Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Thiers wanted a war to reestablish French dignity after a brutal defeat by the Germans (which ended Napoleon III's state), and to destroy the threat of radical Paris once and for all. He wanted one, he started one (predictably it began in Montmartre), he got one: the Paris Commune. It ended with his troops slaughtering anyone in their path: some 30,000 Parisians died in "Bloody week" in summary executions, with government losses at something like 1,000.

I spent quite some time looking for his tomb in Pere Lachaise. Apparently it has regularly been subject to vandalism, and so when I finally found it I realized that they had removed his name and left only his initials. Nevermind - it was exactly what I imagined it would be: massive, grandiose - with armed angels bedecking it. All the miserable gnome could have hoped - bigger than all of the other tombs that I looked at.

And what of the 30,000 Parisians? Many of whom, it must be said, had simply not been able to afford to leave the city on vacation, and were often standing in the doorways of their homes when shot - men, women and children. A simple memorial on the north wall, the "Mur des Federes," where the final hundred or so holdouts of the Communards were murdered. Better that way, I think.

The north path of Pere Lachaise, past the wall of the Communards, also contains some beautiful memorials to those who were deported from Vichy France during the Holocaust. Nuit et Bruillard, Night and Fog (monument at left) was a Nazi directive which directed some prisoners in occupied territories to be deported in the middle of the night, with no notice given to family or friends - thus to increase the intimidation factor.

Quoth the raven, "always more."