The esplanade is located in front of the ITALIE DEUX shopping centre, between Avenue d'Italie and Rue Bobillot. Visitors have their backs to the shopping centre.

Introduction to the 13th arrondissement

Hello and welcome to this walk in the footsteps of the Communards of the 13th arrondissement.

In 1859, Paris still consisted of 12 arrondissements, bounded by the Wall of the Farmers-General — the former toll wall where goods were taxed. To the east, this wall followed what is now Boulevard Vincent Auriol; to the west, Boulevard Blanqui. Here, at Place d’Italie, stood the Barrière de Fontainebleau, from which the present-day Avenue d’Italie ran southwards.

Paris lived under the imperial regime of Napoleon III, the height of the great industrial revolution. A new industrial bourgeoisie—mines, steelworks, railways, banks—lived in unbridled luxury. To keep these large enterprises running, people were needed, lots of people. This gave rise to what Jacques Rougerie calls ‘the working classes in the plural’: on the one hand, the old artisan class, straddling the line between wage labourer and small-scale employer, still harbouring hopes of rising up the social ladder; on the other, the proletariat, who had nothing but their labour to sell and knew they would never become employers.

A new, working-class neighbourhood

In 1860, Napoleon III created the 13th arrondissement by annexing the northern parts of Ivry and Gentilly, land that was still semi-agricultural, between the Farmers-General Wall and the Thiers fortifications. The arrondissement developed around two centres: to the north, around the Salpêtrière and the future Austerlitz station, the small craft trades of Croulebarbe — tanners, shoemakers, cordonniers, tanneries and leather-working workshops; to the south, in the Gare district and along the Bièvre, the large modern factories — the Say sugar refinery, the Lombard chocolate factory, the workshops at Orléans station, tanneries and leatherworks — each employing 800 to 1,000 people, and small urban industries along the Bièvre in the Maison-Blanche district.

It was here that those driven out of the city centre by Haussmann’s major works, people from the provinces and foreigners, crowded into unsanitary and overcrowded slums. Émile Duval would become the representative and defender of this proletariat of large-scale industry. The population exploded: from 46,000 inhabitants in 1860, it reached 70,000 in 1869. Wages were very low, and repression fell upon all those who protested. In this ‘suffering suburb’, 15,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants were destitute.