And that is the whole story. The tempest was unleashed, stones fell like hail, volleys were fired and a mass of people rushed to the river and crossed that narrow arm of the Seine that has since been filled in. The builders’ yards on the lie Louviers, that vast, ready-made fortress, bristled with combatants. Stakes were pulled up, pistols fired, a makeshift barricade erected. The young men who had been held up on the Pont d’Austerlitz now crossed the bridge at the double, dragging the hearse, and charged the Garde Municipale. The carabineers came up, the dragoons used their sabres, the crowd scattered in all directions while sounds of war echoed to the four corners of Paris. The cry, ‘To arms’ rang out and there were clashes everywhere. Fury fanned the uprising as the wind fans a forest fire.
IV
Earlier occasions
Nothing is more remarkable than the first stir of a popular uprising. Everything, everywhere happens at once. It was foreseen but is unprepared for; it springs up from pavements, falls from the clouds, looks in one place like an ordered campaign and in another like a spontaneous outburst. A chance-comer may place himself at the head of a section of the crowd and lead it where he chooses. This first phase is filled with terror mingled with a sort of terrible gaiety. There is rowdiness and the shops put up their shutters; people take to their heels; blows thunder on barred doors, and servants within enclosed courtyards can be heard gleefully exclaiming, “There’s going to be a bust-up!’
These are the things that happened in different parts of Paris within the first quarter of an hour.
In the Rue-Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie a band of some twenty young men, bearded and long-haired, entered a café to re-emerge a minute later carrying a tri-colour flag still wrapped in crêpe, and having three armed men at their head, one carrying a sabre, the second a musket, and the third a pike.
In the Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères a well-dressed citizen, bald and round-bellied, with a black beard, a bristling moustache and a loud voice, was openly offering cartridges to the passers-by.
Bare-armed men were parading the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre with a black banner on which was inscribed in white letters the legend, ‘Republic or Death’, and in the Rue des Jeûneurs, the Rue de Cadran, the Rue Montorgueil, and the Rue Mendar there were groups waving flags bearing the word ‘section’ and a number in letters of gold. One of these flags was red and blue, separated by a faint white stripe.
An arms factory on the Boulevard Saint-Martin was looted, as were three arms shops in the Rue Beaubourg, the Rue Michel-le-Comte, and the Rue du Temple. Within a few minutes the crowd had secured possession of 230 muskets, nearly all double-loaders, sixty-four sabres, and sixty-three pistols. Muskets and bayonets were distributed separately, that more men might be armed.
Young men armed with muskets took possession of apartments overlooking the Quai de la Grève for use as firing-posts. They rang the bell, walked in and set about making cartridges. A woman said afterwards: ‘I didn’t know they were cartridges until my husband told me.’
A party burst into a curio-shop in the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes and helped themselves to scimitars and other Turkish weapons.
The body of a builder’s labourer, killed by a musket-ball, lay in the Rue de la Perle.
And on both banks of the river, on the boulevards, in the Latin Quarter and the quarter round Les Halles, breathless men – work-men, students, section-leaders – were reading out proclamations and shouting, ‘To arms!’ Street-lamps were being smashed, carriage sunharnessed, cobblestones torn up, trees uprooted, house-doors battered down, and piles of timber, paving-stones, barrels, and furniture built up into barricades.
The citizenry were forcibly enlisted. Houses were broken into and women forced to surrender any weapons belonging to their absent husbands, and a note of the proceeding was chalked on the door – ‘Weapons handed over’. Some men even signed a formal receipt for a musket or sabre, saying, ‘You can get it back tomorrow at the Mairie.’ Isolated sentries and national guards on their way to their local headquarters were disarmed in the streets. Officers had their epaulettes ripped off. An officer of the Garde Nationale, being pursued by a band armed with cudgels and swords, was forced to take refuge in a house in the Rue du Cimetière-Saint-Nicolas from which he was not able to escape until dark and in disguise.
In the Saint-Jacques quarter students poured out of their lodging-houses up the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrès or down to the Café des Sept-Billards in the Rue des Mathurins. Here the young men distributed arms, standing on curbstones outside the doors. The timber-yard in the Rue Transnonain was looted to build barricades. Only in one place did the inhabitants resist, at the corner of the Rues Sainte-Avoye and Simon-le-Franc, where they pulled down a barricade. And in one place the insurgents gave ground. After firing on a detachment of the Garde Nationale they abandoned a half-constructed barricade in the Rue du Temple and fled along the Rue de la Corderie. The detachment found a red flag on the barricade, a bag of cartridges and 300 pistol bullets. They tore up the flag and bore off the fragments on the points of their bayonets.
All these incidents, here slowly related in succession, occurred almost simultaneously in separate parts of the town amid a vast tumult, like a string of lightning flashes in a single clap of thunder.
Within less than an hour twenty-seven barricades had sprung up in the quarter of Les Halles alone. At the centre was the famous House No. 50, which became the fortress of the workers’ leader, Jeanne, and his 106 followers, and which, with the Saint-Merry barricade on one side and the Rue Maubuée barricade on the other, commanded three streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which faced it. Two barricades set at right angles ran from the Rue Montorgueil to the Grande-Truanderie, and from the Rue Geoffrey-Langevin to the Rue Sainte-Avoye. No need to specify the countless barricades in twenty other quarters. There was one in the Rue Ménilmontant with a porte cochère lifted off its hinges and another within a hundred yards of the Préfecture de Police on which was an overturned coach.
A well-dressed man distributed money to the workers manning the barricade in the Rue des Ménétriers, and a mounted man rode up to the Rue Grenéta barricade and handed the leader something that looked like a roll of coins, saying, ‘This is to cover expenses, wine, and so forth.’ A fair-haired young man without a cravat went from one barricade to another passing on orders. Another, wearing a blue police cap and carrying a drawn sabre, was posting sentries. Within the barricades, cafés and porters’ lodges were converted for use as guard-posts. In general the uprising conformed to accepted military procedure. The streets it made use of, narrow and with many twists and turns, were admirably chosen, particularly in the neighbourhood of Les Halles, where the network was more tangled than footpaths in a forest. It was said that the Société des Amis du Peuple had taken charge of operations in the Sainte-Avoye quarter. A man killed in the Rue du Ponceau was found to have on him a street-map of Paris.
But what had really taken charge of the uprising was a kind of wild exhilaration in the air. While rapidly building barricades, the insurgents had also seized nearly all the garrison-posts. In less than three hours, like a lighted powder-train, they had assailed and occupied, on the Right Bank, the Arsenal, the Mairie in the Place Royale, all the Marais, the Popincourt arms factory and all the streets round Les Halles; and on the Left Bank the Veterans’ Barracks, the Place Maubert, the Deux-Moulins powder-factory and all the city barriers. By five o’clock in the evening they were masters of the Place de la Bastille, the Place de la Lingerie, and the Place des Blancs-Manteaux; their patrols were moving into the Place des Victoires and threatening the Banque de France, the Petits-Pères barracks, and the central Post Office. In a word, they held one third of Paris.
Everywhere battle had been joined on the largest scale, and through the disarming of soldiers, house-to-house requisitions and the looting of arms-shops, what had started as a brawl with brickbats had become an engagement with musketry.
At
about six o’clock that evening the Passage du Saumon had become a battlefield, with the insurgents at one end and the military at the other. An observer, the marvelling author of these lines, who had gone to witness the upheaval at first hand, found himself caught between two fires, with nothing but the half-pillars separating the shops to protect him from the bullets. He was pinned in this unhappy position for nearly half an hour.
Meanwhile, the drums were beating and the men of the Garde Nationale were putting on their uniforms, snatching up their arms, and pouring out of houses while the regiments of soldiers marched out of barracks. Opposite the Passage de l’Ancre a drummer-boy received a dagger-thrust, and another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by some thirty youths who destroyed his drum and took away his sabre. Yet another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. Three officers died in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, and a number of wounded members of the Garde Municipale beat a retreat along the Rue des Lombards.
A detachment of the Garde Nationale found, outside the Cour Batave, a red flag bearing the inscription, ‘Révolution républicaine No. 127’. Was it in fact a revolution?
The uprising had turned the centre of Paris into a vast, labyrinthine citadel. This was its focal point, and it was here that the matter had to be decided. The rest was mere skirmishing: and the proof that this was the real centre lay in the fact that thus far no fighting had gone on there.
The soldiers in certain regiments were of doubtful reliability, and this added to the terrifying uncertainty of the situation. They remembered the popular ovation with which, in July 1830, the neutrality of the 53rd regiment of the line had been rewarded. Two tried veterans of the great wars, Maréchal de Lobau and Général Bugeaud, were in command of the government forces, Bugeaud being subordinate to Lobau. Very large patrols consisting of detachments of regular soldiers flanked by entire companies of the Garde Nationale, and preceded by a Police Commissioner in ceremonial attire, set out to reconnoitre the streets held by the insurgents, while on their side the insurgents stationed outposts at the crossroads and audaciously sent out patrols beyond their barricades. Each side was probing the other. The Government, with an army at its disposal, was hesitant. It would soon be dark, and the Saint-Merry tocsin was beginning to sound.
The then Minister for War, Marshal Soult, who had fought at Austerlitz, was sombrely following the course of events. Old – stagers such as he, warriors accustomed to text-book manoeuvres and having no other guide than orthodox military tactics, are dismayed by the huge and formless blast of public anger. The wind of revolution is not easily controlled.
The suburban units of the Garde Nationale rallied hastily and in disorder. A battalion of the 12th Light Infantry arrived at the double from Saint-Denis; the 14th line regiment came in from Courbevoie; the École Militaire batteries had taken up their station in the Place du Carrousel and the guns were brought in from Vincennes.
The Tuileries were a solitude. Louis-Philippe was entirely calm.
V
The uniqueness of Paris
In the past two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more than one upheaval Outside its rebellious districts nothing as a rule is more strangely untroubled than the face of Paris during an uprising. She very quickly adapts herself – ‘After all, it’s only a riot’ – and Paris has too much else to do to let herself be disturbed by trifles. Only the largest of cities can offer this strange contrast between a state of civil war and a kind of unnatural tranquillity. Ordinarily, when the uprising begins, when the drums and the summons to arms are heard, the shopkeeper in another part of the town remarks to his neighbour, ‘Seems there’s trouble in the Rue Saint-Martin’… or ‘in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine’… and he will very likely add unconcernedly, ‘- or somewhere that way’. And when later he hears the heartrending sound of musket-fire he comments, ‘Seems to be hotting up.’
But then, if the trouble seems to be coming his way, he will hastily shut up shop and don his uniform – that is to say, safeguard his merchandise and risk his life.
There is shooting at a crossroads or in a street or alleyway, barricades are besieged, captured and recaptured, houses are pockmarked with bullets, blood flows, corpses litter the pavements – and two streets away one may hear the click of billiard-balls in a café. Curious onlookers laugh and gossip within a stone’s throw of streets echoing with the sounds of war, theatres open their doors and present vaudeville, fiacres proceed along the street with parties on their way to dine, sometimes in the very quarter where the battle is in progress. In 1831 the firing stopped to allow a wedding to pass.
In the uprising of 12 May 1839, an old man in the Rue Saint-Martin, pulling a handcart adorned with a tricolour flag and containing bottles of some nondescript beverage, shuttled between the Government forces and the forces of anarchy, offering his wares impartially to either side.
Nothing could be more strange: and this is the peculiar characteristic of Paris uprisings, to be found in no other capital. For such things to happen, two qualities are requisite – the greatness of Paris and her gaiety. It calls for the city of Voltaire and of Napoleon.
But on this occasion, in the battle of 5 June 1832, the great city encountered something that was perhaps even greater than herself. She was stricken with fear. Everywhere, even in the remotest and most ‘uninvolved’ districts, closed windows and shutters were to be seen in broad daylight. Brave men reached for their weapons, and cowards hid. The heedless and preoccupied pedestrian vanished from the streets, many of which were as deserted as in the small hours of the night. Strange tales were told and terrifying rumours circulated – that they had captured the Banque de France – that there were six hundred of them in the Saint-Merry monastery alone, barricaded in the chapel – that the army was not to be trusted – that Armand Carrel had been to see Marshal Clauzel, one of La-marque’s pall-bearers, who had said,’ Find me one reliable regiment’ – that Lafayette was ill but had nevertheless said to them, ‘I’m on your side. I’ll go wherever there’s room for a chair’ – that one had to be on one’s guard against bands of pillagers who were looting isolated houses in the less frequented parts of the town (in this last one may discern the vivid imagination of the police, that Ann Radcliffe* of the government) – that a battery of artillery had been installed in the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher – that Lobau and Bugeaud had concocted a plan whereby four columns were to march upon the centre of the insurrection, coming respectively from the Bastille, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Place de la Grève and Les Halles – but on the other hand that the troops might evacuate Paris altogether and withdraw to the Champ de Mars – that no one knew what was going to happen, but the position was undoubtedly serious – that Marshal Soult’s hesitation was disturbing – why did he not attack at once? The old lion was certainly very much perplexed, seeming to discern amid the confusion a monster hitherto unknown.
That evening the theatres did not open. The police patrols were evidently on edge, searching pedestrians and arresting suspects. By nine o’clock more than eight hundred persons had been arrested and the prisons were full to bursting point, the Conciergerie in particular, where the long underground passage known as the ‘Rue de Paris’ was floored with bales of straw for the accommodation of the dense mass of prisoners whom Lagrange, the revolutionary from Lyon, was boldly haranguing. The rustling of so much straw, under so many bodies, was like the sound of a downpour. Elsewhere the prisoners were in the open air, huddled together in prison yards. There was apprehension everywhere, a tremulousness unusual to Paris.
People were barricading their houses, while wives and mothers waited anxiously for men who did not come home. Occasionally there was a distant rumble of cartwheels, and doorways echoed with a subdued tumult of voices reporting the latest developments – ‘That was the cavalry… there go the ammunition tenders…’ The sound of drums and bugle-calls, of sporadic firing; above all the dismal tolling of the Saint-Merry tocsin. The first thunder of cannon-fire was awaited. Armed men appeared at street corners and
swiftly vanished, shouting, ‘Go home!’ Doors were hastily bolted while householders asked each other, ‘Where will it end?’ With every minute that passed Paris in the gathering dusk seemed more and more ominously tinged with the red glow of revolution.
Book Eleven
The Straw in the Wind
I
The poetry of Gavroche
THE MOMENT when rebellion, arising out of the clash between civilians and the military in front of the Arsenal, enforced a backward movement of the crowd following the hearse, which, winding through the boulevards, brought its weight to bear, so to speak, on the head of the procession, was a moment of terrible recoil. The crowd broke ranks and scattered, some uttering bellicose cries, others in the pale terror of flight. The river of humanity filling the boulevards overflowed to left and right, breaking up into lesser streams along a hundred side streets with a sound like the bursting of a dam. At this moment a ragged small boy, coming down the Rue ménilmontant with a sprig of flowering laburnun which he had picked on the heights of Belleville, noticed in a stall outside an antique shop an old cavalry pistol. Throwing away his flowers, he snatched it up, shouted to the proprietress, ‘Missus, I’m borrowing your thingumajig!’ and made off with it.
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