“Ce que nous demandons à l’Avenir.

Ce que nous voulons de Lui.

C’est la Justice.

Ce n’est pas la Vengeance.”

Victor Hugo (Inscription on the Communards’ Wall)

What we ask of the future

What we want from it 

Is justice

Not vengeance

The Communards’ Wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris was very close to where Seamus and Cecilia lived in Paris between 1984 and 1985.  Friends who visited Seamus in Paris were no doubt given a guided tour of this place, which will always be one that I associate with Seamus.

On 28 May 1871, one-hundred forty-seven federes, combatants of the Paris Commune, were shot and thrown in an open trench at the foot of the wall. To the  left, the wall became the symbol of the people’s struggle for their liberty and ideals. The massacre of the Communards did not put an end to the repression. During the fighting between 20,000 and 35,000 deaths, and more than 43,000 prisoners were taken; afterwards, a military court pronounced about a hundred death sentences, more than 13,000 prison sentences, and close to 4,000 deportations to  New Caledonia.

The memory of the Commune remained engraved in the people's memory, especially within the workers’ movement which regenerated itself in a few years time. The first march to the Wall took place on 23 May 1880, two months before the Communards’Amnesty: 25,000 people, a symbolic "immortal" red rose in their buttonholes, stood up against police forces. From that time on, this "ascent to the Wall", punctuated French labour force political history. Every year since 1880, the organizations of the French left have held a demonstration in this symbolic place during the last week of May.

Jules Jouy, a chansonnier from Montmartre wrote:

"Tombe sans croix et sans chapelle, sans lys d'or, sans vitraux d'azur, quand le peuple en parle, il l'appelle le Mur.”

"Tomb without a cross or chapel, or golden lilies, or sky blue church windows, when the people talk about it, they call it The Wall."

Inscription on the Communards’ Wall

Seamus at Communards’Wall 1983

“Monument to the Victims of Revolutions” by Paul Vautier-Moreau,

Liz Osborne