Victor Noir's tomb at Père Lachaise

Ten minutes that nearly ended an empire

Victor Noir was born Yvan Salmon. At twenty-one he was a junior journalist on La Marseillaise, a republican paper edited by Henri Rochefort that spent its days attacking the regime of Napoleon III.

On 10 January 1870 the paper's editor sent Noir and a colleague to the house of Prince Pierre Bonaparte, the Emperor's cousin, to arrange the terms of a duel over an exchange of insults. Accounts of what happened inside differ on the detail. They agree on the outcome: Bonaparte produced a revolver and shot Noir in the chest. He died in a chemist's shop a few doors away.

It was, in one sense, a squalid quarrel between newspapers. In another, it was a Bonaparte shooting an unarmed republican in his own drawing room, four months before a plebiscite.

The funeral

Something like a hundred thousand people came to the funeral at Neuilly on 12 January. Rochefort and the republican leadership argued through the day about whether to march the coffin into central Paris — which would almost certainly have started an insurrection — or to bury him quietly. They buried him quietly. Rochefort was arrested days later anyway.

Bonaparte was tried by a specially constituted High Court at Tours and acquitted, on a plea of self-defence, which persuaded almost nobody. Within eight months the Empire had fallen at Sedan, and within a year the Commune had come and gone. Noir's death is not the cause of any of that, but it is the moment at which a very large number of Parisians stopped giving the regime the benefit of the doubt.

In 1891, under the Third Republic, his remains were brought to Père Lachaise and Dalou's monument was installed over them. Jules Dalou was a republican who had been exiled to London for his part in the Commune; giving him this commission was itself a political statement.

The sculpture, and what happened to it

Dalou did something unusual. Instead of an effigy laid out in state, he modelled the body as it fell: flat on its back on the slab, one arm slack, the top hat upturned on the stone beside the hip where it landed. The coat and waistcoat are open. The trousers are rendered with a realism that was, in 1891, a straightforward statement about a young man's body being wasted, and that has since been read very differently.

A fertility superstition attached itself to the statue during the twentieth century, and the relevant bronze — along with the lips and the tips of the boots — is now polished to a bright gold against the dark patina of the rest. In 2004 the cemetery fenced the tomb and posted a warning notice. The protest was immediate and largely female, the fence came down, and the polishing has continued ever since.

It is worth saying plainly: a young man was shot dead at twenty-one for working at a newspaper, and his memorial has become a joke that most visitors repeat without knowing his name. Dalou's sculpture is very good, the superstition is harmless, and Noir deserves the ten seconds it takes to learn what he was doing in that house.

Finding it

Division 92 is in the upper eastern part of the cemetery, a ten-minute walk from the Gambetta gate and a long climb from the boulevard. The bronze lies flat, so it does not read from a distance the way a standing monument does; look along the ground rather than up.

Oscar Wilde is three divisions away in 89, and the Mur des Fédérés — where 147 Communards were shot in May 1871, eighteen months after Noir's death, some of them very probably people who had walked in his funeral — is a few minutes south in division 76. Walking from one to the other in that order is the single most useful ten minutes anyone can spend in this cemetery.