The Invention of Paris (45 page)

An immense red flag floated over the barricade. The two Ferré's were there, Théophile and Hippolyte, J. B. Clément, the Garibaldian Cambon, Varlin, Vermorel, Champy. The barricade on Rue
Saint-Maur had just fallen, that on Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi stubbornly held, spitting fire in the bloody face of the Versaillais . . . The only ones still standing, when the Père-Lachaise cannon fell silent, were those of Fontaine-au-Roi. At the moment that they fired their last shots, a young girl coming from the barricade on Rue Saint-Maur arrived, offering to help. They told her to go away from this place of death, but she remained despite them. It was to this ambulance girl of the last barricade and the last hour that J. B. Clément dedicated, much later, his song
Le Temps des Cérises
.

When you think of the Commune, the first image is that of the barricade, although the ‘magic cobbles' only arose in the last week of its brief existence. But if the Commune became a paradigm of revolution in its purest form, it was by the way it faced death on the barricades rather than by the measures it took, however strong their political and poetic charge. The barricade, in fact, had never been effective as a fighting instrument. In the ascending phase of uprisings, erected in a few minutes with whatever came to hand – an upturned cart, a couple of cupboards, a few barrels hoisted onto a heap of paving-stones – it was not defended for long, but was there simply to impede the movement of regular troops, weighed down with their kit, and to make their horses stumble. When it became a major defensive work, like ‘the Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple' in June 1848, described at the start of Volume Five of
Les Misérables
, or the gigantic redoubt constructed to block Rue de Rivoli at the level of Rue Saint-Florentin in May 1871, it only held out a few hours, as after June 1832 the forces of order no longer had any hesitation in using cannon.

Right from the start, the barricade played a role that doubled its fighting status with that of a stage set. A comic scene, when the fighters on both sides called out to one another, insulting each other as under the walls of Troy, or trying to convince the other side, either to capitulate before they were massacred, or, conversely, to join the ranks of their brothers. A tragic scene,
all' antica
, in which the hero descends from the barricade and walks alone towards the soldiers, in a final effort of persuasion or simply to avoid experiencing defeat, to end it along with life. It is this theatrical role of the barricade that explains its resurgence in the twentieth century, from St Petersburg to Barcelona, from Spartakist Berlin to Rue Gay-Lussac, even when its military effectiveness has fallen asymptotically over time to nearly zero.

Even if several streets of Old Paris keep the memory of risings and insurrections, going back at least to Étienne Marcel, even if one could recall a ‘Red' Paris stretching across centuries, I have decided to focus this narrative on the heyday of that great symbolic form of Parisian revolution that is the barricade, in other words on the nineteenth century.

The barricade made its reappearance in Paris in the late 1820s, after two centuries of absence. There had been time to forget the ‘day of the barricades' in May 1588, when, against the troops that Henri III had deployed in the city, ‘all men hastily took up arms, set out through the streets and sections, and in no time brought chains and made barricades at the street corners'.
²⁸
Far back too were the barricades of the Fronde, erected on an August night in 1648, which Cardinal de Retz describes in terms strangely familiar for anyone who has read Lissagaray:

The movement was like a sudden and violent fire, which spread from the Pont-Neuf to the whole city. Everyone without exception took up arms. You could see boys of five or six years with daggers in their hands, and mothers who brought these themselves. In Paris there were more than twelve hundred barricades in less than two hours, decorated with flags and with all the weapons that the League had left intact.

Since then, there had indeed been the barricades of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine during the days of Prairial, but this was not much in the great annals of revolutionary events. And if Chateaubriand noted in his
Memoirs
that ‘for the rest, the barricades are retrenchments that belong to the Paris spirit: they are found in all our disturbances, from Charles V to our own day', there was none the less a long hiatus in the history of the barricade between the baroque and the romantic age.

The barricade made its reappearance on 19 November 1827.
²⁹
This was an election day. Two weeks previously, had dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and named seventy-six new peers so as to keep control of the upper house. The Liberal opposition won a great success in Paris. On the evening of the
18
^th
, the newly elected deputies held banquets and lit up their windows. The director-general of the police warned his prefect: ‘Since it is possible that the movement led by the revolutionaries may go further than we had envisaged, I urge that preparations be made to suppress any disorder . . . I have arranged with the major of the royal guard that three hundred cavalry will remain on duty to be available as soon as they are needed.' And indeed, on the evening of the 19
^th
, in Rue Saint-Denis, a police informer noted that ‘rockets and petards are being thrown on the public way; men, mainly sales clerks, are walking about with an unfurled umbrella in their hand, topped with a lighted candle. Every now and then, musket or pistol shots can be heard fired from within buildings; in a word, in the streets above mentioned where the crowd is assembled, there is a repetition of all the scandalous scenes that took place when the law on the license of the press was withdrawn.' At ten in the evening the crowd attacked a police station on the Rue Mauconseil. The prefect sent fifty mounted police to disperse them. The officer in command later explained to the commission of inquiry that ‘when the troops arrived, they found Rue Saint-Denis without cobbles in many places, and four barricades in succession, behind which a large number of bad characters had assembled, armed with stones'. From the tallest barricade, where the Passage du Grand-Cerf opens into Rue Saint-Denis, came a hail of bullets. The police finally reestablished order. In withdrawing, they fired into Rue aux Ours and wounded several people including a twenty-two-year-old student, Auguste Blanqui, who received a bullet in the neck.

The following evening, several bands again roamed Rue Saint-Denis and its surroundings. The investigation of the high court indicated that

unknown individuals broke into the houses under construction in front of the Saint-Leu church and the Passage du Grand-Cerf, removing the fences; to erect barricades they seized tools and materials that had been used the previous day and which had been locked up in the houses instead of being taken away. The new barricades were constructed with greater care and intelligence than the day before. This work, performed by young people mostly between fifteen and eighteen, continued for two hours without meeting any obstacle, or any public force being commissioned to prevent it.

At eleven o'clock, Colonel de Fitz-James, who commanded the regular troops, reached Rue Saint-Denis via Rue Greneta:

At a distance of about fifty yards we perceived a strong barricade, from behind which the crowd's shouts could be heard, and before we could
clearly make out the insults and provocations, stones began to reach the advance squad and gave us positive warning of the intentions of those behind the barricades.

The troops fired and killed four people. The adjacent streets were cleared by cavalry.
Le Journal des débats
for the next day, 21 November, deemed that the forces of order had shown insufficient vigour: ‘It is impossible to regret too much that this mob were not hunted down and arrested by the troops.' But the prefect of police maintained that ‘the events of this evening inspired in the quarter a salutary fear that we must hope will prevent the return of similar disorders'.

This hope was not to be realized. In the course of the half-century between the anonymous nighttime barricades of November 1827 and the seventy sunny days of the Commune, the list of Paris demonstrations, riots, coups, uprisings and insurrections is so long that no other capital can claim anything similar. Their geography, and their distribution between the quarters of Paris, reflects the industrial revolution, the new relationship between bosses and workers, the centrifugal migration of the labouring and dangerous population, the development of major works, and the ‘strategic embellishment' of the city. The same street names, and the same quarters, return constantly throughout the century, but we do see the centre of gravity of Red Paris shift slowly to the north and east, with interruptions and accelerations that stamp on the map of the city the mark of an old notion now fallen into disrepute, that of class struggle.

The unfurling of Paris insurrections in the nineteenth century is well known, but the story is often presented as a succession of
images d'Épinal
– Delacroix and his
Liberty
, Lamartine with his tricolour, Hugo's
Chastisements
and his rock, Gambetta's balloon. This constructs an ideal republican genealogy, complete with names of Métro stations and fictionalized biographies, which gives a reassuring version of what was in reality a series of bloody and pitiless confrontations. The care taken to give all this the most bowdlerized presentation is still more manifest today, when, in the name of rejecting the archaic, we are pressed to abandon the ‘dusty philosophical and cultural corpus' of the nineteenth century.
³⁰
I shall try to retrace the stages of this insurrectionary history, limiting myself to what happened in the streets and quarters of Red Paris, but without forgetting that these events served as
calls to action for the whole of Europe, as theoretical models and reasons for hope.

On 27 July 1830, the day after the publication of decrees on the press and the electoral law, the police turned up at
Le Temps
, on Rue de Richelieu, to break up the presses.
³¹
The printers in this quarter, fearing unemployment, dismissed their workers:

The printing workers never worked on Mondays. Now, it was precisely Monday 26 July that they learned of the publication of decrees that deprived them of bread by undermining the freedom of the press . . . They left the city, spread out beyond the barriers and dined in the taverns there, with the avowed intention of neglecting nothing to move the minds of builders, carpenters, locksmiths and other workers.
³²

The following day they mingled with students, including those of the École Polytechnique, crying: ‘Down with Polignac!' At the Palais-Royal, stones were thrown at the gendarmes. An infantry company opened fire on the crowd; one demonstrator fell. Immediately, men surged forward as if from nowhere and seized the body, which they paraded with cries of revenge. The inflamed crowd began to raid the armourers, and erected a barricade on Rue de Richelieu. Yet by the evening Paris seemed calm, the deputies had gone to ground, there seemed to be neither leaders nor organizations. These appeared during the night. The Carbonari and officers on half-pay formed twelve directing committees, seized and distributed weapons and took control of the Imprimerie Royale. On the morning of the 28
^th
, the royal army found itself facing on the barricades former soldiers of the Empire who taught the Parisians how to fight. Paris was at boiling point:

They dragged down and burnt the arms of France; they hung them from the cords of broken street-lamps; they tore the fleur-de-lis badges from
the postmen's uniforms; the notaries took down their escutcheons, the bailiffs removed their badges, the carriers their official signs, the Royal suppliers their warrants. Those who had previously covered their oil-painted Napoleonic eagles with Bourbon lilies in distemper only needed a sponge to wipe out their loyalty; nowadays empires and gratitude are effaced with a little water.
³³

At midday, the state of siege was proclaimed. Marshal Marmont, major-general of the guard, ‘a man of intellect and merit, a brave soldier, and a wise but unlucky general, proved for the thousandth time that military ability is insufficient to handle civil disturbances; any police officer would have had a better idea than he what should be done . . . He had only a handful of men with him, but devised a plan which would have needed thirty thousand soldiers for its execution.'
³⁴
This plan was to send four columns out from the Louvre: one via the boulevards towards the Bastille, another to the same destination but along the quays, an intermediary column towards the Innocents market (Les Halles) and a fourth up Rue Saint-Denis.
³⁵
‘As they advanced, the communications posts established en route, being too weakly defended and too far apart, were isolated by the mob, and separated from one another by fallen trees and barricades.'
³⁶

On the morning of the 29
^th
, a column of insurgents left the Panthéon in the direction of the Louvre, defended by the Swiss guards. Along the way, two regular regiments who were occupying the Place Vendôme went over to the side of the people. Marmont was forced to remove guards from the Louvre. Students scaled the façade, the Swiss retreated, and Marmont's forces surged back in disorder towards the Champs-Élysées. Charles X had to flee, for, as Benjamin Constant replied to emissaries seeking a compromise: ‘I will only say that it would be all too convenient for a king to open fire on his subjects and then be quit of it by claiming:
He did nothing
. The statue of Henri IV on the Pont-Neuf held a tricolour flag, like
a standard-bearer of the League. Men of the people said, looking at the bronze king: “You would never have done anything so stupid, you old rascal.”'
³⁷