Sculpture 'Les Fusilles', Lille

[Lil O'lady]

I wonder if anyone knows more background about this war memorial in Lille? http://membres.lycos.fr/cercleetudes/41a%20-%2 0fusilles%20lillois.jpg
In particular, I cannot find out whether the people represented are meant to be portraits of real victims, or if they are symbolic 'types'. Any suggestions?

[Hammond Egg]

They are real people (though I don't know whether they are likenesses)

The monument commemorates four people - members of the resistance - shot by the occupying Germans during the first world war. It was dismantled by the Germans when they occupied Lille again in WW2, but pieces of the monument were preserved by the locals and it was rebuilt after the war.

The momument's title means "Lille, to her people who were shot". I don't know whether the four specified were the only ones shot during WW1, but the fifthe figure (on the right, on the ground) suggests otherwise; presumably much the same thing would have happened during WW2, so the monument would commemorate citizens of Lille killed during that war, too.

More about it here, in French:

http://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/page/affic heLieu.php?idLang=fr&idLieu=1347

[Lil O'lady]

Thanks Hammond, very useful. FYI there is recent interest in the atrocoties commited by the occupying Germans on the civilian population of northern France during the first world war - Helen MacPhail has written on this. It strikes me as one of those situations like the Spanish civil war, where society was literally only able to move on by agreeing not to refer to it, until much longer after the event.