Rue Victor Simonnel — White Town, Pondicherry

Named after: Victor Simonnel, soldier from Pondicherry killed at Verdun in the First World War

Welcome to Rue Victor Simonnel, one of the busiest streets in the White Town. It runs north to south from Ananda Rangapillai Street to Rue Bussy, and along the way you pass the General Hospital, the Maternity Hospital, the Legislative Assembly, St. John's Church, and the Lycée Français. The European Cemetery is here too. Victor Simonnel was a soldier from Pondicherry killed at Verdun in 1916. His street did not stay quiet.

Rue Victor Simonnel may be named after a soldier of the First World War, but it has become one of the most institutionally dense streets in the city. The Pondicherry General Hospital and the Maternity Hospital draw patients and families from across the territory every day, and the pavement around them is lined with tea stalls and small shops: the informal economy that surrounds any major public hospital anywhere in India. In the middle of the street sits the Pondicherry Legislative Assembly, the seat of the Union Territory's government. St. John's Church, belonging to the Church of South India, stands nearby. The Lycée Français, the French school that has educated generations of the Franco-Pondicherrian community, is on this same street.

At the northern end, the European Cemetery has stood since around 1700. It is what one observer called the 'silent directory' of French India: where the paper archives were scattered across Aix-en-Provence, Paris, and Pondicherry, the tombstones stayed put. Governors, engineers, missionaries, merchants, and soldiers are buried here. The oldest graves, in coral stone, hold the first generation of French colonial builders. The nineteenth-century tombs are the most elaborate: marble sarcophagi, neo-Gothic iron railings, obelisks. The 1761 British destruction of Pondicherry interrupted the cemetery's maintenance, and the oldest stones show it.

Victor Simonnel was a Pondicherrian who died at Verdun. His name is carved on the French War Memorial on Beach Road. A separate bishops' cemetery at the Cathedral on Rue Dumas holds three hundred years of MEP clergy.