The Invention of Paris (49 page)

Raspail read from the tribune a petition in support of Poland, amid great confusion. The president rang his bell. But suddenly silence fell, Blanqui was about to speak:
⁸⁶

It was at that moment that I saw a man go up onto the rostrum, and, although I have never seen him again, the memory of him has filled me with disgust and horror ever since. He had sunken, withered cheeks, white lips, and a sickly, malign, dirty look like a pallid, mouldy corpse; he was wearing no visible linen; an old black frockcoat covered his lean, emaciated limbs tightly; he looked as if he had lived in a sewer and only just come out. I was told that this was Blanqui.
⁸⁷

This description is worth dwelling on. Blanqui had just spent eight years in the worst prisons; his health was ruined, he spat blood, his wife had died, and one might well believe that these cruel tests had marked him. On top of this, he can hardly have been at his best that day, forced into a confrontation that he did not want. But in Tocqueville's words there is hatred, the same as he expresses towards the mob, the
ochlos
, these ‘disgustingly sweaty and quite ragged' men – the same as he would soon express for the June insurgents. Tocqueville, that cynosure of the Institut des Sciences Politiques and the late lamented Fondation Saint-Simon, the idol of the liberals, was literally possessed by a hatred for the people, and though highly polite in general, he expresses himself in a vulgar fashion, to use one of his own adjectives.
⁸⁸

The affair turned disastrously wrong. Blanqui was not very convincing, wavering between Poland and the situation in France. Barbès spoke after him, undoubtedly in a fit of crazy outbidding directed against Blanqui, now that they had become enemies, and demanded an immediate tax of a billion francs on the rich. A certain Huber – who turned out to be an agent provocateur – proclaimed the dissolution of the Assembly, amid total chaos. The majority of deputies left the chamber. Soon the call to arms was heard, and the Mobile Guards arrived and expelled the demonstrators; the
journée
was over. In the evening, Barbès, Albert and Raspail were arrested. The clubs of Blanqui and Raspail were closed. Blanqui himself went underground, but was arrested on 26 May along with his faithful friends, the chef Flotte and the doctor Lacambre. The most evident result of this
journée
was that of depriving the Paris proletariat of its leaders at the very moment when it had most need of them.

‘Rather an end with terror than a terror without end!' – this was the cry that the bourgeois ‘madly snorted at his parliamentary republic'.
⁸⁹
During
the five weeks that elapsed between the
journée
of 15 May and the June insurrection, the bourgeoisie made preparations for this ‘end with terror'. A
union sacrée
came into being against Red Paris – Orleanists, Legitimists, republicans of all shades, including the quasi-totality of socialists, had only one idea in mind: to put an end to all this. Discordant voices were very rare, such as that of Pierre Leroux in the Assembly on 10 June: ‘You have no other solution than violence, threats and blood, the old, false, absurd political economy. There are new solutions, socialism can bring them, allow socialism to let humanity live!' Daniel Stern noted how ‘nothing could appear more singular to this Assembly, which was beginning to find that it was a bit too republican, after hearing that it was not republican enough'.

The preparations for the battle against the Paris proletariat were made in the broad light of day. Lamartine presented the general lines of these to the Executive Commission, which had replaced the Provisional Government in May:

I do not wish to take upon my name the responsibility of a position of weakness, and of disarming society, which may degenerate into anarchy. I demand two things: laws of public security respecting the rioters, the clubs, the abuses of complaint in anarchical journals, the power of banishing from Paris to their communes the agitators convicted of public sedition, and lastly a camp of twenty thousand men, under the walls of Paris, to assist the army of Paris and the National Guard in the certain and imminent campaign which we would inevitably have to make against the National Workshops, and against the more guilty factions which might arise and become masters of this army of all the seditions.
⁹⁰

This gentle elegiac poet, the head of the angelic school as Balzac ironically called him, would obtain satisfaction of his demands – a law against rioting, with a penalty of twelve years in prison and withdrawal of civil rights for any citizen taking part in an armed riot that did not disperse at the first summons. Thanks to this law, ‘the prisons of the Republic opened again for those who had grown old in the prisons of the monarchy'.
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The memories of February were still fresh. The party of Order knew that the military could change sides and that the National Guard from the popular arrondissements was unreliable. A new body was therefore created, specially recruited and trained for repression: the Mobile Guard, recognizable by its
green epaulettes. It was in relation to this force that Marx used for the first time, I believe, the term ‘lumpenproletariat'. According to Victor Marouk, this was formed from ‘people with no allegiance'; in Hippolyte Castille's words, ‘the scum of Paris'. For Louis Ménard, ‘since no precautions were taken with recruitment, this floating population that pullulates in the big cities had no trouble in joining'.
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These were very young men, including a large unemployed number of working-class origin, who were attracted by the pay of 30 sous a day, and by uniform and adventure.
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The bourgeoisie was unsure until the last moment whether they would not betray it. Tocqueville expressed this fear at the feast of Concorde on the Champs-de-Mars, a sinister parody of the feast of the Fédération of 1790:

The sight of those two hundred thousand bayonets will never leave my memory . . . Only the rich sections sent out any large number of the National Guard wearing military uniform . . . Among the legions from the suburbs, which by themselves stretched out into whole armies, one saw little but jackets and blouses, although that did not prevent them marching with very warlike expressions. Most of them, as they came by us, shouted, ‘Long live the democratic Republic!' or sang the
Marseillaise
or the Girondins' song . . . The various exclamations which we could hear from the battalions of the Garde Mobile left us full of doubts and anxiety about the intentions of these young men, or rather children, who, more than anybody else at that time, held our destinies in their hands. The regiments of the line, who closed the review, marched past in silence. My heart was filled with sadness as I watched this prolonged spectacle . . . I felt that these were the two armies of the civil war that we were just beginning.
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The proletariat was also preparing for battle in its workshops. This was above all a question of manufacturing gunpowder and firearms, as weapons were not lacking. Even a cannon was constructed in the Faubourg du Temple. In July, a certain Allard, police chief in charge of public security, testified before the parliamentary commission of inquiry:

I had the houses searched on the right and left sides of the whole length of Rue de Charenton. We were sometimes forced to knock down the doors. We found muskets that were still hot, and hands black with powder. But what caught our attention above all was a veritable factory for gunpowder and other ammunition in a small passage on Rue du Chantier, between Rue de Charenton and Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine . . . Here, at no. 10, was a locksmith's foundry where gunpowder, bullets and cartridges were being made. Bullets were moulded in thimbles, others in musket barrels. The lead ingots produced in these were then cut into sections.
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To make an end a pretext was needed, and this was provided by the National Workshops. Established in the wake of the February revolution, after an idea of Louis Blanc, these were supposed to relieve poverty by organizing new forms of work. But very soon the enormous demand transformed these cooperative and generous projects into meaningless tasks; by May-June, more than 100,000 men were employed, and 20,000 women, with all trades mixed together and functioning as navvies or seamstresses; 2 francs per day for men, and 1 franc for women.
⁹⁶
There was no money left to finance the major works originally envisaged, as the economic crisis that had begun in 1846 was aggravated by a flight of capital.
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The overwhelming majority of the National Assembly wanted the immediate closure of the National Workshops, as not only did they cost a great deal, but they aroused fear. Daniel Stern:

This confused and floating population that had been pressed here to clear the public space was tacitly inspired by a common spirit. It was disciplined and organized by its own strength; it constituted a veritable army
. . . which elected leaders of its own choice that would be the only ones obeyed on the decisive day. But if some spirits, taking account of circumstances, sought a mode of slow and managed dissolution which would not suddenly cast into distress the families of valiant workmen whose only wrong was to lack employment, others on the contrary treated the equity of the former as culpable complicity, and wanted immediately, without transition or arrangement, to expel these
lazzaroni
, these
janissaries
– as they called them in terms both unjust and imprudent – from Paris and disperse them at any cost, without worrying about where they would find bread.

Under the influence of Falloux, chair of the labour committee, the Assembly and the Executive Commission decided to act quickly. On 20 June, Victor Hugo demanded the dissolution of the National Workshops in terms very close to those of Falloux, to whom he specifically referred: ‘Independently of the dismal effect that the National Workshops have on our finances, these Workshops in their present form, and as they threaten to continue, could in the long term – a danger that has already been pointed out to you – seriously alter the character of the Parisian worker.' On 21 June, the Commission decreed that all male workers between 18 and 25 years of age would be immediately enrolled in the army. Others would be sent to provincial departments that would be allocated them, to do navvying work. The first contingent was to leave Paris for the swamps of the Sologne the next day, 22 June. This decree fell on a city that was already in ferment: ‘On 6 June, new rioting on Rue Saint-Denis, constantly increasing. At ten o'clock there was a compact crowd on the boulevard . . . detachments of National Guard, Mobile Guard and regular forces arrived from all sides . . . Same rioting on the 8
^th
. The crowded is bigger every day, the repression more energetic . . . On the 11
^th
the agitation continued, and 134 seditionists were arrested.'
⁹⁸

By the evening, groups of hungry people roamed the streets calling out in a low voice: ‘Bread or lead, bread or lead', a dark and contracted version of the battle cry of the Lyon silk-workers: ‘Live working or die fighting'.

The Executive Commission's provocation would trigger the June insurrection, which Tocqueville saw as:

the greatest and the strangest that had ever taken place in our history, or perhaps in that of any other nation: the greatest because for four days more
than a hundred thousand men took part in it, and there were five generals killed; the strangest, because the insurgents were fighting without a battle cry, leaders, or flag, and yet they showed wonderful powers of coordination and a military expertise that astonished the most experienced officers. Another point that distinguished it from all other events of the same type during the last sixty years was that its object was not to change the form of the government, but to alter the organization of society. In truth it was not a political struggle (in the sense in which we have used the word ‘political' up to now), but a class struggle, a sort of ‘Servile War'.
⁹⁹

On 22 June, when news of the decree reached them, tens of thousands of workers came out in the streets, crying: ‘Down with Marie! Down with Lamartine!', and chanting in unison: ‘We won't leave, we won't leave.' A procession made its way to the Luxembourg, where the Executive Commission and the labour committee were in session, to ask for the suspension of the decree. A delegation led by Pujol, an official of the National Workshops, was received by Marie, the minister of public works. The tone grew rapidly heated, and Marie ended up uttering the fatal words: ‘If the workers are unwilling to leave for the provinces, we shall compel them by force.' The delegates left the Luxembourg in a fury, and headed for the Place Saint-Sulpice, where Pujol, standing on the fountain, informed them of the response of the government and summoned the workers to the Panthéon that same night.

During the evening, an immense crowd of men and women from the working-class quarters, the Faubourg du Temple and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, made their way up Rue Saint-Jacques and massed around the Panthéon. Pardigon, a law student who was to take part in the insurrection, recalled:

Several speakers spoke at once, but without leading to confusion. Each of them had their own audience. At certain moments, low murmurs and oscillations among these groups, in which even faces could not be distinguished, showed that all minds were moved by a single thought, a thought as cold and severe as it was passionate, for the shouts, cheers, applause and enthusiasm customary at popular meetings were lacking . . . The spectre of the Sologne was present in everyone's mind, like a French Siberia, to which the workers of the National Workshops were to be exiled, thus putting an end to the question of the Right to Work and ridding Paris of its revolutionary forces.
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