Jon's Page

By Jon_Davey

Inclement weather

So a day to stay indoors. The yellow guys were eager to encourage work on my Paris Book. Unfortunately once I started I ended up going down a rabbit hole investigating what are said to be the first pictures of an insurrection. On wikipedia and most other places online in English they are identified as 'before and after' shots of the barricades on the rue Saint-Maur. Even an article that identifies the modern-day location doesn't make much of the fact the place they have identified that matches the images is on the rue du Faubourg du Temple. They do say 'at rue Saint-Maur' and I think therein lies the problem, going a long way back in the documentation of the three images. 

I finally found an article in French that describes how the photographer, Charles-Francois Thibault, took the images from his apartment at what was then 92 rue du Faubourg-du-Temple looking towards the crossroads with rue Saint-Maur where the first barricade can be seen. Hence the confusion - 'at rue Saint-Maur' has become 'on rue Saint-Maur' and the location is wrongly identified. Although initially a distraction from the chapter I was writing it turned out to be another example of the corruption of knowledge on the internet which has become something of a theme as I research things prompted by my Parisian wanderings. If the first page of search results all come up with the same erroneous 'facts' (frequently because they reference each other) how are we to keep track of the truth?   

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