بخش 4 کتاب 10

BOOK TEN

JUNE 5, 1832

THE ISSUE ON THE SURFACE

WHAT MAKES A riot? Nothing and everything. Electricity released a little at a time, a flame suddenly shooting out, a roving force, a momentary breath of wind. This breath of wind meets beings that think, brains that dream, souls that suffer, passions that burn, howling torments, and carries them away.

Where?

Anywhere, willy-nilly. Regardless of the state, regardless of the laws, regardless of the prosperity and the insolence of others.

Inflamed convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations, warlike instincts held back, exalted young spirits, blindly generous impulses, curiosity, the taste for change, the thirst for the unexpected, the feeling that gives us pleasure reading the bill for a new show and makes us thrill to the whistle of the stagehand at the theatre; vague hatreds, resentments, disappointments, any vanity that feels that fate has failed them; discontentments, hollow dreams, ambitions hedged in by high walls; whoever hopes that collapse will provide a way out; finally, at the very bottom, the peat bog, that mud that catches fire—these are the elements that make up a riot.

The grandest and the most inconsequential; beings who roam on the fringes, beyond the pale, waiting for an opportunity, bohemians, vagrants, street-corner vagabonds, those who sleep at night in urban deserts with no roof over their head but the cold clouds in the sky, those who look to chance, not work, for their daily bread, those unknown inhabitants of destitution and nothingness, the bare-armed, the barefoot, belong to the riot.

Anyone who nurses in their soul a secret grudge against some act of the government, or of life or fate, lives on the brink of riot and as soon as it shows, begins to quiver and feel themselves lifted up by the vortex.

The riot is a sort of whirlwind of the social atmosphere that forms without warning when the temperature reaches a certain level and that rises as it swirls, runs, thunders, rips up, crushes, demolishes, uproots, dragging with it great natures and puny ones, manly men and the feebleminded, the tree trunk and the wisp of straw.

Woe to the one it carries away as much as to the one it comes to strike! It smashes them against each other.

It imparts to those it seizes some mysterious extraordinary power. It fills the first comer with the force of events; it turns everything into projectiles. It turns a bit of rubble into a cannonball and a street porter into a general.

If you believe certain oracles of under-the-table politics, from the authorities’ point of view, a bit of a riot is desirable. How it works in theory: A riot shores up those governments it fails to overthrow. It tests the army; it focuses the bourgeoisie; it flexes the muscles of the police; it gauges the strength of the social backbone. It is a gymnastic exercise; it is almost hygiene. The government feels better after a riot like a man after a rubdown.

Thirty years ago, the riot was seen in a different light.

For everything there is a theory that proclaims itself “common sense”; Philinte versus Alceste;1 the offer of a compromise between the true and the false; explanation, admonition, a somewhat arrogant mitigation that, because it is mixed with blame and excuse, believes itself to be wisdom yet is often only pedantry. An entire school of politics, known as the happy medium,2 has emerged from this. Between cold water and hot water, it is the party of lukewarm water. This school, whose pseudoprofundity is all on the surface, dissects effects without going back as far as causes, and rails against the tumult of the marketplace from the height of its pseudoscience.

To hear this school: “The riots muddied the waters in 1830 and robbed that great event of part of its purity. The July Revolution had been a beautiful popular breath of fresh air, swiftly followed by blue skies. The riots brought the cloudy skies back, they made that revolution, initially so remarkable for its unanimity, degenerate into a brawl. In the July Revolution, as in all disjointed bouts of progress, there had been secret fractures; rioting made these more marked. It became possible to say: ‘Ah! This is broken.’ After the July Revolution, all you had was a sense of liberation; after the riots, you sensed catastrophe.

“Any riot shuts the shops, depresses funds, upsets the stock exchange, suspends commerce, hampers business, speeds up bankruptcies. Money runs dry; private fortunes are thrown into turmoil, public credit is rattled, industry is thrown out of whack, capital withdraws, labour is underpaid, fear is everywhere; aftershocks are triggered in all the towns. Fissures then open into chasms. They reckon the first day of rioting costs France twenty million, the second, forty, the third, sixty. A three-day riot costs a hundred and twenty million; in other words, looking only at the financial result, it is equivalent to a disaster, a shipwreck or battle lost, one that wipes out a fleet of sixty ships of the line.

“Doubtless, historically, the riots had their beauty; the war of the cobblestones is no less grandiose and no less pathetic than the war of the bushes; in one lies the soul of the forest, in the other the heart of the city; one has Jean Chouan, the other has Jeanne.3 The riots lit up in red, garishly but splendidly, all the most prominent features of the Parisian character in its originality, generosity, devotion, stormy gaiety, with students proving that bravery plays a part in intelligence, the National Guard unshakable, the bivouacs of shopkeepers, the fortresses of street kids, the contempt for death of the average man in the street. Schools and legions clashed. After all, there was only a difference in age between the combatants; they are the same race; the same stoical men die at twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The army, always sad in civil wars, pitted prudence against audacity. The riots, at the same time that they manifested the intrepidity of the people, were the making of bourgeois courage.

“That is all very well. But is all that worth the bloodshed? And to the blood shed add the future darkened, progress compromised, anxiety among the best, honest liberals despairing, foreign absolutism rubbing its hands with glee to see the revolution inflict such wounds on itself, the vanquished of 1830 triumphant and crowing, ‘We told you so!’ Add Paris made greater, perhaps, but France diminished, for certain. Add, for we have to make a clean breast of it, the massacres that too often dishonoured the victory of order turned ferocious over liberty run amok. All in all, the riots have been catastrophic.” Thus speaks that approximation of wisdom with which the bourgeoisie, that approximation of the people, contents itself so readily.

As for us, we reject this too broad and consequently too convenient term: the riots. Between one popular movement and another popular movement, we make a distinction. We don’t ask ourselves if a riot costs as much as a battle. For a start, why a battle? Here the question of war raises its ugly head. Is war less of a scourge than a riot is a calamity? And then, are all riots calamities? And what if the fourteenth of July did cost twenty million? The setting up of Philippe V in Spain4 cost France two billion. Even if the cost was the same, we prefer July 14. Besides, we reject these figures that sound like arguments but are merely words. Given a riot, we look at it on its own. In all that the doctrinaire objection exposed above says, it is a question only of the effect; we look for the cause.

We try to be specific.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

THERE IS THE riot and there is the insurrection; they are two different forms of rage; one is wrong, the other is right. In democratic states, the only states based on justice, it sometimes happens that a fraction usurps power; then all rise up and the necessary vindication of rights can go as far as the taking up of arms. In all the issues that arise from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is an insurrection, the attack of the fraction against the whole is a riot; according to whether it is the king or the Convention that is holed up in the Tuileries, they are justly or unjustly stormed. The same cannon turned on the hordes is wrong on August 10 and right on Vendémiaire 14. Similar in appearance, different at bottom; the Swiss Guards defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true.1 What universal suffrage has done in all its liberty and its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. The same goes for the things of civilization pure and simple; the instinct of the masses, yesterday clear-sighted, may be cloudy tomorrow. The same fury is legitimate against Terray and absurd against Turgot.2 The smashing of machines, the pillaging of warehouses, the tearing up of railway lines, the demolition of docks, the wrong turns taken by the multitudes, the people’s denials of justice for progress, Ramus assassinated by schoolboys,3 Rousseau driven out of Switzerland,4 pelted with stones—that is rioting. Israel versus Moses, Athens versus Phocion, Rome versus Scipio—that is rioting. Paris versus the Bastille is insurrection. The soldiers versus Alexander, the sailors versus Christopher Columbus5—it is the same revolt; an ungodly revolt. Why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Christopher Columbus does for America with the compass; Alexander, like Columbus, discovers a world. These gifts of a world to civilization are such increments of light that any resistance to them is criminal. Sometimes the people twist fidelity to themselves. The mob is a traitor to the people. Is there anything more peculiar, for instance, than that long and bloody protest of the contraband saltmakers, a chronic legitimate revolt which, at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, at the hour of popular victory, suddenly takes up the cause of the throne, turns into the Chouan uprising and goes from being an insurrection against to a riot for! Grim masterpieces of ignorance! The contraband saltmaker escapes the royal gallows and, with a remnant of rope still around his neck, sports the white cockade. “Death to the Salt Taxes”6 gives birth to “Long Live the King.” The Saint Bartholomew killers, September cutthroats, Avignon slaughterers, assassins of Coligny, assassins of Madame de Lamballe, assassins of Brune, Miquelet militia, followers of Verdet, Cadenette-wearing soldiers, Companions of Jesus, the Chevaliers du Brassard—that is riot for you. La Vendée is one big Catholic riot.7 The sound of justice in motion is recognizable and it doesn’t always come from the quaking of the overburdened masses; there are crazy rages, there are cracked bells; not all tocsins ring out with the sound of bronze. The surging motion of passion and ignorance is not the same as the jolt of progress. Rise up, by all means, but only to grow. Show me where you are going. Insurrection can only ever forge ahead. Any other uprising is bad. Any violent step backward is riot; to recoil is an act of assault and battery against the human race. Insurrection is the truth’s fit of fury; the cobblestones that the insurrection tears up throw off the spark of justice. These cobblestones leave riot only their mud. Danton versus Louis XVI is an insurrection; Hébert versus Danton8 is a riot.

This is why, in given cases, an insurrection may be, as Lafayette claims, the most sacred of duties, but a riot may be the most deadly of violent attacks.

There is also some difference in the intensity of heat given off; an insurrection is often a volcano, a riot is often a flash in the pan.

Revolt, as we have said, sometimes occurs within the powers that be. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins9 is a ruler.

Sometimes insurrection is resurrection.

The solving of everything by universal suffrage being an entirely modern development, and all history prior to this development being filled for four thousand years with the violated rights and suffering of peoples, each era of history brings with it what protest is thinkable to it. Under the Caesars there was no insurrection—but there was Juvenal.10 The facit indignatio—anger writes poetry—replaces the Gracchi.11

Under the Caesars, there is the Syene exile; there is also the man of the Annals.12

We say nothing of the mighty exile of Patmos13 who, too, shatters the real world with a protest in the name of the ideal world, turns vision into an enormous satire, and casts over Rome-Nineveh, over Rome-Babylon, over Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.

John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal: We may not understand him; he is a Jew and it is all in Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annals is a Latin; better still, a Roman.

Since the Neros14 reign so blackly, they should be depicted accordingly. The work of the engraver’s burin on its own would be too pale; we need to pour concentrated prose that bites into the engraved lines.

Despots have a hand in creating thinkers. Shackled words are terrible words. The writer doubly, triply intensifies his style when silence is imposed on the people by some master. A certain mysterious fullness swells up out of this silence and it filters thought and turns it to stone. Clamping down in history produces concision in the historian. The rock-solid compactness of whatever celebrated prose is nothing more than a tamping down by the tyrant.

Tyranny forces the writer to make cuts in diameter that are incremental increases in strength. The Ciceronian period,15 barely adequate on the subject of Verres, would lose its edge on Caligula. Less scope in the phrase, more intensity in the punch. Tacitus thinks with his arm drawn back.

The honesty of a big heart, condensed into justice and truth, strikes like lightning.

We might note in passing that it is remarkable that Tacitus was not historically superimposed on Caesar. The Tiberii16 were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena whose meeting seems to have been mysteriously avoided by the one who regulates entrances and exits in the mise-en-scène of the centuries. Caesar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two great men by not pitting them against each other. The righter of wrongs, striking Caesar, may strike too hard and be unjust. God does not want that. The great wars of Africa and Spain, the eradication of the Sicilian pirates, the introduction of civilization into Gaul, Britain, and Germany—all that glory spans the Rubicon.17 There is a sort of delicacy in divine justice here, when it hesitates to let the formidable historian loose on the illustrious usurper, saving Caesar from Tacitus and allowing the genius extenuating circumstances.

Of course, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius. There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but moral pestilence is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In those particular reigns nothing cloaks the shame; and the makers of examples, Tacitus as much as Juvenal, slap this unanswerable ignominy in the face more usefully with the human race looking on.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sulla.18 Under Claudius and under Domitian19 there is a deformed baseness corresponding to the ugliness of the tyrant. The vileness of the slaves is a direct product of the tyrant; a miasma is given off those foul consciences in which the master is reflected; public authorities are sleazy; hearts are cramped, consciences are shallow, souls are slug-like; this is how it is under Caracalla, this is how it is under Commodus, this is how it is under Heliogabalus,20 while the only thing given off by the Roman Senate under Caesar is the pong of droppings peculiar to eagles’ aeries.

Whence the coming, apparently late in the piece, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals; it is only when everything is obvious that the demonstrator pops up.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, just like Isaiah in biblical times, just like Dante in the Middle Ages, mean lone men; riot and insurrection mean the multitude, now wrong, now right.

In the most general cases, the riot springs from a material event; insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. The riot is Masaniello, insurrection is Spartacus.21 Insurrection is limited to the mind, the riot to the stomach. Gaster gets cranky, but Gaster,22 of course, isn’t always wrong. In cases of famine, the riot, Buzançais,23 for instance, has a real, pathetic, and perfectly just starting point. Yet it remains a riot. Why? Because, being right at bottom, it is wrong in form. Vicious, though right, violent, though strong, it lashed out in all directions; it crashed along like a blind elephant, crushing everything in its path, leaving the dead bodies of old men, of women and children behind it; it shed, without knowing why, the blood of the innocent and the inoffensive. To feed the people is a fine goal, massacring them is not a good way to go about it.

Every armed protest, even the most legitimate, even August 10, even July 14, kicks off with the same turmoil. Before right becomes clear, there is sound and fury. At the start, the insurrection is a riot, just as the river is a torrent. Normally it ends in the ocean that is revolution. Sometimes, though, having come from those high mountains that dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, made up of the purest snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and being swollen by a hundred tributaries in the majestic pace of triumph, the insurrection suddenly loses itself in some bourgeois quagmire, like the Rhine in a swamp.

All that is in the past, the future is something else. Universal suffrage has a wonderful way of dissolving the riot’s raison d’être, and by giving insurrection the vote, it takes away its weapons. The melting away of wars, the street war as much as the border war—such is inexorable progress. Whatever today may be, peace is Tomorrow.

But insurrection, riot, and how the first differs from the second—your so-called bourgeois really can’t tell the difference. For him everything is sedition, rebellion, pure and simple, revolt of mastiff against master, a bid to bite that has to be punished with the chain and the doghouse, barking, yapping; until the day when the dog’s head, suddenly much bigger, stands out dimly in the shadows with the face of a lion.

That’s when the bourgeois shouts: Long live the people!

Given the above explanation, what is the movement of June 1832 in the eyes of history? Is it a riot? Is it an insurrection?

It is an insurrection.

We may at times, in this mise-en-scène of a fearsome event, happen to say riot, but only to describe surface events and always maintaining the distinction between riot as form and insurrection as foundation.

In its swift explosion and its bleak extinction, the movement of 1832 had so much grandeur that even those who see it as a mere riot do not talk about it without respect. For them it is like a hangover from 1830. Imaginations once fired, they say, do not calm down in a day. A revolution does not break off just like that. It always of necessity has a few ups and downs before returning to a state of peace, like a mountain shifting back down again onto the plain. There are no Alps without the Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis in contemporary history, which Parisians like to remember as “the days of the riots,” is surely a typical moment in the stormy episodes of this century.

One last word before we tell the story of it.

The events we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality that the historian sometimes neglects for want of space and time. But this is where, and we insist on this, this is where life is, the throbbing, the shuddering of humanity. Little details, as I think we may have said, are the foliage, so to speak, of big events and are lost in the remoteness of history. The era known as “the riots” abounds in details of the kind. The judicial investigations, for reasons other than history’s, did not reveal everything, nor did they perhaps get to the bottom of everything. So we will bring to light, among the known and published particularities, things that were never made known, facts buried by the obliviousness of some, the death of others. Most of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; they kept their mouths shut from the very next day; but of what we are about to relate, we can say: We saw it with our own eyes. We will change a few names, for history recounts, it does not denounce, but we will be telling a true tale. Within the terms of the book we are writing, we will only show one side and one episode, and that certainly the least known, of the days of the fifth and sixth of June 1832; but we will do so in such a way that the reader will catch a glimpse of the real face of this terrible public incident, beneath the dark veil we are about to lift.

A BURIAL: AN OCCASION FOR REBIRTH

IN THE SPRING of 1832, although for three months cholera had turned Parisians cold and thrown some mysteriously morbid blanket over their turbulence, Paris had long been ready for some kind of strife. As we said, the big city is like a cannon; when it’s loaded, all that’s needed is a flying spark, and off it goes. In June 1832 that spark was the death of General Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of action and of renown. Under both the Empire and the Restoration, one after the other, he had enjoyed the two forms of bravery necessary to the two epochs, bravery on the battlefield and bravery at the rostrum. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; you could feel the sword in what he said. Like Foy, his predecessor,1 he upheld liberty after having upheld command. He sat between the left and the extreme left, loved by the people because he accepted the chances the future offered, loved by the hordes because he had served the emperor well. He was, along with the comte Gérard and the comte Drouet,2 one of Napoléon’s maréchaux in petto.3 The treaties of 18154 stirred him up like some personal offence. He hated Wellington with a straightforward hate that pleased the masses; and for seventeen years, scarcely paying any attention to intermediate events, he had magnificently maintained his sadness over Waterloo. In his death throes, at his final hour, he had hugged to his breast a sword that the officers of the Hundred Days had presented to him. Napoléon died uttering the word armée, Lamarque uttering the word patrie—homeland.

His death, which was foreseeable, was dreaded by the people as a loss and by the goverment as a galvanizing occasion. This death was a day of mourning. Like anything bitter, mourning can turn into revolt. That is exactly what happened.

The night before and the morning of June 5, the day set for Lamarque’s funeral, the faubourg Saint-Antoine,5 which the funeral procession was to skirt, took on a very formidable aspect. This turbulent network of streets filled with hubbub. People armed themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. Joiners carted off the clamps and joining presses from their workbenches “to break down doors.” One of them had made himself a dagger out of a shoemaker’s hook by snapping the hook off and sharpening the stump. Another, in his feverish keenness to attack, had gone to bed for three days in a row fully dressed. A carpenter named Lombier ran into a comrade who asked him: “Where are you going?” “Well, I haven’t got a weapon.” “So?” “I’m going to the site to get a pair of compasses.” “What for?” “Damned if I know,” said Lombier.

A certain Jacqueline, a man in the transport business, accosted any worker who happened to go by: “Over here, you!” He stood them to ten sous’ worth of wine and said: “You got a job?” “No.” “Right. Go to Filspierre’s, between the Montreuil barrière and the Charonne barrière, there’s a job for you there.” At Filspierre’s they found cartridges and weapons. Certain acknowledged leaders “collected the post,” meaning they ran from door to door rounding up their cohorts. At Barthélemy’s, near the barrière du Trône, at Capel’s, at the Petit-Chapeau, drinkers sang out to each other with heavy gravity. You could hear them say to one another: “Where’ve you got your pistol?” “Under my smock. What about you?” “Under my shirt.” Rue Traversière, outside Roland’s workshop, and in the courtyard of the Maison-Brûlée, outside Bernier the toolmaker’s workshop, groups huddled, whispering. A certain Mavot stood out as the most ardent; he was a man who never spent more than a week in any one workshop, the masters sending him packing “because we had to argue with him every day.” Mavot was killed the next day on the barricade in the rue Ménilmontant. Pretot, who was also to die in the struggle, seconded Mavot and to the question, “What is your goal?” answered: “Insurrection.” Workers, gathered on the corner of the rue de Bercy, were waiting for a certain Lemarin, a revolutionary agent for the faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged almost out in the open, in public.

And so, June 5, on a day of mixed rain and sunshine, General Lamarque’s funeral procession crossed Paris with all official military pomp and state, somewhat enhanced as a precautionary measure. Two battalions of infantry, drums draped, fusils inverted, ten thousand National Guards, their sabres at their sides, the batteries of the artillery of the National Guard, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men. Disabled officers followed immediately behind carrying branches of laurel. Then came a motley crowd in countless numbers, excited, strange, the sectionaries6 of the Friends of the People, the school of law, the school of medicine, refugees of all nations,7 bearing Spanish, Italian, German, Polish flags, horizontal red-white-and-blue flags and every kind of banner imaginable, children waving branches of greenery, stonemasons and carpenters who were out on strike at that very moment, printers recognizable by their paper caps, walking two by two, three by three, letting out shouts, nearly all of them waving sticks, some sabres, in disarray and yet as one at heart, now a pushing and shoving crush, now a column. Packs chose leaders for themselves; one man, armed with a perfectly visible pair of pistols, seemed to be passing others in review as the files moved out of the way in front of him. On the side streets off the boulevards, in the branches of trees, on balconies, at windows, on rooftops, men, women, and children milled; their eyes were full of anxiety. An armed mob went by while a frightened mob looked on.

The government, for its part, observed. It observed, its hand on the hilt of its sword. In the place Louis XV,8 you could see, ready and raring to march, with cartridge pouches full and muskets and carbines loaded, four squadrons of carabineers in the saddle, bugles at the head; in the quartier Latin and the Jardin des Plantes, the municipal guard was echeloned from street to street; at the Halles-aux-Vins there was a squadron of dragoons, at La Grève, one half of the 12th Light, the other half at the Bastille, the 6th Dragoons were at the Célestins, the courtyard of the Louvre was full of artillery. The rest of the troops were stationed in the barracks as reserves, without counting the regiments from the outskirts of Paris. The nervous authorities held hanging over the menacing hordes twenty-four thousand soldiers in the town itself and thirty thousand in the suburbs.

Sundry rumours rippled through the procession. There was talk of legitimist intrigues; there was talk of the duc de Reichstadt,9 whom God marked down for death at the very moment the mob was singling him out for the Empire. A character who remained anonymous announced that, at the appointed hour, two foremen who had been won over would open the doors of an arms manufacture to the people. The dominant expression on the bared foreheads of most of those taking part was enthusiasm mingled with overweening woe. You could also see here and there among the multitude, gripped by so many violent but noble emotions, the faces of real miscreants and ignoble mouths saying: “Let’s do some looting!” There are certain kinds of turbulence that stir up the bottom of the swamp, causing clouds of mud to rise up through the water. A phenomenon not altogether foreign to certain “well-organized” police.

The procession ambled along with a slowness that was febrile, from the house of the departed down through the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained now and again, but the rain meant nothing to that thronging crowd. Several incidents occurred, the coffin was trotted around the Vendôme column,10 stones were thrown at the duc de Fitz-James,11 spotted on a balcony with his hat on, the Gallic cock12 was ripped off a popular standard and dragged through the mud, a police officer was wounded by a sword thrust at the porte Saint-Martin, an officer of the 12th Light was heard to say out loud, “I am a republican,” the École Polytechnique popped up unexpectedly after its forced confinement, with shouts of “Long live the École Polytechnique! Long live the Republic!” marking the progress of the cortège. At the Bastille, the long and awe-inspiring lines of curious onlookers going all the way down the faubourg Saint-Antoine ran into the procession and the crowd started to heave and boil over in a terrifying way.

One man was heard telling another: “You see that fellow with the red goatee? He’s the one who says when its time to shoot.” It would seem that the same red goatee popped up later with the same function in another riot, the Quénisset affair.

The hearse went past the Bastille, then along the canal, crossed the little bridge, and reached the esplanade of the pont d’Austerlitz. There it stopped. At that moment a bird’s-eye view of the crowd would have revealed a sort of comet with its head in the esplanade and its tail fanning out over the quai Bourbon covering the Bastille and stretching all the way down the boulevard to the porte Saint-Martin. A circle was drawn around the hearse. The vast throng fell silent. Lafayette spoke and said farewell to Lamarque. It was a moving and majestic moment, every head was bared, every heart beat faster. Suddenly a man on horseback, dressed in black, appeared in the middle of the group with a red flag, though others claim it was a pike topped by a red cap.13 Lafayette turned his head the other way. Exelmans14 left the cortège.

This red flag kicked up a storm and disappeared into it. From the boulevard Bourdon to the pont d’Austerlitz, one of those commotions that are like rough swells stirred the crowd. Two almighty shouts rose over the racket: “Lamarque to the Panthéon!” “Lafayette to the Hôtel de Ville!”15 Some young men, to the cheers of the crowd, harnessed themselves up and set about dragging Lamarque in the hearse via the pont d’Austerlitz and Lafayette in a fiacre via the quai Morland.

In the crowd surrounding and cheering Lafayette, people noticed a German named Ludwig Snyder and pointed him out to each other. Snyder, who has since died a centenarian, had also been in the war of 1776 and had fought at Trenton under Washington and at Brandywine under Lafayette.

Meanwhile, on the left bank, the municipal cavalry swung into motion and came to bar the bridge exit; on the right bank the dragoons emerged from the Célestins and deployed along the quai Morland. The crew dragging Lafayette suddenly saw them at the bend in the quai and shouted: “The dragoons! The dragoons!” The dragoons advanced at a walking pace, in silence, their pistols in their holsters, sabres in their sheaths, carbines in their rests, with an air of grim expectancy.

Two hundred feet from the little bridge, they halted. The fiacre with Lafayette in it wound its way over to them, they broke ranks to let him pass, then closed ranks again behind him. At that moment, the dragoons and the crowd came together, face-to-face. The women fled in terror.

What happened in that fatal minute? No one will ever know. It was that dark moment when two clouds merge. Some say a trumpet blast was heard sounding the charge from the direction of the Arsenal, others that a boy stabbed a dragoon with a dagger. The fact is that three shots were suddenly fired, the first killing the head of the Cholet squadron, the second killing an old deaf woman as she was shutting her window in the rue Contrescarpe, the third singeing the epaulet on an officer’s uniform; a woman cried out, “They’re starting too soon!” and all of a sudden, from the opposite side of the quai Morland a squadron of dragoons, who had stayed in the barracks, was seen debouching at a gallop, sabres drawn, via the rue Bassompierre and the boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

The die is cast, the tempest rages, stones rain down, gunfire erupts, many scuttle headlong down the bank and cross over the narrow arm of the Seine16 that is now filled in; the building yards of the Île Louviers, that vast ready-made citadel, bristle with combatants; stakes are torn up, pistols are fired, a makeshift barricade is erected, young men driven back now race across the pont d’Austerlitz with the hearse and charge the Municipal Guard, the carabineers come running, the dragoons lash out with their sabres, the crowd scatters in every direction, talk of war flies around the four corners of Paris, people cry: “To arms!” They run, they tumble, they flee, they stay and put up a fight. Anger spreads the riot the way the wind spreads fire.

THE SEETHING OF DAYS GONE BY

NOTHING IS MORE extraordinary than the initial swarming hustle and bustle of a riot. Everything breaks out everywhere at once. Was it predicted? Yes. Was it planned? No. Where does it spring from? From the cobblestones. What does it come out of? From out of the blue. Here the insurrection looks like a plot; there, like an improvisation. The first comer gets hold of a current from the crowd and takes it wherever he likes. It is a beginning full of horror mixed with a sort of tremendous gaiety. First there is the hubbub, the shops shut, merchants’ displays disappear; then there are isolated shots; people flee; butts and clubs hammer portes cochères; you hear servants laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying: “There’s going to be a hell of a dustup!” Here is what happened almost at the same time at twenty different spots aound Paris before a quarter of an hour had elapsed.

At the rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty or so young men, with beards and long hair, went into a bar and came out again a moment later carrying a horizontal tricolour flag covered in crepe; at their head were three armed men, one with a sword, the second with a fusil, the third with a pike.

At the rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères, a well-dressed bourgeois with a big gut, a deep ringing voice, bald head, high forehead, black beard, and one of those wiry moustaches that cannot be curled, was openly handing out cartridges to passersby.

At the rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, bare-armed men were parading a black banner on which this could be read in white letters: Republic or Death. At the rue des Jeûneurs, rue du Cadran, rue Montorgueil, rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which you could make out the word section and a number in gold letters. One of these flags was red and blue with an imperceptible white stripe1 in between.

An arms factory was ransacked on the boulevard Saint-Martin, and three armourers’ shops, the first in the rue Beaubourg, the second in the rue Michelle-Comte, the other in the rue du Temple. In just a few minutes, the mob with its thousand hands had seized and carried off two hundred and thirty fusils, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and eighty-three pistols. So that more people would be armed, one grabbed a fusil, the other a bayonet.

Young men armed with muskets set themselves up among the women overlooking the quai de la Grève to shoot. One of them had a musket with a matchlock. They rang the bell, waltzed in, and started making cartridges. One of the women said: “I didn’t know what a cartridge was until my husband told me.” A throng broke into a curiosity shop in the rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes and took some yataghans2 and other Turkish weaponry.

The dead body of a mason killed by musket shot lay in the rue de la Perle.

And then, right bank, left bank, on the quais, along the boulevards, in the quartier Latin, in the quartier around Les Halles, breathless men, workers, students, sectionaries, read proclamations and cried: “To arms!” They smashed streetlamps, unhitched wagons, tore up the streets, battered down the doors of houses, uprooted trees, ransacked cellars, rolled out barrels, piled up paving stones, rubble, furniture, and timber and made barricades.

They forced the burghers to lend a hand. They broke into houses where the women were, made them hand over the absent husband’s sabre and fusil, and wrote over the door in Spanish white: “Weapons have been handed over.” A few signed receipts for the fusils and sabres with their name, saying: “Send for them tomorrow at the Hôtel de Ville.” They disarmed solitary sentinels and National Guards on their way to their mairie. They ripped officers’ epaulets off. In the rue du Cimitière-Saint-Nicolas, an officer of the National Guard, pursued by a troop armed with clubs and foils, took refuge after much ado in a house where he was stuck until that night, and could then only leave it in disguise.

In the quartier Saint-Jacques, students scurried out of their hotels in droves and swarmed up the rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrès or down to the Café des Sept-Billards, rue des Mathurins. There, young men standing in the doorways on stone posts distributed weapons. The timber yard on the rue Transnonain was ransacked for barricades. At a single point, the residents resisted—at the corner of rue Sainte-Avoye and the rue Simon-le-Franc, where they themselves destroyed the barricade. At a single point the insurgents buckled, abandoning a barricade begun in the rue du Temple after having fired on a detachment of the National Guard and fleeing down the rue de la Corderie. The detachment picked up a red flag, a packet of cartridges, and three hundred pistol bullets at the barricade. The National Guards tore up the flag and carried off the shreds on the points of their bayonets.

All that we are relating here slowly and sequentially occurred at all points over town at once amid an incredible and vast tumult, like a host of lightning flashes in a single roll of thunder.

In under an hour, twenty-seven barricades had sprung up out of the ground in the Les Halles quartier alone. At the centre was the famous house at no. 50, once the fortress where the worker Jeanne and his one hundred and six companions3 holed up, and which, flanked on one side by a barricade at Saint-Merry and on the other by a barricade in the rue Maubuée, commanded three streets, the rue des Arcis, the rue Saint-Martin, and the rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which it fronted. Two barricades at right angles stretched out and ran from the rue Montorgueil to the Grande-Truanderie, and from the rue Geoffroy-Langevin to the rue Sainte-Avoye. This is without counting the innumerable barricades that went up in twenty other quartiers of Paris, in the Marais, on the montagne Sainte-Geneviève; one, in the rue Ménilmontant, even sported a porte cochère that had been torn off its hinges; another close to the little bridge of the Hôtel Dieu was made with the coach known as an écossaise, unhitched and upended, only three hundred feet from the prefecture of police.

At the barricade in the rue des Ménétriers, a well-heeled man distributed money to the workers. At the barricade in the rue Greneta, a man appeared on horseback and handed something that looked to be a roll of silver to the man who seemed to be in charge of the barricade. “There you go,” he said. “This is to cover your expenses, for wine and so on.” A young blond man, without cravat, was going from one barricade to the next passing on watchwords. Another man, sabre drawn, a blue police cap on his head, was posting sentries. Inside the barricades, wine bars and porters’ lodges were converted into guardhouses. What’s more, the riot was conducted according to the soundest military tactics. The narrow, uneven, winding streets full of twists and turns, had been impressively well chosen; the environs of Les Halles in particular, a network of streets more tangled than a forest. The Society of the Friends of the People had, they said, taken over the insurrection in the quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in the rue du Ponceau was rumbled and found to have a map of Paris on him.

But what had really taken over the riot was a sort of unfamiliar recklessness that was in the air. The insurrection had suddenly thrown up barricades with one hand and, with the other, seized practically all the posts of the garrison. In under three hours, like a powder train that catches alight, the insurgents had invaded and occupied, on the right bank, the Arsenal, the mairie in the place Royale, all of the Marais, the Popincourt arms factory, the Galiote, the Château-d’Eau, all the streets close to Les Halles; on the left bank, the veterans’ barracks, Sainte-Pélagie, the place Maubert, the Deux-Moulins powder store, all the barrières. At five o’clock in the evening they were masters of the Bastille, the Lingerie, the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had got as far as the place des Victoires and were threatening the Banque de France, the Petits-Pères barracks, the Hôtel des Postes. A third of Paris was rioting.

At all points the struggle was escalating on a gigantic scale and the outcome of all the disarming, the house-to-house visits, the brisk invasion of armourers’, was that combat that had kicked off with stone-throwing moved on to an exchange of gunfire.

Toward six o’clock in the evening, the passage du Saumon became a battlefield, with the rioters at one end, the troops at the other, shooting each other from opposite gates. One observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to see the volcano up close, found himself caught in the crossfire in the arcade. All he had to protect himself from bullets was the bulging half-columns that divide the shops; he remained pinned in this delicate situation for close to half an hour.

Meanwhile the drums were drumming up the troops, the National Guards dressed and armed themselves in hot haste, the legions poured out of the mairies, the regiments poured out of the barracks. Opposite the passage de l’Ancre, a drummer received a thrust of a dagger. Another drummer in rue du Cygne was assailed by thirty or so young men who punctured his drum and took his sabre. Yet another was killed in the rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the rue Michel-le-Comte, three officers fell down dead one after the other. Several Municipal Guards, wounded in the rue des Lombards, turned back.

In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red flag bearing this inscription: Republican Revolution No. 127. Was it actually a revolution?

The insurrection had turned the centre of Paris into a sort of colossal, impenetrable, labyrinthine citadel. This was where the focal point was, it was obviously where the outcome would be decided. Everything else was a mere skirmish. The proof that everything would be decided there was that they were not fighting there yet.

In some regiments the soldiers were undecided, which added to the terrifying amorphousness of the crisis. They remembered the popular ovation that greeted the neutrality of the 53rd regiment of the line in July 1830. Two intrepid men, whose mettle had been tested and proved in the great wars, the maréchal de Lobau and General Bugeaud, commanded, Bugeaud under Lobau. Huge patrols, composed of regular battalions of the line flanked by whole companies of National Guards and preceded by a police commissioner in full regalia, set off to reconnoitre the insurgent streets. On their side, the insurgents posted sentinels at the corners of crossroads and boldly sent patrols beyond the barrières. Both sides kept close watch on each other. The government, with an army in hand, hesitated; night would soon be coming on and the tocsin of Saint-Merry5 had begun to sound. The war minister of the day, the maréchal Soult,6 who had seen Austerlitz, watched it all with a sombre air.

These old hands, used to the correct manoeuvre and having only that battle compass, tactics, as a resort and guide, are quite disoriented when faced with the immense fuming known as public wrath. The winds of revolution are not easily controlled.

The National Guards from the suburbs raced in swiftly and chaotically. A battalion of the 12th Light galloped in from Saint-Denis; the 14th of the line arrived from Courbevoie; the batteries of the École Militaire took up position at the Carrousel; the artillery came across from Vincennes.

The Tuileries were isolated. Louis-Philippe was perfectly serene.

ORIGINALITY OF PARIS

IN THE PAST two years, as we said, Paris had seen more than one insurrection. Outside the insurgent quartiers, nothing is more weirdly calm as a rule than the face of Paris during a riot. Paris very quickly gets used to everything—it’s only a riot—and Paris is so busy that it does not trouble itself for so little. Only such colossal cities can offer such spectacles. Only such vast enclosures can contain civil war and an indescribably odd tranquillity at the same time. Usually, when an insurrection kicks off, when you hear the drums, the recall, the alarm call, the shopkeeper is content merely to say: “Looks like there’s a bit of trouble, rue Saint-Martin.” Or: “Faubourg Saint-Antoine.”

Often he adds, nonchalantly: “Somewhere over that way.”

Later, when the harrowing and mournful din of musketry and the gunfire of platoons makes itself heard, the shopkeeper says: “So, things are heating up, eh? Well, well, well; they’re heating up!”

A moment later, if the riot gets closer and bigger, he swiftly shuts up shop and throws on his uniform; in other words, he secures his merchandise and puts his person at risk.

People shoot at each other at street corners, in arcades, in dead-end streets; barricades are taken, lost, and taken back; blood flows, house fronts are riddled with grapeshot, bullets kill people in their beds, dead bodies choke the pavements. A few streets away, you can hear the clinking of billiard balls in the cafés.

The curious laugh and chatter two feet away from these streets full of war; the theatres open their doors and perform vaudeville. The fiacres roll along; people go off to dine en ville. Sometimes in the very quartier where the fighting is going on. In 1831,1 a fusillade was suspended to let a wedding party pass.

In the insurrection of May 12, 1839,2 in the rue Saint-Martin, a rickety little old man dragging a handcart with a tricolour cloth over it and carrying carafes filled with some kind of liquid, came and went from the barricade to the troops and from the troops to the barricade, impartially offering glasses of licorice water now to the government, now to the anarchists.

Nothing could be weirder; and that is precisely the nature of the riots peculiar to Paris which you will not find in any other capital. Two things are needed for this, the greatness of Paris and its gaiety. You need the city of Voltaire and the city of Napoléon.

Yet this time, in the military parade of June 5, 1832, the great city felt something that was perhaps greater than it. It felt fear. Everywhere, in the most remote and “uninvolved” quartiers, you saw doors, windows, and shutters closed in the middle of the day. The brave armed themselves, cowards hid. The insouciant bustling man on foot disappeared. Many streets were as empty as they would be at four o’clock in the morning. Alarming details made the rounds, ominous news was spread like wildfire. It was said that they had gained control of the Banque de France; that, in the Saint-Merry cloister alone, there were six hundred of them, entrenched and fortified in the church; that the line was not secure; that Armand Carrel had been to see the maréchal Clauzel3 and that the maréchal had said, “Get a regiment together first”; that Lafayette was sick, but had told them anyhow, “I am at your disposal. I’ll follow you wherever there’s room for a chair”; that everyone had to stay on their guard; that come nightfall, there would be people looting isolated houses in the deserted corners of Paris (here you could detect the imagination of the police at work—that Anne Radcliffe4 embedded in the government); that a battery had been planted in the rue Aubry-le-Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud5 were conferring and that at midnight, or at daybreak at the latest, four columns would march at the same time on the centre of the riot, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from the porte Saint-Martin, the third from La Grève, the fourth from Les Halles; that perhaps the troops would also evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ de Mars; that no one knew what would happen but that one thing was for sure and that was that, this time, it was serious. Everyone was worried about Maréchal Soult’s holding back. Why didn’t he attack right away? One thing is certain and that was that he was deeply absorbed. The old lion seemed to scent some unknown monster in the shadows.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols did the rounds looking peevish; pedestrians were searched; suspects were arrested. By nine o’clock, more than eight hundred people had been arrested; the prefecture of police was packed, the Conciergerie was packed, La Force was packed. At the Conciergerie, in particular, the long underground tunnel known as the rue de Paris was strewn with bundles of straw on which a heap of prisoners lay, being harangued, valiantly, by Lagrange, the man from Lyon.6 The rustling of all that straw, tossed around by all those men, made a noise like a shower of rain. Elsewhere prisoners lay in the open air in the prison yards, piled on top of each other. A feeling of foreboding was everywhere, and a certain tremulousness, most unusual for Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers fretted; all you heard was: “Oh, my God! He hasn’t come home!” In the distance, carriages were only very rarely heard bowling along. People listened, on their doorsteps, to the noise, the shouting, the commotion, the muted and indistinct sounds, things about which they said, “That’s the cavalry,” or, “That’s the caissons galloping along,” the bugles, the drums, the fusillades, and, especially, the mournful tocsin of Saint-Merry. Everyone was waiting for the first cannonball to be fired. Armed men surged up at street corners and then vanished, shouting: “Go home!” And everyone bolted their doors as fast as they could. They said: “How will it all end?” With each passing moment, as night came down and the twilight thickened, Paris seemed to redden ever more woefully with the fearful blaze of the riot.