The other day I spent a leisurely afternoon strolling through Père Lachaise, the great Paris cemetery.
It may be the ghoul in me, but I like cemeteries in general and historical ones in particular. Or else it’s the historian in me: stones speak. Dead bodies bring history alive.
Here’s the tombstone of Chopin, erected by his friends who made sure it specified that ‘Fred’s’ father was French.
That reminded me of two Polish sisters who had once almost torn my head off for saying that very thing. They wouldn’t hear of the great Pole being ethnically impure and, since they were beautiful, I let them win the argument.
A brief course in French literature would be well illustrated by the graves of two friends Molière and La Fontaine who weren’t so much buried as reburied at Père Lachaise – along with many other luminaries from earlier centuries.
The cemetery was opened in 1804, and in those pre-laïcité days Parisians ignored it because it hadn’t been consecrated by the church. But the sly authorities proved themselves adept at marketing before the word was even invented.
They moved many famous graves of the past there, and suddenly Parisians were fighting for the privilege of lying next to them. Even Abelard and Héloïse, then dead for 650 years, unwittingly lent their remains to the promotion, and today more than a million bodies lie in rest at Père Lachaise.
Some of them are grouped together thematically. For example, several Napoleonic warriors lie side by side, regardless of how they met their end.
Marshal Ney, for example, was executed as a traitor. After Napoleon’s original exile, Ney swore an oath to the restored Bourbons. When Napoleon landed back in France on the first of his 100 days, Ney was put in command of the army sent to intercept the returning emperor and his handful of men.
The two forces met in a field near Auxerre. One look at his hero, however, and Ney fell into Napoleon’s arms – an emotional impulse for which he paid with his life after Waterloo.
Murat, Napoleon’s dashing cavalry commander, lies a few feet from Ney.
Napoleon made him King of Naples and after the emperor’s fall Murat’s ungrateful subjects put him in front of a firing squad. Both he and Ney commanded their own executioners, and the word ‘Feu!’ was the last the two courageous men uttered.
Also grouped together are the nameless graves of foreigners who died in the Resistance. One of them, for the Russians, is adorned with a sculpture of a resistance fighter toting two German machine pistols and wearing a British flying jacket.
The sculpture isn’t bad, and many others are excellent, including the magnificent 1968 Pietà on the grave of the publishing magnate Cino Del Duca. Without passing a comparative aesthetic judgement, it moved me as much as Michelangelo’s two sculptures on the same subject.
And so on, up and down the steep hills of Père Lachaise, back and forth in history – and some implicit ideological interpretations thereof.
Skirting the edge of the cemetery, I came across a long row of memorials dedicated to the 77,000 French Jews “betrayed by the Vichy government and murdered by Nazi barbarians”, as one inscription has it.
Each memorial commemorates victims murdered in a particular camp. One walks along the obelisks bearing diabolical names: Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka…
Suddenly a shock: interspersed with those are the graves of French communist chieftains Marcel Cachin, Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclot, Georges Marchais and a few others.
The implicit message is that the victims and the communists belong together. They are supposed to have been on the same side.
That, to me, looked like a gruesome mockery of the dead. For the French Communist Party, led at the time by the first three chaps I mentioned, made a telling contribution to the atrocity.
From 23 August 1939 to 22 June 1941, Germany and the Soviet Union were close allies. Hence all communist parties belonging to the Comintern were on the side of the Nazis in every conflict between their own countries and Germany during this period.
The FCP was particularly subversive, spreading pacifist propaganda, demoralising the army and committing acts of sabotage against munitions factories.
When the Nazis attacked Poland on 1 September, 1939, they had to denude their western border, leaving not a single tank there. France, on the other hand, had 1,600 tanks poised at the border, and that’s even without counting the British Expeditionary Corps.
The Allies’ armour could have driven to Berlin unopposed, just as the Germans were getting bogged down at the Vistula. Then, 17 days later, the Soviets stuck a knife in Poland’s back. Hitler and Stalin triumphed.
The moment to avert the catastrophe – of which the subsequent murder of 77,000 French Jews was but a small part – was lost, partly because of the FCP’s efforts. These continued after Germany attacked France on 17 January, 1940.
The subjunctive mood being an unproductive grammatical category when applied to history, I don’t know if the French could have beaten back the German attack in the absence of communist subversion. Maybe, maybe not.
One thing for sure: the French fought with nowhere near the same determination as they had shown in the previous war. Thus, even if the FCP’s role in this demoralisation was small, the party bears at least some responsibility for France’s defeat and the ensuing tragedies.
When the Germans occupied Paris, Duclot asked the Nazis for permission to continue the publication of L’Humanité, the party’s newspaper. He pointed out, not unreasonably, that the newspaper had been supporting the Nazi cause unwaveringly, and the Germans couldn’t refute the arguments.
Nonetheless they turned the request down, possibly because they, unlike Duclot, knew that their friendship with Stalin wouldn’t last.
After Hitler narrowly beat Stalin to the punch on 22 June, 1941, the FCP instantly changed its principled stand. The party became active in the Resistance, fighting not only the Nazis but also, often, the non-communist resistance groups.
It wasn’t just a battle against Germany, but also one for France. The communists lost. Even though after the end of the war the FCP became the largest political party, it narrowly failed to move France from Nazi concentration camps into Soviet ones.
But not entirely: the camp at Drancy, whence French Jews had gone to their deaths in Nazi gas chambers, was seamlessly transformed into a Soviet camp from which Russian resistance fighters were forcibly sent to their deaths in the Soviet Union.
The FCP was complicit in this crime, as it facilitated the transfer of their yesterday’s comrades to the care of the NKVD. But at least the memorial to those Russians is some distance away from the graves of the NKVD’s French agents.
The Jewish victims of the FCP’s 1939-1941 allies aren’t so lucky. Sharing the same corner of Père Lachaise with the communists, they must be screaming out of their graves. I merely winced.