In last week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple writes about the many famous and also less well-known people who are buried in the immense Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise, near his apartment.

There is, in fact, a communist corner in the cemetery, where such luminaries of the French Communist Party as Maurice Thorez and Georges Marchais are buried, as well as communist or communist-sympathizing writers, not all of them by any means negligible. The fact that they are all buried together or in close proximity, these dogmatic materialists, so that they should be united in death, is powerfully suggestive of the quasi-religious appeal of communism. I am not religious myself but on the whole (and within limits) prefer the religious kind of religion to the secular kind.