On first arriving to Paris, I realized how perfect our class’s timing is. As I walked from the Luxembourg station to the hostel, I paid close attention to the shop windows that had been shattered in the most recent riots France saw after Emmanuel Macron passed a bill that raised tax prices on gas. Many French citizens felt that this bill was an attempt to favor the rich while being environmentally aware, as many people in the upper classes can afford to live closer to their work in Paris and thus do not have to worry about a raise in gas prices. Frustration over the bill resulted in strikes that erupted into riots. Much of the present state of Paris that I got to see in the broken shop windows reflect on the state of France during the French Revolution, a time in which lower and middle classes felt the structure and actions of their government favored the rich over the poor and ultimately stripped citizens of their birth-rights.

As I continued to make my way about Paris, the parallels between France now and France leading up to the French Revolution kept manifesting themselves. When at the Sacre Couer, I saw a group of the pink-vested strikers and this flyer of a yellow-vested striker on a near-by shop:

 

 

I found the juxtaposition between the Sacre Couer, a beautiful yet unfortunate reminder of how the Three Estate system of eighteenth-century France favored the Church (the second estate) over most of the country’s citizens, and the poster that represents a new (yet old) movement in France today to be an all to eery connection between the two moments of French history.

The Lachaise Cemetery too reflected the connections between the France of the French Revolution and the France of the modern day (albeit in a much more poetic sense). As I walked around the cemetery, two things became very clear to me: The Lachaise Cemetery is a burial ground for the Parisian upper class, and that all of the graves are decaying. By decaying, I mean that the over-the-surface graves are covered in moss, and some are even crumbling apart after years and years of being unprotected from weathering. When I saw these mossy graves, I began to think of how the aristocrats’ tombs, though becoming destroyed and forgotten, are literally giving new life in the form of the plants that have grown over them. Figuratively, though, the moss could be compared to the shattered windows I saw upon coming to Paris or the portrait of the yellow vested servant I took a photo of. The windows and the portrait came as a result of the struggle of the lower and middle classes face against the high class of French society—a struggle that extends from French aristocrats buried in Lachaise Cemetery.

 

 

P.S. While walking around the Lachaise cemetery, I did notice that two particular headstones were being preserved: Jim Morrison’s and Oscar Wilde’s. This doesn’t conflict with my poetic understanding of the park, though, as both were outsiders in both France and the upperclass.