The Invention of Paris (46 page)

A lithograph by Granville, titled
Révolution de 1830
, shows a clutch of terrifying beings – animals with nightmarish heads, dressed in bourgeois frock-coats – attacking a flight of stairs on top of which a bizarre creature is enthroned, apparently made up of banknotes. It bears the epigraph: ‘The people are victorious, these gentlemen are sharing out the spoils.' The streets of Paris were not yet cleared of the heaped-up cobbles and felled trees, but the people were already expressing their discontent at the musical-chairs trick that had brought to the throne the ‘best of republics' in the person of Louis-Philippe. On 6 August, a week after the fighting had ended, a procession of several thousand students, led by Ulysse Trélat and François Raspail, doctors to the poor, set out from the Latin Quarter to take an address to the Palais-Bourbon, refusing constituent power to the Chamber elected under Charles X.
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At the end of August, the Société des Amis du Peuple,
³⁹
inspired by Trélat, sent a battalion to fight alongside the Belgian revolutionaries against the Dutch. In November, the students of the
grandes écoles
formed brigades to go and support the uprising in Warsaw.

On 21 September, an immense crowd came into the streets to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of Jean-François Borie and the three other sergeants of La Rochelle, executed on the Place de Grève eight years before. The new school year at the École Polytechnique was so agitated that the minister was forced to appoint François Arago, very popular with the students, as director of the school.

On 10 December, the funeral carriage of Benjamin Constant, drawn to Père-Lachaise by the students, was followed by all the republican leaders.
Trélat gave a speech at the graveside: ‘Friends of the people, let us all swear that our July days, so dearly bought by the lives of our brothers, will not be lost.'
⁴⁰

In December again, a riot broke out in front of the Luxembourg, where the trial of Charles X's ministers was under way. The crowd, who had literally waited for days, expressed its fury at sentences limited to prison terms. The repression was violent. Those wounded included a law student aged twenty-two, Charles Delescluze.

On 13 February 1831, the Legitimists celebrated a mass at Saint-German-l'Auxerrois, for the anniversary of the assassination of the Duc de Berry. A collection was organized for the benefit of the Swiss guards wounded during the July days.
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When news got round, the crowd invaded and sacked the church. The following day, the archbishop's residence was attacked and completely devastated. In
The Atheist's Mass
, a little masterpiece from 1836, Balzac used the event – a memorable one, therefore, even if Martin Nadaud sees it as a police provocation
⁴²
– to date the meeting that serves as a coda to his story: ‘At last, seven years later, after the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence, when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by side with Rebellion. . .' Following this explosion of anticlerical fury, the king was forced to remove the fleur-de-lis from the French coat of arms, and ceased attending mass in public. (But this was not without precedent: in January 1815 the people had ravaged the
church of Saint-Roch – where the priest had refused to conduct a funeral service for an actress of the Comédie-Française, Mlle Raucourt – to the cry of ‘Death to the priests!')

7 September 1831 brought the capitulation of Warsaw, under siege by the troops of Paskievitch. When the news reached Paris, a crowd gathered on Boulevard des Capucines in front of the foreign ministry, to cries of ‘Long live Poland! Down with the ministers!' Dispersed by dragoons, the rioters reached the Porte Saint-Denis, pillaging on their way an armourer on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. The next day, barricades were erected on Boulevard Montmartre, and it took the troops and the National Guard three days to reestablish order.

Such agitation was constant. George Sand, who had been in Paris for a few weeks, wrote on 6 March 1831: ‘It really is very funny. The revolution is in permanent session, like the Chamber; and we live as merrily, in the midst of bayonets, riots and ruins, as if there was complete peace.'
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Political refugees flocked in from all countries where insurrections, launched in the wake of Paris, were crushed one after the other.
⁴⁴
Casimir Perier, the energetic prime minister appointed after the Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois affair, banished them to zones of residence where they were subject to all kinds of political harassment, and were not allowed to change their domicile or their employer without administrative authorization.

Early in 1832, just after the first insurrection of the Lyon silk-workers had been crushed by a regular army under the command of Marshal Soult, Paris was gripped by cholera. On 13 February, the disease struck down a porter in Rue des Lombards, then a little girl from Rue du Haut-Moulin on the Île de la Cité, then a street salesman on Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, then an egg-seller on Rue de la Mortellerie.
⁴⁵
By March, some eight hundred people were dying each day. The nature of the disease and the way it spread were as mysterious as at the time of the Black Death five centuries earlier. After a study trip to London, Magendie decided that the disease was not contagious. At the Hôtel-Dieu, directed by Broussais – a
convinced republican but a dangerous doctor – the mortality was frightful. The hearse of his most famous patient, Casimir Perier, took with it the master's ‘physiologism'.
⁴⁶
Heinrich Heine, 19 April 1832:

Many disguised priests are now gliding and sliding here and there among the people, persuading them that a rosary which has been consecrated is a perfect preservative against the cholera. The Saint-Simonists regard it as an advantage of their religion that none of their number can die of the prevailing malady, because progress is a law of nature, and as social progress is specially in Saint-Simonism, so long as the number of its apostles is incomplete none of its followers can die. The Bonapartists declare that if any one feels in himself the symptoms of the cholera, if he will raise his eyes to the column of Place Vendôme he shall be saved and live.

The epidemic harshly showed up social inequality in the face of death: Jules Janin referred to ‘this plague of a population that is the first and only one to die, formidably giving the lie by its bloody death to the doctrines of equality that have been preached to it for half a century'. Hatred broke out in the city. The bourgeois accused the poor of having unleashed and spread the plague: ‘All individuals affected by this epidemic disease', you could read in
Le Journal des débats
for 28 March 1832, ‘belong to the class of the people. They are shoemakers and those working on the manufacture of woolen garments. They live in the dirty and narrow streets of the Île de la Cité and the Notre-Dame quarter.' The people, for their part, accused the government of poisoning the public water-sources, the barrels of the water-carriers, the sick in the hospitals. Heine noted how ‘the multitude murmured bitterly when it saw how the rich fled away, and, well packed with doctors and drugs, took refuge in healthier climes. The poor note with discontent that money has also become a protection against death.'

‘The great city is like a piece of artillery. When it is loaded, a spark need only fall and the gun goes off. In June 1832, the spark was the death of General Lamarque.'
⁴⁷
Maximilien Lamarque, deputy for the Landes, had defeated Wellington in Spain and was popular among the young. On 5
June, an immense crowd followed his coffin, which was being taken to Mont-de-Marsan. The procession mingled Bonapartists and republicans, with students from the Alfort veterinary school and the Polytechnique at its head. (Lucien Leuwen, we recall, ‘had been expelled from the Polytechnique for having gone for an inappropriate walk, on a day that he and all his fellow students were detained: that was the time of one of the famous days of June, April or February 1832 or 1834'.) Setting out from Rue d'Anjou, the hearse reached the Madeleine and followed the boulevards as far as the Bastille. Here, ‘a circle was formed around the hearse. The vast throng was hushed. Lafayette spoke, and bade Lamarque farewell . . . All at once a man on horseback, dressed in black, appeared in the middle of the group with a red flag.'
⁴⁸

Heine also noted how ‘there was indeed some mysterious influence in this red flag with black-fringed border, in which were in black the words “
La Liberté ou la Mort!
” and which rose like a banner of consecration to death above all heads on the Pont d'Austerlitz'.
⁴⁹
Tradition has it that this was the first appearance of the red flag on the side of the uprising, in a remarkable turnaround since it had served until then as the final warning given by the forces of order before the unleashing of repression (‘At the signal of the red flag, any assembly becomes criminal and must be dispersed by force' – such had been the law since October 1789).

Meantime, the Municipal cavalry galloped along the Left Bank to bar all passage of the Pont d'Austerlitz, while on the Right Bank the dragoons came from the Célestins and deployed along the Quai Morland.
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The people . . . suddenly perceived them . . . and cried: ‘The dragoons!' The troops advanced at a walk, silently, with their pistols in the holsters, their swords in their scabbards, their muskets slung in their leather sockets, with an air of gloomy expectation.

Where did the first shots come from? History does not say, but what had to happen did happen:

The tempest was unchained, stones showered, the fusillade burst forth. Many rushed to the water's edge, and crossed the small arm of the Seine, which is now filled in. The timber-yards on the Île de Louviers, that ready-made citadel, bristled with combatants; stakes were pulled up, pistols were fired, a barricade began. The young men, driven back, crossed the Pont d'Austerlitz with the hearse at a run, and charged the Municipal Guard. The carabineers galloped up, the dragoons cut and slashed, the crowd dispersed in all directions; a rumour of war flew to all four corners of Paris . . . Passion spread the riot as the wind does fire.
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In the evening, the crowd roamed the Marais, and the Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis quarters, calling out: ‘To arms! Long live liberty! Long live the Republic!' In Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, lampposts were broken and barricades erected. The police stations on the Place du Châtelet, Rue de la Verrerie and Rue Mauconseil were disarmed, and the armourer Lepage on Rue du Bourg-l'Abbé pillaged.
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At seven o'clock the insurgents were in control of the Châtelet, the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai de Gesvres, but the government had gathered 25,000 soldiers in Paris and this time the National Guard were on its side – except for the artillery which refused to fire on the people.
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The following day, 6 June, the insurgents had to abandon almost all their positions, and the fighting centred on the Saint-Merri cloister, a labyrinth of little streets where the Centre Beaubourg is now, along with its esplanade and the Horloge quarter. Rey-Dussueil:

Within less than an hour they improvised a fortress. A house facing Rue Aubry-le-Boucher was their headquarters, and a barricade five feet high defended its approaches . . . Two lit stoves were placed outside the door; molten lead was poured into moulds to be rounded into bullets, each one of which seemed to have a ready destination.
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To the south, in front of the Saint-Merri church, piled-up stones closed off Rue de la Verrerie and Rue des Arcis; behind, another barricade stopped any enemy who sought to advance through Rue de Cloître. There was no way out to the north, nor through Rue Maubuée, nor the Passage de Venise, nor Rue de la Corroierie. It was necessary to attack either from the front through Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, or from behind through Rue Saint-Martin . . . This Thermopylae did not occupy, in length, a space of more than a hundred paces; its width was that of Rue Saint-Martin.
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This fortress could not be taken without artillery. A gun battery was accordingly installed on Rue Saint-Martin, which it enfiladed from the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. Another battery fired from the Innocents market through Rue Aubry-le-Boucher. This was the first time that artillery was used against the people of Paris, and these days of June 1832 thus saw two innovations with a great future – the red flag of the people, and the cannon of the party of order. On the evening of the 6
^th
, the central barricade was demolished by a convergent attack of overwhelming force from both north and south of Rue Saint-Martin. The barricade leader, a workman named Jeanne who had been one of the July insurgents, went down in legend for refusing to surrender, and single-handedly opening a passage with his bayonet through the battalions of the 4
^th
legion of the National Guard. Heine: