For some, the Montée au Mur of 23 May 1971 was not without consequences. For example, Daniel Mongeau played down the idea of a fight to the death with the Maoists and Trotskyists, and rather emphasised the PCF’s key role in the Union of the Left:
There was no competition with anyone at the time, because it was the Communist Party that dominated the left. And the context was one where the forces of money, the government and the media, all of them, were cultivating the theme of crisis, the crisis caused by the oil price shock. And the PCF ran a counter-campaign which argued that the crisis was not unavoidable, and that you had to fight with the PCF and for French production. Plus the fact that municipal elections had just taken place in March 1971, showing progress by the PCF, and this would be repeated in 1977. So it was a time when the PCF seemed to have the wind in its sails. We mobilised people around the idea of the Common Programme. We did this at demonstrations, and that was the biggest demonstration of all. … We didn’t want to crush the gauchiste fly with a sledgehammer, even if this fly could be irritating.
The early 1970s did see the ebb tide of the far left, even if the 1972 funeral of the Maoist Pierre Overney, shot dead by a factory guard, allowed his party Gauche prolétarienne to mount a massive show of support in the capital (a phenomenon the non-Communist left attempted to repeat in 1979 at the funeral of Pierre Goldman, who was buried to the beat of Caribbean drums). But the decade would also see the PCF overtaken in the polls by its social-democratic frère-ennemi, now led by François Mitterrand. In post-Mao China, the last vestiges of the Shanghai Commune had been dismantled by 1979, as Deng Xiaoping steered the country on a radically new economic course.
The break-up of the Union of the Left, and the crisis it provoked in relations between the Party and its intellectuals, led to the collapse of the PCF’s Paris Federation and the electoral marginalisation of the party, even in the ‘Communard’ bastion of the 20th arrondissement. There would follow the communist calvary of the 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, and finally the humiliating scores for National Secretary Robert Hue at the presidential elections of 2002 (3 per cent), and for his successor Marie-George Buffet in 2007 (2 per cent) – well behind their old Trotskyist rivals.
As for Père-Lachaise and the Mur des Fédérés, their role as ‘realms of memory’ diminished. After 1975, the funerals of Communist leaders ceased to attract great crowds. It was rather the funeral processions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Yves Montand that got the far left back onto the streets. The wishes of the family seemed to prevail over party-political ones: in 1997, Georges Marchais would be buried in Champigny-sur-Marne, the town he had inhabited and represented in parliament. A year previously, François Mitterrand had made the last request that ‘Le Temps des cerises’ be sung, but this took place on the place de la Bastille, and was performed by an American.
The Wall became a national heritage site in 1980, and the annual commemoration is chiefly kept alive by the Friends of the Commune. The cemetery has not become completely devoid of political passion: in April 1988, Dulcie September, the South African leader assassinated in Paris by an apartheid regime death squad, was cremated at Père-Lachaise at a well-attended ceremony organised by the ANC, SWAPO and the PCF.
Nevertheless, the rapid decline of French communism has taken its toll on the memory of the Paris Commune to which it claimed to be the rightful heir. Jacqueline Chonavel, retired from national and municipal politics but still fiercely communist, told me:
I remember, but I was just a small kid at the time, when we all wore red stars at the sports club. It was a working-class thing, and the sports clubs and the youth movements were highly mobilised to commemorate the Mur des Fédérés, and I even remember there were choral groups, and poetry recitals, a whole sort of ceremonial and a very combative, very warm atmosphere. You felt that the Paris Commune really meant something to committed young people. … What’s left of it now? The name of a street [Adrien Lejeune].
This was echoed by Daniel Mongeau, who had succeeded Chonavel as mayor: ‘In Bagnolet, though less than elsewhere, it’s gradually being lost, it’s turning into ancient history. Take a young secondary schoolkid today, and ask him about the Paris Commune. What would he say? That some guys from the suburbs robbed nuns and then the Sacré-Cœur was built. To expiate the crimes of the Commune.’
From a highly qualified stance within the Maoist tradition, Alain Badiou mourns the fading memory of the Paris Commune. In The Communist Hypothesis, he writes:
Does the working class have a heart? Today, in any case, little is remembered, and badly so. The Paris Commune was recently removed from French history syllabuses, in which, however, it had barely occupied a place. The public offices are swollen with the direct descendants of the Versaillais, those for whom communism is a criminal utopia, the worker an outdated Marxist invention, the revolution a bloody orgy, and the idea of a non-parliamentary politics a despotic sacrilege.1
Nevertheless, for Badiou, the martyrdom of the Commune challenges us to think about politics ‘outside of its subjection to the state and outside of the framework of parties or of the Party’.2
A similar assessment has been made by Kristin Ross, for whom, after 1989, the Commune was ‘untethered from Lenin’s apocryphal dance in the snow’.3 No longer moored to the once dominant historiographies of official state communism and national French republicanism, the Commune can be viewed as a form of federated, decentralised community, organising its social life according to principles of association and cooperation. The seventy-two days of ‘communal luxury’ anticipated the encampments and occupations that burst spectacularly onto the world political scene in 2011.
The Paris Commune therefore remains a reference for some on the left, and the Mur des Fédérés is still a realm of memory. In September 2005, near to the Mur, I hid behind a hedge with the self-styled ‘necrosopher’ Bertrand Beyern (at that time, guided tours of the cemetery were strictly forbidden by the mairie of Paris). He whispered:
The cemetery is a place of illusion, a theatre where the dead seem to be with us, seem to sleep. Here, they ‘rest’ … Here we see that the cult of the dead is the only thing believers and non-believers have in common. Here communist memory is inscribed in stone, granite and bronze. In the month of May, this corner of the cemetery takes on a peculiar hue, for 130 years on, people continue to commemorate the Commune. There are political demonstrations. Societies like the Friends of the Commune keep the tradition alive. Often I see real cherries on the grave of Jean-Baptiste Clément. And these days you often see Chinese delegations. Any Chinese person who comes to Paris knows the name, knows about the famous Wall. They ask me: ‘The Wall! The Wall!’ and they come here to pay homage because even if their country is evolving in the direction we know, they were still raised in the cult of the Communards. In a few square metres we have in condensed form the memory of the workers’ movement and the whole turbulent history of the twentieth century. It is the only place in this cemetery where there are no flights of fancy. We are accustomed to seeing tombs that stand out for their humour, but here we find something more powerful, something more profound.4
That same day I crossed Paris to talk to Marcel Cerf, then ninety-five years old – grand-nephew of the Communard Maxime Vuillaume, biographer of the ‘D’Artagnan of the Commune’, Maxime Lisbonne, and doyen of the Friends of the Commune. Cerf confessed to me that, although he had been passionately interested in the Commune early on and had followed the huge funeral procession of Zéphirin Camélinat in 1932, he had only heard of Adrien Lejeune after the war, and especially at the time of the centenary. As neither a communist nor an anti-communist, Cerf offered this judgement on the Last Communard:
Obviously, we can’t deny that Adrien Lejeune fought for the Commune, but we would have to see in precisely what conditions. During the siege, he was a member of the National Guard and even obtained the rank of sergeant, but after the armistice with the Prussians he surrendered his weapons. And when the Commune was proclaimed, he had no desire to resume a military role in the National Guard, and managed to find a job in the food supply service at the mairie of the 20th arrondissement. That meant he could avoid being in the National Guard. So he did this work during the entire Commune, until the start of the Bloody Week. And at the start of the Bloody Week he thought it would be preferable to get out of Paris. He was arrested at the gates of Paris by the National Guard and taken to the prison of La Petite Roquette, where it was proposed to him to take back his role in the National Guard, because if he stayed in prison he would most certainly be considered a traitor. He therefore decided it would be better to get back into uniform, and it seems he fought bravely either at the rue du Faubourg St-Antoine, or the rue Ramponneau, as he himself said [sic]. In any case, he fought to the last day and was arrested on 28 May. … As a combatant he was not perhaps absolutely exemplary, but he did fight for the Commune and for this reason deserves our homage.5
This is a nuanced judgement based on a precise knowledge of certain documents, which other evidence from Moscow and elsewhere can serve to complement. Adrien Lejeune was not the heroic Communard of Communist hagiography, but a man who played a modest yet fateful role in an event whose brief existence would come to haunt the left, and ultimately determine the rest of Lejeune’s days.
The Bagnolet of today is very different from that of 1971, let alone 1871. In 2014, the last Communist mayor, Marc Everbecq, was defeated by the socialist frère-ennemi: Bagnoletais municipal communism therefore had a shorter lifespan than Adrien Lejeune. Given the crushing dominance of the left in this suburban town, there are no plans yet to rechristen streets: the rue Lénine is still adjacent to the rue Karl Marx; the College of Labour, Red Bagnolet’s first ambitious project, still carries a bas-relief of a worker and a peasant brandishing hammer and sickle respectively. The very modest rue Adrien Lejeune is also there, extending beneath a block of flats occupied on the ground floor by a geriatrician’s office, and opening onto neat 1960s-style pavillons, much sought after by the poorer ‘bohemian bourgeois’ who are being driven out of Paris by booming house prices. But the Grand’Rue, where Lejeune walked to and from the Commune, is in a sorry state: many shops are boarded up and covered with graffiti, though the house where he was born is occupied by a thriving couscous restaurant, Les Folies Berbères. The mairie that Lejeune and Roussel descended upon is dwarfed by the Mercuriale twin towers and a huge new town hall. The périphérique now prevents you from reaching Paris on foot. The city walls, of course, are no more. Instead, at the end of the Grand’Rue is the Paris International Coach Station, where Eurolines transport migrant workers from all over former Communist Eastern Europe.
At the end of this tortuous journey through the life and legend of Lejeune, it only remains to salute the Last Communard’s entrance into fiction. In 1994, the Swiss novelist Jeanlouis Cornuz published Les Désastres de la guerre. At the start of this narrative we find ourselves in the rue Oberkampf during the last battles of the Commune, with ‘Adrien Lejeune’, his sweetheart ‘Aline’, and ‘Arthur de Charleville’, all three of them aged seventeen. Adrien fires the last shot of the Commune, after Aline has expired in his arms. Arthur will leave to pursue the brief but brilliant poetic career we are all familiar with. Adrien rediscovers his sister in Frankfurt, joins the Socialist International, gets to know Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, takes part in the German Revolution of 1918, becomes the father of a son who will join the International Brigades, then ends up reaching the USSR, where he dies in 1942. In the sequel, Les Caprices, Cornuz writes:
Adrien Lejeune died during the war. After all the uncertain years he had lived through, forced to take such and such from his youthful idols, such and such from his old comrades, for so many traitors – not to mention the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which was not easy to swallow – he had had the double joy of seeing the USSR stand up to Hitler’s Germany and, after the catastrophes of the first months of the war, see it recover, block the way of the invaders in front of Leningrad and Moscow, so much so that the hope of final victory became reasonable. His last years were lonely, for he had lost his wife at the start of the Spanish Civil War. He managed to feel glad about that, since it meant she had not seen the triumph of Franco. Lonely? And yet he was not alone, surrounded by younger men and women who had been born during the First World War and took him to be a sort of monument to Revolution – hadn’t he experienced the struggles of the Commune, in 1871, then the German Revolution–or the bid for one – in 1918? He followed on the radio the deadly fight waged by the Soviet armies for the USSR and for the freedom of the people, the final struggle which would lead at last – you could hope – to the socialist and communist society evoked by Babeuf, whose fitting first name was Noel, one hundred and forty years before.6
Cornuz thus turns Lejeune into a container of history, an extra in a fresco of what he calls the ‘cataract’ of time. As a form of conclusion, I would say that this text leaves a lot to be desired: it creates arbitrary and implausible links between Lejeune and his times. His picaresque character as grand old revolutionary, betrayed by others and virtuous to the end, does not touch the reader.
The novel leaves out the elements that make Adrien Lejeune so interesting: his real and imagined life, with its convictions, friendships, moments of cowardice, half-truths, lies, shady corners and banalities, a story of property and theft at every level; the manipulation of memory and the (largely consensual) instrumentalisation of an individual who became a ‘relic’ of a cause; the randomness, the pathos and the cruelty of History. It seems that, much more than any novel, the documents and testimonies, swarming with contradictions and silences, constitute in themselves a historical drama and answer at least a few of the questions that a little black marble grave had raised in my mind on the morning of 10 November 1989.