by Mike Rapport
it was a sort of muffled chant which always repeated the same grave, low, incomparably sad notes. Anxious people came out of their houses and, like me, tried to see into the thick shadows which enveloped the lower end of the street, from which that strange murmur came. Our uncertainty soon vanished. A band of men - two thousand at least - marched three by three, climbing the steep windings of the rue Saint-Jacques. As they passed, all the shops closed up and alarmed faces appeared at the windows; they ignored them. They advanced in good order, leaning forward a little, without weapons, and keeping in step. All of them, neither shouting nor clamouring, repeated the same phrase, dismally in hushed tones: ‘Bread or lead! Bread or lead!’ It was sinister and truly startling.21
The social fear shrouded the city. The massive crowd gathered below the darkened dome of the Panthéon and listened to delegates from the National Workshops, including one named Louis Pujol - who told them to prepare for the following day. By 11 p.m., the workers had dispersed, but only to gather their strength for the collision to come.22
The authorities were well aware that the protests were gathering pace, but they did little to stop them. Caussidière went so far as to ask: ‘did they allow the riot to grow in order to destroy the worker insurgents in one blow?’23 None other than Karl Marx, writing shortly after the events, claimed that, after the insurrection of 15 May, the National Assembly was bent on a final resolution: ‘Il faut en finir! This situation must end! With this cry the National Assembly gave vent to its determination to force the proletariat into a decisive struggle.’ For Marx, the Assembly’s decisions regarding the workers were deliberately provocative.24 It does seem that the decree dissolving the National Workshops was hasty: even the liberal monarchist newspaper Le Constitutionnel - no great supporter of the public works - baldly stated on 23 June that ‘more effort could have been made . . . to prepare opinion for the announcement; more prudence could have been shown’. It specifically criticised the government for issuing the decree without any attempt to reassure those affected.25
It is true, as Caussidière and Marx suggested, that the insurrection was given time and space to develop. But this was probably not due to any desire to have a bloody collision with the left. Although there were certainly plenty of conservatives who relished the prospect of settling scores, when the insurrection gathered momentum the most outspoken opponent of the workshops, the Comte de Falloux, tried to rush through parliament a package of welfare reforms; hardly the action of a man hell-bent on confrontation.26 Rather, the initial space given to the uprising was the price of the authorities’ strategy for dealing with the anticipated protests. The lessons of February 1848 had been that when troops or militia were used as police - dispersed in small detachments to keep order on the streets and prevent the construction of barricades - the insurgents easily isolated and disarmed them. The minister of war, General Louis Eugène Cavaignac, who had put the Paris military garrison on a state of alert at noon on 22 June, therefore intended to deal with any insurrection by concentrating his forces in three strong columns, each with infantry, artillery, National Guards and the Mobile Guard. These would smash their way into the heartlands of the uprising from the outside. All this may have made sense from a military perspective, but, as Alexander Herzen later despairingly cried, ‘At that moment everything could still have been prevented - the republic saved - and with it the freedom of Europe; there was still time to make peace . . . But the stupid and clumsy government did not know how to do this.’27
Early in the morning of 23 June, some seven to eight thousand workers marched unopposed on to the Place de la Bastille, where Pujol, seizing on the symbolism of the location, called on the workers to bare their heads and kneel ‘at the tomb of the first martyrs of liberty’. His stern voice carried across the respectful silence: ‘The revolution is to begin anew,’ he told the sea of bowed heads. ‘Friends, our cause is that of our fathers. They carried on their banners these words: Liberty or Death. - Friends! Liberty or Death! ’28 The crowd arose and thundered back: ‘Liberty or death!’ Pujol solemnly led the crowd to begin its work of building barricades. ‘I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them,’ wrote Herzen later. He passed by some workers joining a student in singing ‘The Marseillaise’: ‘the chorus of the great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one’s soul’, but, ominously, the Russian socialist could also hear the clatter of artillery being moved across the river. He saw General Bedeau scanning the ‘enemy’ positions with his field-glasses.29
By the end of the day, almost all of eastern Paris was held by the insurgents, whose numbers have been estimated at somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000, as against 25,000 regular troops and the 15,000-strong Mobile Guard. Many of the members of this latter militia were pitifully green - some no more than sixteen years old. As it was recruited from among the same unemployed workers as the insurgents themselves, few people believed that it would be reliable. The National Guard, democratised under the Second Republic, had been swollen to an impressive 237,000, but the thoroughly frightened rank and file proved less than courageous in their response to the call to arms.30 Maxime du Camp was one of the few who joined his battalion: many of his comrades, he charitably put it years later, ‘pushed prudence to excess’.31 In fact, the more middle-class units (which tended to be based in the westernmost districts of the city) were the most likely to see their members respond to the drum beat. The units from the central districts, with their substantial population of master-craftsmen and shopkeepers, were severely thinned by an ‘excess of prudence’. Their reluctance to fight did not indicate cowardice but rather reflected their social position: this lower middle class had been severely affected by the economic crisis and, while having a stake in law and order, it had no desire to get enmeshed in a struggle against people who were often their customers, employees and neighbours. Of 64,000 National Guards from the central arrondissements, only 4,000 turned out. Meanwhile, thousands of men from the legions of the working-class eastern districts actually defected to the insurgents. Of the 7,000 National Guards in Belleville, 3,000 joined the uprising. The balance, therefore, was not necessarily tipped in the government’s favour.
There were last-ditch efforts at mediation. François Arago stood before the barricade on the rue Soufflot near the Panthéon, trying to persuade the insurgents to stand down. The bitter reply showed that the barricade was not just a military fortification but could symbolise the great social division within the republican movement: ‘Monsieur Arago, we are full of respect for you, but you have no right to reproach us. You have never been hungry. You don’t know what poverty is.’32 Arago sadly withdrew, convinced that ‘force must decide’.
The first deaths came at noon on 23 June, when the barricade at the Porte Saint-Denis was attacked by National Guards. It is said that two beautiful prostitutes hoisted up their skirts and, taunting the troops with obscenities, dared them to fire. They were immediately cut down in a hail of bullets.33 The National Guards managed to overcome the defences, but only after losing thirty men in some bitter fighting.
In the end the government prevailed over the insurrection because it had superior firepower. Lamartine, who joined the fighting at twilight, saw the cannon sent by Cavaignac levelling the fortifications in the north-eastern Faubourg du Temple. He counted ‘four hundred brave men, killed or mutilated, [who] strewed the faubourg’. It was carnage. Cavaignac himself supervised the successful attack on one particularly stubborn barricade on the rue Saint-Maur. In his absence none other than Ledru-Rollin - no socialist, but certainly a left-wing republican - had telegraphed the provinces on his behalf asking for the help of their National Guard units against the uprising. This was ample illustration of how sharply the republicans were divided over the June days and how isolated the insurgents were even from those who might have sympathised with their plight. Ledru-Rollin’s appeal would be met with an instant and enthusiastic response. The opportunity -
if any ever really existed - for conciliation had rapidly passed. When the socialists Louis Blanc and Victor Considérant proposed appealing to the rebels to put down their weapons, they were silenced by a deputy who roared: ‘One doesn’t reason with insurgents, one defeats them!’34 That night, many deputies slept fitfully in the chamber, where Cavaignac also established his headquarters.
When the National Assembly reconvened at 8 a.m., some of these bleary-eyed and shaken politicians suggested a withdrawal of the legislature to the suburban palace of Saint-Cloud. The more pusillanimous - or alarmist - deputies even suggested a wholesale flight to Bourges. The foreign minister, Jules Bastide, confided to the British ambassador, the Marquis of Normanby, that no member of the government could be sure that they would live to see the end of this day. Tocqueville hastily scribbled a note to his wife, advising her to leave the city.35 In this atmosphere of near panic significant numbers of deputies - republican and monarchist alike - agreed that strong government was needed to weather the crisis. Cavaignac was the obvious candidate. An experienced soldier of impeccably republican credentials of the National ilk, he was seen by his fellow moderates as a saviour who would protect the republic against the double-headed serpent of social revolution and royalism.
Even the monarchist deputies, assembled in their club on the rue de Poitiers, backed the general, perhaps seeing in authoritarianism the prelude to the destruction of the Second Republic and the first step towards bringing back the monarchy. At 10 a.m., the thoroughly frightened Assembly - after a mere twenty-five minutes of debate - invested Cavaignac with executive power. This meant he had absolute military authority in the capital, but he was also virtual dictator of France. Preoccupied with the insurrection, though, he kept on the existing ministers, although the Executive Commission was dissolved and a state of siege declared in Paris. Maxime du Camp recalled the deep impression that this last decree made: ‘we sensed that we were about to follow a serious, unique and determined direction’. The normally jostling Paris boulevards were now ‘a desert . . . here and there several stray dogs ran off, as if they themselves were frightened by so much solitude’.36
The government forces, supported by cannon, pressed on with the grim work of reducing the barricades to splinter and rubble. Du Camp’s National Guard unit was hurled against a barricade in the northern suburb of the Faubourg Poissonnière through a maelstrom of spinning metal: ‘bullets fell so thickly around us, and with such a repeated, shrill noise, that I remember stopping and looking at the ground . . . the paving stones were marked with brilliant, blue, metallic spots, traces of lead which grazed them as they drew new momentum’. In this hornets’ nest du Camp shuddered with ‘a violent shock to my leg, as if I had been hit with a thick whalebone cane’. His lower leg had been splintered and his boot filled with blood. With masterful understatement, he recalled that it made him feel ‘melancholic’.37
It is harder to piece together the experience of the struggle from the insurgents’ perspective. In the first place, many of them were killed - in both the fighting and the repression that followed - while others simply wanted to escape the brutal retribution that came after and, having managed to melt away, kept quiet. Those insurgents whose voices were heard were mostly recorded in the distinctly unsympathetic surroundings of magistracy interrogation cells. Unsurprisingly, most of the captive insurgents were coy about their role in the uprising and their political commitment. One accused claimed that, having been plied with drink, he was led to a barricade by the insurgents and told to shoot. ‘Hell,’ the insurgent claimed to have replied, ‘who at?’ When asked why he eventually fired at the forces of order, he pleaded, ‘I was carried away, like lots of others. The ones who wouldn’t go along with them got called idlers and were maltreated . . . A man like me up from the country, who had never heard these things talked about, had never seen anything, and who couldn’t read or write - a man like me is easily led astray.’38
It is, of course, entirely plausible that some insurgents were press-ganged or misled, but such testimony should be treated with caution. Those captured faced the possibility of death, transportation or imprisonment - reason enough to play down one’s commitment to the uprising. The leadership of the insurrection, meanwhile, was unabashed in giving political reasons for its inception. One leader, who had been imprisoned under the July Monarchy for his political activities, explained bluntly to his interrogators what he meant by a ‘social Republic’: ‘I mean a republic with social reforms . . . free and compulsory education and the organisation of work through association; . . . that the worker receives the product of his labour, a proportion of which is at present taken away from him by the man who provides the capital.’39 The rank and file did not lack political influences, either. After 15 May delegates from the abolished Luxembourg Commission had made contact with the elected representatives of the National Workshops and, along with the clubs, they held a common ideology in the call for a ‘democratic and social republic’.40 It was just that, among the mass of the insurgents, the meaning of the term was far from clear. Furthermore, many still cried out for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s enigmatic heir, who had been elected to the National Assembly on 4 June and was regarded by some as the people’s champion.
The insurgents were well aware of republican and socialist rhetoric, but they often used it only loosely to give expression to their far deeper social distress. This was illustrated by the interrogation of Louis Bocquet, an unemployed hat-maker who had found sustenance in the National Workshops. He had been captured while wielding a sabre on a barricade near the Pont Saint-Michel (agonisingly close to the Palais de Justice, which probably explains the prosecutor’s zeal in questioning him). While he admitted only that he had once attended a political club, he made no bones about the fact that he and others planned to ‘raise and defend the barricades in order to name [parliamentary] representatives who would perhaps be nobler or who might have done their duty better’. Having admitted this much - which was already enough to condemn him, as the prosecutor certainly thought - one might have expected him then to expand defiantly on his démoc-soc motives, but he revealed little else other than stating simply that ‘our rights [were] being repressed’. When pushed, Bocquet’s main concern appeared to have been that ‘the workers should not leave Paris and it was a result of that resolution . . . that I did all that I could to prevent them from going’.41 For many workers, the National Workshops comprised one of the few meaningful gains of the February revolution, and these were torn from them: it was this, rather than any fully developed démoc-soc ideology which gave the uprising its rather blunt political edge. In his memoirs, Caussidière hit the mark when he called the June days ‘that insurrection of despair’.42 The insurgents were drawn not only from those workers disbanded from the National Workshops but from among those fifty or sixty thousand who had arrived in Paris seeking to learn a trade or, failing that, to find assistance in the public works, but who had been turned away from both, the first because of the economic downturn, the second because of the rules that no migrants from the provinces were to be admitted. Their participation in the uprising was an expression of their desperation and resentment. The strong presence among the insurgents of these poorest and most deprived of all workers also explains why so many of those arrested had addresses in the worst slums. This bleak landscape of social despair is compounded by the fact that a large number of those who joined the uprising were married, older workers with children, whose families would suffer enormously if they lost a husband or father to death, prison or exile. Their presence on the barricades indicated the depth of distress.43
Moreover, the uprising did not secure political leadership from sympathisers within the institutions of the Second Republic. Neither the clubs (under pressure since 15 May) nor the parliamentary leadership of the republican left (many of whom had already been arrested or cowed) put themselves at the head of the uprising. So while there were some sympathetic noises coming from the radical politicians, no
one who was either close to the centre of power or at the forefront of the radical revolutionary movement was willing to make sincere efforts on the insurgents’ behalf. On the contrary, on 23 June, Louis Blanc tried to persuade them to stand down: ‘the counter-revolution has been sighing for an opportunity to crush [the Second Republic] . . . defeat is almost certain; nothing is primed for success’.44 He later stated that the political clubs were thrown into utter confusion and that among the socialist newspapers there ‘reigned a poignant uncertainty’.45 In fact, much of the left was caught off guard. Among them was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the great anarchist thinkers (and later a friend and associate of Herzen), who had just been voted into the National Assembly (in the same round of by-elections in which Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and Victor Hugo secured their seats), largely thanks to working-class Parisian votes. But the June days, from which he remained aloof, showed how out of touch Proudhon was with his constituents. ‘No, Monsieur Sénard’, he frankly declaimed later to the president of the National Assembly, ‘I was not a coward in June, as you have said in insulting me in front of the Assembly; I was, like you and so many others, an imbecile.’46 Blanc probably expressed the views of most of the socialist politicians when he wrote: ‘I was consternated. What side should I take? I thought the best thing to do was go to the Assembly, where I could at least be of some use in opposing violent measures which by their nature would aggravate or complicate the situation.’47 This was the furthest that most socialist politicians dared go.