Dust and Freedom: The Historical Arc of the Paris Commune

In 19th-century Paris, echoes of empire, the cries from barricades, and the shadows of mass executions intertwined.
Five paintings guide us through this turbulent history:
from the fall of Napoleon’s empire to the martyrdom of republican deputies;
from the tense anticipation of ordinary citizens behind barricades, to the Commune’s bloody finale, and finally to the profound artistic reflection on the meaning of “freedom.”

This is a story of hope and sacrifice, of disillusionment and unrelenting questions.

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The End of an Era

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Execution of Marshal Ney (1868)
Execution of Marshal Ney

On December 7, 1815, Michel Ney, one of Napoleon’s most celebrated marshals, was executed on the outskirts of Paris. Jean-Léon Gérôme captures the moment with his signature academic realism: cold, restrained, and hauntingly silent. Ney stands upright before the firing squad—isolated, yet resolute.

Gérôme avoids melodrama. Instead, his detached perspective forces viewers to confront the brutality of politics: the execution is not glorified but rendered as a stark, inevitable fact.

In French memory, Ney’s death symbolized the cruelty of shifting regimes. Half a century later, the Communards would inherit this same tragic pattern—where ideals are purchased with blood.

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A Martyr Before the Commune

Ernest Pichio, Victor Baudin on the Barricade of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, December 3, 1851
Victor Baudin

In December 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, dissolving the National Assembly. Barricades rose across Paris. Deputy Victor Baudin was shot dead while defending the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Ernest Pichio portrays Baudin almost like a saint of the Republic: his fallen body, mourned by comrades, transforms the barricade into an altar of civic sacrifice.

For republicans, Baudin became a martyr. His death embodied the continuity of Paris’s revolutionary spirit, a foreshadowing of the Commune’s own fallen defenders twenty years later.

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Waiting Behind the Barricade

André Devambez, La Barricade ou l’Attente
La Barricade ou l’Attente

By 1870, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was besieged and starving. Citizens—workers, students, ordinary families—gathered behind improvised barricades.

André Devambez chooses not to show battle, but silence. His canvas captures the psychology of anticipation: tense faces, clenched hands, and watchful eyes. The barricade is not yet a battlefield but a threshold, holding back the weight of history.

This painting embodies the dawn of the Commune: a fragile pause before the eruption of collective action. Waiting itself becomes a revolutionary emotion.

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The Cemetery Massacre

Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, Assault on a Cemetery by Regular Troops, May 1871
Massacre cimetiere lachaise

May 1871: “La Semaine sanglante” (“Bloody Week”). Government troops stormed Paris, crushing the Commune district by district. At Père Lachaise cemetery, the dead and the living commingled. Philippoteaux depicts soldiers clashing with Communards amid toppled gravestones, where marble and flesh collapse together.

The cemetery—traditionally a place of rest—became a theater of slaughter. Thousands were executed and buried in mass graves, their ideals silenced beneath the earth.

This image is not merely historical documentation, but a testimony to the horror of state violence, and the tragic ending of the Commune’s social experiment.

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Freedom on Trial

Laslett John Pott, Oh Liberté ! Que de crimes on commet en ton nom !
Oh Liberté

Though painted by the British artist Laslett John Pott, this work resonates powerfully with the memory of the Commune. Its title cries: “Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in your name!”

Liberty is personified as a woman, but she is surrounded by bones, fire, and desolation. The irony is stark: the noblest of ideals has become a justification for endless bloodshed.

Placed after the Commune’s collapse, the painting reads as a moral indictment. It asks: Can freedom survive when pursued through violence? Or must liberty be re-imagined beyond the cycle of repression and revolt?

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Conclusion

These five paintings trace a century-long arc of Parisian history:

• 1815: Ney’s execution marks the ruthless end of the Napoleonic dream.
• 1851: Baudin’s death rekindles the barricade tradition.
• 1870–71: Devambez shows the anxious pause before revolution.
• 1871: Philippoteaux depicts the bloodbath at Père Lachaise.
• Finally: Pott’s allegory places liberty itself under judgment.

Together they reveal the tragedy and resilience of the Paris Commune, and the broader 19th-century struggle for freedom:
Is liberty worth such a price?
And who truly has the right to claim it?

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