We have family in Paris, or nearby at least on a trip last year we went to see them and spent various days bumming around in the middle bit staring at things and drinking small coffees and trying not to look too gauche or too much like tourists. One evening My brother-in-law parked up just around the corner from Le Jardins du Luxembourg, we were all heading off to the Café Le Rostand to have a coffee and stroke the cat; Roxanne or Cyrano, I’m not sure which it was, On the corner of Rue Auguste Comte I spotted what looked like a large-calibre bullet holes in a wall around a window and a big layer of history peeled off right in front of me laid out on the dark canvas of a wall coloured only dimly by streetlights. I just stood there staring at it in temporal disarray while the others walked on unaware. We don’t really see this in Britain, not in this way, you get bullet holes, yes, from strafing planes, shrapnel and blast scars from the blitz still mark nearly every metropolitan street in the country, but not this sort of ‘evidence’ of a battle where you can almost forensically take it apart with your eyes. The light was bad, and a photo was pointless but further along the side of the old Hotel de la Vendome is this more obvious spike sticking right through the now:
‘Jean Montvallier-Boulogne Died for France, at 24 years of age during the liberation of Paris, 25 August 1944.’
Twenty-Four. Look at him.
There are many of these in the area, dotted around the Jardins du Luxenbourg waiting to be noticed. This is possibly the most poignant, the evidence of the fighting, both small arms and larger rounds still mark this wall, a lot of the rest have been patched up. The scarring covers both wars, the bombardment of Paris in 1918 and the attempts of the resistance or the Free French Army of the Interior to remove about 600 SS troops entrenched in the Gardens and the buildings around them. What I found truly strange was how you can actually see the angles of fire in the walls and the ferocity of the attacks, and this man, in the middle. There’s a far better account of it here.
Photo below, Robert Doisneau, famous for the Kiss, also shot the Paris Barricades in 1944. Remarkable how close you are to these things.
When you see bullet holes it is a visceral shock isn’t it? And to see the faces of those killed by them…
People forget how near the last great war was. I was born a mere nineteen years after it. My FIL came home from school to find his house bombed, the house where he was staying with friends of friends after his family moved away and fragmented. This was a few weeka after his school was bombed- in Plaistow/ East Ham and the damage is stil evident in the streets now despite redevelopment. There’s something….wrong about the way the street looks. An interruption.
The people were gone and he wandered the streets aged eight for two days, surviving by sleeping in doorways and drinking from public fountains. He didn’t remember much but he remembered enough to know that he wished to not talk about it.
Thank you for this great post; I found it through a Google search for Jean Montvallier-Boulogne; I just wrote my own article about this same bullet hole-riddled wall for my own site, and linked to your post.
What is your website?