Les Misérables
cartridges. One of these women relates: “I did not know what cartridges
were; it was my husband who told me.”
One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des
Vieilles-Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.
The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
la Perle.
And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
shouted: “To arms!” broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.
They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting:
“The arms have been delivered”; some signed “their names” to receipts
for the guns and swords and said: “Send for them to-morrow at the
Mayor’s office.” They disarmed isolated sentinels and National
Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the
epaulets from officers. In the Rue du Cimitière-Saint-Nicholas, an
officer of the National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with
clubs and foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was
only able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.
In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their hotels
and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrèss, or
descended to the Café des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.
All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less
than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the
quarter of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No.
50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions,
and which, flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and
on the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuée, commanded three
streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue
Aubry-le-Boucher, which it faced. The barricades at right angles fell
back, the one of the Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the
other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without
reckoning innumerable barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in
the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant,
where was visible a porte-cochère torn from its hinges; another near
the little bridge of the Hôtel-Dieu made with an “écossais,” which had
been unharnessed and overthrown, three hundred paces from the
Prefecture of Police.
At the barricade of the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
silver. “Here,” said he, “this is to pay expenses, wine, et cætera.” A
light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
barricades, the wine-shops and porters’ lodges were converted into
guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most
scientific military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full
of angles and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the
Halles, in particular, a network of streets more intricate than a
forest. The Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said,
undertaken to direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A
man killed in the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a
plan of Paris.
That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection had
abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
Château-d’Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the
powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
o’clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Pères barracks, and the
Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.
The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as
a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers’ shops
hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing
of stones was continued with gun-shots.
About six o’clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the
field of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the
other. They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer,
the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this
volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that
he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two
half-columns which separate the shops; he remained in this delicate
situation for nearly half an hour.
Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
their barracks. Opposite the passage de l’Ancre a drummer received a
blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by
thirty young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword.
Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue
Michel-le-Comte, three officers fell dead one after the other. Many of
the Municipal Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards,
retreated.
In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a
red flag bearing the following inscription: _Republican revolution, No.
127_. Was this a revolution, in fact?
The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of
inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.
There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.
In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his
scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The
insurgents, on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open
spaces, and audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each
side was watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand,
hesitated; the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin
began to make itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal
Soult, who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.
These old sailors, accustomed to correct manœuvres and having as
resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called
public wrath.
The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
from Vincennes.
Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
serene.
CHAPTER V—ORIGINALITY OF PARIS
During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more
than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than
the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of the
rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to
anything,—it is only a riot,—and Paris has so many affairs on hand,
that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal
cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone
can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable
tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the
shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he
contents himself with the remark:—
“There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin.”
Or:—
“In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.”
Often he adds carelessly:—
“Or somewhere in that direction.”
Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and
firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:—
“It’s getting hot! Hullo, it’s getting hot!”
A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his
shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places
his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.
Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and
re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts
of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber
the streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be
heard in the cafés.
The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious
laugh and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with
war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner
somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is
going on.
In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.
At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a
little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored
rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade,
offering his glasses of cocoa impartially,—now to the Government, now
to anarchy.
Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of
uprisings in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this
end, two things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The
city of Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.
On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 5th, 1832, the