Massacre (5 page)

It seemed, briefly at least, that these efforts would pay off. Beginning with an amnesty in 1859 for those punished for resisting the coup d’état or being militant republicans or socialists, Napoleon III’s Second Empire entered a somewhat more liberal phase. The legalisation of strikes in 1864 led to a wave of work stoppages. Laws in 1868 made press censorship less oppressive. A spate of republican newspapers began to publish, notably
La Marseillaise
and
La Lanterne
, which had a circulation of up to 150,000.
²⁷

However, despite its new liberal facade, Napoleon III’s Second Empire remained a police state, focusing attention on perceived threats to the regime. The Prefecture of Police stored information on as many as 170,000 Parisians. In two decades, the number of police had increased from 750 to more than 4,000, along with countless police spies. The municipal police force was 2,900 strong, backed by garrisoned army units.
²⁸

Still, there was a vibrant culture of resistance to Napoleon III. Anyone entering the most popular cafés of the Latin Quarter would encounter a variety of republican and socialist militants determined to bring about a change in regime as they dreamed of creating a government committed to social and political justice. In those days, the
brasserie
Chez Glaser
appeared as if still under construction, with two large chunks of cement at the base of metal poles greeting clients, seemingly the only things keeping the place from collapsing. Small tables of white marble and a billiard table in the rear of the small hall awaited the thirsty. Glaser, an Alsatian schoolteacher dismissed by the government for his republican views, had, like most of his customers, little use for Napoleon III’s Second Empire.

Other major watering-spots for militants included the Café Madrid on boulevard Montmartre on the Right Bank and, on the Left Bank, the Café de la Salamandre, place Saint-Michel, with the Café d’Harcourt nearby and Café Théodore on rue Monsieur-le-Prince. A
cabinet littéraire
(a bookshop that rented books) on rue Dauphine also brought critics of the regime together, including, from time to time, the naturalist painter Gustave Courbet, a fixture in the Latin Quarter.
²⁹

A police report described Courbet with the compelling accuracy of one of his own self-portraits: ‘Physically, he has lost his romantic allure.’ He was ‘big, fat and stooping, walking with difficulty because of back pain, long greying hair, with the air of the mocking
paysan
, and badly dressed’. English resident Ernest Vizetelly described Courbet as ‘peasant-like in appearance, puffed out with beer, good-humoured’. Denis Bingham, another British observer, saw the painter as ‘a good-natured country farmer … Courbet was always treated by his friends as an overgrown child, and he behaved as such’.
³⁰
Born in Ornans in Franche-Comté, eastern France, the accent of which he proudly retained, Courbet had been a friend of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was from the same region and shared his contempt for the Second Empire. Proudhon held that the purpose of art was ‘the physical, intellectual, and moral perfecting of humanity’. Courbet, the
maître d’Ornans
, sought the same freedom in painting that he wanted for individual French men and women.
³¹

Courbet emerged as a feisty opponent of Napoleon III. Turned down by the Salon, the annual government exhibition of approved academic painting, in 1863, he insisted he had become a painter ‘in order to gain his individual liberty and only he could judge his painting’. In 1870, the government offered Courbet the
Légion d’honneur
. In his letter refusing the award, the painter stated that the government ‘seemed to have taken on the task of destroying art in our country … the state is incompetent in such matters … I am fifty years old and have always lived as a free man – let me end my existence free.’
³²

Most Parisians did not feel free. Unlike all the other 36,000 cities, towns and villages in France, Paris did not have the right to elect a mayor. The
post had been abolished in 1794 and again in July 1848. Now Parisians could not even elect
arrondissement
municipal councils – the city’s twenty
arrondissements
had municipal councils appointed by the Emperor. Each had a mayor and a deputy mayor, but they, too, were appointed by the government. All this generated calls for self-determination. In 1869–70, demands for municipal autonomy merged with republicanism. In the dance halls and warehouses on the edge of Paris, the idea of one day having a ‘Commune’, in which Paris would have political rights and stand as a beacon of liberty, gained strength.
³³

Raoul Rigault had become a well-known opponent of the imperial regime. He was also a prominent personage in the cafés and brasseries of the boulevard Saint-Michel during the late 1860s. He ate, drank and socialised with young women, some of whose charms he rented for cash. With a bock – a strong beer – in hand, he held court, providing acid commentaries on the Second Empire. Obsessed with the French Revolution, Rigault considered himself the living incarnation of the radical Jacques-René Hébert, whose life and writings he studied carefully when he left his table to cross the Seine to visit the Bibliothèque Nationale. There he took a place at one of the long rows of seats toward the front, always on the left side, of course. He could recite by heart passages penned by Hébert, his hero, the uncompromising revolutionary, guillotined in March 1794 at the order of the Committee of Public Safety.
³⁴

Parisian through and through, Rigault was born in the capital in 1846, his father, Charles-Édouard, a respectable republican. Following the coup d’état, the family took up residence in north-western Paris’s Seventeenth Arrondissement, whose residents where somewhere between elite and proletarian. Expelled from the Lycée Imperial in Versailles, he nonetheless passed the
baccalauréat
examination in both science and literature. In 1866, Rigault’s father kicked him out of their home after a particularly nasty argument. Moving into an attic room on rue Saint-André-des-Arts and earning a little money by giving mathematics lessons, Rigault first began to hang out at the Café Buci, discussing politics or playing billiards. He began calling everyone he met
citoyen
or
citoyenne
, including ‘citizen prostitutes’, as had the
sans-culottes
of the Revolution. Rigault and other young political radicals organised and published several short-lived newspapers, one of which was seized and shut down by the police in 1865 for containing an article that ‘outraged religion’. The offending article had Raoul Rigault written all over it.
³⁵

Rigault’s café life, interrupted by short spells in gaol, brought him premature corpulence. He was of average height, with ‘prying eyes’ peering
from behind his pince-nez. Dressing as shabbily as possible and carrying his snuffbox, Rigault welcomed visitors with a shower of spit that flew from his mouth as he harangued and coughed. Some drops caught on his bristly, thick, chestnut-coloured beard, which complemented his long, unruly hair. Those who encountered him noticed that his lips contributed to his seemingly ‘ironic’, even provocative, pose, his glare piercing and inquisitorial, ‘full of sardonic cheekiness’. Rigault’s voice rose from resonant to thunderous when the subject turned to politics and class struggle. His temper was notorious; he once shouted at his opponent during an argument, ‘I am going to have you shot!’
³⁶

Developing an obsession with the organisation and personnel of the police, Rigault studiously followed agents, including the omnipresent police spies (
mouchards
) on their rounds, noting their habits, strengths and weaknesses, as well as their addresses. By dressing as a lawyer, he obtained entry to the court in the Palace of Justice, which considered political crimes, and took careful notes on policemen who testified. Rigault collated the information he gathered or observed in a large file.

Like many other young militants, Rigault joined the International, banned in France in 1868.
³⁷
In late 1865, he helped organise a student gathering in the eastern Belgian city of Liège. The next year police arrested him following a raid on a boisterous gathering in the Café Buci – which they subsequently closed for several months – on charges of having formed a secret society known as ‘the Renaissance’. Although Rigault refused to swear an oath to tell the truth that invoked Jesus Christ, he was freed because this was his first arrest.

In 1865 Rigault became attracted to Blanquism through Gustave Tridon, a French revolutionary socialist. ‘Blanquists’ were followers of Auguste Blanqui, ‘
Le Vieux
’ (the Old One), a professional revolutionary and consummate man of action who had spent around half his life in prison for his role in a series of conspiracies. He held that a tightly-organised band of left-wing militants could one day seize revolutionary power.

In order to attend student political meetings in its lecture halls, Rigault enrolled in medical school, not far from his favorite cafés and brasseries. Over the next few years, Rigault’s dossier in the Prefecture of Police grew. At the dance hall Folies-Belleville, Rigault found eager listeners among craftsmen and semi-skilled workers. In a speech on December 1868, he called for the recognition of
unions libres
(unmarried couples), arguing that any obstacles to ‘the union of a man and a woman’ violated the laws of nature. Rigault taunted the ever-present police spies, who scribbled down what was said. That year he published a prospectus for a newspaper,
informing readers, ‘God is the absurd’. Later that year, an article of his appeared in
Démocrate
, predicting that if atheists came to power, they would not tolerate their enemies. When, during one court appearance, the prosecuting attorney contemptuously referred to Rigault as a ‘professor of the barricades’, the target replied, ‘Oui! oui!’
³⁸

After one arrest, Rigault managed to escape by reaching the roof of a building, running to the Gare de Lyon, and jumping on the first departing train. He got off in Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainbleau, and for two days wandered through a forest. Rigault came upon Auguste Renoir standing before his easel. The Impressionist painter saw several deer suddenly scatter and heard noises in the bushes. A young man ‘of an appearance not terribly engaging appeared. His clothes were torn and covered in mud, his eyes wild and his movements jerky.’ Renoir, believing Rigault to be a madman escaped from an institution, grabbed his cane to defend himself. The man stopped several feet from him and exclaimed, ‘I beg of you, Monsieur, I am dying of hunger!’ Rigault explained his situation, and Renoir, who had republican sympathies, went to town and bought a painter’s smock and a box of paints, assuring him that people in the vicinity would ask no questions; peasants there were now quite used to seeing painters.
³⁹

Back in Paris, Rigault helped effect an alliance between the ‘citizen proletarians’ and the radical intelligentsia, linking the traditionally revolutionary faubourg Saint-Antoine and the new workers’ bastions of Montmartre and Belleville with the Latin Quarter. At the same time, he helped find funds for upstart newspapers to replace those that had shut down or failed, collecting news and accounts of political trials and publishing torrid denunciations of individuals Rigault considered imperial lackeys. In four years, Rigault faced ten judicial condemnations in court – the
bordel
(whorehouse), as he liked to call it.
⁴⁰

Thus in the late 1860s, Paris came alive with the surging political mobilisation of ordinary people. A law of 8 June 1868 permitting freedom of association initiated the frenetic period of the ‘public meeting movement’. Crowds flocked to dance halls, café-concerts and warehouses, most of them on the plebeian periphery of Paris, to listen to speeches and debate political themes previously forbidden. From 1868 through mid-1870, almost 1,000 public meetings took place. As many as 20,000 people participated on a single night. Workers remained the principal constituency of the political meetings, although these gatherings drew middle-class Parisians as well. The police, to be sure, were also in attendance, copying down what was said, and thus providing historians with an incredibly rich account of these ‘parliaments of the people’.
⁴¹

At the beginning of 1870, in the wake of continued liberal political mobilisation and electorial victories, Napoleon III appointed a new cabinet led by Émile Ollivier, a moderate republican, one that was considered a government of conciliation. Yet this brief accommodation between the government and the republican opposition came to an end amid escalating republican militancy. It was no coincidence that the rapprochement ended during a stalled economy that brought hard times. When the financing of Haussmann’s grand projects became a public scandal, contributing to growing opposition to the regime, the balloon popped and on 5 January 1870 Napoleon III dismissed the baron as prefect of the Seine, which Ollivier had made one of the conditions of his acceptance of a role in the government. Resentment against Napoleon III mounted, amid strikes and more public meetings. In this precocious springtime, it became possible to imagine a new political world.
⁴²

Rigault was entering the Bibliothèque Nationale when he heard the news that on January 11, 1870, Prince Pierre Bonaparte had shot his friend Victor Noir dead during a duel following insults the prince had given two journalists. ‘Chouette! Chouette!’ (Cool! Cool!), Rigault intoned, because a Bonaparte would finally stand on trial. On 12 January 1870, political opponents of the regime transformed Noir’s funeral into a massive demonstration against the empire attended by 100,000 people. Gustave Flourens, one of about 3,000 Blanquists, attempted to turn the demonstration into an insurrection. Rigault also helped organise and lead the march, which included a few workers bearing pistols or iron bars under their blue tradesmen’s smocks. Confronted by readied soldiers, the crowd dispersed. A court acquitted the emperor’s cousin, condemning the two journalists to prison sentences. The acquittal would not have surprised members of the left; instead, it galvanised them.