





Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything. Of an
electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting
forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath
encounters heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer,
passions which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.

Whither?

At random. Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the
insolence of others.

Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,
instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has
been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change, the
thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to take
pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love, the
prompter’s whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors,
disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted
it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitions that are hedged about, whoever
hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the
rabble, that mud which catches fire,—such are the elements of revolt.
That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl
outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants,
vagabonds of the crossroads, those who sleep at night in a desert of
houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who,
each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown
of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to
revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed
whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for
riot, and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and
to feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.

Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms
suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies
about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes,
uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and
the feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom
it bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one
against the other.

It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and
extraordinary power. It fills the firstcomer with the force of events;
it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a
rough stone, and a general of a porter.

If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a
little revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System:
revolt strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It
puts the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out
the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social
framework. It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene. Power
is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing
down.

Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.

There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself “good sense”;
Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the
true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which,
because it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and
is often only pedantry. A whole political school called “the golden
mean” has been the outcome of this. As between cold water and hot
water, it is the lukewarm water party. This school with its false
depth, all on the surface, which dissects effects without going back to
first causes, chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation
of the public square.

If we listen to this school, “The riots which complicated the affair of
1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The
Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by
blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that
revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate
into a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress
accomplished by fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these
riots rendered them perceptible. It might have been said: ‘Ah! this is
broken.’ After the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of
deliverance; after the riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.

“All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange
into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates
failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public
credit shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a
discount, fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs.
It has been calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty
millions, the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days’ uprising
costs one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the
financial result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a
disaster, a shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet
of sixty ships of the line.

“No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of
thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.
Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety,
students proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National
Guard invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street
urchins, contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and
legions clashed together. After all, between the combatants, there was
only a difference of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical
men who died at the age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their
families. The army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence
to audacity. Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also
educated the courage of the bourgeois.

“This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the
bloodshed add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness
among the best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism
happy in these wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the
vanquished of 1830 triumphing and saying: ‘We told you so!’ Add Paris
enlarged, possibly, but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all
must needs be told, the massacres which have too often dishonored the
victory of order grown ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all,
uprisings have been disastrous.”


Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

For our parts, we reject this word _uprisings_ as too large, and
consequently as too convenient. We make a distinction between one
popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire
whether an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the
first place? Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a
scourge than an uprising is of a calamity? And then, are all uprisings
calamities? And what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and
twenty millions? The establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France
two milliards. Even at the same price, we should prefer the 14th of
July. However, we reject these figures, which appear to be reasons and
which are only words. An uprising being given, we examine it by itself.
In all that is said by the doctrinarian objection above presented,
there is no question of anything but effect, we seek the cause.

We will be explicit.






There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as
insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the
wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones
which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction
usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may
proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from
collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is
insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;
according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are
justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the
populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of
Vendémiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;
the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which
universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty
cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining
purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted
to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when
directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The
destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of
rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the
refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by
students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,—that is
revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,—that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,—that is
insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against
Christopher Columbus,—this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?
Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to
civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in
that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to
itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,
anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in
contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive
moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into _chouannerie_, and, from having been an
insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of
ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope’s end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. “Death to
the salt duties,” brings forth, “Long live the King!” The assassins of
Saint-Barthélemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of
Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the
assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of
Jéhu, the chevaliers of Brassard,—behold an uprising. La Vendée is a
grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is
recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited
masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do
not give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances
is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what
direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may
grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any
other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a
revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human
race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These
pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis
XIV. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as
Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most
fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing
powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering
of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which
it is capable. Under the Cæsars, there was no insurrection, but there
was Juvenal.

The _facit indignatio_ replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Cæsars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
the _Annales_. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on
his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of
the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts
on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection
of the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we
may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who
writes the _Annales_ is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a
Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word
that is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his
style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this
silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into
thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history
produces conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and
such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the
tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
upon Cæsar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are
two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be
mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the
stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Cæsar is great, Tacitus
is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to
clash with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Cæsar,
might strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great
wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization
introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,—all this glory
covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine
justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the
formidable historian, sparing Cæsar Tacitus, and according extenuating
circumstances to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of
genius. There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the
moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such
reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus
as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face,
more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and
under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product
of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein
the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;
consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under
Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus,
while, from the Roman Senate, under Cæsar, there comes nothing but the
odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his
appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in
the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which
is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the
stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always
in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzançais, for example,
holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it
remains a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in
form. Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at
random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses
of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of
inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment
of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning,
the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it
ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those
lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom,
reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall
from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency
and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal
suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its
inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of
its arms. The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars
on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day
may be, To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the
former and the latter,—the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing
of such shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and
simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite
whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping,
until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined
vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: “Long live the people!”


This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and
insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy
extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an
uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it
is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be
calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs
undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,
nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of
Parisians calls “the epoch of the riots,” is certainly a characteristic
hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we
enter on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time
and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life,
palpitation, human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already
said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in
the distance of history. The epoch, surnamed “of the riots,” abounds in
details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and
perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.
We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published
peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts
over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of
others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have
disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace;
but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: “We have seen
this.” We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform
against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In
accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we
shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least
known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but
we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse,
beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of
this frightful public adventure.






In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds
for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an
indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe
for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of
artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the
shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General
Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,
under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the
bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a
sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after
upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and
the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances
of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the
Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gérard and Drouet, one of
Napoleon’s marshals _in petto_. The treaties of 1815 removed him as a
personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which
pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically
preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to
intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to
his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of
the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word _army_, Lamarque
uttering the word _country_.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and
by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like
everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what
took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the
day appointed for Lamarque’s burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which
the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This
tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed
themselves as best they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of
their establishment “to break down doors.” One of them had made himself
a dagger of a stocking-weaver’s hook by breaking off the hook and
sharpening the stump. Another, who was in a fever “to attack,” slept
wholly dressed for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade,
who asked him: “Whither are you going?” “Eh! well, I have no weapons.”
“What then?” “I’m going to my timber-yard to get my compasses.” “What
for?” “I don’t know,” said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an
expeditious man, accosted some passing artisans: “Come here, you!” He
treated them to ten sous’ worth of wine and said: “Have you work?”
“No.” “Go to Filspierre, between the Barrière Charonne and the Barrière
Montreuil, and you will find work.” At Filspierre’s they found
cartridges and arms. Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds,
that is to say, running from one house to another, to collect their
men. At Barthélemy’s, near the Barrière du Trône, at Capel’s, near the
Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air. They
were heard to say: “Have you your pistol?” “Under my blouse.” “And
you?” “Under my shirt.” In the Rue Traversière, in front of the Bland
workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulée, in front of tool-maker
Bernier’s, groups whispered together. Among them was observed a certain
Mavot, who never remained more than a week in one shop, as the masters
always discharged him “because they were obliged to dispute with him
every day.” Mavot was killed on the following day at the barricade of
the Rue Ménilmontant. Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the
struggle, seconded Mavot, and to the question: “What is your object?”
he replied: _“Insurrection.”_ Workmen assembled at the corner of the
Rue de Bercy, waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for
the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.

On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General
Lamarque’s funeral procession traversed Paris with official military
pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with
draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with
their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn
by young men. The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it,
bearing laurel branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated
multitude, the sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law
School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish,
Italian, German, and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every
possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters
and carpenters who were on strike at the moment, printers who were
recognizable by their paper caps, marching two by two, three by three,
uttering cries, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing
sabres, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous
rout, again a column. Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with
a pair of pistols in full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and
the files separated before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards,
in the branches of the trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs,
swarmed the heads of men, women, and children; all eyes were filled
with anxiety. An armed throng was passing, and a terrified throng
looked on.

The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with
its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in
the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their
head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to
march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the
Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street; at the
Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Grève half of the 12th
Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons
at the Célestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery.
The remainder of the troops were confined to their barracks, without
reckoning the regiments of the environs of Paris. Power being uneasy,
held suspended over the menacing multitude twenty-four thousand
soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the banlieue.

Divers reports were in circulation in the cortège. Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had
marked out for death at that very moment when the populace were
designating him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained
unknown, announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won
over, would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people.
That which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those
present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in
that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there
were visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which
said: “Let us plunder!” There are certain agitations which stir up the
bottoms of marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A
phenomenon to which “well drilled” policemen are no strangers.

The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the
deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained
from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many
incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at
the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his
head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,
a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,
an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: “I am a
Republican,” the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against
orders to remain at home, the shouts of: “Long live the Polytechnique!
Long live the Republic!” marked the passage of the funeral train. At
the Bastille, long files of curious and formidable people who descended
from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the
procession, and a certain terrible seething began to agitate the
throng.

One man was heard to say to another: “Do you see that fellow with a red
beard, he’s the one who will give the word when we are to fire.” It
appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quénisset
affair, entrusted with this same function.

The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,
surveyed at that moment with a bird’s-eye view, would have presented
the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail
spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was
prolonged on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle
was traced around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette
spoke and bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august
instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.

All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance in
the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
Exelmans quitted the procession.

This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From
the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors
which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts
went up: “Lamarque to the Pantheon!—Lafayette to the Town-hall!” Some
young men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves
and began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of
Austerlitz and Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.

In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed
that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a
centenarian afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who
had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under
Lafayette.

In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set in
motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Célestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men
who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner
of the quay and shouted: “The dragoons!” The dragoons advanced at a
walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air
of gloomy expectation.

They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in
which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it
to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that
fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds
come together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the
charge was heard in the direction of the Arsenal, others that a blow
from a dagger was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that
three shots were suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of
the squadron, the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of
closing her window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a
woman screamed: “They are beginning too soon!” and all at once, a
squadron of dragoons which had remained in the barracks up to this
time, was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through the
Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade
breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank,
and pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of
the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with
combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun,
the young men who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the
hearse at a run, and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the
dragoons ply their swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a
rumor of war flies to all four quarters of Paris, men shout: “To arms!”
they run, tumble down, flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as
wind spreads a fire.






Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was
it prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it?
From the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot;
there of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the
throng and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in
which is mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the
shops are closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come
isolated shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against
portes-cochères, servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of
houses and saying: “There’s going to be a row!”


A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded
and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later,
carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at
their head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the
third with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindières, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff moustaches which will not lie flat,
offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.

In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
“Republic or Death!” In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word _section_ with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.

They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and three armorers’ shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second
in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few
minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two
hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four
swords, and eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one
man took the gun, the other the bayonet.

Opposite the Quai de la Grève, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
cartridges. One of these women relates: “I did not know what cartridges
were; it was my husband who told me.”


One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des
Vieilles-Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.

The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
la Perle.

And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
shouted: “To arms!” broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.

They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting:
“The arms have been delivered”; some signed “their names” to receipts
for the guns and swords and said: “Send for them to-morrow at the
Mayor’s office.” They disarmed isolated sentinels and National
Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the
epaulets from officers. In the Rue du Cimitière-Saint-Nicholas, an
officer of the National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with
clubs and foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was
only able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.

In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their hotels
and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrèss, or
descended to the Café des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.

All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less
than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the
quarter of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No.
50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions,
and which, flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and
on the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuée, commanded three
streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue
Aubry-le-Boucher, which it faced. The barricades at right angles fell
back, the one of the Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the
other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without
reckoning innumerable barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in
the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant,
where was visible a porte-cochère torn from its hinges; another near
the little bridge of the Hôtel-Dieu made with an “écossais,” which had
been unharnessed and overthrown, three hundred paces from the
Prefecture of Police.

At the barricade of the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
silver. “Here,” said he, “this is to pay expenses, wine, et cætera.” A
light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
barricades, the wine-shops and porters’ lodges were converted into
guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most
scientific military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full
of angles and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the
Halles, in particular, a network of streets more intricate than a
forest. The Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said,
undertaken to direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A
man killed in the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a
plan of Paris.

That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection had
abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
Château-d’Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the
powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
o’clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Pères barracks, and the
Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.

The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as
a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers’ shops
hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing
of stones was continued with gun-shots.

About six o’clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the
field of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the
other. They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer,
the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this
volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that
he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two
half-columns which separate the shops; he remained in this delicate
situation for nearly half an hour.

Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
their barracks. Opposite the passage de l’Ancre a drummer received a
blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by
thirty young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword.
Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue
Michel-le-Comte, three officers fell dead one after the other. Many of
the Municipal Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards,
retreated.

In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a
red flag bearing the following inscription: _Republican revolution, No.
127_. Was this a revolution, in fact?

The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of
inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.

There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.

In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his
scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The
insurgents, on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open
spaces, and audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each
side was watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand,
hesitated; the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin
began to make itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal
Soult, who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.

These old sailors, accustomed to correct manœuvres and having as
resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called
public wrath.

The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
from Vincennes.

Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
serene.






During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more
than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than
the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of the
rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to
anything,—it is only a riot,—and Paris has so many affairs on hand,
that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal
cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone
can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable
tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the
shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he
contents himself with the remark:—

“There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin.”


Or:—

“In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.”


Often he adds carelessly:—

“Or somewhere in that direction.”


Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and
firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:—

“It’s getting hot! Hullo, it’s getting hot!”


A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his
shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places
his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.

Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and
re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts
of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber
the streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be
heard in the cafés.

The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious
laugh and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with
war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner
somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is
going on.

In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a
little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored
rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade,
offering his glasses of cocoa impartially,—now to the Government, now
to anarchy.

Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of
uprisings in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this
end, two things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The
city of Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.

On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 5th, 1832, the
great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It
was afraid.

Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the
most distant and most “disinterested” quarters. The courageous took to
arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.
Many streets were empty at four o’clock in the morning.

Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,—that
_they_ were masters of the Bank;—that there were six hundred of them in
the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the
church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel had
been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: “Get a
regiment first”; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,
nevertheless: “I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room
for a chair”; that one must be on one’s guard; that at night there
would be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of
Paris (there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed
up with the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been
established in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were
putting their heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at
latest, four columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the
uprising, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte
Saint-Martin, the third from the Grève, the fourth from the Halles;
that perhaps, also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the
Champ-de-Mars; that no one knew what would happen, but that this time,
it certainly was serious.

People busied themselves over Marshal Soult’s hesitations. Why did not
he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The
old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with an
air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were
arrested. By nine o’clock, more than eight hundred persons had been
arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the
Conciergerie, so was La Force.

At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the
Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap
of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly. All
that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy
shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled
on top of each other.

Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual
with Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were
uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: “Ah! my God! He has not come
home!” There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be
heard.

People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the
tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were said:
“It is cavalry,” or: “Those are the caissons galloping,” to the
trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
the streets and disappeared, shouting: “Go home!” And people made haste
to bolt their doors. They said: “How will all this end?” From moment to
moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take
on a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.




