Access: to reach this stage, the site of the last battles, return to the Chemin du Bastion and take it on your right. Follow the path, cross the next crossroads and continue straight ahead on the Chemin Casimir Delavigne. After about 30 metres, on your right, you will see Charles Nodier's tomb, the site of the final battles (Div. 49).

Located in the heart of working-class Paris, where the Communards were firmly entrenched, Père-Lachaise cemetery was an improvised entrenchment camp set up by the federates while the Commune was dying on its last barricades.

Two hundred federates armed with around ten cannons took refuge in the necropolis, which was besieged by Versailles troops who bombarded the Communards' fallback position from the Butte Montmartre before storming the cemetery.

The Versaillais stormed Père Lachaise on 27 May at 4pm.

The federates repelled them (bullet holes on Nodier's tomb). Due to a lack of ammunition, knife fights took place among the graves...

"Did you see the cemetery after the battle?

- Yes, the very next day... Sunday. I couldn't wait to see the damage... I've built so many tombs here... Everywhere, the tombs were scratched by the shooting and, above all, by the shells from Montmartre... Where we'd fought, almost hand to hand, the ground was ravaged, the trees broken, the monuments toppled... The dead, federates and soldiers, everywhere... even in the tombs. They had not yet been raised... The fighting had been particularly fierce around the Beaujour pyramid and in the neighbouring divisions, around the tombs of Charles Nodier and Balzac among others... On the terreplein of the rooms, the large vaults lining it were almost all smashed, the statues half smashed... Quite a devastation... The ground strewn with wreaths, gates torn off... The cannon were still there, some of them knocked over...". Extract from an interview with a witness to the massacres, published in the press in 1920, and conducted by Maxime Vuillaume.