A symbol of the bloody week and the bloody repression of the Paris Commune, the wall of Père Lachaise is the landmark of the Commune. Every year during Bloody Week, a "climb to the wall" is organised to celebrate the Commune and commemorate its dead.

On Saturday 27 May 1871, Versailles troops succeeded in taking over the Père-Lachaise cemetery, but the Communards resisted to the point where the fighting sometimes ended in hand-to-hand combat with knives between the tombs, not far from the graves of Nodier, Balzac and Souvestre.

One hundred and forty-seven Communards taken prisoner were shot against the eastern wall of the cemetery. In the hours and days that followed, the bodies of thousands of other federates were buried alongside them in the mass graves used at the time.

In their memory, a section of this wall was named the "Mur des Fédérés" in 1871, and an annual commemoration was held there on the initiative of former Communards and their relatives, soon to be joined by militant left-wing and far-left political and trade union organisations.

Today, the Saturday closest to 28 May - which in 1871 marked the end of the "Bloody Week" and the crushing of the Commune - is the date of an annual "Ascent to the Wall" called by the Friends of the Paris Commune 1871 association.

One wall trying to hide another

There is another "wall", a monument located in the Samuel-de-Champlain square, on the edge of the cemetery on avenue Gambetta in the 20th arrondissement of Paris! It is the work of Paul Moreau-Vauthier, son of the Communard Augustin Moreau-Vauthier, and is entitled "To the Victims of Revolutions". It also includes a quotation from Victor Hugo: "What we ask of the future, what we want from it, is justice, not vengeance". It maintains the ambiguity of reconciling all the dead of the Commune, victims of both sides, but also confuses the issue, especially for foreign tourists.

Stones from the original wall are said to have been used to build this monument, which bears the scars of the shootings... Bullet holes are visible.