The Invention of Paris (51 page)

On the Right Bank, Cavaignac and Lamartine directed operations on horseback, accompanied by Pierre Bonaparte. (‘This intrepid young man', wrote Lamartine in his
History
, ‘inherited the republicanism of his father.' Twenty-two years later Pierre Bonaparte would murder the journalist Victor Noir, bringing all of Paris into the street for the first time since the coup d'état.) During a rainstorm, they attacked the Faubourg du Temple. ‘Many representatives who were present during the day had already received gunshot wounds, when Monsieurs Cavaignac and Lamartine put
themselves at the head of the assault columns that successively attacked all the barricades.'
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Cavaignac and his seven battalions were halted by an immense barricade on the corner of Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi and Rue de la Pierre-Levée – the very place where the last barricade of the Commune would later hold out. Cavaignac had the 20
^th
Battalion of the Mobile Guard lead the assault, but it was stopped short by a tremendous volley of gunfire. A second battalion suffered the same fate, and all seven were repulsed one by one:

Then Cavaignac had the cannon brought up. Alone on horseback, in the middle of the roadway and completely composed, he remained immobile and gave orders with a perfect sang-froid; two-thirds of the men operating the guns were killed or wounded at his side. The general sent several detachments through side streets to try and get round the barricade. But it was all in vain. Hours passed, ammunition ran out. Cavaignac, who had come to bring reinforcements to Lamoricière, was forced to ask him what to do. Night was falling. It was only after a battle lasting five hours that the barricade was finally taken by Colonel Dulac, at the head of the 29
^th
Regiment of the line . . . Cavaignac, his heart shattered by this sad success [so highly sensitive, these generals: E.H.], headed back to the Palais-Bourbon.
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The next day, the barricade was rebuilt.

Around the Hôtel de Ville, in the evening of the 23
^rd
, the party of Order was in no better position: ‘The taking of the town hall, which was the traditional seat of popular government, would give a kind of legal character to the insurrection; so the insurgents made unheard-of efforts to seize it.'
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Barricades surrounded the Hôtel de Ville, on the Île de la Cité, Rue Saint-Antoine, the little streets around Saint-Gervais and Rue du Temple. The troops were harassed by sniper fire from buildings between the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville and the Place du Châtelet.

 

In the Assembly, that evening, the atmosphere was gloomy and tense:

When the sitting resumed, we learned that Lamartine had been received with fire at every barricade he had approached; two of his colleagues, Bixiou and Dornès, had been mortally wounded attempting to harangue
the insurgents. Bedeau got a bullet through his thigh at the turning into the Faubourg Saint-Jacques; many distinguished officers were already killed or put out of action . . . Towards midnight Cavaignac appeared . . . In a jerky, abrupt voice and using simple, exact words, Cavaignac recounted the main events of the day. He announced that he had given orders for all the regiments along the line of the railway to converge on Paris, and that all the National Guards in the outskirts had been called up.
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The next day, Saturday, 24
^th
June, Victor Hugo, who had just been told (wrongly) that his house on the Place des Vosges had been burned during the night, witnessed the death agony of the Executive Commission:

I suddenly found myself face to face with all those men who were the established authority. It was more like a cell in which the accused await their condemnation than a council of government . . . M. de Lamartine, standing against the frame of the left-hand window, was chatting with a general in full-dress uniform, whom I saw for the first and last time; this was Négrier. Négrier was killed in front of a barricade on the evening of that same day. I hastened to Lamartine who took a few steps towards me. He was pale, untidy, with a long beard, his coat not brushed and all powdery. He stretched out his hand: 'Ah, good day, Hugo.' . . .

‘What is happening, Lamartine?'

‘We're f. . .'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I mean that in a quarter of an hour the Assembly will be invaded.'

‘How on earth? And the troops?'

‘There are no troops.'
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But the Assembly, by a parliamentary coup d'état fomented by the royalists in alliance with the right-wing republicans, declared Paris in a state of siege and gave full powers to General Cavaignac to restore order. Only sixty deputies voted against the decree (including Tocqueville, though he later admitted that he was mistaken). The Executive Commission resigned amid general indifference: ‘It was resolved that sixty members of the Chamber, selected by the committees, should disperse through Paris to inform the National Guards of the various decrees just passed by the
Assembly and thereby restore their confidence, for they were said to be hesitant and discouraged.'
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Among them were Tocqueville and Victor Hugo.

From three a.m. on the 24
^th
, the fighting recommenced with extreme violence. On the Left Bank, the church of Saint-Séverin, the Place Maubert and the barricades on Rue Saint-Jacques were stormed in turn. The troops arrived on the Place du Panthéon, where the insurgents had occupied the building, the law school and the neighbouring houses. Pardigon, familiar with these places and himself involved in the battle, recalled:

The insurgents, retrenched beneath the porticos of the Panthéon and in its wings, showed great skill in manoeuvring and defending themselves. Two barricades, as strong as bastions, flanked the monument. One of them dominated Rue d'Ulm . . . The troops' cannon fired from Rue Soufflot. Their shells passed through the church from end to end: one of them broke off the head of the statue of Immortality that stands on the steps of the choir. The platoon-fire of the insurgents rivalled in precision that of the troops, and left the officers of the National Guard quite amazed.

But the soldiers succeeded in gaining entrance to the law school through a back door. They fired on the insurgents from the windows, and were fired on themselves from the dome of the Panthéon and the
mairie
. General Damesme – who was subsequently wounded in the thigh and died a few days later – managed to get a gun battery into the middle of Rue Soufflot. The door of the Panthéon was broken down and the building saw hand-to-hand fighting; prisoners were shot on the spot. The troops then attacked Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques and Rue de l'Estrapade. In the evening, General Bréa, who had replaced Damesme, made his way down the southern slope of the Montagne along Rue Mouffetard, and captured the barricades of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau and the surroundings of the Jardin des Plantes.

On the side of the Hôtel de Ville, the insurgents had retaken during the night Rues Planche-Mibray, des Arcis, de la Verrerie and Saint-Antoine. General Duvivier tried to reach the building, but in order to capture the block of houses around Saint-Gervais he had to use cannon, and the fighting was house by house. ‘On the Place Baudoyer, despite the cannon deployed against the barricades, resistance was so strong that
when night fell it was decided to bring troops up to the surroundings of the Hôtel de Ville.'
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In the northern faubourgs, fighting was centred around the Place La Fayette, where engineering workers from La Chapelle and Saint-Denis had constructed an immense barricade, supported by the houses on the corner of Rues La Fayette and d'Abbeville. This fortification resisted for several hours, but in the evening the great barricade was finally taken after hours of cannon fire. The workers fell back to the Clos Saint-Lazare. In the Faubourg Saint-Denis, the troops unsuccessfully attacked barricades defended by workers of the Nord railway. The two generals commanding the artillery, Korte and Bourgon, were both wounded, the latter mortally.

On Sunday morning, the 25
^th
, the insurgents were reduced to isolated quarters: in the north, the Clos Saint-Lazare and the adjacent section of Faubourgs Poissonière and Saint-Denis; in the centre-east, the greater part of the Faubourg du Temple and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; and in the south, the periphery of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau towards the Fontainebleau barrier (now Place d'Italie). Cavaignac posted up his proclamation, with such a generous ending that it might have been written by Lamartine: ‘Come to us, come as brothers repentant and subject to the law, and the arms of the Republic are quite ready to receive you.' As Marouk writes, these arms were quite ready to receive the insurgents, but only to murder them. Fighting began again at dawn. Around the Hôtel de Ville, the troops managed this time round to break the encirclement, and by the end of the morning they reached the Bastille. In the south, Bréa arrived at a great barricade by the Fontainebleau barrier, defended by two thousand men. He was shot there in circumstances that are rather unclear, and his death, along with that of Monsignor Affre, the archbishop of Paris, the same day in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, would serve as justification – even in some educational textbooks – for the massacres that followed the defeat (the hostages of Rue Haxo played the same role in the history of the Commune). As Granier de Cassagnac explains in choice terms: ‘Towards men guilty of the greatest excesses, of many of the most serious crimes, all the moderation was used that victory counsels and that the state of society permits . . . The seditionists, who completely dispense with all laws, will always be ready to complain of the victors who dispense with some formalities.'
¹²⁶

That Sunday, the balance of forces was reversed, as ‘down all the roads not held by the insurgents, thousands of men were pouring in from all parts
of France to aid us. Thanks to the railways . . . These men were drawn without distinction from all classes of society; among them there were great numbers of peasants, bourgeois, large landowners and nobles, all jumbled up together in the same ranks.'
¹²⁷

With the fall of the Barrière d'Italie the Left Bank was lost. That morning, Tocqueville, who played his role of representative of the people to the armed forces with sufficient courage, was at the Château d'Eau, from where Lamoricière was attacking the Faubourg du Temple:
¹²⁸

I eventually reached the Château d'Eau, where I found a large body of troops from different branches of the army congregated. At the foot of the fountain was a cannon trained down Rue Samson [now Léon-Jouhaux]. At first I thought the insurgents were answering our fire from a gun of their own, but I finally saw my mistake; it was the echo of our own firing that made the frightful noise. I have never heard anything like it; one would have thought one was in the midst of some great battle. But in fact the insurgents answered only with infrequent but deadly musket fire . . . Behind the fountains, Lamoricière, astride a large horse and in range of the guns, gave his orders amid a rain of bullets. I found him more excited and more talkative than I would have supposed a general in command should be at such a moment . . . and I would have admired his courage more had it been calmer . . . I had never imagined war was like that. As the boulevard [du Temple] seemed clear beyond the Château d'Eau, I could not see why our columns did not advance, or why we did not capture the large house facing the street at a rush, instead of remaining so long subject to the murderous fire from it. Yet nothing could have been easier to explain: the boulevard that I supposed free . . . was not so; there was a bend in it, and after that point it bristled with barricades the whole way to the Bastille. Before attacking the barricades, we wanted to control the streets that would be behind us, and in particular to get control of the house facing Rue Samson, which dominated the boulevard and would have harassed our communications badly; finally, we could not take that house by assault because the canal stood in the way, but I could not see that from the boulevard . . . As the insurgents had no guns, this battlefield must have been less terrible to contemplate than one ploughed up by cannon balls. The men struck down before my eyes seemed transfixed by an invisible shaft; they staggered and fell with no more to be seen at
first than a little hole in their clothes . . . It was indeed a strange and a terrifying thing to see the quick change of expression, the fire of life in the eyes quenched in the sudden terror of death . . . I noticed that the soldiers of the line were the least eager of our troops . . . Without any doubt the keenest were those very Gardes Mobiles whose fidelity we had questioned so seriously and, I still say, even after the event, so rightly, for it would have taken very little to make them decide against us instead of for us.
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A few hours later, the troops had advanced to the Bastille. Victor Hugo was on the boulevard:

The insurgents fired from the top of the new houses all along Boulevard Beaumarchais . . . They had put dummies in the windows, bundles of straw dressed in blouses and with caps on top. I could clearly see a man there defended by a small brick barrier, at the corner of the fourth-floor balcony on the house opposite Rue du Pont-aux-Choux. He kept up his fire for a long while and killed several people. It was three o'clock. The soldiers and the Mobile Guard were on the roofs of Boulevard du Temple and responded to his fire . . . I believed that I had to make an effort to try and stop the flow of blood, if this was at all possible, and I pressed forward to the corner of Rue d'Angoulême [now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud]. As I was passing the little tower at that point, a volley of shots came in my direction. The tower behind me was riddled with bullets. It was covered with theatre posters shredded by the musket-fire. I pulled off a strip of paper as a souvenir. The poster this was from advertised a fête at the Château des Fleurs that very Sunday, with ‘ten thousand Chinese lanterns'.
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