Les Miserables. The barricades of Paris and London

With the film of the stage Musical of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables -- the story and the geography of insurrectionary barricades have undergone repeated transformations.... 

Scenes of revolutionary barricades were actually shot in the far-from revolutionary surroundings of the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich in London - the site of a secret nuclear reactor in the 70s and 80s - formerly a "Hospital" for elderly retired naval staff





original photo click on http://www.panoramio.com/photo/70798170
The stand-in for revolutionary Paris was actually the Old Royal Naval College - before then Hospital- at Greenwich, now Greenwich University

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A barricade of the Paris Commune,

on the rue des Amandiers, 1871. 

Compare with the genuine article, a barricade of the Paris Commune,
on the rue des Amandiers, 1871. The air of determination and the seriousness of the business is evident










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Cumulative plan of barricades, after Philippe, S. (1989). Les Barricades. Architectural Review, 186 (1110, August), 84-86.

The sites of insurrectionary barricades were almost traditional as the memory of each revolutionary episode was not lost in Paris before the next was to be erected

Famously Baron Hausmann's design for boulevards was partly to divide communities as well as to allow army access to the heart of Paris to intervene










A more recent example of the continuity of the sites of barricades -- and human shields was that of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 (where Fascists were prevented from marching in the east End of London) and the locations where the racist EDL were also prevented from demonstrating in Tower Hamlets in September 2011. On both occasions the slogan adopted by the locals (Jews, Irish Catholics and Bangladeshi Muslims alike) was "¡No pasarán!"  They shall not pass (from the Spanish Civil War)

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