Les Misérables
the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot
whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is
thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this
shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub
petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though
there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent
progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress?
Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There
was something of the cesspool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the
cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of
the broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling
headsman’s blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets
having the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the
rubbish, amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of
the old tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine
converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could
throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it
was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which
there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones,
coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles
on account of the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the
clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the
army, it was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of
flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of
guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast
red flag flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the
roll of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the
starving were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the
back of an electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of
lightning. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit
where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of
God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish.
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the
revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade, chance, hazard,
disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—had facing it the
Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal
suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding
defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the
faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the
strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its
excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and
grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the
bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its
enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which
debouches on the boulevard near the Château-d’Eau, if one thrust one’s
head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne
shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street
which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the
rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts,
a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the
left, as though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall
in order to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of
paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled
with the square, laid out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of
course, but, as in the case of certain Roman walls, without interfering
with its rigid architecture. The entablature was mathematically
parallel with the base. From distance to distance, one could
distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which
resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated from each other
by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.
All windows and doors were closed. In the background rose this barrier,
which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and
tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not
a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.
The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.
It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was
impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this
mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,
rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One
felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.
From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the
people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp
whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he
escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaïen was seen to ensconce itself in
some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or
in the plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made
themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe,
plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of
useless powder. Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and
there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly
which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes-cochères were
encumbered with wounded.
One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one
understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.
Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms
at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the
attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal
redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some
crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the
bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.
The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
shudder.—“How that is built!” he said to a Representative. “Not one
paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain.”—At
that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.
“The cowards!” people said. “Let them show themselves. Let us see them!
They dare not! They are hiding!”
The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they
did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they
came over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty
cowards thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of
the leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall speak presently.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed
a maw; the other a mask.
Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was
composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first
barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.
These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,
Cournet, the other, Barthélemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
barricade; Barthélemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image
of the man who had built it.
Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible
eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men,
the most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very
air he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in
the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he
sprang from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried
the hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there
was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the
divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.
Barthélemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street
urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for
him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came
out and made this barricade.
Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthélemy
slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in
the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion
plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating
circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthélemy
was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being who
possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began in
France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.
Barthélemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.
CHAPTER II—WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE
Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection, and
June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline, and an
embryo compared to the two colossal barricades which we have just
sketched; but it was formidable for that epoch.
The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
after anything, had made good use of the night. The barricade had been
not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised it two feet. Bars of
iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of
rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated the external
confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the
inside and a thicket on the outside.
The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the
wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.
The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the
kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded
completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had
been gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped,
the fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned,
the rubbish swept up, corpses removed.
They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondétour lane, of which they were
still the masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.