The Invention of Paris (47 page)

It was the best blood of France which ran in Rue Saint-Martin, and I do not believe that there was better fighting at Thermopylae than at the mouth of the alley of Saint-Merri and Aubry-le-Boucher, where at the last a handful of some sixty Republicans fought against sixty thousand troops of the line and National Guards, and twice beat them back . . . the few who remained alive in no wise asked for mercy . . . they rushed with bared breasts before the enemy, offering themselves to be shot.

Martial law was proclaimed the next day, and to identify the dead ‘many people visited the Morgue, where there was a queue like that at the Opéra when
Robert le Diable
is performed.' Anger mounted in these lines waiting outside the Morgue:

As remedy for the long series of ills they have visited on us, as consolation for their order of things in which everything goes to despair, they open wide to us the doors of the morgue, and their police push us in with their swords in our sides! The day is not far off when they will be afraid to confess the crimes of the night; there will be talk of massacre, bridge, and river, and the rest will be passed over in silence.
⁵⁶

In April 1834, Thiers, interior minister in the Soult government, had a law passed on the subject of public criers and hawkers, which immediately deprived the people of their main source of information, as well as a further
law requiring preliminary authorization for any associations: ‘Hardly was this monstrous law promulgated, than it was right away applied; clubs were closed, the sale of newspapers was banned on the public way, and, as the high point of infamy, the right of assembly was completely suppressed, since for more than twenty-one citizens to gather without authorization in any place was a crime.'
⁵⁷
Lyon then rose in a second insurrection, while the leaders of the first one were being tried. The workers of La Croix-Rousse were massacred by cannon fire, and on 10 April, Soult was able to make a second triumphal entry into the city in the company of the crown prince, the Duc d'Orléans.

In Paris on 12 April, Armand Marrast, publisher of the republican newspaper
La Tribune
, printed a special issue calling the sixty-three sections of the Société des Droits de l'Homme to come out in the streets. The police raided the print works, seized the paper and arrested Marrast and his deputy. Too late: on the night of the 12
^th
, barricades arose once more in the quarter that was still called Maubuée: Rue Beaubourg, Rue de Montmorency, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Transnonain, Rue Geoffroy-Langevin, Rue aux Ours and Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare. But the few hundred insurgents were rapidly overwhelmed by the soldiers of the 25
^th
regiment of the line. When the fighting was over, someone fired a musket from a window in 12 Rue Transnonain, where the barricade had resisted longer than elsewhere.
⁵⁸
The soldiers entered the house and massacred all its inhabitants – men, women and children. In his
Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle
, Pierre Larousse states that ‘the regiment that had sullied the glorious French uniform by this crime was an object of horror in its various garrisons for the rest of Louis-Phillipe's reign'.
⁵⁹
And Bugeau, who commanded these troops in their application of techniques perfected in Algeria, would always remain ‘the butcher of Rue Transnonain'. Repression came down hard on the republican leaders. A big trial, with 121 accused, was held in
April 1835, before the Court of Peers sitting in the Luxembourg palace. All those who had not managed to take flight were imprisoned. In July 1835, Armand Carrel, publisher of
Le National
, was killed in a duel by Émile de Girardin. As his friend Chateaubriand wrote, ‘it seemed there was never enough danger for him'.
⁶⁰
His death weakened the republican camp further, and the days of April 1834 were its last armed uprising until 1848.

But there was still Blanqui. If he took part in most of the
journées
of the 1830s, this was without the slightest illusion as to the manner in which the republican bourgeoisie conceived equality and fraternity. In January 1832, before the court of assizes where he was accused of infringing the press laws, the procurer asked his profession. He replied: ‘proletarian'. The procurator objected that this was not a profession. Blanqui responded: ‘It is the profession of the majority of our people, who are deprived of political rights.'
⁶¹
The magistrates acquitted Blanqui for the press offence, but condemned him to a year in prison for insulting the court. Early in 1834, after serving this sentence, Blanqui established
Le Libérateur, journal des opprimés
, in which he wrote, by way of programme: ‘Our flag is equality . . . The Republic means the emancipation of the workers, the end of the reign of exploitation, the coming of a new order that will free labour from the tyranny of capital.' There were not many people who could express these thoughts in 1834, either in France or elsewhere. (Marx was sixteen years old at this time. Much later, he would say that he learned these essentials from the Paris workers, who were largely Blanquists.)

In 1835, Blanqui and Barbès, who had not yet quarrelled, founded the Société des Familles. In 1836 they were arrested for having established, on Rue de Lourcine, a workshop for making gunpowder. After being amnestied, Blanqui organized the Société des Saisons, and early in 1839, cadres were prepared for the army of revolt.
⁶²
The day was fixed for 12 May, a Sunday, as Paris was then relatively empty of police, and the bourgeois were at the races in Neuilly. The thousand men whom Blanqui counted on to start the uprising were to gather between Rue
Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin, in the back rooms of wineshops, and in buildings near the store of the armourer Lepage on Rue du Bourgl'Abbé. Around midday, Blanqui arrived at the café on the corner of Rue Mandar and Rue Montorgueil. He briefly announced the object of his summons. Everyone came out, his supporters thronged into the neighbouring streets, and the cry ‘To arms!' was heard. The doors of Lepage's establishment were broken down, Barbès and Blanqui handed out muskets and cartridges through the windows. But the affair got off to a bad start, and Parisians watched in bemusement as these armed groups passed by. Victor Hugo:

Towards three o'clock two or three hundred young men, poorly armed, suddenly broke into the
mairie
of the 7
^th
arrondissement, disarmed the guard, and took the muskets. Thence they ran to the Hôtel de Ville and performed the same freak . . . When they had the Hôtel de Ville, what was to be done with it? They went away . . . At this moment barricades are being made in Rue des Quatre Fils, at the corner of all the little Rues de Bretagne, de Poitou, de Touraine, and there are groups of persons listening . . . It is seven o'clock; from my balcony in the Place Royale platoon-firing is heard.
⁶³

The insurgents had not been understood and supported. They returned to the Saint-Martin quarter, to Rues Simon-le-Franc, Beaubourg and Transnonain. Blanqui and Barbès found three barricades in Rue Greneta as defence against the National Guard. But very soon they had to retreat to Rue du Bourg-l'Abbé under a hail of bullets. The last barricade, in the Saint-Merri quarter, was taken, and the uprising was over. At the trial of nineteen insurgents, in June, Barbès and Blanqui were condemned to death – Blanqui in his absence, as he had managed to escape, though he was captured not long after. Both men had their sentences commuted, and spent long years in Mont Saint-Michel. This was the end of Parisian uprisings for a long time. Heine wrote on 17 September 1842:

A very great calm reigns here. All is as silent as a winter night wrapped in snow. Only a little mysterious and monotonous noise, like falling drops. This is the interest on capital, falling into the strongboxes of the capitalists and almost spilling over. The continual swell of the riches of the rich can be distinctly heard. From time to time there is mixed with this dull ripple
the sob of a low voice, the sob of poverty. Sometimes you can also hear a light metallic noise, like that of a knife being sharpened.
⁶⁴

The knives would emerge from their sheaths in 1848, on the occasion of a banquet that did not actually take place. To close the election campaign going on in the provinces, the opposition had prepared an enormous banquet in Paris, organized by the 12
^th
legion of the National Guard (the legion of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau under the command of François Arago), along with the students of the Latin Quarter who were in ferment: Michelet and Quinet had been suspended from lecturing, and on 4 and 6 January the students demonstrated en masse to demand their recall. On 14 January, Guizot banned the banquet. After much hesitation, the opposition decided to go ahead. On 19 February,
Le National
affirmed that this would be held at noon on the 22
^nd
. Rodolphe Apponyi, an attaché at the Austrian embassy, wrote in his diary on the 18
^th
:

In the last few days, all the talk is of this famous banquet that is to be held. We do not yet know either the time or the place, but the very idea of such a gathering, to which not only the rioters of Paris are invited, but also those of towns a hundred leagues around, makes one tremble. The sponsors themselves are afraid, since if the head of the procession, which is supposed to cross the whole of Paris, keeps calm, it is by no means sure that the tail will do the same.
⁶⁵

Tocqueville wrote in his
Recollections
: ‘On the 20
^th
February almost all the opposition newspapers published a programme for the forthcoming banquet, which was really a proclamation calling on the schools and the National Guard itself to attend the ceremony as a body . . . One might have taken it for a decree of the Provisional Government, which was formed three days later.'
⁶⁶
This ‘programme' envisaged that the deputies,
peers, and other guests at the banquet would assemble at eleven o'clock at the regular gathering place of the parliamentary opposition, on the Place de la Madeleine. The procession was to go via the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, ending at Chaillot where the banquet would be held.

The 22
^nd
was a rather well-behaved
journée
. At nine o'clock the students gathered without weapons at the Panthéon, where they were joined by workers from the Faubourgs Saint-Marceau and Saint-Antoine. The procession reached the Madeleine at around eleven. After a little scuffle with the local police, it headed down Rue Royale, crossed the Place de la Concorde, pushed aside the Municipal Guards defending the bridge and invaded the courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon. The dragoons and gendarmes cleared the Assembly, it rained throughout, and the
journée
was over.

In the morning of the 23
^rd
, it was still raining. Duchâtel, the interior minister, ordered two battalions of each legion of the National Guard to occupy strategic zones: the Place de la Bastille, the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde, the Place des Victoires, the Pointe Saint-Eustache and the Porte Saint-Denis. In the morning, however, the majority of these legions, far from attacking the barricades that were rising throughout the city centre, refused to fight, shouted ‘Long live Reform, down with Guizot!', and interposed themselves between the regular troops and the insurgents. On hearing this news, Louis-Philippe, who up till then had been optimistic – ‘You call a carriage turned upside down by two ruffians a
barricade
', he said – collapsed. He dismissed Guizot and replaced him with Molé.
⁶⁷
News of this led to celebrations throughout Paris.

The boulevards took on a fairyland appearance. A long garland of multicoloured lights, hanging from every floor, linked the buildings as a joyful emblem of the union of hearts. From time to time, you could see groups pass along the road carrying flags and allegorical streamers, and singing the
Marseillaise
in chorus . . . Towards half past nine a much larger group appeared, a long column waving torches and a red flag, on the boulevards at the crossing of Rue Montmartre. This came from the depths of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine . . . Attracted by the beauty of the chanting, a large number of curious persons joined in this demonstration, which
seemed inoffensive. In the effusion of this common festival, bourgeois and proletarians clasped each other's hands.
⁶⁸

The republican leadership, however, were not satisfied with this conclusion, which they saw as a comic dénouement. This party's men of action kept their weapons and prepared fortifications in the old centre of popular uprisings, Rues Beaubourg, Transnonain, etc.

The course of the revolution quickened on the night of 23 February. Apponyi had a grandstand view. He had left the Princesse de La Trémoille in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and was on his way home:

The boulevards were filled with promenaders: women, children, those simply curious like myself. But the foreign ministry building was so well guarded that there was no more room to walk by; you had to go down to Rue Basse-du-Rempart, which was still more filthy than usual.
⁶⁹
A crowd of young people, most of them in workers' clothes, were advancing down the boulevards, preceded by lanterns in red and yellow paper that were carried on long poles. This jubilant mob wanted to enter Rue de la Paix, but the soldiers stationed there prevented them and they came towards us. To avoid finding myself in the midst of this mass of proletarians, whose attitude was in no way reassuring for an individual armed only with an umbrella, I thought it best to walk as close as possible to the metal railing that runs along Rue Basse-du-Rempart at that point. I had not taken more than a few steps towards the crowd, when all at once the regiments of the line opened platoon-fire on us, and there we were, a hundred persons, lying, falling, rolling on the ground; on top of one another, with cries and whimpers . . . The two little women [whom he had described talking with some minutes before] were now dead bodies, along with more than fifty others struck by a second round of firing before those wounded in the first had time to stand!