by Luc Sante
“Les faits-divers.” Cover illustration by Max Radiguet, from L’Assiette au Beurre, 1906
Cover of L’Oeil de la Police, 1914
“The execution of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann.” Broadside print, 1870
Détective, a tabloid with full-page photographic front and back covers and aggressively jazzy layouts, was launched in 1928 by Georges Kessel and his brother, the novelist and reporter Joseph Kessel, under the surprising imprint of Gallimard, the most august of Parisian publishers. The paper succeeded in having it both ways. Early issues ran in-house ads labeled “How They Read It,” with photographs of Détective being studied on café terraces by flat-capped hoodlums, midinettes, sailors on leave. At the same time, it drew the bourgeois intelligentsia with—besides its layouts—contributions by significant writers, including Carco, Mac Orlan, and Jean Cocteau; major reporters such as Joseph Kessel and Géo London; the Bonnot Gang affiliate Eugène Dieudonné, who had escaped from Devil’s Island and wrote a series on the penal colonies from his new home in Brazil; and the young Simenon, who as Georges Sim wrote puzzle stories: prizes were awarded to readers for the most ingenious solution to the mystery. By its second year its circulation had shot from 250,000 to 800,000; above its masthead ran the line “The largest circulation of any illustrated paper in the world.”*
It was not alone in its field. Besides lesser epigones such as Police Magazine, there was, for example, the short-lived Scandale: Revue des Affaires Criminelles (1933), which sumptuously aestheticized the subject, with nudes and Hollywood stars alongside bloody crime scenes and staged gang photos by Brassaï. And there was Le Crapouillot, which began as a frontline paper in World War I (the name means “trench mortar,” as well as being a slang term for “penis”), mutated into an art magazine in the 1920s, and then in the late ’30s brought a fine connoisseur’s eye and scholarly documentation to the disinterested study of crime and vice, knowingly situating the horrors of the moment in well-upholstered historical context.
Scandale: Revue des Affaires Criminelles, with Joan Crawford on the cover, 1933
“New Year’s Day on death row at the Santé prison.” Détective, 1930
But none of these was as purely symptomatic as Détective, which in its prime exemplified all the ambiguities of the Parisian bourgeois attitude toward crime: its vicarious perch on the dotted line between order and disorder, its amused tolerance for mayhem at a safe distance, its epicurean consumption of the sordid in decorously presented canapé form, its fatalistic preoccupation with foredoomed and extreme mentalities and behaviors, its appreciation for the promiscuous mingling of louche glamour and grim terminal depravity, its supposition that barbarity begins just outside the door, making the foyer (the hearth) the capital of reason. Also, it implied a view of class in which you, the reader, proved your aristocratic bona fides by virtue of your ability to encompass high and low with equal sangfroid. Even cops and grocers were invited to join the elect for as long as they could cock an eyebrow, exhale a smoke ring, and forget that they were cops and grocers.
11
Insurgents
In a sense, the revolution that began in Paris in 1789 never really ended. The uprising of the population against its rulers, which overthrew feudalism and absolutism, produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man that same year and then proclaimed a republic in 1792, failed to achieve its stated goal of liberty, fraternity, and equality. The Constitution of 1793, passed overwhelmingly by popular vote (universal male suffrage), was never implemented. In 1794, in the wake of the Terror, the army besieged and defeated the sansculottes in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, summarily terminating any hope of a classless state. The following year, the Directoire replaced universal male suffrage with a vote based on property, handed the economy over to speculators, brought back the monarchists, and paved the way for Napoléon Bonaparte. And after Napoléon’s defeat the Bourbons immediately came back, first the feeble Louis XVIII and then the vile Charles X.
Nevertheless, the Parisian population would not fold its cards. The Parisians have historically shown an extraordinary willingness and even eagerness to fight authority in the streets. The first half of the nineteenth century in particular can seem like a continuous blur of riots and skirmishes and full-scale insurrections, ranging from the strictly local and obscurely motivated to the world-historical and reverberating. Even today, when the city is generally far outside the means of even the middle class, and its social problems have been exported to the banlieues and the provinces, it continues to serve as a theater for every sort of demonstration and strike, on a regular basis, often to the exasperation of visitors from more placid or repressed societies. Friedrich Engels sounded like a particularly appreciative nineteenth-century tourist when he wrote that the Parisians “join, as no other people have done, a passion for enjoying life with a passion for taking historical action.” A century later, Walter Benjamin speculated that “Paris is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the natural order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.”
The mob piles on. Drawing by Théophile Steinlen, circa 1900
The decades that passed between the demise of Napoléon Bonaparte’s empire in 1814–15 and the coup d’état undertaken by his nephew, Napoléon III, in 1851, are a confusing welter of incidents that account for nearly every year of that span. What they had in common is that they were all directed against authority, generally royal authority, although they took many different forms. There were riots by liberals,* and there were riots by students defending professors who had been expelled from their chairs because of their liberalism. There were anticlerical riots—the Church, after all, was the First Estate, above even the nobility in its power. There were riots by Bonapartists, including, in 1822, the brief uprising that resulted in the execution of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle, once so famous that cafés were named in their memory. The sergeants were Carbonari, members of a Masonic secret society that exerted enormous influence throughout Europe, notably in the reunification of Italy. The Carbonari—the name derives from its original function as a guild of charcoal makers—in turn inspired a great number of secret societies with diverse goals, such as the later revolutionary cabals: the Society of the Seasons, the Society of Families, the Society of Avengers. The first of these attempted its own insurrection in 1839, out of the blue, which failed because its potential allies were caught unprepared; all three societies were active in the thwarted revolution of 1848. Secret societies in any case held a cloak-and-dagger appeal that covered the political spectrum. In his History of the Thirteen (1833), Balzac, who was fascinated by occult fraternities and attempted without much success to found a secret lodge of writers, laid out the seductive promise of the ring:
In Paris under the Empire, thirteen men came together who were equally possessed by the same idea, all of them endowed with sufficient energy to be faithful to the same principles, sufficiently honest with one another not to betray the cause even when their individual interests conflicted, so deeply prudent as to keep hidden the sacred bonds that linked them, strong enough to position themselves above all laws, tough enough to undertake all that was required, and so lucky that they almost always succeeded in their schemes. They had run great risks but veiled their defeats; they were impervious to fear and had never trembled in the presence of the prince, nor of the executioner, nor of innocence itself; they accepted one another for what they were, despite social prejudices; they were undoubtedly criminals, but they also displayed some of the qualities that mark men as great; they only recruited among the elite. Nothing is lacking in the dark and mysterious poetry of this story: these thirteen men remained unknown, for all that each of them had realized the most bizarre ideas that imagination might conjure based on the fantastic powers fals
ely ascribed to a Manfred, a Faust, a Melmoth—and today all of them are broken, or at least dispersed.
The other effect of the fascination with conspiracies is of course a tumble in the direction of pure fantasy, leading easily to the evil-genius criminal template. Nevertheless, the cabal model was more than idle playacting when it came to revolutionary plans arising from the elite—from power, money, or intellect—since royal Paris was small enough that its prominent citizens could be minutely scrutinized by the forces of order, who had spies in every drawing room.
Disabled veterans. Illustration by Célestin Nanteuil, 1840s
Revolution in that period could come from the top or the bottom, and even sometimes both at once, as happened in 1830 and briefly in 1848. The bourgeoisie had suffered under the yoke of the Old Regime, and they suffered again under its compromised revival. Nevertheless, their concerns were rather different from those of the poor, and they had more leverage to turn things their way. And once their needs were met they generally had little interest in helping out anyone else. The July Revolution of 1830 is often known as the Trois Glorieuses because it happened in just three days. It seems like a model revolution, stirring and noble—the uprising’s enduring icon is Delacroix’s tableau of bare-breasted Liberty hoisting the tricolor to encourage the People, in top hats and rags, over the barricades strewn with their dead—and at the same time efficient. The people got their tricolor and the bourgeoisie got their constitutional monarch, in the form of a member of the house of Orléans with a famously pear-shaped head: Louis-Philippe. It wasn’t a republic, but on the other hand the prospect wasn’t another Bourbon with a view to regaining absolute power, either, so maybe things would work out. Which they didn’t, of course.
The insurgents seize the Louvre, 1830
If the July Revolution has endured in memory for any single thing, it is the style in street fighting it presented, not entirely novel but rather distilled and refined from long experience and providing a model for the rest of the century and the rest of the world. The barricade as a means of improvised defense dates back, at least in Paris, to 1588, during the wars of religion, when a “day of the barricades” focused the combat between the relatively tolerant Henri III and the Duc de Guise and his Catholic absolutist Holy League. Barricades had recurred here and there over the centuries, although they barely figured in the 1789 revolution. In 1830 they were central. Some of the fundamentals of guerrilla fighting were invented in those three days, and they hinged on the existence of neighborhoods, in the tight blocks of medieval Paris, which, through the use of barricades, could be transformed quickly and cheaply into fortresses. Anything would do in a pinch: furniture, crates, bedding, even ropes strung across a street could give an advantage to the barricade’s defenders. Some of the most successful barricades used omnibuses—horses unharnessed, passengers let out—turned over on their roofs, which effortlessly blocked a street and could be made nearly impregnable with just a few more meters of additional impedimenta and perhaps an outer wall of paving stones; it seems that “the 4,054 barricades … were made from … 8,125,000 paving stones.” The fortress analogy holds; not only were the windows of the outward-facing houses nests of sharpshooters, but as would have been the case in a medieval castle defense, perhaps even more destructive action came from their roofs. “Fewer were felled … by bullets than by other projectiles. The large squares of granite with which Paris is paved were dragged up to the top floors of the houses and dropped on the heads of the soldiers.” The royal troops on the ground, trained for traditional combat involving fields and straight lines, were not at all prepared.
The barricade on Rue Dauphine, 1830
Louis-Philippe, “past, present, and future.” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from La Caricature, 1834
The insurrection of June 1832 also lasted three days. Its precipitating cause was a report by republicans that inventoried gains and losses for their side in the two years since Louis-Philippe became king—overwhelmingly the latter—and it warned that a counterrevolution was well under way. The news spread rapidly, and the opposition was further galvanized by the funeral of the republican general Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who had died in the cholera epidemic that was then waning. But the rebels were quickly crushed, at a cost of 166 dead and 635 wounded, and the uprising would have fallen into relative obscurity had it not been for Victor Hugo, who made it the climactic centerpiece of Les misérables. Writing long afterward but drawing on ample documentation as well as his own experiences of fighting behind them (in 1851, after the coup d’état of Napoléon III), he gave the world a determining view of barricades.
In less than an hour, 27 barricades had sprung up in the neighborhood of Les Halles alone. At the center was the famous house at number 50, the fortress of Charles Jeanne and his 106 companions, which, flanked on one side by a barricade at Saint-Merri and on the other by one across Rue Maubuée, commanded three streets, Rue des Arcis, Rue Saint-Martin, and Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which it fronted. Two barricades at right angles stretched out, one from Rue Montorgueil to the Grande-Truanderie, the other from Rue Geoffroy-Langevin to Rue Sainte-Avoye. That without counting the innumerable barricades in twenty other neighborhoods of Paris: in the Marais, on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. On one of them, Rue Ménilmontant, you could see a porte-cochère torn off its hinges; another near the little bridge off the Hôtel-Dieu was made from a horse cart, unhitched and overturned, this just three hundred feet from the police prefecture.
But these horizontal barricades were merely roadblocks. The novel’s great barricade rises up as a towering symbol.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was monstrous, three stories high and seven hundred feet across. It sealed off the vast mouth of the faubourg from one corner to the other, comprising three entire streets. Furrowed, jagged, notched, hacked up, crenellated with one enormous rip, buttressed with piles that were themselves bulwarks, pushing out peaks here and there, powerfully braced by the two great promontories of the faubourg houses, it loomed like a cyclopean levee at the far end of the formidable square that witnessed the first July 14. Nineteen barricades rose in tiers down the depths of the streets behind the mother barricade. Just by looking at it you could feel that the faubourg’s immense agony had reached the point where distress shades into catastrophe.
And then he stages the heroic death of Gavroche on the Saint-Denis barricade, allowing him the full movie-star treatment: he is shot but immediately stands up, a trickle of blood running down his face, and starts to sing; then another bullet finishes him off.
There were more barricades erected in 1834, and again in 1839, during the brief and unexpected attempt at insurrection carried out by the Society of the Seasons; and then once more in 1848, when the Saint-Denis barricade included an entire locomotive, dragged there from the shop where it was undergoing repairs. It was on that barricade that Hugo saw a woman,
young, beautiful, wild-haired and wild-eyed. This woman, a prostitute, lifted her dress up to her waist and shouted to the national guards…: “Cowards! Shoot the belly of a woman if you dare!” … The guards didn’t hesitate. The shots of a whole squad knocked her over. She fell with a loud cry. There passed a silent moment of horror, on the barricade and among the attackers. Suddenly a second woman appeared, even younger and more beautiful, barely seventeen; she, too, a prostitute. She lifted up her dress, showed her belly, and shouted, “Shoot, you thugs!” They fired, and she fell, riddled with bullets, across the body of the first.
On Rue Saint-Martin the barricade was dominated by five women, one of them a widow in weeds, armed with sabers and halberds requisitioned from the prop shop of the adjacent theater. There were sixty-eight barricades on Rue Saint-Antoine, built with felled trees and carts filled with paving stones. Nevertheless, the iconography of the 1848 barricades yields one primary image: Meissonier’s painting of a street in which a scatter of paving stones is nearly obscured by the clot of corpses.
The Barricade, Rue de la Mortellerie, June 1848. Painting
by Ernest Meissonier
The wily professional revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, head of the Society of the Seasons, who had fought in the streets in 1830, 1839, and 1848 (and who in 1871 was elected president of the Commune, although he languished in prison for its entire duration), had learned from those experiences, and while in exile after escaping from Sainte-Pélagie in 1865 he wrote a manual of guerrilla warfare, Instructions for a Show of Arms.* Among other things, he gave precise directions for the construction of barricades: built from paving stones mortared with plaster, the rampart should be twelve meters wide by three meters tall by two meters thick, fronted at a distance of six meters by a counterguard of the same dimensions, with a glacis extending a further four meters at its deepest.
Did anyone ever follow those directions? None of the barricades that were photographed during the Commune quite answers to the description, although some of the central ones, such as those on Rue Royale, Rue de Castiglione, and Rue Saint-Florentin, engineered by Napoléon Thiébault and built with paving stones and sandbags, look absolutely formidable, especially the last of these, in which the ramparts rise up in tiers, fifteen or twenty feet tall, with ditches, projecting buttresses, and inserted snipers’ nests. On Place Blanche was a “perfectly constructed” barricade, built and guarded by a battalion of 120 women. Nevertheless, some of the biggest defenses, such as the one on Rue de Rivoli that protected the Hôtel de Ville, proved porous at the crucial moment. But the barricades in the outlying faubourgs, among which were some of the last to fall, were another matter, improvised from the same detritus as their predecessors. A photo of Boulevard de Puebla (now Rue des Pyrénées) shows paving stones piled haphazardly about four feet high, fronted by the metal grates that to this day protect the bases of trees (and to this day, when rioting appears imminent, the city removes and stores those grates). Louise Michel tells the story of Élodie Richoux, a very proper restaurant owner, who oversaw the construction of the Saint-Sulpice barricade out of the largest statues she could find in a nearby religious paraphernalia shop. When she was arrested and made to account for herself, she said, “The statues were made of stone, and those who were dying were made of flesh.”