On the Barricade
About On the Barricade
In a Paris kitchen a mother sends her boy out for a bottle of milk. In the street, people are building a barricade as gendarmes advance and fire. The boy walks into the fight, is taken for one of the fighters, and is lined up to be shot.
Cast & crew
More about On the Barricade
Gaumont released the film in 1906. It runs about six minutes. Most sources credit Alice Guy. A Gaumont company book credited Étienne Arnaud, which later writers treat as a mistake. It is Guy's second Victor Hugo adaptation, after La Esmeralda (1905). Alternate titles include Sur la barricade and L'Émeute. The French title used in current catalogs is L'Enfant sur la barricade.
Themes
Background
The Paris Commune was thirty-five years past when Gaumont released the film. Hugo's poem, not a battle report, supplies the child in front of the firing squad.
Making
Guy stages the Commune as an errand. The barricade is built in the time it takes a child to cross the street for milk.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
A print survives and has been circulated under the title L'Enfant de la barricade.
Notes
- The boy is likened to Gavroche in Les Misérables, but the scene follows Hugo's poem "Sur une barricade," from L'Année terrible (1872), about the Paris Commune.
- In the poem a child taken by soldiers asks to return his mother's watch, promises to come back, and does. The officer lets him go. The film's surviving synopsis stops at the moment he is about to be shot.
- The picture is also known as L'enfant de la barricade.
Scenes
- The boy comes out of the shop with the milk and steps into the street as the gendarmes fire on the barricade.
- He is seized and placed with the fighters who are about to be shot.
Influenced by
- Victor Hugo's poem "Sur une barricade" (1872)
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-lenfant-de-la-barricade)
