Victor Noir

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is the largest cemetery complex in Paris, France. Located in the 20th arrondissement, this cemetery was built in 1804 by a French Catholic clergyman named Père François de la Chaise. Various famous figures in the fields of art, literature, science, and politics are buried in this cemetery, including Jim Morrison, Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Molière, and Edith Piaf. Every year more than 3 million visitors come to make pilgrimages and tours to this place.

There are also 'les pèrelachaisiens' or people who regularly come to take a walk to breathe fresh air like they are in a park in general. The complex, which has an area of around 44 hectares and has more than 70,000 graves, is quite well-maintained and beautiful. Each tombstone has a unique shape and is decorated with ornaments and statues that represent the figures or feelings of the figures buried. This uniqueness is what attracts many visitors.

Good Luck for Sexual Life Over time, many myths and mysterious stories have developed in this cemetery. One of the myths circulating comes from Victor Noir's grave, which is now a symbol of fertility. Many people deliberately come to this tomb to try their luck in their sexual lives. Above the tomb, there is a 1:1 bronze statue showing the figure of Victor Noir wearing a suit in his final position after being shot dead. A stovepipe hat fell beside his right foot. The statue has a distinctive patina green color. Some parts of the surface appear to be eroded due to touches from visitors who want to practice the myth that rubbing the statue's body, especially in the genital area, will help increase fertility or virility. This myth developed in other variations, such as kissing the statue on the lips and placing flowers in the statue's hands. So it's not surprising that the color on the lip area of the statue also fades. Due to the large number of visitors who came to touch the statue of Victor Noir, in 2004 the management of Père-Lachaise, based on the decision of the Head of the Paris City Cemeteries Department, erected a fence around the tomb to maintain the quality of the statue. The visitors protested and the fence was immediately removed so they could come closer and touch the statue.

Journalist Shot Dead Prince Victor Noir was born in the Vosges, France, with the name Yvan Salmon to a Jewish family who converted to Catholicism. "Victor Noir" is a pen name taken from his mother's maiden name. He was born in 1848 and grew up as an ordinary boy with his simple family in the Attigny area, in the Vosges. His father was a miller who later worked as a watchmaker. He had an older brother named Louis Salmon who fought in the Crimean War against Russia. After the war, her brother had a career as a journalist at La Patrie and Le Peuple. Victor Noir also followed in his brother's footsteps and became a journalist and moved to Paris to start his career. At the end of 1869, a dispute broke out between the radical newspaper La Revanche which condemned Napoleon I, and the loyalist newspaper L'Avenir de la Corse which published a response letter written by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew and cousin of Emperor Napoleon III. The head of the newspaper where Victor Noir works, Henri Rochefort, gives full support to La Revanche in fighting the Empire. Prince Pierre-Bonaparte wrote a threatening letter to Rochefort to immediately appear before him at a house on Auteuil Street, Paris. Rochefort sent Victor Noir and Ulric de Fonvielle. The Prince felt intense hatred from Noir and Fonville when they met. His frustration came out in six shots from his revolver at the two journalists. Fonville survived, but Noir was shot in the chest and immediately became unconscious when he ran towards the veranda. Victor Noir was buried on 12 January 1870 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. His funeral was attended by more than 100,000 people who opposed the establishment. Victor Noir's death initiated a large-scale anti-Napoleonic movement in France and fostered resistance that led to the fall of the empire eight months later and the formation of the French Third Republic.

Connotations of the Recumbent Statue To honor Victor Noir's death as a young Republican who became an innocent victim of the Second Empire and sparked a great movement, his tomb was moved from Neuilly to Paris, alongside other important figures buried at Père-Laichaise. The eminent French sculptor, Jules Dalou, designed and created statues for his new tomb. The sculptor wanted to depict the figure of Victor Noir lying stiff in a realistic manner with full clothing at the time of his death. In La tombe de Victor Noir au cimetière du Père-Lachaise (2010), Marina Emelyanova-Griva examines the gestural tendencies of Victor Noir's sculptures which now connote sexuality. In making the statue, Dalou depicted Victor Noir's death as realistically as possible and without the intention of highlighting the genitals or giving sexual tendencies. Making statues with a recumbent gesture on tombstones covering graves has been a common pattern since the 11th century. The influence of romanticism and the neo-gothic spirit revived the creation of recumbent statues in Paris. One of them is the statue of Godefroy Cavaignac by François Rude in the Montmartre Cemetery. If we look at the history of Victor Noir, the creation of his statue is completely unrelated to the current sexual cult. But merely as an award with a political connotation. So there is a paradigm shift in society in appreciating this work. No one has yet discovered the exact origins of when the sexual connotation first appeared in Victor Noir's grave statue. The oldest finding is visually depicted in a work by the German painter, Christian Schad, which was created in 1929. The untitled work, in the form of a caricature drawing using ink on paper, visualizes a woman straddling a recumbent statue that has characteristics like the statue of Victor Noir.

There is no definite explanation regarding the intensity of women in the work. However, based on Gérard Laplatine's account in Ethnologie des faits religieux en Europe (1993), it can be concluded from Schad's work that there was a response from society towards statues with recumbent gestures. There is a certain subject and intensity that is carried out, which is then developed by the people who come to the tomb, instead of just seeing the statue as an object separate from visitors. Although this hypothesis cannot be completely proven, because it may just be Schad's imagination, the practices depicted have a similar atmosphere in real life decades after the work was created. Still in her study of La tombe de Victor Noir au cimetière du Père-Lachaise (2010), Marina Emelyanova-Griva dates the first information found in popular literature about the fertility cult of Victor Noir's tomb to 1966, which begins the record of worship at the tomb. Since the late 1970s, various texts and books have spoken about the burial of Père-Lachaise, describing the rites that accompanied it. Often the explanation ignores the true history of the journalist's death. Information about the rites of that period enlarges the circle of visitors who come to Victor Noir's grave. They photograph themselves with a distinctive gesture (hands on the statue's genital area), touching it while making a wish. The cult around Victor Noir's grave, which continues to this day, increasingly has a sexual connotation. This phenomenon becomes a new form of tradition for those who believe in its myths to claim legitimacy, by recreating an imaginary connection with stories that had great power in the past.