Interviewed by EVA Petropoulou Lianou | Greece

Tell the readers about yourself

I was born on January 1984. Soon after my literary general high school, I studied for a while in London, then obtained a law degree in Paris, France. After this I studied again for a while the Library Sciences. I directed two research libraries! Meanwhile I was writing and painting a lot. Today I am a full time creative. I have published many books of fiction, essay, and poetry. I am also an international artist as a painter.

Please share your thoughts about the future of literature

The future of literature? I know already so few about it’s past, although I am definitely a reader, well this is a difficult question. Then I hope it will be bright, I hope that literacy in the first place, then education too, can strengthen, to let the literary creations improve!

There are two visible trends, from my perspective here in France today that would be first the establishment of the auto fiction as a dominant genre, then the come-back of poetry. These two currents are likely to keep on increasing in the near future I presume. Also, maybe, will we hopefully see a growth of the ‘grey-literature’, as it’s often called: the scientific and research books, directly linked to universities or institutions.

When did you start writing?

Very soon in the course of my life. There’s a sad thing to me here that is that I have lost, or have not here now with me, let’s say, most of my childhood or youth age’s verses, stories, researches… I think that I have lost more than a thousand of pages, this is bitter. Yet, as long as now I am meeting with more success, and I have gained the confidence in some publishing houses, well I will keep on working as much as I can.

The Good and the Bad. Who is winning in nowadays?

There clearly is a battle, a wrestle, between the good and the bad, as much as possibly always it has been a part of humanity, but with a scope, a range, that is new today because maybe the wrestling is intense. I am confident in the victory of good. Eventually! As the sacred texts from all different religions prophesied, as far as I know.

Then we have to be very proactive, very cautious too, and we sure need to prepare for this fight to be long. Endurance, in strength, and with intelligence for a better good!

How many books have you written and where can we find your books?  

So, I am working now on number 23 and number 24. There’s also a full translation upon one of my English poetry books, that’s undergoing at present. The count will soon be 25, hopefully. I have 22 books available, right now.

You could find them online, for many of them, still distributed, as hard copies or as electronic books. Online, I have seen this recently, you can also easily find some books of mine in « second hand ». If you want to buy a copy, check for my name in your favorite search engine. They are easy to find really!

The book. E book or Hardcover book. What will be the future?

The two of them will be inseparable one from the other, for a long time, I would say. As a professional librarian myself, I can only advocate for the hard covers copies and also, I can advise people to keep some books, in a collection, at their homes. The physical books are of a great value, when some time passes. This will likely be a trend in the future too, I presume.

A wish for 2025

So, in the year to come 2025? I wish, and I pray as much as I can, for a better peace, along with more understanding, tolerance, intelligence, in the world!

How could we hope or wish otherwise I would say, this is a logical fact that prosperity and happiness, are directly sourced in peace and social stability. There’s also a fact that is true: humanity will always benefit from the exchanges and the benevolent relations between us men and women.

I wish this good might happen!

A phrase from your book Or A book you like

‘Little by little, let a bird nestle…’

French proverb.

Thank you dear Eva, dear Polis Magazino! I love Greece! I wish I could come back, one day soon!

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Eva Lianou Petropoulou is an awarded author and poet from Greece with more than 25 years in the literary field, having published more than 15 books. Her poems are translated in more than 20 languages. She is President of creativity and art of Mil Mentes Por Mexico Association, representing Greece; President of Global UHE Peru, Vice President of Cultural Association China, Mexico. She is also the Ambassador of Peace for The Global Nation newspaper Bangladesh; World Ambassador of International Academy of Ethics India.

Read: Culture is the only tool that can facilitate social mobility

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Paris

On Monday, the National Federation of French Agricultural Unions (FNSEA) and the French Young Farmers (JA) block the main access roads to Paris to demand that President Emmanuel Macron accede to the demands of French farmers.

“I call for calm and determination in a week where we will face all kinds of risks,” the FNSEA Secretary Arnaud Rousseau said, adding that the farmers’ goal “is neither violence nor provocation,” but rather to pressure the government to improve their living conditions.

On Sunday, Macron convened a crisis cabinet to analyze measures that would allow the French government to prevent chaos and a potential blockade of Paris.

The government’s priority is to protect the highway access to the Roissy and Orly international airports from closures and to prevent the closure of the Rungis market, which is considered the world’s largest wholesale fresh produce market.

Le #BlocusDeParis est patiemment et méthodiquement mis en place sur l'A1 avec des agriculteurs venus de l'Oise et du Val d'Oise, alors que 6 autres points de blocage probablement aussi conséquents sont répartis autour de Paris. #AgriculteursEnColere pic.twitter.com/uripEIjqY8

— Cerveaux non disponibles (@CerveauxNon) January 29, 2024

The text reads, “The farmers from Oise and Val d’Oise are patiently and methodically installing the Paris blockade on the A1 highway. Meanwhile, six other blocking points probably just as large are distributed throughout Paris. Angry farmers.”

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered the mobilization of 15,000 police officers and gendarmes to prevent the blockades on eight highways from isolating Paris.

He clarified that his directive is not to intervene in the blockades, with the exception being if trucks carrying foreign products are confiscated.

“That is unacceptable, and therefore, we have given instructions for intervention and detention if such incidents occur, which are sporadic but have already happened,” said Darmanin.

Des agriculteurs du Lot-et-Garonne et de Dordogne viennent de se rallier à Bergerac (24) pour partir en cortège en direction de Paris.#AgriculteursEnColere #BlocusDeParis #BlocusRungis pic.twitter.com/QKvPT6bfSQ

— Enzo Rabouy (@enzorabouyy) January 29, 2024

The text reads, “The farmers of Lot-et-Garonne and Dordogne have just gathered in Bergerac to leave for Paris in a caravan.”

So far, the Macron administration has been cautious about deploying police forces to disperse these protests, which it has deemed peaceful despite the blocking of infrastructure and the burning of some public buildings.

The French government has supported the farmers’ argument about the ongoing unfair competition from European Union partners such as Spain and Italy.

Also read: French Farmers Block Roads and Surround Paris With Tractors

“Our farmers are subject to phytosanitary rules that are not imposed on other countries,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said on Sunday.

Currently, France imports at least 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables it consumes. This is due to certain European environmental rules that hinder French food sovereignty.

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Courtesy: TeleSur (Posted on Jan 29, 2024)

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Paris

On Wednesday, Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti reported that the French authorities handed down 1,278 sentences for the riots that occurred in late June and early July.

Approximately 95 percent of those sentences were convictions, that is, 1,056 people were sentenced to prison. Among them are 742 citizens who must serve mandatory jail terms with an average duration of 8.2 months.

“It was extremely important that there be a firm and systematic response. It was imperative that we restore republican order,” Dupond-Moretti said.

The authorities also imposed sentences for using social networks to organize riots because they wanted to “remember that Snapchat is not a hiding place.”

#France | The protests -which took place after a police officer shot dead a 17-year-old boy in the city of Nanterre on Wednesday- left some 150 people in custody according to official sources. #PoliceBrutality pic.twitter.com/cLAEwPEi7Z

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) June 29, 2023

The tweet reads, “The Unsubmissive France refuses to participate in the minute of applause requested by Valerie Pecresse in tribute to the security forces that stood firm in the face of the riots and to the victims of the sordid violence such as Vincent Jeanbrun and Stephanie Von Euw. The Republic is us!”

On June 27, a French Police officer murdered a 17-year-old teenager who was driving a car without a permit in the city of Nanterre. This event unleashed a wave of strong protests and riots throughout the country.

From that day to July 5, over 2,500 buildings were set on fire or damaged, hundreds of businesses were looted, and some 12,000 vehicles were vandalized. According to the Interior Minister, security forces detained 4,000 people, a third of whom were minors.

So far, 742 people have been firmly sentenced to prison and 600 citizens are already incarcerated.

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Courtesy: TeleSur (Posted on July 19, 2023)

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Paris

Abu Zubier Mohammed Mirtillah, Editor, La fenêtre de Paris France has announced the upcoming publication of the 3rd edition of the poetry anthology of La fenêtre de Paris in July 2023.

According to the announcement, this time, the theme of the anthology will be “River Water Rights.”

Editor, La fenêtre de Paris France, in a letter circulated through an mail, also received by Sindh Courier, has invited all poets from across the world to submit their original, unpublished poems on the theme for consideration.

The following conditions apply to all submissions:

1. The poetry must be in English and no more than 40 lines.
2. The writer must provide copyright permission for publication, and there will be no royalty or remuneration.
3. A biography of the poet within 300 words should be given.
4. Any plagiarism found will be the responsibility of the poets, not the editor of the anthology.
5. A profile photograph should be submitted along with the completed Google form, which is available with the announcement.

All poets will receive a PDF copy of the poetry book, and the book will also be available for purchase on Amazon.com.

“We encourage you to submit your best work and look forward to reading your submissions,” Abu Zubier said.

For any further inquiries, the poets may contact Editor, La fenêtre de Paris France at abuzubier4001@gmail.com

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Carolyn Eichner

Before dawn on 18 March 1871, the French National Army sent troops to the working-class neighborhood of Montmartre in Paris, charged with retrieving the cannons left at the end of the country’s recent war with Prussia. Perched high on the buttes of Montmartre, the artillery was ‘turned toward the centre of the city, toward the city of luxury and palaces, of monarchical plots, of infamous speculators, and of cowardly governments,’ as described by the renowned novelist, journalist and socialist feminist André Léo (the male pseudonym of Léodile Champseix).

The soldiers had arrived before the horses were dispatched to move the cannons, and so the men waited. As the sun rose, women left their homes to buy bread and milk for their families. Stunned to encounter these Parisian brothers, fathers, husbands and sons preparing to stealthily remove the weapons, Montmartre’s women stepped between the cannons and the troops. The soldiers fraternized, raised their rifle butts into the air, and turned on their leaders. By the end of the day, two generals lay dead. As the legendary Communard Louise Michel later proclaimed: ‘the revolution was made.’

The French military withdrew from the city and placed it under siege. In the wake of these stunning events, Parisians formed the Paris Commune. The name of both the insurgency that ruled Paris for 72 days, and the revolutionary civil war in which it was forged, the Paris Commune stands as an iconic insurrectionary moment. For the past 152 years, it has loomed large, representing egalitarian potentials for the Left and terrifying power inversions for the Right.

Parisians took action within their city walls. They formed a government fully subject to recall, while citizens simultaneously developed other centers of power: organizations and new institutions rooted in prior movements, ideological developments, and a palpable revolutionary tradition. The Paris Commune emerged as a radical experiment in direct democracy. Working-class women and men formed political clubs, seizing space in churches across the capital in a clear act of anti-clerical appropriation. They pressed the elected Commune government with demands and grievances. Other local and city-wide associations developed around women’s labor, education, and artists and the arts. The Commune opened elite institutions – the royal palace, the National Library, the Louvre – to the public for the first time. Its government outlawed bakers’ night work, ended the exploitative measures of the national pawnshop, and financially supported the feminist Union des femmes in its efforts to reorganize and revalue women’s work. The city held free public concerts and festivals, as a celebratory current of optimism shot through its neighborhoods. It was a moment of extraordinary potential, and working-class, socialist, feminist, and anarchist Parisians seized it, toppling political, economic and sociocultural structures. And they did it under siege by the French army, waging a defensive civil war.

How did this happen? How did a brief and unplanned insurgency allow multiple nodes of power, widespread participation and an upending of hierarchies, without a clear leader and while under a military blockade? What enabled the sudden emergence of not only a revolutionary force, but also multiple highly organized, self-mobilizing, autonomous political groups that reoriented the most powerful city in Europe into an egalitarian, radical, pro-worker metropolis?

The Paris Commune exploded onto the world stage. At the intersection of political developments, resistance movements, emerging liberatory ideologies and community-based organizations, the Commune resulted from the political will of a wide range of actors to embrace the revolutionary opportunity, and put hopes and ideas into action. They drew not only on their prior liberatory plans and resistant experiences, but also on Paris’s revolutionary legacy – a potent set of available memories embraced by socialists and feminists of many stripes. This combination of history, ideology, opportunity, lived experience and hope facilitated a radically democratic urban experiment. Without this extraordinary confluence of factors, pressed into the crucible of the revolutionary moment, there would be no Commune as we know it.

These emergent Communards began creating the world they wanted

In the wake of the 18 March events, Adolphe Thiers, the head of France’s reactionary republican government, pulled the army out of Paris. Facing a city-wide uprising by long-feared socialists and a radicalized working class, Thiers recognized the need to crush the uprising at any cost. The world would be watching this emerging contest between the forces of order and forces intent on destroying established hierarchies. He laid siege to the city.

Within the municipal walls, the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard, thrust unexpectedly into control, recognized the enormous challenge they would face in fighting the French army with their poorly supplied and minimally trained guardsmen. Tasked with both governing and defence, they called elections to ‘legitimate’ their authority, a move contested as ‘unrevolutionary’ by the more radical Commune members. Following the election of the Commune Council, the new governing body, the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard stepped down – but they remained constituted as a self-appointed informal oversight committee to assure the defence of both the revolution and workers’ interests. That made two centers of power.

An optimistic current of possibility shot through the city. Thousands of Parisians stepped up to participate in defence and governing. Across the city’s working-class districts, women and men established vigilance committees and joined (or re-joined) the National Guard to help defend the revolution. They formed political clubs, expressing their concerns and demands, and associations to reform or revolutionize education, women’s labor, the arts. Uncertain of what lay ahead, these emergent Communards began creating the world they wanted. The popular clubs and associations enacted direct democracy: a third power center.

The intensity of the revolutionary moment produced a context that allowed concurrent nodes of power, but their emergence can be attributed to the effective laboratory of radicalism and democracy constituted in the immediate pre-Commune years. Political activism, labor organizing and intellectual projects germinated and grew during the repressive Second Empire, from 1851 to 1870. Socialists and feminists organized resistance, in some cases from prison, and often from exile. These cooperative groups built the templates from which the Commune’s centers of organization would be formed.

The International Workingmen’s Association (which did include some women) arose as a dominant force in Parisian socialism and labor activism, and subsequently in the Commune. Organized by British and French socialists in 1864 to unify multiple socialist movements, followers of the deeply misogynist ‘father of anarchism’ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon initially dominated the Parisian branch. But his influence waned by the decade’s end. Supporters of the revolutionary socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui, along with moderate feminist socialist men and women – including future Communards Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon, Nathalie Lemel and the aforementioned André Léo – rose to the fore. While the organisation was capacious, ideological and political contentions – particularly around gender, labor and tactics – persisted within the International before, during and after the Commune.

Prior to the insurgency, French feminists addressed a range of equity issues but, because of their extreme marginalization under the Napoleonic Code of law, women focused especially on political and legal equality. The Code denied women full citizenship, deprived married women of corporeal autonomy (a husband had unlimited rights of sexual access to his wife’s body), and disallowed their juridical rights (along with ‘minors … criminals, and the mentally debilitated’). During the Commune, most feminists abandoned these rights-based goals. They saw the insurgency as the end of old repressive institutions and the beginning of a new order. The revolution provided the opportunity for working-class, socialist, and anarchist feminists to dig beneath and beyond the level of political exclusion to address quotidian and structural inequities of not only gender but also class, and to do so from a variety of perspectives using differing approaches. As a result, multiple feminist socialisms emerged within and carried on after the revolution. Communard women, with the support of some Communard men, transgressed gendered barriers to labor, politics, religion, education and the battlefield. They reshaped these multiple and intersecting gendered spaces.

Wide boulevards lined with elegant apartment buildings meant displacement of working-class populations

In the final years of the Second Empire, Louis-Napoléon had sought to regain waning support by loosening restrictions on speech, association and the press. Parisians responded by holding public meetings across the city; these meetings became another vital revolutionary training ground. Drawing a broad range of participants – workers, thinkers, activists – the meetings became fora for articulating grievances and voicing economic, social and political desires. Expressions of anticlericalism abounded, as when an anonymous participant condemned priests for ‘abusing the confidence the confession gives them to seduce workers’ daughters’. Meeting topics included ‘Marriage and Divorce’, ‘Liberty: The Condition of Socialism’ and ‘Women’s Work’. Initiated by socialist and feminist leaders, the events offered the podium to all interested parties. As Léo explained: ‘working women with fingers bruised from toiling all day, listen and learn … [and] also want to speak.’ With attendance numbering in the tens of thousands at multiple Parisian sites, the 1868-69 public meetings radicalized and served as a tutorial in insurgency for working-class future Communards.

The city itself provided revolutionary preparation both psychically and physically. Long resented by the provinces and feared by the national leadership – for its history of political radicalism, its wealth, and its power – the French government had denied Paris self-rule since 1795. The desire for municipal autonomy, interlaced with the pervasive revolutionary tradition, infused the capital’s political movements.

Geographically, Louis-Napoléon had drastically redesigned the city for interlaced aesthetic and political reasons. Levelling tight, dark medieval-era neighborhoods and replacing them with wide, sweeping boulevards lined with elegant apartment buildings meant displacement of working-class populations. Perennially concerned with social unrest, the government also intended the broad avenues of the city center to facilitate rapid troop movement across urban spaces and to impede the construction of barricades. Working-class Parisians, driven to the undeveloped edges of the city, created radicalized communities like Montmartre, which birthed the uprising. They identified strongly with their specific neighborhoods as well as with the larger city. This localized allegiance undergirded community-based political and defence efforts during the Commune.

The year before the Commune, in July 1870, Louis-Napoléon had begun a war with Prussia, a calamitous endeavor that resulted in his battlefield surrender two months later. The Empire fell, and the Republic was declared. The new Government of National Defence, however, feared the city’s working class more than they feared Prussia. They surrendered in January 1871.

France’s newly elected, monarchist-led National Assembly, which replaced the Government of National Defence, introduced a series of repressive economic and political measures aimed at the working class and intended to ‘restore order’. Decreeing the immediate payment of all back rents (suspended during the siege), the end of a moratorium on sales by the national pawnshop (in which desperate Parisians had deposited vital household items and work tools), and the shuttering of most socialist publications (which had proliferated), the government then relocated from Paris to Versailles, the historical seat of the monarchy. Together, these acted as tinder to smoldering working-class anger and frustration.

Immediately after the seizure of the cannons on 18 March, Thiers pulled the French national army out of the city. Parisians suddenly held the capital, and people rejoiced in the streets. Seizing the revolutionary opportunity, they spent the next two months enacting the ideas and programs they had envisioned in the antecedent years. Communard women and men worked to reconceptualise political, economic and social life. Bourgeois socialists and feminists, and working-class participants in political clubs, neighborhood arrondissement associations and vigilance committees held a wide range of ideologies, goals and strategies. Paris became a massive canvas filled with revolutionary lines and colors, some beautifully blending, some contrasting, and some sharply clashing, muting or erasing each other.

During the Commune, political factions undertook some significant actions that undercut the liberatory visions of opposing political groups. When the new Commune government – dominated by anti-authoritarian, moderate socialists – held elections intended to garner legitimacy and legality, the Blanquists opposed the move as anti-revolutionary. As the Communard Louise Michel lamented, Thiers and his army ‘benefitted from the time that Paris lost around the voting urns.’ The Blanquists, who subsequently held a majority on the elected Commune Council, ultimately created an authoritarian extrajudicial body, the Committee of Public Safety, in response to the increasingly dire military situation. Modelled after the eponymous body created by the Jacobins in 1793, the moderate socialists vociferously opposed the Committee of Public Safety as antidemocratic and counter to fundamental Commune principles. Outside of the governmental hierarchies, working-class political clubs (some male-only, some female-only, some mixed) claimed their status as inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition and enacted popular sovereignty, promoting cooperation, association and militant anticlericalism. They pushed the Commune Council toward greater radicalism. Expressing frustration with the inaction of this Council, a speaker in a women’s political club contended: ‘It is time for woman to replace man in directing public affairs.’

The Commune’s suddenness and absence of clear leadership allowed an openness

Political factions undertook conflicting actions regarding women’s rights and freedoms. In the Commune Council elections, women were excluded from participation, continuing their historical disenfranchisement. As the Commune evolved, however, most feminists focused their efforts on goals more tangible than the vote, and looked beyond the revolution’s formal governing structure. The Commune’s Commission of Labor and Exchange, led by the feminist, moderate socialist Léo Frankel, agreed to financially support the feminist Union des femmes in its city-wide efforts to reorganize women’s labor into producer-owned cooperatives. They backed measures to advance women’s economic and social independence. In contrast, the Committee of Public Safety, on its first day of existence, banned women from the battlefield, indicative of the antifeminism of many of the majority Blanquists. Women nonetheless persisted to participate militarily and were welcomed by rank-and-file National Guardsmen. Asserting women’s place on the battlefield, André Léo wrote: ‘Women are no less courageous than men.’

The Commune’s suddenness and absence of clear leadership allowed an openness that enabled a broad range of actors and ideologies to share, and jostle for, power. The revolution fluoresced because politically, economically and/or socially oppressed and marginalized people had organized and theorized for decades. They did so from different positions and perspectives, advocating a range of tactics and seeking varied goals. When the revolutionary door opened, they stepped in. Proudhonists, Blanquists, Internationalists, feminist socialists, labor unionists and ‘everyday’ working-class Parisian women and men found space in the insurgent arena to enact their visions of equity and justice. No hard line existed between the governing and the governed. The Commune operated with what the political theorist Massimiliano Tomba terms a ‘dynamic between powers that reciprocally limit each other’. Such reciprocal limitation not only allowed decentralized power, but also enabled antidemocratic efforts to curb such capaciousness and steps toward equity.

Sixty-four days after the Commune’s inception, the French army breached the walls of Paris and streamed into the capital. By week’s end, 15,000 to 20,000 Parisians lay dead as fires burned across the city. Over the ensuing century and a half, debates have raged around the causes of the Commune’s demise, and over the question of the Commune’s ‘success’. Inarguably, the Commune triumphed as an ideal for the Left, creating a set of radical possibilities. It endures not only as a historical event, but also as a sketch open to multiple interpretations. Its historical content provides a map suggesting various routes to egalitarianism, while ‘the idea of the Commune’ presents an open vessel, sufficiently ample to hold differing and shifting equitable ideals.

Yet, activists and scholars have long competed to define and own the Commune’s legacy. Retelling the revolution involved politicized interpretation and scholarly critique, and often a combination of the two. During the 20th century, the French communist and socialist parties vied for the mantle of the Commune’s true descendant, often shaping the revolutionary history to their needs. More recently, French (and some American) scholars and activists have misread the insurgency as part of a liberal, republican tradition. This misinterpretation and deradicalisation is best exemplified in the 2013 (failed) efforts to have Louise Michel placed in France’s Panthéon, a memorialization intended for those who extraordinarily sustained the Republic – which, as a revolutionary anarchist, she did not. Pantheonisation would have been anathema to Michel.

From both the Left and the Right, innumerable publications have retold and analyzed the Commune, its actors, and its aftermath. Whether demonizing or glorifying it, or falling somewhere in the wide interstices, nearly every work published on the Commune prior to recent years shares a fundamental common misapprehension: they ignore or profoundly marginalize women’s participation and the gendered nature of the revolution.

Some women, like some men, likely lit some fires. But Communard women did not burn Paris

The women who did appear in the first dozen decades of scholarship were the pétroleuses, the working-class Communards accused of burning Paris during Bloody Week. Most scholars, at minimum, uncritically mentioned these alleged incendiaries. Ignited then stoked by Versailles, its sympathizers and its journalistic supporters, the pétroleuse accusations exploded because of the uncertainty over who set the conflagrations engulfing the city. Working-class women made obvious targets. Participants in the upending of class and religious hierarchies as Communards, they simultaneously undermined the gender order in their political, economic and martial engagements. Anti-Communards expressed palpable fear and hatred of these revolutionary women. Having destabilized these dominant forms of control, could not political arson be a next, desperate step?

Paris burned because of Versailles bombardment, and because, once the end appeared inevitable, Communards torched major institutional buildings, including the Tuileries Palace, the Prefecture of Police, and the Ministry of Finance. Male and female Communards fought side by side on the streets of Paris and behind barricades during Bloody Week. While the pétroleuse myth materialized from gendered and class-based conservative fears, and led to the execution of innocent women and girls, some women, like some men, likely lit some fires. But Communard women did not burn Paris. Until recent decades, however, scholars did not question the myth. Without an understanding of the era’s dominant gender order, and its intersections with class and religion, the depth of working-class Communard women’s transgressions remained opaque – as did its link with the pétroleuse invention.

In addition to the mythical pétroleuses, Louise Michel also briefly appeared in multiple works on the revolution. Generally portrayed as a heroic anomaly, Michel stood as the lone woman within the fully masculine revolutionary world shaped by scholars of the Commune. They ignored the presence and significance of women in the primary sources, as well as, from the 1960s onward, the slowly emerging scholarship that re-examined the Commune as a gendered event composed of both women and men. The exclusion of women and blindness to gender results in a distorted and partial vision of the event, its causes, and its aftermaths.

Women created the largest and most effective organization during the Commune (the Union des femmes); the Commune’s official governing body made a gendered decision to perpetuate the reactionary politics of maintaining the disenfranchisement of half of the population; women formed political clubs demanding specifically gendered changes in religion, education and familial authority; one of the Committee of Public Safety’s first actions was to ban women from the battlefield (in response to their appropriating space in the deeply masculinized arena). These are but a few examples of events and ideas central to the Commune that most scholars have either omitted or glossed over, events and ideas that reshape and clarify our understanding of the insurgency.

Conflict marked not only the Commune’s internal workings, but also its long wake. Although ruthlessly crushed, the uprising still generates heated disputes over its definition and claims to its heritage. Women and men seized the revolutionary moment following years of repression, political organizing and ideological development, enacting radically democratic ideals by allowing multiple centers of power. Erasing the roles and significance of a substantial portion of its participants (women), and neglecting to recognize one of its fundamental forms of power relations (gender), has for too long stymied a clear comprehension of this extraordinary event and its legacy.

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Carolyn Eichneris professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of The Paris Commune: A Brief History (2022), Feminism’s Empire (2022) and Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (2004).

Courtesy: AEON (Received through email on Jan 5, 2023)  

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By Jen

I know sexy mannequins are a thing, but before reading about Victor Noir, I had no idea that sexy grave statues existed.

What’s super fascinating about Victor Noir is that his well-endowed bronze sculpture was simply a generous embellishment by the artist who crafted it.

Victor was the lucky recipient of an artistic bulge in his pants that has now brought visitors from all over the world to his grave.

Victor Noir Lived A Short, Tragic Life

Victor was an ordinary man. He lived from 1848-1870. During the early stages of his career, he worked as an apprentice journalist for a newspaper called “La Marseillaise” in Paris. Overall, he’s remembered as a generally unimpressive fellow. Not sure why most of the articles need to point that out. Perhaps they’re jealous of the impressive bulge in his pants and need to point out that otherwise, he didn’t really cause much of a stir.

Anyway, one day poor Victor Noir found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, Prince Pierre Bonaparte, was angry about an article that had been published in “La Marseillaise”. Because of this, he challenged the editor of the newspaper to a duel. Acting on behalf of his editor, Victor went to help setup the details.

When Victor Noir was in the middle of establishing a time and place for the duel, things got tense. The prince lost his cool in a major way, pulled out his pistol, and shot and killed poor Victor.

Immortal Glory

Victor’s murder enraged the public. They were already not happy with the political situation in the country, and the murder of a journalist by a member of the emperor’s family was too much.

Because of this, Victor Noir ended up becoming a symbol of revolution. Over 100,000 people attended his funeral in his hometown of Neuilly. Sadly, Pierre Bonaparte was acquitted of the murder charge, and this lead to demonstrations in the streets!

Despite his status as a bit of a martyr, Victor Noir was buried in Neuilly, and basically forgotten about for 20 years.

However, in 1891, his name started to become the talk of the town again. After the establishment of the Third French Republic, his body was moved from his hometown to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. To help honor his name and what he died for, a renowned French sculptor, Jules Dalou, was given the job of creating the sculpture in bronze that would stand in front of his grave.

All you Need Is A Little Luck

The story of Victor Noir has spread far and wide. His statue has become a symbol of sexual satisfaction and fertility.

It is believed that if a woman kisses the statue of Victor Noir on the lips, rubs the bulge in his trousers and drops a flower in his hat it will bring her enhanced fertility, and a blissful sex life. More specifically – if you want to find a beautiful lover, you should kiss Noir`s lips; if you want to get pregnant, you should touch his right foot; and if you want to have twins, you should touch his left foot. According to the myth, a baby will follow soon after and single ladies will find a husband within the year.

Women from all over come to the cemetery to kiss Victor’s lips, and rub the bulge in his trousers. There are a whole list of superstitious rewards you’ll receive if you do various things to the statue.

Using drawings for reference, the artist chose to depict Victor Noir lying down on the ground with his hat beside him. There was a lot of time and detail put into his features. Hair on his head, creases in his shoes, and the lines on his face… the artist considered everything.

Further to all of these cosmetic details, the artist also chose to add one mysterious feature to Victor Noir’s bronze statue: a large bulge in his pants.

For example, if you want to get pregnant, you should touch Victor’s right foot, and if you want to have twins, you should touch his left foot.

The high-touch nature of various spots on his statue have caused them to be shiny (from rubbing) while the rest of his body is the standard green of oxidized bronze.

Visit The Victor Noir Statue

In 2004, Dita Von Teese posed on top of Victor, and caused quite the stir. Other women have also been visiting Victor to get luck and fertility. From them touching it, posing with it, and doing other suggestive things, they put a fence around the statue.

This, however, caused even more of a fuss so they decided to take the fence down.

Ready to boost your fertility, or add a sassy photo-stop to your visit to Paris? Go and check out Victor Noir. While you’re there, check out all of the other famous people buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

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Courtesy: Indie88 (October 16, 2021) 

The post The Story of Victor Noir & the Sexiest Tomb in France first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Tom Arms

The Bataclan Trial which opened this week in Paris has huge domestic and international significance.

Domestically, it will be an act of national catharsis. 1,500 “civilian plaintiffs”—surviving victims and family members of the dead—are scheduled to give five weeks of testimony about the horror of the attack on Friday the 13th November 2015 and its life-changing consequences.

The bulk of the nine-month trial, however, will focus on the details of the attack on the Bataclan Theatre, the Stade de France and the street cafes of the 10th and 11th arondissements, and the origins and planning of the operation.  The latter will be closely followed by intelligence agencies around the world for information to help identify and defeat future attacks.

And there is a lot of evidence from the Gendarmerie, the Direction General de la Securite Exterieure  (DGSE), Direction Generale de la Securite Interieure (DGSI) and Service Central de Territorial (SCRI).

French Intelligence and French and Belgian police have spent six years compiling evidence in 19 different countries. 47,000 depositions have been taken and 52 volumes of evidence have been set before the judges at the historic Palais de Justice.

Some of the evidence has leaked. For instance, it is known that the attack was conceived and planned in the upper echelons of the ISIS command based in Raqqa, Syria. Carefully chosen “commandos” were smuggled into Europe through Turkey disguised as refugees from the Syrian Civil War.

The destination of these Jihadists was the impoverished and overcrowded Brussels district of Molenbeek. Roughly 25 percent of Molenbeek’s 100,000-strong population is Muslim. The unemployment rate is 40 percent.  There is strong support in the district for Jihadism and it has been used as a base for several terrorist attacks in France and Belgium. Its own mayor has described Molenbeek as “a breeding ground for violence.”

In Molenbeek the Jihadists did their final planning for the attack that left 130 dead and hundreds wounded. Weapons were gathered, suicide bombs assembled, transport and finance arranged and the Jihadists were assigned their specific roles. As part of the six-year investigation into the attack, security forces interviewed 22,668 individual Molenbeek inhabitants—virtually the entire Muslim population. As a result they discovered 52 people who were directly involved in terrorism and another 75 who had terrorist connections and were put on the watch list.

As with most Jihadist terrorist attacks, the “commandos” did not expect to return from Paris. It was a suicide mission. The one exception was  Salah Abdelsalam. He survived. He was expected to blow himself up with a suicide bomb vest, but the bomb was defective. He threw the vest away and fled back to his Molenbeek sanctuary where he was arrested by police three months later.

Abdelsalam will be a key witness in the Bataclan Trial. Not only is he the only terrorist survivor, but it appears that he played a key role in assembling the attack team. It is questionable, however, that he will cooperate. Early indications are not good. Asked his occupation by the court, Abdelsalam replied: “Soldier of the State of Islam.”

Abdelsalam is one of 20 defendants. Five are absent. Of these, four are believed to have been killed by subsequent US drone strikes. One is being held in a Turkish prison. 14 defendants are charged with aiding and abetting the attack in some way—either by providing sanctuary, weapons, transport or finance.

The start of proceedings in the Palais de Justice coincides nicely with the West’s defeat in Afghanistan. NATO invaded the central Asian country 20 years ago because it had become a breeding ground for terrorism against Europe and the US.

The fear of many Europeans is that a Taliban government will be unable to prevent a return to the bad old days despite its pledges to the contrary. Or, at the very least, their victory will encourage Jihadist groups elsewhere in the world. That is certainly the opinion of Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s MI5, who this week told the BBC’s Today Show that British Intelligence had foiled 31 “late stage” terrorist attacks in the past four years but that he warned that “the fall of Afghanistan may have emboldened terrorists in Britain.”

World Review

• It is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Two decades since 2,996 lives were lost in suicide attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. In New York the occasion will be marked by families of the dead reading statements about their loved ones. The event will be closed to the public. Elsewhere in the world, the anniversary will be marked with foreboding. The attack was carried out by Al Qaeda and was planned and coordinated from its base in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Within weeks a US-led NATO force toppled the Taliban government. There has not been a Jihadist attack on US soil since. President Biden has now withdrawn US forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban is back in power. Biden claims that the US-led occupation and long war against the Taliban was a success. It was, and now it isn’t. The current Taliban government is filled with faces who were thrown out in 2001. Some of them are on America’s Ten Most Wanted List. The leadership started off on the right foot promising to protect women’s rights (according to Islamic law), and most importantly pledged to prevent their country from again being used as a base for international terrorism. But do they have the power to prevent it? The new cabinet has abolished the post of Minister for Women and it is widely believed that some of its members have linked to ISIS-K which was responsible for the bombing that killed 200 and wounded many more during the evacuation at Kabul Airport. Instead of denying the undeniable, President Biden should accept that American revenge on Afghanistan has been a failure and has most likely led to the re-establishment of terrorist groups in the Central Asian country and emboldened Jihadist organizations around the world. He pulled out because the twenty-year war was unpopular with the American electorate. But another 9/11 will be more so.
• President Joe Biden this week signed a decree requiring all federal employees and employees of major US companies to be covid vaccinated—that is 100,000 people in total. Biden justified the move by saying that the crisis has moved from an every person pandemic to a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” He has a point. Eighty million Americans remain unvaccinated. 476,000 have died so far. A large number of the roughly 1,500 new hospitalizations a day in America are victims of covid vaccine conspiracy theories. But not all. New Variants are emerging. The latest is the MU variant which appears to have originated in Colombia. Like its predecessors, MU is highly contagious. There is a fear that it may also be less susceptible to existing vaccines. A few months ago, Israel was hailed as the golden-boy of the anti-coronavirus brigade. Within a matter of weeks it had vaccinated almost its entire population. “We have beaten coronavirus,” the Israeli government crowed. Now it is in the middle of its fourth wave and preparing a fourth round of vaccinations. It is true that those who have had at least two vaccinations are less likely to contract the virus and, if they do, the symptoms are less severe. But Delta and MU are so highly contagious that it is working its way scythe-like through the unvaccinated or partly vaccinated population. In the meantime, libertarian-minded US Republicans are planning a legal challenge to the president’s decree on the grounds that personal liberties trump social responsibilities.
• The possible fate of Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is an object lesson in the dangers of calling an early election. After the 2019 federal elections Trudeau emerged with a minority government. Like most political leaders, he wants a majority. The early summer opinion polls indicated that the votes were swinging his way and so he called a snap election two years before it was necessary. Canadians now troop to the polls on 20 September. They appear displeased that their prime minister has created a political distraction when they want him to get on with the job of dealing with the pandemic and the economic problems resulting from it. As of this writing, Trudeau is tied with Canada’s Conservative Party. Assuming that the polls are correct and remain firm, his best hope is a coalition with either the French-speaking Parti Quebecois led by Yves-Francois Blanchet, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Jameet Singh or the tiny Greens (currently three seats) led by Annamie Paul. But even that is going to be tough as Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is having some success portraying his party as a broad church. He has, for instance, cast himself in the role of Canada’s number one protector of LGBT rights.
• There is also an election coming up in Russia. It does not directly involving President Vladimir Putin. They are parliamentary elections for the 450-seat Duma as well as elections to 39 regional parliaments. The three-day election which starts on 17 September has been billed by the English-language Russian newspaper “The Moscow Times” as the “least competitive in 20 years”. For “least competitive” you may substitute “least fair.” So far 21 candidates not belonging to the ruling United Russia Party have either been banned from standing for election. Alexei Navalny’s Russia of the Future Party has been disbanded by the authorities and its leader and most members of its ruling council are now languishing in Russian prisons on various trumped up charges. But there is still a rump operating in the shadows and six of its members were planning to stand for office and have now been banned by the authorities from doing so. The Yabloko Party, which advocates the unthinkable policies of improving relations with the US and membership of the EU, has had seven members banned. Two independents are out and even the Communist Party has been told that one of its members—Pavel Grudinin—cannot stand because he allegedly owns foreign property. Putin is not officially a member of the United Russia Party which won 54.2 percent of the vote in the last election. The President is meant to be independent and above party politics, but he is a former party president and the party slavishly accepts every decree he passes. Therefore, election observers will be closely monitoring 1- The performance of the United Russia Party 2- The number of election abstentions and 3- Any Reports of ballot-rigging or intimidation.
• Boris Johnson’s global Britain is becoming a farce. For it to succeed requires the British government to successfully work with other countries and follow international law—most of which it wrote. The antics of Home Secretary Pritti Patel (officially now the most heartless person in the British cabinet) is another example of British failure on both counts. A key issue in the 2016 Brexit debate was immigration and Ms. Patel is determined to put a stop to the growing number of refugees flowing across the English Channel from France to England. She tried to secure French support by paying for the French police to increase their surveillance of the French coast. That didn’t work. No amount of money would enable the police to be everywhere every time. So now she has announced that the British Coast Guard and possibly also the Royal Navy, will intercept any refugee-laden boats and tow them back to French waters. She has also said she will probably stop funds to the French police. In one fell swoop, the British Home Secretary has infuriated the French and broken international maritime law which says those in danger at sea must be rescued. Global Britain is beginning to look increasingly like the Emperor’s new clothes.

Tom Arms

Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. and the author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War”.His book “America: Made in Britain” is published on 15 October.

The post Observations of an Expat: Bataclan Trial first appeared on Sindh Courier.