Wanderlust: A History of Walking (34 page)

In the heady days after the fall of the Bastille, the market women and
poissardes,
or fishwives, had grown accustomed to marching together, and they must have first felt their common desires and collective strength during the religious processions they went on that season. At least one local was alarmed “at the discipline, pageantry, and magnitude of the almost daily processions of market women, laundresses, tradesmen, and workers of different districts that, during August and September, wound up the rue Saint-Jacques to the newly built church of Sainte-Genevieve [patroness of Paris] for thanksgiving services.” Simon Schama points out that on the feast-day of Saint Louis, August 25, the market women of Paris traditionally went to Versailles to present the queen with bouquets. It is as though having learned the form of the procession, they could give it new content: having marched to pay homage to church and state, they were ready to march to demand terms.

On the morning of October 5, 1789, a girl took a drum to the central markets of Les Halles, while in the insurrectionary faubourg Saint-Antoine a woman compelled a local cleric to ring the church bells in his church. Drum and bells gathered a crowd. The women—now numbering in the thousands—chose a hero of the Bastille to lead them, Stanislas-Marie Maillard, who found himself constantly preaching moderation to his followers. Though made up mostly of poor working women—fishwives, market women, laundresses, portresses—the crowd included some women of means and a few noted revolutionaries, such as Theroigne de Mericourt, known as Theroigne the Amazon. (Prostitutes and men dressed as women loomed large in contemporary accounts of the march, but this seems to
have been because many believed “respectable” women were incapable of such insurrection.) The women insisted on moving straight through the Tuileries, still the gardens of the king, and when a guard pulled his sword on one of the women in the lead, Maillard came to her defense—but “she delivered such a blow with her broom to the crossed swords of the men that they were both disarmed.” They continued on chanting “Bread and to Versailles!” Later that day the marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, led an army of about 20,000 national guards after them in equivocal support.

By early evening they were at the National Assembly in Versailles, demanding that this new governing body deal with the food shortage, and a few women were taken before the king to make their case. Before midnight the crowd was at the palace gates; and early in the morning the crowd came inside. It was a gory arrival—after a guardsman shot a young woman, the crowd decapitated two guards and rushed the royal apartments looking for the hated queen, Marie Antoinette. That day, the terrified royal family was forced to return to Paris with the jubilant, exhausted, victorious crowd. At the head of the long procession—Lafayette estimated it at 60,000—came the royal family in a carriage surrounded by women carrying branches of laurel, followed by the National Guard, escorting wagonloads of wheat and flour. At the rear, writes one historian, marched more women, “their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes and musket barrels giving the impression, as one observer thought, of ‘a walking forest.' It was still raining, and the roads were ankle deep in mud, yet they all seemed content, even cheerful.” They shouted to passersby, “Here come the Baker, the Baker's Wife, and the Baker's Little Boy.” The king in Paris was a very different entity than the king in Versailles. There the once absolute power of the French monarchy ebbed away, and he became a constitutional monarch, then a prisoner, and within a few years a victim of the guillotine as the revolution spiraled down into factions and bloodbaths.

History is often described as though it were made up entirely of negotiations in closed spaces and wars in open ones—of talking and fighting, of politicians and warriors. Earlier events of that revolution—the birth of the National Assembly and the storming of the Bastille—correspond to these versions. Yet the market women had managed to make history as ordinary citizens engaged in ordinary gestures. During the walk of the thousands of women to Versailles, they
had overcome the weight of the past in which they had been deferential to all the usual authorities, while the traumas of the future were yet unforeseen. They had one day in which the world was with them, they feared nothing, armies followed in their wake, and they were not grist for history's mill but the grinders. Like mass marchers everywhere, they displayed a collective power—the power at the very least to withdraw their support and at the most to revolt violently—but they managed to start the revolution largely as marchers. They carried branches as well as muskets—for muskets operate in the realm of the real, but branches in that of the symbolic.

This intertwining of religious festivity, huge gatherings in public squares, and mass marches would appear again on the two hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the French Revolution. The revolutionary year began inauspiciously with government tanks literally crushing the student democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, but across Europe Communist governments had lost their appetite for or their confidence in violent repression. Violence itself had become a far less casual tool than it had been before Gandhi spread his doctrine of nonviolence, human rights had become far more established, and media had made events around the world more visible. The American civil rights movement had demonstrated its effectiveness in the West, and peace movements and nonviolent direct-action tactics had become a global language of citizen resistance. As Hobsbawm points out, marching down the boulevard had largely replaced rioting in the quarter. Throughout Eastern Europe the insurrectionaries made it clear that nonviolence was part of their ideology. The revolution in Poland worked the way nonviolent changes are supposed to—slowly, with lots of outside political pressure and inside political negotiation, culminating in the free election of June 4, 1989—and all the revolutions benefited from Mikhail Gorbachev's shrewd dismantling of the Soviet Union. But in Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, history was made in the streets, and their old cities accommodated public gatherings beautifully.

It was, reported Timothy Garton Ash, a funeral held thirty-one years late for Imre Nagy, executed for his part in the unsuccessful 1956 revolt, that started the revolution in Hungary. On June 16, two hundred thousand people marched in a gathering that would have been violently crushed in previous years. In the
exhilaration of having recovered their history and their voice, dissidents stepped up their efforts, and on October 23, the new Hungarian Republic was born. East Germany was next. Repressive measures were at first stepped up—students on their way home from school and employees returning for work were arrested just for being in the vicinity of disturbances in East Berlin: even the everyday freedom to walk about had become criminalized (as, with curfews and bans on assembly, it often is in turbulent times or under repressive regimes). But Leipzig's Nikolaikirche had long held Monday-evening “prayers for peace” followed by demonstrations on adjacent Karl-Marx-Platz, and there the numbers began to grow. On October 2, fifteen to twenty thousand gathered at that square by the church in the largest spontaneous demonstration in East Germany since 1953, and by October 30, nearly half a million people marched. “From that time forward,” writes Ash, “the people acted and the Party reacted.” On November 4 a million people gathered in East Berlin's Alexanderplatz, carrying flags, banners, and posters, and on November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. A friend who was there told me it fell because so many people showed up when a false report circulated that the wall was down that they made it into a real event—the guards lost their nerve and let them through. It became true because enough people were there to make it true. Once again people were writing history with their feet.

Czechoslovakia's “Velvet Revolution” was the most marvelous of them all, and the last (Romania's Christmastime violence was something else altogether). In January of that magic year, playwright Václav Havel had been imprisoned for participating in a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of a student who had burned himself to death in Prague's heart, Wenceslas Square, in protest of the crushed “Prague Spring” revolution of 1968. November 17, 1989, was the anniversary of another Czech student martyr, killed by Nazis during the occupation, and this commemorative procession was far larger and far bolder than that of January. The crowd marched from Charles University, and when the official itinerary was over at dusk, they lit candles, produced flowers, and continued on through the streets, singing and chanting antigovernment slogans—the past once again becoming an occasion to address the present. At Wenceslas Square, policemen surrounded them and began clubbing anyone within reach. Marchers stampeded down side streets, where some slipped away or were taken into nearby homes, but many were injured. False accounts that one student had joined the ranks of student martyrs infuriated the nation. Afterward came spontaneous
marches, strikes, and gatherings in Wenceslas Square—really a kilometer-long, immensely wide boulevard in the heart of the city—with hundreds of thousands of participants. Behind the scenes, in the Magic Lantern Theater, the recently released Havel brought together all the opposition groups into a political force to make something pragmatic of the power being taken in the streets (the Czech opposition was called the Civic Forum; the Slovak equivalent was called the Public Against Violence).

Czechoslovakians had begun to live in public, gathering every day in Wenceslas Square and proceeding down adjoining Národní Avenue, getting their news from other participants, making and reading posters and signs, creating altars of flowers and candles—reclaiming the street as public space whose meaning would be determined by the public. “Prague,” reported one journalist, “seemed hypnotized, caught in a magical trance. It had never ceased to be one of Europe's most beautiful cities, but for two long decades a cloud of repressive sadness had enveloped the Gothic and baroque towers. Now it vanished. The crowds were calm, confident and civilized. Each day, people assembled after work at 4pm, filing politely, patiently and purposefully into Wenceslas Square. . . . The city burst with color: posters were plastered on walls, on shop windows, on any inch of free space. After each mass rally, the crowd sang the National Anthem.” Four days later the country's two most famous dissidents—Havel and the hero of 1968, Alexander Dubček—appeared on a balcony above the square, the latter in his first public appearance after twenty-one years of enforced silence. Dubček said at this time, “The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard.”

The revolution that began by remembering a student peaked by celebrating a saint. Saint Agnes of Bohemia, great-granddaughter of the saintly Wenceslas, had been canonized a few weeks earlier. Prague's archbishop, a supporter of the opposition, held an outdoor mass for hundreds of thousands in the snow a few days after Dubček reappeared. Like the Hungarians, the Czechoslovakians had wrested their future free by remembering the heroes and martyrs of the past, for by December 10 there was a new government. Michael Kukral, a young American geographer who was there throughout the Velvet Revolution, wrote, “The time of massive and daily street demonstrations was over after November 27th, and thus, the entire character of the revolution metamorphosed. I did not
awaken the next morning to find myself transformed into a giant bug, but I did feel a sense of sadness knowing that I will probably never again experience the momentum, spontaneity, and exhilaration of these past ten days.”

Nineteen-eighty-nine was the year of the squares—of Tiananmen Square, of the Alexanderplatz, of Karl-Marx-Platz, of Wenceslas Square—and of the people who rediscovered the power of the public in such places. Tiananmen Square serves as a reminder that marches, protests, and seizures of public space don't always produce the desired results. But many other struggles lie somewhere in between the Velvet Revolution and the bloodbaths of repression, and the 1980s were a decade of great political activism: in the colossal antinuclear movements in Kazakhstan, Britain, Germany, and the United States, in the myriad marches against U.S. intervention in Central America, in the students around the world who urged their universities to divest from South Africa and helped topple the apartheid regime there, in the queer parades increasing through the decade and the radical AIDS activists at the end of the decade, in the populist movements that took to the streets of the Philippines and many other countries.

A few years earlier another insurrection found a square for its stage. The saga of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began when these women started to notice each other at the police stations and government offices, making the same fruitless inquiries after children who had been “disappeared” by agents of the brutal military junta that seized power in 1976. “Secrecy,” writes Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, “was a hallmark of the junta's Dirty War. . . . In Argentina the abductions were carried out beneath a veneer of normalcy so that there would be no outcry, so that the terrible reality would remain submerged and elusive even to the families of the abducted.” Mostly homemakers with little education and no political experience, these women came to realize that they had to make the secret public, and they pursued their cause with a stunning lack of regard for their own safety. On April 30, 1977, fourteen mothers went to the Plaza de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires. It was the place where Argentinean independence had been proclaimed in 1810 and where Juan Perón had given his populist speeches, a plaza at the heart of the country. Sitting there was, a policeman shouted, tantamount to holding an illegal meeting, and so they began walking around the obelisk in the center of the plaza.

There and then, wrote a Frenchman, the generals lost their first battle and the Mothers found their identity. It was the plaza that gave them their name, and their walks there every Friday that made them famous. “Much later,” writes Bouvard, “they described their walks as marches, not as walking, because they felt that they were marching toward a goal and not just circling aimlessly. As the Fridays succeeded one another and the numbers of Mothers marching around the plaza increased, the police began to take notice. Vanloads of policemen would arrive, take names, and force the Mothers to leave.” Attacked with dogs and clubs, arrested and interrogated, they kept returning to perform this simple act of remembrance for so many years that it became ritual and history and made the name of the plaza known around the world. They marched carrying photographs of those children mounted like political placards on sticks or hung around their neck, and wearing white kerchiefs embroidered with the names of their disappeared children and the dates of their disappearances (later they were embroidered instead, “Bring Them Back Alive”).