The Invention of Paris (52 page)

By Sunday afternoon, the insurgents held on only to the Clos Saint-Lazare and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Cavaignac decided to deal first with the former, so that he could then bring all his forces to bear on the latter. Lamennais wrote in his newspaper,
Le Peuple constituant
: ‘In the Clos Saint-Lazare, the struggle took enormous proportions: to speak only of the National Guard, it was a complete battle, with all the features of bold heroism and sublime death. Whether or not these men were seditionists, anyone who saw them fall under the hurricane of shot that ploughed through them from all four sides at a time could not prevent an involuntary admiration.'
When all was over, the leader of the insurgents there, a journalist by the name of Benjamin Laroque, one of the few intellectuals engaged in the battle on the side of the people, ended up marching forward to his death, in Roman style, as Baudin would later do in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Delescluze on the Place du Château-d'Eau in 1871.

By the morning of the 26
^th
, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine remained alone. An attempt at mediation by three deputies was rebuffed by the army command. ‘The African generals were unwilling to release their prey. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine could not escape the fate of the other working-class quarters. The army's
honour
demanded this.'
¹³¹
Lamoricière's column emerged from the Popincourt quarter through Rues Saint-Maur and Basfroi, at the same time as the troops massed around the Bastille drowned the faubourg with a formidable artillery fire. The battle did not last long, but was terribly violent. At ten o'clock, the faubourg capitulated. A few insurgents resisted until the evening at the Amandiers barrier (now Boulevard de Charonne, at the western corner of Père-Lachaise), but at two in the morning, Sénart, the president of the Assembly, was able to exclaim: ‘It is all over, gentlemen, thank God!'

‘Shoot, gentlemen, but don't slander!' Blanqui demanded from the depths of his prison.
¹³²
The winners of June had already begun to apply the first part of this exhortation when the fighting was still in progress. In this respect, as in many others, June 1848 stood in sharp contrast to the insurrections of the 1830s. Certainly, it had not been very safe to be caught with weapons in hand in the Saint-Merri cloister or Rue Transnonain, and for those who did escape the courts of the July monarchy were not inclined to be lenient. But the banker Leuwen could not ignore that his dear Lucien was fighting on the other side, with his fellow students of the École Polytechnique. A section of the sons of the republican bourgeoisie were then behind the barricades with the workers, which ruled out the prisoners being shot en masse. There was no concern of this kind in 1848. Ménard, Pardigon and Castille speak of rivers of blood, mountains of piled-up corpses, punctured and bleeding flesh, manhunts, public gardens turned into slaughterhouses – and these were not just metaphors. Insurgents captured with weapons were shot on the spot:

The majority of workers caught on the barricade of Rue des Noyers and other barricades on Rue Saint-Jacques were taken to the police station
on Rue des Mathurins, or the Hôtel de Cluny, and shot . . . When the proclamation [of Cavaignac, promising to spare the lives of insurgents who surrendered] became known to the workers, a large number gave themselves up. Some were then shot on the spot, others taken to the Hôtel de Ville and some other points that were particularly used for slaughter. On the Pont d'Arcole, prisoners fell under the crossfire of the Mobile Guards placed on the two quays. On the Pont Louis-Philippe, more than forty were thrown into the water. Others were taken to the Quai de l'Hôtel-de-Ville and thrown into the river, where they were shot. Most often they fell on the bank, and other Mobile Guards finished them off with musket fire.
¹³³

The insurgent city was transformed into a charnel house. The cobbles and the earth in the gardens were red. ‘It was only when a rainstorm came that the pools of blood were washed away.'
¹³⁴
The dead were heaped up in pits, thrown into the Seine, piled into hastily dug common graves.

In the Place du Carrousel, on the night of the 24th the National Guard, all the more savage in that they had not performed too brilliantly during the fighting, murdered a column of prisoners who were being taken to the cellars of the Tuileries. Pardigon was among them:

My knee had hardly grazed the ground when a terrible gunfire, from just in front of us, burst like a shell. The hurricane toppled us. The head of the column was swept by shots . . . A few weak cries could be heard, several men fell back heavily in silence, they died as soon as they were hit. The wounded and living were left among the dead and dying . . . The hail of bullets continued. I myself fell with my face against the ground, I was hit . . . Stray bullets crossed the fence towards the Louvre, on the side of Rue de Rohan, in fact all around. National Guards were posted in these different places. When they were struck by bullets they thought they were under attack, and responded. Then thousands of bullets converged on us from all sides. This dark mass of men, lit up only too brightly by the lampposts in the square, became the general target.

And he concludes: ‘There were the dead, the only question now was to remove them. The wounded dragged themselves along and were tied up. Some survivors had fled, but they would be caught. It was not all over,
now would come revenge!' This affair made a great impression right across Europe. Even the Russians in Warsaw or the Austrians in Milan had not done any better. A dozen years later, Baudelaire recalled the massacre as explicitly as the censorship would permit, in
Les Fleurs du mal
. In ‘The Swan', the final evocation of the Place du Carrousel ends on a thought, ‘Of the captives, of the vanquished! . . . of many others too', and the final stanzas of ‘The Flawed Bell' are like an echo of Pardigon's account: ‘I, my soul is flawed, and when, a prey to ennui,/She wishes to fill the cold night air with her songs,/It often happens that her weakened voice/Resembles the death rattle of a wounded man,/Forgotten beneath a heap of dead, by a lake of blood,/Who dies without moving, striving desperately.'
¹³⁵

After the killing there began the great hunt – searches, denunciations, arrests. The Procurator-General gave the police ‘instructions on the means to discover the June fighters'. He advised ‘checking whether prisoners have their lips or hands blackened by powder. Grains of powder may remain in the wrinkles or crevices of calloused hands. A thumb that has been used to load the musket hammer will sometimes bear a burn, and most often at least a bruise . . . Pockets must be scrupulously examined; they may contain some grains of powder or explosive caps. It is said that if you place your face close to the butt of a musket you can smell the scent of powder a full week after it has been fired.'
¹³⁶

The captives were imprisoned in forts, barracks, in the Luxembourg (a real headquarters of butchery),
¹³⁷
in the cellars of the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries, where they were left to die of hunger. If they made a noise or asked for anything, the guards fired at the heap of prisoners through the bars. Pardigon's account (‘They also fired through the grill, along the cellar. This firing was no longer haphazard, but deliberate') prefigures Père Roque's famous gesture in
A Sentimental Education
:

Other prisoners present themselves at the vent-hole, with their bristling beards, their burning eyeballs, all pushing forward, and yelling: ‘Bread!'
Père Roque was indignant at seeing his authority slighted. In order to frighten them he took aim at them; and, borne backward into the vault that nearly smothered him, the young man, with his eyes staring upward, once more exclaimed: ‘Bread!' ‘Hold on! Here it is!' said Père Roque, firing a shot from his gun. There was a fearful howl, then silence.
¹³⁸

In this catastrophe, the Paris proletariat stood alone. Those who should have supported them, ‘that party that dared to call itself the Mountain', as Louis Ménard put it, did not lag behind in shooting them down. Ledru-Rollin, minister of the interior, left the repression to Cavaignac when he resigned from the Executive Commission, but just before this, ‘he took it upon himself to use the telegraph to ask for regiments of the line, the National Guards of the departments, and even sailors from Brest and Cherbourg, to be brought in as rapidly as possible by rail'.
¹³⁹
Louis Blanc, ‘accused of supporting the insurrection, would maintain in August: “No one could have been more foreign than myself to these unhappy events, no one mourned more deeply than I did this deplorable conflict, the first news of which was given me by my concierge.”'
¹⁴⁰
Few indeed dared to publicly protest against the massacres – Pierre Leroux, Victor Considérant, and Proudhon.
¹⁴¹
Announcing the closing
down of his newspaper, old Lamennais was almost alone in showing that he understood it all:

Le Peuple constituant
began with the Republic, and is ending with the Republic. For what we are seeing is certainly not the Republic, it is not anything that has a name. Paris is in a state of siege, delivered to a military power, which is itself handed to a faction that has made it its instrument; the jails and fortresses of Louis-Philippe are filled with 14,000 prisoners, in the wake of an atrocious butchery; mass transportations, banishments unequalled by those of 1793, laws curtailing the right of assembly, in practice destroyed, the enslavement and ruin of the press . . . the People decimated and repressed in their misery, more deeply than ever before – no, once again, this is certainly not the Republic; but around its bloody tomb the saturnalia of reaction.

The Paris Commune, repression of which involved far more shootings, deportations and banishments than the June days of 1848, ended up by being integrated into consensual republican history, thanks to Hugo, Jaurès and Péguy, to the point that it is sometimes overlooked how in 1871 the social democrats were in Versailles and not in Paris. A plaque at 17 Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, notes: ‘The last barricade of the Commune resisted in the Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. A hundred and twenty years later, the Socialist party and its first secretary Pierre Mauroy render homage to the people of Paris who sought to change their lives, and to the 30,000 dead of the Time of Cherries.' This trumpery makes short work of history, for Louis Blanc, the Mauroy of his day, maintained that ‘this insurrection is completely to be condemned, and must be condemned by any true republican'.

If textbooks dispatch the June days in a few short lines, if the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 1848 went by quite unnoticed and the only monograph devoted to them, that of Marouk, goes back a hundred and twenty years, it is because their ghost is still as troublesome as it was then. Already at that time, the clearest minds had grasped that June was a fundamental rupture, that these days marked the end of an era, the end of the illusion that had underpinned all the struggles since the Restoration, in other words that the bourgeoisie and the people, hand in hand, would finish what had been started in 1789.

The seventy days of the Commune gave time for many joyful episodes, in which men and women spoke to each other in the street, and embraced without knowing each other. Above all, despite Engels's famous phrase on the ‘dismal solo' played by the proletariat during the Commune, the
Paris workers were not alone in 1871. There was with them a whole literary and artistic
bohème
– Courbet and Vallès were not isolated cases – and such major figures as the scientists Flourens and Élisée Reclus. There were foreigners, Garibaldians, Poles, Germans. There were republicans who had broken with their own party, such as Delescluze, the doctor Tony-Mollin, and Millière who was shot on the steps of the Panthéon, shouting: ‘Long live humanity!'

Nothing of that in June 1848, but a desolation that struck even the least sentimental. For Blanqui, ‘26 June was one of those days that the Revolution claims in tears, like a mother claiming the body of her son'.
¹⁴²
And for Marx, ‘the June revolution is the
ugly
revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown . . . Woe unto June!'
¹⁴³
It was in stupefaction that the bourgeoisie saw these threatening savages surge forward from nowhere, these new barbarians, these wild beasts, these beings towards whom Lamartine, Musset, Tocqueville, Mérimée, Dumas, Berlioz and Delacroix expressed their disgust and terror. Hugo, in his speech of 20 June on the National Workshops, launched into a flight of oratory: ‘Take care! Two plagues are at your gate, two monsters are waiting and roaring, there in the shadows behind us and behind you: civil war and servile war, the lion and the tiger.' The June insurgent, whether a recent industrial worker, an unemployed builder or an uprooted artisan, was Agamben's
Homo sacer
, who could be rightfully killed without this being a crime or a sacrifice.
¹⁴⁴
To shoot or deport them no legal process was needed, or else a purely derisory one: ‘Opposite Rue des Mathurins, the Mobile Guards put up trestles to form a kind of tribunal; they simulated a council of war and handed out death sentences that were carried out on the spot.'
¹⁴⁵

These barbarians who emerged from the shadows had no known commander. Thirty years later, Marouk summoned up the memory of some of the barricade leaders:

Legénissel, a draughtsman and former deserter, captain of the National Guard, directed the defence of the Place La Fayette. The Clos
Saint-Lazare was headed by a journalist, Benjamin Laroque. An old shoemaker of sixty, Voisambert, commanded Rue Planche-Mibray. A young engineering worker, Bartélemy, was in charge of the barricades on Rue Grange-aux-Belles. In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine you would find Pellieux, the worker Marche,
¹⁴⁶
Lacollonge, editor of
L'Organisation du travail, journal des ouvriers
, and the naval lieutenant Frédéric Cournet. The engineering worker Racary commanded the Place des Vosges. Touchard, formerly of the Montagne, was in charge in Rue de Jouy, and Hibruit, a hat-maker, Rues des Nonnains-d'Hyères, du Figuier and Charlemagne. Raguinard was at the Panthéon, and the builder Lahr at the Barrière d'Italie, supported by the horse-dealer Wappreaux, Choppart and Daix.
¹⁴⁷