A new art exhibition has recently opened in Paris and it’s caused a bit of a stir. Housed in the city hall, ‘Che in Paris’ is dedicated to the life and times of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary who was killed in Bolivia just over fifty years ago.
Guevara had an affection for the French capital, particularly the Louvre, where he would spend hours admiring Jérôme Bosch’s ‘La Nef des fous’.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is evidently proud of this link, describing Che Guevara recently as a ‘romantic icon’, a curious description of a man who oversaw the torture and execution of his class enemies while in charge of La Cabaña prison in Havana.
Hidalgo isn’t the first French socialist to wax lyrical about South American Marxists. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left France Insoumise, was an admirer of Hugo Chavez, and in 2016 the former Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, jetted off to Cuba to attend the funeral of Fidel Castro, describing the man who murdered thousands of his own people as ‘a monument to history’.
On her return to France, Royal brushed aside her critics, declaring that it wasn’t her job but that of historians to examine the ‘light and shade’ of the Castro era.
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