Mur des Fédérés

The Mur des Fédérés is a scarred section of gray stone wall tucked against the back of Père Lachaise Cemetery. On May twenty-eighth, eighteen seventy-one, soldiers of the French government lined up one hundred and forty-seven members of the Paris Commune against this wall and executed them. The bodies were dumped directly into a trench dug at its base. It remains a raw patch of masonry where the last stand of an radical uprising turned into a quiet, permanent burial ground.