The Invention of Paris (50 page)

Finally, Pujol, perching on a fence post, invited the workers to assemble the next day in the same place. ‘Acclamations greeted his incendiary words, the torches were extinguished, the crowd melted away, and the night passed in dull and horrible preparations.'
¹⁰¹

That night, the prefect of police received the order to occupy the Place du Panthéon and arrest the fifty-six delegates of the National Workshops of the 12
^th
arrondissement, which housed what Lamartine called the ‘famished masses', along with those of the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This order was not carried out, and at six in the morning several thousand workers massed on the Place du Panthéon. Coming down through Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue de la Harpe, they erected barricades in the little streets around the church of Saint-Séverin, occupied the Petit-Pont, and built fortifications in the labyrinth of the Île de la Cité, where they threatened the police prefecture.
¹⁰²

At the same time, another mass of insurgents gathered at the Poissonière and Saint-Denis barriers (now the Barbès-Rochechouart and La Chapelle crossroads) and in the Clos Saint-Lazare – the construction site of the Louis-Philippe (now Lariboisière) hospital. This group built fortifications around the new church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and on the Place La Fayette (now Franz-Lizst). On Rue de Bellefond, Rue Rochechouart and Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, railway engineers erected barricades.

The third focus of insurrection was the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. This joined the Faubourg du Temple in the Popincourt quarter, and established its forward positions right against the Hôtel de Ville, fortifying the little streets around the church of Saint-Gervais:

In all the little streets around that building [the Hôtel de Ville] I found the people busy constructing barricades. They went about the work with the methodical skill of engineers, not taking up more paving-stones than were needed to provide squared stones for a solid and even fairly tidy wall, and they usually left a narrow opening by the houses to allow people to circulate.
¹⁰³

The Place du Panthéon and the Clos Saint-Lazare, on the Left and Right Banks respectively, were thus the two outer strongholds of the insurrection.
They were linked to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine which was its headquarters – the former through the Place Maubert, the Cité, and the Hôtel de Ville quarter, and the second via the Faubourgs Saint-Martin and du Temple and their respective boulevards. In this way, the insurrection controlled a great semicircle in the eastern part of Paris, the most populous and the poorest, where the narrow streets and the nature of the buildings made any attack very problematic:

Once in control of this broad space, and having expanded its ranks with the whole working population of these quarters, the insurrection could advance on the Right and Left Banks simultaneously, through the boulevards and along the quays, towards the other half of Paris that was richer and less populated, that containing the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, the ministries, the National Assembly, the Bank, etc.
¹⁰⁴

But an offensive of this kind required a strategic conception, and this was lacking. ‘The June insurrection was made without an overall plan, without a conspiracy in the strong sense of the term, without a headquarters, but it was certainly not made without work by the people on itself, without advance agreement', writes Pardigon. Louis Ménard thought likewise: ‘The leaders of the democratic forces played no part in the insurrection. The most talented and energetic of them were imprisoned at Vincennes. The others lacked boldness and faith; hence, in the party of the People, this absence of unity, of overall plan, that made possible the victory of its enemies.'
¹⁰⁵

At all events, by midday on the 23
^rd
, half of Paris was in the hands of the people without a shot being fired. In the afternoon, the Executive Commission transferred all military power to the minister of war, General Cavaignac (‘Lamartine's fireworks have turned into Cavaignac's incendiary rockets', Marx wrote in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
). The son of a member of the Convention, a student at the Polytechnique when the school was a focus of republicanism, and the brother of Godefroy Cavaignac who had been a leading light in the republican opposition (‘our Godefroy', Delescluze called him), there was something ambiguous about this character, but it was the African general in him who carried the day: ‘This time they will not escape us . . . I am charged with crushing the enemy and I shall act massively against him, as in
war. If need be, I shall attack in the open country and I shall succeed in defeating him.'
¹⁰⁶

Cavaignac's forces were made up of three bodies, designed to operate, as he put it, in compact masses, so as to avoid fragmentation and demoralization when they came in contact with the insurgents:

The three headquarters were: 1) the Porte Saint-Denis, to act against the Clos Saint-Lazare, the Faubourg Saint-Martin and the Faubourg du Temple; M. de Lamoricière, in command of this side, would distinguish himself by the swiftness of his vision and his brilliant courage; 2) the Hôtel de Ville, where Duvivier prepared operations against the Saint-Antoine quarter and faubourg; 3) the Sorbonne, from where Bedeau and Damesne, commanding the Mobile Guard, were to act against the Panthéon and the Faubourgs Saint-Jacques and Saint-Marceau.
¹⁰⁷

The first engagement was late in the morning of the 23
^rd
, at the Porte Saint-Denis:

The detachment that set out from the Clos Saint-Lazare to occupy the Porte was made up of a force of young men with a drum at their head. As this force was arriving, a voice cried out: ‘To the barricades!' ‘To arms!', a thousand other voices replied. From every house, men, women and children came out into the streets, seizing vehicles, tearing up cobbles, and in a few minutes erecting a formidable barricade. One woman hoisted to the top of the barricade a flag with the words: ‘National Workshops, 4
^th
arrondissement, 5
^th
section'.
¹⁰⁸

The Rue and the Faubourg Saint-Denis, Rue Sainte-Apolline, Rues d'Aboukir and de Cléry were all covered with barricades. The railings and fences of Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle were torn up. Suddenly a detachment of National Guard came down the boulevards. When they saw the barricade, they opened fire without reading the summons. The insurgents
responded, and the Guards fled. Then came a battalion of the 2
^nd
Legion and a company of the 3
^rd
. The leader of the insurgents who was directing the fire was struck by a bullet and fell. A woman took up the flag:

with thin hair and bare arms, in a strikingly coloured dress, she seemed to defy death. On seeing her, the National Guard hesitated to fire; they shouted to the young woman to get back; she remained undaunted, and provoked the attackers with her gestures and voice; a shot was fired, and she staggered and collapsed. But another woman suddenly rushed to her side; with one hand she supported the bloody body of her friend, with the other she hurled stones at the attackers. A new volley of shots echoed, and she fell in her turn on to the body that she was embracing.
¹⁰⁹

The barricade was taken. At the same time, the head of the column led by Lamoricière appeared on the boulevard, coming from the Madeleine – troops of the line and Mobile Guards – to take up position at the Château d'Eau. It swept the boulevards, the Faubourgs Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, and advanced northward through the Faubourg Poissonière, where it stormed the barricades erected on Rue Richer and Rue des PetitesÉcuries. But it was brought to a halt at the gigantic defences on the Place La Fayette, commanded by the industrial designer Legénissel, a captain in the National Guard who had gone over with his company to the insurrection. Lamoricière had to retreat towards the Porte Saint-Denis.

That Friday 23
^rd
, the first of four days of fighting, the insurgents succeeded in securing their positions:

The Clos Saint-Lazare, the barriers of Poissonière, La Chapelle, La Villette and Temple, the communes of Montmartre, La Chapelle, La Villette and Belleville, the Faubourg du Temple, the Popincourt quarter, the Faubourg and Rue Saint-Antoine, the quarters of Saint-Jacques and Saint-Victor, were entirely controlled by the insurrection . . . In the Saint-Martin quarter as well, which was cut off from the three main centres of rebellion, barricades were raised in Rues Rambuteau, Beaubourg, Planche-Mibray, etc. A portion of the National Guard of the 8
^th
, 11
^th
and 12
^th
arrondissements were installed behind the barricades.
¹¹⁰

At the Panthéon, it took very little for two legions of the National Guard to come to blows. The 11
^th
Legion, commanded by Edgar Quinet, was mainly on the side of order. The 12
^th
Legion, which had gone over to the side of the people, demanded that the 11
^th
should return to the limits of its own arrondissement. ‘Some thirty students from the École Normale Supérieure, in their new uniforms and armed with muskets, intervened to prevent the spilling of blood. They deplored the insurrection, but were not hostile to it.'
¹¹¹
The mayor of the 12
^th
arrondissement, a very popular doctor, was negotiating with the people on the barricades when suddenly a detachment led by the elderly François Arago arrived from the Luxembourg and stopped at the barricade barring Rue Soufflot. Arago furiously asked the insurgents why they were fighting against the Republic. An old insurgent reminded him: ‘We were together at the time of Rue Saint-Merri.' After summoning those present to disperse, the barricade was attacked and taken. On the Place de Cambrai and Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, new barricades went up, and this time Arago gave orders to use cannon.
¹¹²

Quinet and Arago – how did these old republicans arrive at bombarding the people?

These men, who had spent their whole life fighting for the progress of democratic ideas . . . were persuaded on this occasion that the people, by rising up against the national representation, would drown not only law and right, but the Republic and perhaps even the state in their calamitous victory, and with a shattered heart but a firm spirit, they set out against
this strange enemy whose emancipation had been the goal of their efforts for more than twenty years.
¹¹³

Perhaps also, in the face of this proletariat of which they had previously had only an abstract vision, their class instinct took the upper hand over their generous ideas.

In the afternoon of the 23
^rd
, General Bedeau left the Hôtel de Ville with two columns to attack the Montagne Saint-Geneviève. One column crossed the Seine by the Pont d'Arcole, the other by the Pont Notre-Dame. An artillery battery was installed in the Hôtel-Dieu to support them.
¹¹⁴
The Guards easily stormed the barricade of the Petit-Pont on the Île de la Cité, but on the other side, the one blocking entrance to Rue Saint-Jacques remained. This was defended by old republicans who had been in prison under Louis-Philippe together with Guinard, the officer now commanding the artillery opposite them. ‘Citizen Guinard was at the head with his gunners, though not all of them, as some were on the barricade, so that they could recognize one another and call out to each other by name.'
¹¹⁵
As happened very often in the course of these days, it was the arrival of the Mobile Guard that decided things. The barricade was taken. The insurgents took refuge in a draper's shop at the bottom of Rue Saint-Jacques, ‘Aux Deux Pierrots':

Belval, their leader, an energetic man of great composure, wanted to demolish the staircase and fight from the upper floors. He was not listened to, and got angry with his companions. The Mobile Guard began a terrible carnage. The workers, hidden behind display cases, under the counters, in the eaves and the cellars, were killed with bayonet thrusts, to the savage laughter of the murderers. Blood ran in streams.
¹¹⁶

Tocqueville had no reason to be worried about the behaviour of the Mobile Guards:

The bravery of these youngsters of the Mobile Guard, in this first and terrible test, could not even be imagined by those who did not witness
it. The noise of the firing, the whistling of bullets, seemed to them a new and joyful game. The smoke and the smell of powder excited them. They ran to the attack, climbed up the falling cobblestones, clung to every obstacle with a marvellous agility. Once on their way, nothing could hold them back; they were seized by a desire for emulation which drove them on in the face of death. To seize a musket from the bloody hands of an enemy, to press the barrel of a carbine against a naked breast, to dig the point of a bayonet in quivering flesh, to trample corpses underfoot, to be the first to stand on top of the barricade, to receive mortal attacks without flinching, to laugh at one's own blood flowing, to seize a flag and wave it about one's head, defying the enemy bullets – all this was, for these foolish and heroic youngsters of Paris, unknown bliss that made them insensitive to everything. Not much else was needed for this transport of youth and madness for glory, supported by the brilliance and calmness of army officers, to lead the regiments and the mass of the National Guard. If the Mobile Guard had gone over to the insurrection, as was feared, it is almost certain that victory would have gone over with them.
¹¹⁷

After this success, General Bedeau attacked up Rue Saint-Jacques, but fire came from every window, the troops ran out of ammunition, barricades multiplied as they climbed, and the losses were enormous. Night fell, and there was no longer any question of reaching the Panthéon. The troops fell back on the Hôtel de Ville. ‘So many dead and wounded, such disproportionate losses for the slim advantages won, cast a great sadness into the mind of General Bedeau.'
¹¹⁸
On the other flank of the Montagne, towards the south, the situation for the forces of order was no better. The Mobile Guard had experienced very heavy losses, and one company had been disarmed on Rue Mouffetard. On the Left Bank, the insurrection was still unvanquished on the night of the 23
^rd
.