A Conversation for Sacre-Coeur and Montmartre, Paris, France
Cossacks?
sprout Started conversation May 4, 2002
I don't think the Communards were resisting Cossacks unless I missed something - there were still Prussians around Paris at this point, fresh from winning the Franco-Prussian war, but no Russian Cossacks surely? Most of the fighting in and around Paris at that point, was French against French, the Thiers government against the Commune.
Also I had always understood that Sacré Coeur was built as a kind of two fingered salute to the Commune insurrectionists - I think the idea was for Paris to atone for its sins during the insurrection. I don't think the survivors on the Commune side would have built many churches in commemoration - they were fairly anticlerical on the whole. The losers in civil wars don't generally get many memorials...
The place that people go to commemorate the Communards today is the Mur des fédérés, the wall against which a considerable number of the last resistants were shot - this is in Pére Lachaise cemetery I believe, and is still a symbol for the French left today.
Sprout
Cossacks?
Mina Posted May 7, 2002
If this is true then my research was faulty. 
That wall is in Pére Lachaise cemetery, I visited there during the same week that I saw Sacre-Coeur. 
Cossacks?
Blues Shark - For people who like this sort of thing, then this is just the sort of thing they'll like Posted May 7, 2002
It's in the 97th Division at Pere Lachaise which includes all the monuments to the Concentration Camps and Resistance fighters, as well as communists and Gypsies.
I found it very moving. 
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Cossacks?
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