A statue of Our Lady of France replaces the sickle and the hammer

Today, in the town of Baillet-en-France (Parisian region), is a monumental statue of Our Lady of France, standing on the same spot where, 80 years ago, stood a Communist edifice surmounted by the Sickle and Hammer ...

This is why: In 2004, the park of the local castle was in the process of being redesigned, when a team of archeologists from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) doing research on the medieval habitat made an unexpected discovery of a medallion buried in the mud of the castle’s embankment, bearing the State emblem of the Armenian Soviet Republic. It depicted a hammer and sickle, a tractor on a snow-covered mountain background with a ship, depicting Mount Ararat and the stranded Ark of Noah. In 1936, Armenia became a Soviet republic federated to the USSR. Other artifacts were unearthed, from the former Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

In fact, all the discovered objects came from the same monument, the large Soviet pavilion of the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris. This pavilion was surmounted by a gigantic steel sculpture: a young couple—a Russian worker and collective farmer—brandishing a sickle and hammer, with the allegories of the eleven Soviet Republics of the time at their feet. These reliefs and cement sculptures were discovered in Baillet-en-France.

After the International Exposition, the reliefs were donated by the USSR to the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), a communist trade union which bought the castle park of Baillet-en-France in 1937 and turned it into a vacation center. Seized by the government in 1939, after the prohibition of the PCF (1) and the CGT, the park became a center for Pétainist youths in November 1940. In the spring of 1941, the sculptures were destroyed.

Historical irony or a sign of the times? In 1988, Baillet-en-France was chosen to host a monumental statue of Our Lady of France, also made for that same 1937 International Exposition to adorn the pontifical pavilion located exactly between the Russian pavilion and the German pavilion of the expo!

(1) PCF: French Communist Party

Inrap