User:Czar/drafts/Mur des Fédérés

fr:Mur des Fédérés

Executions
The Mur des Fédérés is a wall on the eastern end of the Père Lachaise Cemetery where the last Communards of the Paris Commune were killed at the end of the semaine sanglante "bloody week" of repression.

Commemoration
Soon after the semaine sanglante, the wall became Paris's predominant symbol of the Commune and a space for for its commemoration. By the 1870s, thousands of Commune sympathizers marched to the Mur des Fédérés twice annually to commemorate the start of the Commune and its end. The latter, memorializing the Commune's bloody suppression, became the major commemorative event by the 1880s, with schedules and maps posted in newspapers. The procession ended at the wall, where speakers glorified the valor of the communards. These processions served to mythologize the Commune and invigorated workers as a symbol of "bourgeois duplicity" and "heroic proletarian struggle".

Following the Commune, the Government of Moral Order forbade depictions of the Commune. Among the acts of censorship, an École des Beaux-Arts administrator removed Ernest Pichio's etching of the wall's executions from the 1875 Salon.