Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER III—A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN
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