The Suzanne-Buisson Square is a green space in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. on the Montmartre Hill. It is named after the politician and resistance fighter Suzanne Buisson (1883-1944), who was deported and died in Auschwitz.
How to get into the Suzanne-Buisson Square ?
The entrance is located at 7 bis, rue Girardon or Rue Simon Demeure.
Suzanne-Buisson : a left-wing and Jewish activist
In 1905, she joined the French section of the Workers' International, which she attended until 1920, and was part of their delegation at the Socialist Workers' International in Vienna (Austria) in 1931.
She was the first widow of Charles Gibault, killed in 1914, and remarried in 1926 to Georges Buisson, one of the leaders of the CGT Union. She was for a long time secretary of the National Committee of Socialist Women and editor of the women's page in the weekly Le Populaire. She was particularly interested in the place of women at the time, eternal minors, and considered that it was necessary to "free women from all domestic servitude, and make them independent beings sentimentally, economically and intellectually".
Simone-Buisson: the Resistance fighter
She joined Libération-Sud, a clandestine resistance movement in the Lyon region. In 1943, she became a liaison between the occupied and free zones for the clandestine Socialist Party and for relations with the French Communist Party.
She was arrested on April 1, 1944 in Lyon. Her last address in Lyon was 25 rue Marc Bernard and then we lost track of her. From a letter from Marie-Louise Eymard, we know that she was locked up in the Montluc prison in Lyon. According to this letter, Suzanne Buisson did not reveal any secrets during her interrogations. She left the prison for the Fresnes prison in Paris on May 12 after being tortured. She finally arrived at Drancy on June 28, 1944.
A Jew and a member of the Resistance, she was deported by convoy no. 76 on June 30, 1944 from the Drancy camp to Auschwitz. No one knows what happened to her upon her arrival in Auschwitz, but she did not return from deportation.
A commemorative plaque of the Resistance fighter is fixed at the entrance of the square that bears her name.
The statue of Saint Denis in the Suzanne-Buisson Square
It is the statue of Saint Denis that appears after the stone columns.
Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was beheaded. He carries his head in his hands, and surmounts a modern fountain without water, the old source having dried up in 1810 following an underground collapse.
The legend says that Saint Denis was tortured (beheaded) in the 3rd century by the Romans, together with the priest Rusticus and the archdeacon Eleuthero. Saint Denis would then have walked carrying his head to the place of his burial, the current city of Saint-Denis, located at approximately 6 km, and stopping at a fountain at the mount Martyrium (Montmartre) to wash his head. Still according to Hilduin, this mythological source would be located on the plot where the castle of Brouillards will rise later.
The surrounding garden in the Square
A game of bowls and play structures make it a very popular garden for all generations of Montmartre residents. They like to meet in the shade of the plane trees, poplars and rosebushes, as well as trees chosen for their exceptional flowering: apple trees and cherry trees, prunus 'pissardii'. A sorbier des oiseleurs stands among them. This poetically named tree can live up to 150 years in cool, light soil, and its reddish-coral pisiform (pea-sized) fruits persist from July to December.
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