At the foot of the Mercure Hotel, 25 Boulevard Blanqui

We are at 25 Boulevard Blanqui. On the first floor of the hotel, between two windows, there is a small plaque indicating that this is where Auguste Blanqui, an exemplary revolutionary activist, died.

Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist revolutionary. Some historians regard him as one of the founders of the French far-left; he aspired to ‘real social equality’. Blanquism is a republican movement calling for communism and convinced that power must be seized by force, by an armed and determined group. His ideas would have a profound influence on the Communards of the 13th arrondissement.

Blanqui attempted numerous “coups” which failed and led to him spending over 30 years in prison. In 1871, having been imprisoned on the eve of the Commune, he did not take part in it. As his influence was immense, Thiers opposed any prisoner exchange for his release. Marx said of Blanqui that he was the soul the Commune lacked.

This poem by Eugène Pottier was inspired by his visit to 25 Boulevard d’Italie on 1 January 1881:

Against a heartless class,

Fighting for the people without bread,

He had, in life, four walls,

In death, four pine planks!

The mortuary was on the fourth floor;

And the crowd, with slow steps, climbed the stairs:

The working people of Paris, in their work overalls,

Women, children; more than one pale face.

Now that he is dead, you will hear him... perhaps!

This fighter, passing from prison to the coffin,

From the depths of his silence, he says: Neither God nor master!

Many leaders of the 13th arrondissement were Blanquists, such as Émile Duval, Léo Meillet (who was mayor of ^the 13th during the Commune), Serizier, and Jean-Baptiste Chardon. All were speakers at the great public meetings of 1869, which were the crucible of the Commune.

Before concluding this paragraph, and as we are not far from the subject, we would like to mention, firstly, the workshops where Auguste Blanqui manufactured his own gunpowder: 113 Rue de Lourcine, now Rue Léon Maurice Nordmann. And ought not not to forget Victoire Tinayre, who lived at 16 Rue Abel Hovelacque, an energetic woman, a patriot and humanitarian, a deist and anti-clericalist, a pacifist, a socialist and a Fourierist. As a teacher, she naturally joined the Commune. On 11 April 1871, she was entrusted with the general inspection of textbooks for girls’ schools in the Seine department. On 22 April, Édouard Vaillant also tasked her with “organising and supervising recruitment in girls’ schools”, after which she was appointed inspector of primary schools in the 12th arrondissement.

Émile Duval

Let us now turn to an important figure in the 13th arrondissement and the Commune: Émile Duval. Born in 1840, the son of a laundress, he lived at 87 Rue de la Glacière. In 1860, he became a steel foundry worker, a job involving up to 12 hours’ work a day in temperatures of 40 to 50°C. At a very young age, he realised that he belonged to an exploited class and that it was through the workers’ and revolutionary struggle that the bourgeois society exploiting him must be transformed. Émile Duval was a patriotic revolutionary.

In 1860, he joined the ranks of the Blanquists. He organised activists in working-class neighbourhoods and foundry workers, particularly those in the 13th ^arrondissement, his own neighbourhood. In 1864, a strike by Parisian iron foundry workers took place, in which he took part to secure a reduction of the working day to 10 hours. He set up a mutual aid society that served as a trade union, in which he served at various times as president, treasurer or secretary.

In 1867, almost all the members of the executive committee joined the International, including Émile Duval (whom he left temporarily a little later). In February 1870 began what would become, from 16 April onwards, the largest general strike under the Empire: that of the foundry workers, led by Émile Duval; he became one of the three delegates for the foundry workers on the Federal Council of the IWA. This strike lasted until August 1870. Support poured in from all over: from Switzerland, Belgium, and even Prussia. Duval even travelled to London to seek aid from the English trade unions (Trade-Union). He founded the ‘Club Démocratie et Socialisme’ in the 13th arrondissement, which joined the IWA in 1870.

Émile Duval thus proved himself an outstanding organiser of the struggle that we might today describe as trade unionist, spanning from the Cail factories in Grenelle to the Gouin factories in the 11th arrondissement and the Batignolles. He succeeded in establishing in the 13th arrondissement one of the most ardent hotbeds of revolutionaries, who were beginning to cause the Empire serious concern. We shall have the opportunity to mention Émile Duval again a little later.