The Invention of Paris (55 page)

The History of a Crime
can also be read as a personal adventure. A grand bourgeois, an illustrious writer, an Academician and deputy, becomes in the space of a few hours a clandestine fugitive. Bonaparte's police is at his heels. He spends the night in the backrooms of local cafés, and apartments of friends met by chance. By day, he runs from one meeting to another, through those quarters that were so well pacified three years previously, Rue de la Cerisaie, Quai de Jemmapes, Rue de Charonne. At 82 Rue Poincourt, ‘we entered into a blind alley of considerable length and dimly lighted by an old oil lamp – one of those with which Paris was formerly lighted – then again to the left, and we entered through a narrow passage into a large courtyard encumbered with sheds and building materials. This time we had reached Cournet's.' Cournet! The very same who, in
Les Misérables
and in reality, commanded the Charybdis of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, ‘intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the most formidable of combatants'. Hugo never misses the opportunity to make a connection between the December days of 1851 and the past and future of Red Paris, 1848 and the Commune. In a disturbing contraction of time, two men who were to die under fire, Baudin and Millière, meet each other at 70 Rue Blanche. ‘Millière . . . I can still see that pale young man, that eye at the same time piercing and half closed, that gentle and forbidding profile. Assassination and the Panthéon awaited him
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. . . Millière went up to him. “You do not know me”, said he. “My name is Millière; but I know you, you are Baudin.”' And Hugo concludes: ‘I was present at the handshaking between these two spectres' – words that give me a shiver.

As if the danger was not great enough, Hugo adds to it by provocation. The first day, he is on the way to the centre of Paris:

As the omnibus entered into the cutting of the Porte Saint-Martin a regiment of heavy cavalry arrived in the opposite direction . . . They were cuirassiers. They filed by at a sharp trot and with drawn swords . . . Suddenly the regiment halted . . . By its halt it stopped the omnibus. There were the soldiers. We had them under our eyes, before us, at two paces distance . . . these Frenchmen who had become Mamelukes, these citizen soldiers of the Great Republic transformed into supporters of the degraded Empire . . . I could no longer restrain myself. I lowered the window of the omnibus. I put out my head, and, looking fixedly at the dense line of soldiers which faced me, I called out, ‘Down with Louis Bonaparte. Those who serve traitors are traitors!' Those nearest to me turned their heads towards me and looked at me with a tipsy air; the others did not stir, and remained at ‘shoulder arms', the peaks of their helmets over their eyes, their eyes fixed upon the ears of their horses.

The following day, hurrying towards the barricade on which he arrived too late to be killed, Hugo passed the Bastille in a cab (the cab drivers of that time were singularly courageous):

Four harnessed batteries were drawn up at the foot of the column. Here and there knots of officers talked together in a low voice, – sinister men . . . The emotion which I had felt on the previous day before a regiment of cuirassiers again seized me. To see before me the assassins of the country, at a few steps, standing upright, in the insolence of a peaceful triumph, was beyond my strength: I could not contain myself. I drew out my sash. I held it in my hand, and putting my arm and head out of the window of the fiacre, and shaking the sash, I shouted, ‘Soldiers! Look at this sash. It is the symbol of Law, it is the National Assembly visible . . . You are being deceived. Go back to your duty . . . Louis Bonaparte is a bandit; all his accomplices will follow him to the galleys . . . Look at that man who is at your head, and who dares to command you. You take him for a general, he is a convict.'

Someone murmured that he would get himself shot, but Hugo would not listen, and continued: ‘“You, who are there, dressed up like a general, it is you to whom I speak, sir. You know who I am . . . and I know who you are. I have told you you are a criminal. Now, do you wish to know my name? This is it.” And I called out my name to him. And I added, “Now tell me yours.” He did not answer. I continued, “Very well, I do not want to know your name as a general, I shall know your number as a galley slave.”'

The third level of
The History of a Crime
is that of political analysis, where Hugo joins Marx – whose name he perhaps never heard – in asking: ‘Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after 2 December? . . . Any serious proletarian rising would at once have revived the bourgeoisie, reconciled it with the army, and ensured a second June defeat for the workers.'
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For Hugo, the truth came from the mouth of an old woman, the very first day, in a scene in which the ghost of the June days appears: ‘At the corner of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine before the shop of the grocer Pépin, on the same spot where the immense barricade of June 1848, was erected as high as the second storey, the decrees of the morning had been placarded. Some men were inspecting them, although it was pitch dark, and they could not read them, and an old woman said, “The ‘Twenty-five francs' are crushed – so much the better!”'
¹⁷²
In a chapter with the explicit
title ‘The Rebound of the 24
^th
June, 1848, on the 2
^nd
December, 1851', Auguste, the wineseller in Rue de la Roquette whose life Hugo had saved in June, lucidly explains that ‘the people were “dazed” – that it seemed to all of them that universal suffrage was restored; that the downfall of the law of the 31st of May was a good thing':
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To tell the whole truth, people did not care much for the Constitution, they liked the Republic, but the Republic was maintained too much by force for their taste. In all this they could only see one thing clearly, the cannons ready to slaughter them – they remembered June, 1848 – there were some poor people who had suffered greatly – Cavaignac had done much evil – women clung to the men's blouses to prevent them from going to the barricades – nevertheless, with all this, when seeing men like ourselves at their head, they would perhaps fight, but this hindered them, they did not know for what.

All Hugo's efforts and those of his friends to arouse the faubourgs were in vain. After the death of Baudin:

On leaving the barricade of Rue Sainte-Marguerite, De Flotte went to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, Madier de Montjau went to Belleville, Charamaule and Maigne proceeded to the Boulevards. Schoelcher, Dulac, Malardier, and Brillier again went up the Faubourg Saint-Antoine by the side-streets which the soldiers had not yet occupied. They shouted, ‘Vive la République!' They harangued the people on the doorsteps . . . They even went as far as to sing the
Marseillaise
. People took off their hats as they passed and shouted ‘Long live the Representatives!' But that was all.

A reason had to be given. ‘It was clear that the populous quarters would not rise, we had to turn to the commercial quarters, abandon trying to stir the extremities of the city and agitate the centre.' This strategy of going back in time, in the opposite direction to the sociology of Parisian revolution, meant the defeat of the resistance. The last shots were fired on Rue Montorgueil, a musket-shot away from the place where the barricades had made their first reappearance in November 1827. For Red Paris, a hiatus of twenty years would now begin.

In this whole century of barricades, all the Paris uprisings and revolutions were thus defeats, either immediate or delayed. It was in no way surprising, therefore, that the old Blanqui, in 1871, developed in his cell in the Taureau fortress a cosmogony that reflects his disarray in the face of the eternal recurrence of defeat:

All worlds are engulfed, one after another, in the revivifying flames, to be reborn from them and consumed by them once more – monotonous flow of an hourglass that eternally empties and turns itself over. The new is always old, and the old always new . . . Here, nonetheless, lies a great drawback: there is no progress, alas, but merely vulgar revisionist reprints . . . Men of the nineteenth century, the hour of our apparitions is fixed forever, and always brings us back the very same ones, or at most with a prospect of felicitous variants. There is nothing here that will much gratify the yearning for improvement. What to do? There I have sought not at all my pleasure, but only the truth.
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But if we explore the surroundings of this notion of ‘defeat', beyond the summary executions, the banishments and mass deportations, what remains is an immense truth effect. The defeat brings to light that which did not take place. Where illusion had reigned – of republican fraternity, of the neutrality of right and law, of the emancipation of universal suffrage – defeat suddenly reveals the true nature of the enemy, it dissolves the consensus, dismantles the ideological mystifications of domination. No political analysis, no press campaign, no electoral struggle, so clearly bears a message as the spectacle of people being shot in the street.

For the century from 1871 to 1968, the pacification of political manners – in other words, the continuation of civil war by other means – favoured the return of the illusion. In efforts that would be laughable if they did not lead to such weakening, those who, despite themselves, were the heirs of the Montagnards of 1848 and the Versailles socialists of 1871, constantly worked to plaster over the old prison house that was supposedly democratic and republican. In May 1968, those who had envisaged and prepared revolution placed themselves explicitly in the continuity of the disorders of the nineteenth century. The
Internationale situationniste
wrote in 1961 that ‘we must take up again the study of the classical workers' movement in a disabused fashion, disabused firstly in respect to its various kinds of political
or pseudo-theoretical heirs, since they only possess the inheritance of its defeat'. And a short while after, when barricades appeared in the night of 10 May 1968 on Rue Gay-Lussac, the extraordinary idea of taking up the cobbles from the street was not a residue of collective memory and still less accidental. It was a deliberate and experimental attempt to shatter the mechanisms of domination by raising up from the ground the great spectral figure of revolution, only modernized a little by setting fire to cars. Of course, these ‘magic cobbles' were less effective than ever strategically, and when Malraux and company maintained that tanks would have occupied Rue Gay-Lussac more quickly than the gendarmerie, they were quite right. But it was by this symbolic wager that the uprising of Red Paris in May 1968 was able to set fire – as in July 1789, July 1830, and February 1848 – not only to just Europe this time round but to the whole planet, from Tokyo to Mexico, something that the Berkeley students had not managed to do, precisely for lack of historical anchorage. The Paris insurgents, however, were able to avoid both archaic seductions and the pitfalls of romanticism. They did not storm the police stations, they did not pillage armourers, nor try to seize the buildings of the state (remember the astonishment of journalists when the demonstrators passed the Palais-Bourbon without noticing it). This was not simply from a correct evaluation of the balance of forces: no doubt, if bullets had been mixed with the cobbles and the oddly named ‘Molotov' cocktails, we would have seen just how far the humanism of Prefect Grimaud stretched, or the republican spirit of the generals who had won their stars in Algeria, just like Lamoricière and Cavaignac. There was no massacre because May 1968 was the first modern revolution: it did not aim at taking power. Informed by all the disasters of the century, it unfolded in the mode of a defeat programmed in advance, the devastating effects of which on the old world are still being studied. None of the mechanisms of domination were able to operate after May as they did before. The two rival organizations of Gaullism and the ‘Communist' party, in solidarity with one another in the police order of the time, only appeared to triumph with the demonstration of the ChampsÉlysées and the Pompidou-Séguy agreements at Grenelle. They did not realize that they were already running on empty, like those characters in comic books who continue their chase beyond the edge of the cliff. It took a bit of time to look at the ground and begin the famous nosedive.

The May revolution has not generally been called by its true name. It is denoted by the vague and cowardly term of ‘events'. This denial serves to argue – most often implicitly – that it is inappropriate to give this student affair the same dignity as 1793 or 1917. The CGT never stopped opposing the ‘seriousness' of the striking workers to the festival of the
bourgeois-student youth. It is certainly a fact that it was the students who imagined and programmed May, that the Latin Quarter was from one end to the other the headquarters of operations. The great demonstration of 13 May had its rallying point in the Place de la République, but what is remembered above all is its passage along Boulevard Saint-Michel and in Montparnasse. Not much happened in May on the Right Bank, except of course the rather unconvincing attempt to set fire to the Bourse. The traditional quarters of Parisian revolutions – the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Faubourg du Temple, Belleville – did not move. They had been ravaged during the Pompidou years, plunged into the depths of deindustrialization and renovation. Unstructured building, populations expelled, the working-class tradition wiped out – that was plebeian Paris of the late 1960s. The reconstitution of a mixed population, made up of what remained of the Paris proletariat, together with immigrants and an intellectual but nonuniversity youth, was a reconquest that had not yet begun.

Outside the occupied factories and in their immediate surroundings, the communes of the ‘red belt', Ivry and Villejuif on the one side, Saint-Denis and Gennevilliers on the other, did not move either, solidly held as they were by the ‘Communist' party, whose descent into hell began at this time with its pathetic efforts to maintain order. But what has always been carefully obscured, glossed over in commemorations and anniversaries (the thirtieth anniversary was exemplary in this respect), is that
thousands
of young workers, fringe elements, unemployed and foreigners came running to the Latin Quarter. They were not often heard in the general assemblies, but when it was a question of elegantly swinging a cobblestone, overturning and burning police cars, or throwing back tear-gas grenades, they were first in line, with the poise of people who had spent their whole life on the barricades. The bureaucrats of the various ‘revolutionary youth' organizations tried to keep them at a distance, and they were not seen on television, except when it was necessary to show the terrified provinces the ‘
casseurs
' who had been arrested. Why were they unwanted? All they did was test in anticipation the idea that ‘what gives an action a political character is not its object or the place where it is performed, but solely its form, that which inscribes the verification of equality in the institution of a dispute, of a community that exists only in division'.
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