Communards' Wall

A long stretch of rough, uneven stone makes up the northern edge of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. This is the Mur des Federes, or the Communards' Wall. In May eighteen seventy-one, one hundred and forty-seven soldiers of the Paris Commune were lined up against this brickwork and executed by the regular French army. Their bodies were dumped into the open trench directly below. It remains a gathering place for those marking the final stand of a short-lived socialist revolutionary government.