Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (continued): #25: Eugène Pottier

'EUGÈNE POTTIER

1816 – 1887'

Eugène Pottier was a poet and revolutionary, and perhaps most famous for the song on the final line of the sculptured book here: L'Internationale, symbolic of the international struggle of the working class against their bourgeois oppressors, which became the national anthem of the USSR. Needless to say, he took an active part in the Commune de Paris. He went into exile in the USA in 1873 and returned to Paris after the amnesty of 1880.