The Free Plots

On a grey November day in 1887, Eugène Pottier drew his last breath in such utter destitution that he seemed to want to carry the world's poverty away with him. The man who gave the proletariat its most ardent verses, writing the words to “The Internationale” — that song of revolt destined to echo from Beijing to Santiago — died without even the means to buy himself a final resting place. Yet, in an irony only History could arrange, it was the Paris City Council that hastened, the very next day, to grant him a perpetual plot in Division 95 of Père-Lachaise. And so the Republic chose to shelter, at its own expense and for eternity, the very man who had devoted his life to trying to overthrow it.

This mechanism, simple though it seems in practice, carries a truly extraordinary weight. By a single prefectural order, the City of Paris grants itself the right to offer eternal rest to anyone judged worthy of remaining in its stone gardens. No vast fortune or influential lineage is needed; here, all that counts is the mark left in the marble of culture or the national conscience. It is, in a sense, a Pantheon in shadow, a silent tribute stripped of colonnades and official pomp.

A Pantheon in shadow, a silent tribute stripped of colonnades and official pomp.

The list of these “chosen of the free plot” paints a fascinating and melancholy portrait of nineteenth-century France. Here one finds the shade of Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a writer whose pen was as flamboyant as his pockets were empty, reaching his final resting place in 1895, six years after succumbing to poverty. A few steps away, in Division 53, lies the playwright Henry Becque, whose theatrical vitriol once made fashionable Paris tremble. Further still, the precocious talent of Xavier Bichat, an anatomist who revolutionised medicine before dying at only thirty, rests in Division 8 near the grave of Paul Baudry, the painter whose celestial frescoes still adorn the ceiling of the Palais Garnier opera house.

Yet the paradox reaches its height when it comes to the memory of the insurgents. While the Republic once crushed the Commune in blood, it now grants Léo Frankel, that worker-minister of 1871, a place of honour in Division 96. What a strange fate for Charles Delescluze, who fell on a barricade and is now protected by the State, or for Benoît Malon, the exiled socialist theorist who finally found peace in Division 70. By granting them, in death, the land it denied them in life, the Republic seems to be trying to lay its own ghosts to rest beneath the cemetery sun.

But this gesture extends to collective tragedies too, offering refuge to the victims of the Bazar de la Charité fire, to those who perished at the Opéra-Comique, or to the National Guardsmen of the Great Siege. Père-Lachaise thus becomes the faithful mirror of Republican memory: a sanctuary where those society could not protect receive, as a final offering, a patch of earth for eternity and the solemn promise that their name will never be erased.