Class Struggle

Abstract

The Communist activist ‘Colonel Fabien’ initiated violent Resistance against the German Occupation in August 1941 when he shot a German officer in Barbès-Rochechouart metro station. Now there is another metro station named after ‘Colonel Fabien’ himself. Anyone who travels the short distance between these two points will cross Belleville and Montmartre, two quarters that are intimately associated with the history and struggles of the French working class. The journey goes through stations named after Stalingrad and Jean Jaurès. Zola’s Nana was born in the Goutte d’Or just by Barbès-Rochechouart. The film Hotel du Nord, a brilliant evocation of working-class life in the 1930s, is set on the Canal Saint Martin, which runs parallel to the metro line. The communards fought their last battle close to the Place Colonel Fabien, which is now the headquarters of the Parti Communiste Français. However, members of the working class, whose history is so associated with this area, are less and less likely to live in it. The tenement blocks around Colonel Fabien are being redeveloped to accommodate ambitious professionals and few workers can afford to live here now. These changes owe something to the ambition of Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist mayor, to transform Paris into an exclusively bourgeois city, but they also reflect longer term changes.