by Luc Sante
A rough barricade during the strikes in Limoges, 1905
The Rue Royale barricade, 1871. Photograph by Hippolyte-Auguste Collard
The barricade on Place de la Concorde, 1871. Photograph by Alphonse Liébert
Life during an insurrection could sometimes appear weirdly normal. Hugo:
Outside the insurgent neighborhoods, nothing is more strangely calm than the face of Paris during a riot … People shoot at each other on corners, in arcades, in culs-de-sac; barricades are taken, lost, and taken back; blood flows, house fronts are riddled with grapeshot, stray shots kill people in their beds, the sidewalks are choked with corpses. And a few streets away you can hear the clicking of billiard balls in the cafés.
Rubberneckers talk and laugh two feet from those streets full of war; theaters are open and hosting vaudevilles. Carriages roll along; people go off to dine at the restaurants—sometimes in the very neighborhoods where fighting is taking place. In 1831 an exchange of gunfire was halted to let a wedding party pass through.
He notices a street vendor, an old and sickly man, pushing around a cart topped with a tricolor from which he sells coconut water, calmly serving first one side and then the other. In 1830 the entertainments on the Boulevard du Crime proceeded as usual, while fighting was kept to the side streets. In 1834 the agitator Guillard de Kersausie, who made a habit of meeting his coconspirators on that boulevard, where the noise and the press of bodies would shield them from surveillance, met his fate the same way. When he was grabbed by three undercover cops near Porte Saint-Martin, he yelled, “Help me, republicans!”—to his cohorts a warning rather than a request, but also an appeal to the crowd—but he was drowned out by the hubbub of the fun-seekers.
“This one can be freed. He’s no longer dangerous.” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from La Caricature, 1834
The events of 1834 were brief and might have been ephemeral—the rioting was at least nominally prompted by a ban on neighborhood news criers—but when news of Kersausie’s arrest spread, it led to street fighting around Saint-Merri. At some point an officer was wounded by a shot that was believed to have come from a house on Rue Transnonain (now Rue Beaubourg), next to a barricade, whereupon soldiers rushed into the house and massacred everyone they found. The inhabitants had all been huddling in the back rooms, away from the fighting. The famous lithograph by Daumier shows four corpses in a bedroom, at its center a man in a nightshirt whose body is crushing that of a baby. The picture was, amazingly, allowed to pass by the censors, perhaps because it had spread so far so fast, perhaps because it made no rhetorical claims.
In 1830 the revolution was declared over once the flag had been changed and the Orléanist king installed, and the republicans were invited to go lick their wounds. That king, Louis-Philippe, proved unpopular almost at once—he trampled on freedom of the press, for example, and soon swapped his ministers, most of them active in the events of 1830, for a more conservative set.* A united republican front had gained momentum by February 1848, when a series of mass events was delayed by rain. Weighing his options in view of the fact that the National Guard refused to fight the crowd, the king threw the opposition a sop by dismissing his widely hated minister of foreign affairs, the historian François Guizot, who was the de facto head of state. In the ensuing festivities an impromptu youth parade was halted by the military, one of whose guns discharged accidentally. The soldiers then fired into the crowd, killing between fifty and a hundred. The mood changed immediately; the king abdicated and fled; crowds rushed into the Tuileries palace, seized the throne, and burned it on Place de la Bastille.
Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834. Illustration by Honoré Daumier
However, with the addition of a socialist journalist and a metalworker, the provisional government was otherwise the same as the old one. It agreed to certain socialist demands: the establishment of state-run workshops for the unemployed, the right to unionize, the ten-hour day, universal male suffrage, and the abolition of debtors’ prisons. But when a crowd of one hundred fifty thousand demanded the withdrawal of troops, the government lied and said they were already gone; the socialist deputy went along with the lie. When the crowd demanded that elections be postponed, to allow time for the largely illiterate population to absorb the facts and make an educated choice, they were refused. The upshot was that the socialists came in a weak third, far behind even the monarchists, while the liberal moderates declared victory. Two weeks later, socialist leaders, backed up outside by fourteen thousand unemployed workers, entered the constituent assembly under a pretext; once there, they declared the assembly dissolved. Instead, the leaders and four hundred supporters were arrested, and the workshops were eliminated.
That broke the coalition cleanly across class lines. The liberals sided with the monarchists, and soon moderate figures such as Lamartine and Tocqueville could be heard urging radical means of crowd control. The government created the Mobile Guards, manning its ranks with disaffected working-class youths. Karl Marx, who spent a month in Paris during the lull between Louis-Philippe’s abdication and the election, was moved to define a new demographic category for members of the working class who would shoot their own: the Lumpenproletariat. War in the streets broke out in June, with awful scenes. Cannons were placed between the sickbeds in the Hôtel-Dieu to fire on the Left Bank barricades; hand-to-hand combat went on indoors and out and demolished store aisles. Within three days the government forces had overpowered the rebels. But the violence continued after their surrender: the last holdouts of resistance in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine were massacred; the Mobile Guards set up kangaroo tribunals, passing death sentences that were carried out on the spot; those rounded up were shot on bridges, shot on their way into jails, thrown into the river. At least five thousand people died overall. Six months later Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected the first president of the French Republic. Five months after that, universal male suffrage was revoked and voting was once again restricted to property owners. Then, in December 1851, two years after he was elected, Louis-Napoléon staged a coup d’état. He brought in troops to seize the major printing presses and round up republican leaders, and papered the city with notices announcing that he was henceforth emperor. The liberals, aghast, tried to raise an insurrection, but few of the workers they had betrayed two and a half years earlier were inclined to join. Instead they watched from their windows as the bourgeois fought and died, some four hundred of them, on their own barricades.
The army takes the barricades on Rue du Petit-Pont, June 23, 1848
Eighteen forty-eight was to have been a historical pivot, and its failure led to a general demoralizing of the population. The more prominent losers of ’48 and ’51, such as Hugo, went into exile. The city was reconfigured with, among other things, a view toward eliminating the barricade-fortress strategy of civilian defense. A quantity of bread and circuses was proposed as a palliative distraction. It was the era of the café-concert, of the fait-divers, of elaborate whorehouses and socially prominent courtesans, of Nadar’s portraits, of Offenbach and Rossini, of the Flowers of Evil and Madame Bovary trials, of the birth of haute couture, of streetcars and the belt railway. The city was hugely expanded. The poor were pushed out of many parts of the city center, but many more became Parisians by fiat as their formerly peripheral villages were annexed. It was also a time of repression and surveillance; the press had little freedom, and dissidents were regularly arrested. Matters were not improved by the 1858 assassination attempt on Napoléon III by Felice Orsini, who believed that the emperor was the single major obstacle in the course of Italian unification. (He had a point; Bonaparte did in fact favor restoration of the Papal States.) His three bombs killed 12 and wounded 144, but the imperial couple, on their way to see Rossini’s William Tell, were unscathed. Although the incident did manage to sway Napoléon on the subject of Italy—he met Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, in secret and promised his aid in exchange for Nice and Savoy—it only redoubled the intensity of his repression of di
ssidents.
The tomb of Victor Noir, Père-Lachaise cemetery
The sole significant public show of opposition to the regime occurred in January 1870, when the violently truculent prince Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin, killed the journalist Victor Noir over an obscure matter involving Corsican newspapers. The prince was acquitted, although forced to pay damages—he was hated by the emperor, who forbade him to use his full name, Pierre-Napoléon—while Noir’s employers were prosecuted for provocation. Victor Noir was not widely known in life, but in death he became a symbol of militant opposition. Some two hundred thousand persons attended his funeral; people took the horses off their traces to pull the hearse themselves. Some urged that the occasion be made the spark of an insurrection, but members of the International Workingmen’s Association counseled patience instead, anticipating a more propitious opportunity later, since the empire was showing signs of tilting askew, thanks to its overreaching ambitions. They did not have long to wait.
The emperor, already beset by a string of foreign policy miscalculations, and with a predilection for letting himself be outmaneuvered by rivals at home and abroad, allowed himself to be swayed by hawkish elements in his court. On July 19, 1870, he declared war on Prussia. A hyperventilated frenzy took over Paris, with torchlight parades and hysterical speechifying. Zola catches the flavor in the closing pages of Nana. As his heroine lies dying of smallpox in the Grand Hôtel, a metronomic chant keeps drifting up from the boulevard: “À Berlin! à Berlin! à Berlin!” By this point, Nana has come to incarnate the empire:
Pustules had swarmed over her whole face, one boil closing in on the next. Withered now and with a grayish tone like mud, they looked like a fungus on that shapeless pulp, its features indistinguishable. One eye, the left, was already sunk in the purulence; the other, half-open, was foundering, like a gaping black hole. The nose was still suppurating. A reddish crust stretched from one cheek to invade her mouth, fixed in an abominable rictus. And atop that horribly grotesque mask of nothingness, her hair, her beautiful hair with its solar blaze, tumbled down in a shower of gold.
The emperor, hugely outmatched by the Prussians, tried in vain for a glorious death in battle, but finally capitulated at Sedan just six weeks into the war. Two days later, on September 4, crowds broke into the Palais Bourbon; the empress fled to England; the cabinet proclaimed a republic; a Government of National Defense was formed. The Prussian army surrounded the city on September 19. Adolphe Thiers, who had held government posts almost continuously since 1830 and now functioned as a kind of minister without portfolio, proposed an armistice, but Parisian resistance to the ineffectual government rapidly gained momentum. On October 31, National Guards under Gustave Flourens seized the Hôtel de Ville with the intention of proclaiming a Commune, but the occasion was premature. Meanwhile, although battles took out various suburban towns, the Prussians declined confrontation with the city itself, where the mass of able-bodied citizens potentially outmatched their army in numbers (fifty to one) if not in training or equipment. They were content to starve them out.
“Germans crowning themselves with laurels in the Tuileries Gardens,” 1870
The Siege lasted four months. Supplies of nearly everything were exhausted within the first month. The Bois de Boulogne was soon firewood, followed not long after by the Bois de Vincennes and then by the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Butchers’ meat ran out early in October. Horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, and rats were eaten grudgingly at first, but by November commanded extravagant sums. Various menus have been preserved that list such epicurian fancies as consommé of horse, dog liver brochettes, carpaccio of cat, filet of dog shoulder, salmis of rat, and so on. The anarchist Victorine Brocher-Rouchy recalled that she saw a vendor on the boulevard unload a large quantity of canned goods. It was gone instantly; she bought a can herself. Back home, she spread the contents on crepes, but the baby began to cry right away. “It was a paste made of mouse meat, and they hadn’t even removed the skins, which gave it an awful taste.” The zoo animals of the Jardin d’Acclimatation were sacrificed in inverse order to their popularity: yaks, zebras, and water buffaloes in late October; antelopes a week later; in mid-November boars, reindeer, the kangaroo, the cassowary, and the rare black swan; finally, at the very end of that month, the two beloved elephants, Castor and Pollux. They all wound up on bills of fare at the finest restaurants. The great cats had meanwhile all died of starvation. Fresh vegetables had long before ceased to exist, and cheese likewise, but there were black market purveyors who could produce fingernail-size portions of gruyère for incredible sums. Although the good bakeries had shut down in late September for want of butter, bread was not rationed until mid-January. What bread there was between those two points contained increasing amounts of sawdust and straw.* Gas for lamps ran out in November, replaced by hazardous and unreliable petrol; street lighting in any case ceased, and the city plunged into total darkness at the fall of night. The only staple in bottomless supply was wine. The overall death rate had more than tripled as compared with the same period a year earlier.
“A funeral during the Siege,” 1870
In early January the Prussians, losing patience, began shelling the city. On January 22 an attempt was made to proclaim a Commune. After a brief firefight that left six dead on the Communard side, the attempt was quashed; many arrests ensued, and newspapers were suppressed. On January 26, France formally surrendered to Germany, signing an armistice that included special provisions for Paris: it would not be occupied, and local units of the army and the National Guard would not be disarmed. Those dispensations did not impress the Parisians, who took a dim view of the armistice and swore a fight to the end, had it been up to them. The restriction on disarmament was anyway not for the convenience of the people, but for the protection of the interests of the powerful—guns were needed to stop looters. On February 8 the constitutional monarchists overwhelmed the republicans two to one in the national elections; nevertheless, on February 17, Parliament elected Thiers, a republican, president. Thiers was a man of the future: an expressionless manager. In the broader French political landscape, he was rather to the left: a republican, a Deist, an exile (briefly) after 1848, an opponent of the Franco-Prussian War. In the city, on the other hand, he functioned strictly as a security guard for the interests of the propertied classes.
The revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchêne as revived during the Commune by Eugène Vermersch and Maxime Vuillaume
On March 1, inaugurating a long tradition, Prussian troops marched down the Champs-Élysées. Meanwhile, the city held some four hundred obsolete cannons, paid for by public subscription, deployed in defensive positions on the heights—meaning Montmartre and Belleville, working-class neighborhoods. On March 17, Thiers ordered the army to seize the cannons. On March 18, the army took control of the cannons in the Buttes-Chaumont and other parts of Belleville, but in Montmartre the National Guard would not let the army touch them. They won the standoff. The first barricades started going up late in the morning, as the army retreated from Montmartre, and then in short order Thiers, the government, and the army all relocated to Versailles.
A detachment of Communards on Place de l’Opéra, 1871
On March 26, 227,000 voters elected 90 representatives. The following day, 200,000 people surrounded the Hôtel de Ville and sang “La Marseillaise.” Gabriel Ranvier, a porcelain painter and member of the central committee of the National Guard, proclaimed the Commune. Képis were flung, red flags waved, handkerchiefs fluttered. There were twenty-five laborers among the new officials; the rest were office workers, accountants, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and at least twelve journalists. They faced an enormous administrative task. Not only was the city embattled and barely recovered from the effects of the Siege, but Thiers, on his departure, had ordered all services shut down and their employees dismissed, thus affecting, for example, street lighting, road maintenance, markets, tax collection, the telegraph system, and six thousand patients in the city’s hospitals. Th
e delegates opened soup kitchens, distributed tickets redeemable for bread, halted all evictions for nonpayment of rent, remitted all rents for the period of the Siege, and continued the postponement of commercial debt obligations to keep small shopkeepers from bankruptcy. They abolished the death penalty and effected the separation of church and state. (For one thing, the Church had, and after the Commune continued to have, until 1905, a monopoly on primary education.) They halted sales and prolonged terms of loans indefinitely at the mont-de-piété, the state-run pawn shop that functioned as the bank of the poor. What they failed to do was to seize the assets of the Banque de France, which was barely defended, except by ingrained fear and prejudice. Instead, the Commune periodically sent delegates, hat in hand, to request loans, eking out its existence from day to day like a penurious household. Twenty years later, a member of the Commune wrote that “the central committee presented the bizarre spectacle of a victorious revolution—well armed, well equipped, and having at its disposal capital of roughly a billion francs locked up in the vaults of the national bank—furnishing its ill-equipped, resourceless, penniless enemy with hundreds of millions so that it could come and cut its throat. Such stupidity is unparalleled in history.”