The Invention of Paris (53 page)

The June heroes were anonymous and unknown – shoemakers, engineering workers, people with nothing. The reason for their repression, for hiding the dark monument of the June days, is clear enough: it is that this constituted the real and deep fracture in the history of nineteenth-century France, that it disturbs the republican consensus by shattering for a brief but explosive moment the order of the arrangement of bodies in the community, that order which Rancière calls ‘the police'.

The disruption of the June days can also be read in a different way: as an insurrection that did not unfold – at least not entirely – in the traditional centres of Paris uprisings. Preindustrial Red Paris, that of the 1830s, one would say of
La Comédie humaine
if Balzac had not been silent on this subject, was the heart of the old city, a quadrilateral bordered by the Tuileries, the Bastille, the Boulevards and the Seine. The main battleground was still more restricted, centred on the lower part of Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin where the quarters still kept their medieval names, from the Marches, in other words Les Halles, to the Arcis around the Hôtel de Ville. The same streets turn up time and again in police reports, eyewitness accounts, and parliamentary inquiries: Rues Mauconseil, du Bourg-l'Abbé, Greneta, Tiquetonne; Rues Beaubourg, Transnonain, des Gravilliers, au Maire; Rues Aubry-le-Boucher, Maubuée, Neuve-Saint-Merri; Rue de la Verrerie, and Rue Planche-Mibray where there was always fighting, as it
gave access to the Pont Notre-Dame.
¹⁴⁸
Even if this was not always where things started, even if the first shots were fired on the Pont d'Austerlitz or Boulevard des Capucines, the main fighting always took place in this labyrinth.

This constant is not just explained by symbolism, even if it was the capture of the Hôtel de Ville that enabled an uprising to call itself a revolution. It also had strategic reasons, derived from the interlacing and narrowness of the streets (you have to imagine these quarters without Boulevard de Sébastopol, or the present Rues de Rivoli and Beaubourg, or Avenue Victoria, and remember that the only spaces that were somewhat more open were the Place du Châtelet and the Place de Grève, still smaller then than they are today). Rey-Dussueil:

In the heart of old Paris, where the narrow streets cross and interweave in a thousand directions, an inextricable labyrinth that so bristles with tall and dark houses that the road does not seem wide enough for those taking it, is the church of Saint-Merri whose modest spire scarcely rises above the roofs . . . This is where good folk come to a halt, this is the road leading to the Hôtel de Ville, and this labyrinth of streets and ruined monuments offers a thousand means of attack and defence.

There are two remarkable technical works on this war in the old quarters,
La Guerre des rues et des maisons
by Marshal Bugeaud, and August Blanqui's
Instructions pour une prise d'armes
.
¹⁴⁹
The former was written immediately after June 1848, from a concern to oppose to Cavaignac's costly and clumsy strategy, which Bugeaud detested, the science that he had himself demonstrated in repressing the uprising of 1834. Blanqui's
Instructions
date from the late 1860s, after his long passage through obscurity, prison and exile. There is a striking affinity between these two manuals, written by men whose only exchange had been of bullets. Both insisted on the organization and concentration of forces. Blanqui:

[T]he vice of the popular tactics is responsible for some of its disasters . . . no point of leadership or overall command, not even consultation
between the fighters. Each barricade has its particular group, more or less numerous but always isolated . . . Often there is not even a leader to direct the defence. . . The soldiers just do what they like. They remain, they leave, they return, as they see fit. At night they go home to sleep . . . No one knows anything of what is going on elsewhere, and they don't see this as a problem . . . They calmly hear artillery and gunfire while drinking at the bar of a wine-merchant. As for bringing support to the positions under attack, the very idea doesn't occur to them. ‘Let each defend his post, and all will go well', the most solid ones say. This singular reasoning derives from the fact that the majority of insurgents fight in their own quarter, a capital fault that has disastrous consequences after defeat, in particular in terms of denunciation by neighbours.

Bugeaud also warns against dispersion:

What is most compromising, most dangerous, most paralysing for the public forces, is to let themselves be closely hemmed in by the rioting multitude . . . Thus, when they reach a boulevard or a square, it is necessary to have the terrain to be occupied completely evacuated, and then not let anyone enter. The energetic word of officers is generally enough to effect this suppression, especially when these words are supported by the steps of the troops deployed so as to fill the whole space.

Like Bugeaud, Blanqui held that ‘the real fighting position is at windows. From here, hundreds of snipers can direct a deadly fire in all directions.' And he describes an imaginary system of battle on the upper floors – just as Bugeaud proposed to transform a series of strategic buildings into urban fortresses, with a view to avoiding any future uprising:

One would select buildings that command several streets, bridges and the main arteries of the faubourgs . . . Openings with a view on the streets would be walled in and fortified . . . Entrance doors would be reinforced with metal . . . These buildings should be considered as little fortresses. They would be equipped with the same regularity as in the plans of war . . . Each building would have supplies of thirty or forty thousand rations of biscuits, spirits, and thirty thousand cartridges.

Both writers agreed that artillery was of limited use, showing how their respective instructions bore on the street fighting they had themselves experienced in the tortuous streets of the medieval city. When Blanqui presents a practical example, he describes a defensive front on Boulevard
de Sébastopol to adapt his argument to the modern city, but it is in the adjoining medieval labyrinth that he organizes the defence, describing in his characteristically obsessive manner the disposition of barricades, counter-guards, and firing points.

The predilection of the risings of the 1830s for the central quarters of the Right Bank also had other nonstrategic reasons. The population of these old streets still found men, women and children prepared to join an insurrection. These were immigrant quarters, which had the highest proportion of single male lodgers in Paris, and the lowest proportion of women.
¹⁵⁰
They came from the agricultural regions of the Paris basin and the Nord, from Lorraine and the Massif Central. They were porters, casual workers, water-carriers like Bourgeat, that generous fellow from the Auvergne, friend of the teacher Desplein in
The Atheist's Mass
; they were builders, often from the Creuse like Martin Nadaud, living ten to a room on Rue de la Mortellerie – the street of mortar mixers – in the squalor that was said to have brought cholera to Paris.
¹⁵¹
It was also said that they smelled bad, that they were lazy and thieving, that they didn't even speak French, and that they took work from true Parisians at these times of crisis and unemployment. ‘On Sundays', wrote La Bédollière, ‘the Auvergnat water-carriers go dancing, but to their own Auvergnat dances, never the French ones; for these Auvergnats adopt neither the manners, nor the tongue, nor the pleasures of Paris. They remain isolated like the Hebrews in Babylon.'
¹⁵²
Le Journal de débats
for 10 July 1832 regretted ‘the frightful racket that the opposition made a few months ago on the subject of a mere word, that of “barbarians”, which we applied to a class of men whose lack of education and precarious living lead them in fact to a state of dangerous hostility towards society'. Measures were needed to halt this invasion. In the Chamber of Deputies, in the days following the revolution of 1830, Baron Dupin demanded that, in navvying work, ‘preference should be given to fathers of families, and to workers domiciled in Paris . . . The government should seek the means to return voluntarily to their own departments the overabundant class of workers that are found in Paris.' (Loud murmurs: ‘And liberty?') Dupin continued: ‘I also support the maintenance of order in asking that for
public works in the capital, preference should be given to workers domiciled in the capital (Prolonged interruption).'
¹⁵³

These savages who had nothing to lose were not the only bad subjects in these quarters. In the settled population, among artisans, drapers, haberdashers, goldsmiths, gold-beaters, porcelain workers and typographers, ‘there are a very large number of men with a position between that of master and worker; in other words they have characteristics of both, as they work for masters and are treated by them as workers, while they in their turn are treated as masters by the workers they employ'.
¹⁵⁴
Both masters and workers from this preindustrial population could often be found on the barricades, joined there by shop clerks, who were ready to seize the opportunity to lift cobbles. We already met them in November 1827, preparing evil deeds in the night, ‘an unfurled umbrella in their hand, topped with a lighted candle'.

To this medley of undesirable folk were added roaming children. It was not by chance that Gavroche became a generic term, a type in the same sense as Don Juan or Don Quixote. He was there already, brandishing his pistols, in Delacroix's famous painting. Canler, a former prefect of police, recalls in his
Mémoires
how, just after the insurrection of June 1832 (the one in which Victor Hugo's Gavroche died), ‘a boy of twelve or so years old, clad in a coloured jacket of the Auvergne style, was thrust to the front rank, whether willingly or no. Everyone knew this breed of Paris
gamin
, who always uttered seditious shouts in these gatherings, brought the first cobbles to the barricade in the uprisings, and almost always fired the first shots.'
¹⁵⁵
On the barricade in Rue Saint-Merri, the flag of the Société des Droits de l'Homme was waved for a long time by a boy of sixteen. Rey-Dussueil has little Joseph as one of the main characters in his
Saint-Merri
, and this description possibly influenced Hugo. Joseph hides behind the elephant on the Place de la Bastille – the same spot as Gavroche – to throw stones at the National Guard; and when the men ask him to go and post a letter, to get him away from the barricade, his reply, ‘Very sorry, but I haven't the time', is pure Gavroche.

These
gamins
were an abomination to the party of Order, just as the ‘
pétroleuses
' of the Commune would be later on. The critic of
La Revue des Deux Mondes
, commenting on a painting by Adolphe Leleux titled
The Password
, in which a boy in the centre of the group carries a long musket, asks: ‘
The Password
certainly has solid qualities, life, movement and
harmony; but for God's sake! What does the choice of such a subject mean? . . . The Paris street-urchin is a type which should not tempt any artist. He is generally ugly, small, sickly . . . in our filthy mud, poverty is disgusting and rags are horrible. Since M. Leleux likes rags and tatters, I advise him to keep to those of Spain and the Orient.'
¹⁵⁶

During the 1830s there was scarcely any fighting in the faubourgs, and still less in the fields and vineyards of the surrounding communes – Belleville, Montmartre or Charonne. Since the Revolution of 1789, the population of the working-class faubourgs traditionally came to fight in the centre of Paris. But during the ten years that passed between the action of
Cousine Bette
and that of
A Sentimental Education
, the faubourgs and banlieue were transformed. To the north and east of Paris, factories, warehouses and workers' housing drove out market gardeners, winegrowers and cattle dealers. (‘The industrial revolution . . . had attracted a whole new population of workers within its walls, to which the works of fortification had added a further population of cultivators now without work.').
¹⁵⁷
There was very little difference between the population of the villages of La Villette or La Chapelle, and that of the Faubourg Poissonière or the Faubourg du Temple. At the same time, workers began to be driven out of the old streets of the city centre, whose destruction had been begun by Rambuteau. The 7
^th
arrondissement of that time, i.e., the Marais, ‘has quarters that are poorly built, unhealthy and poorly inhabited. The worst of these is the Quartier des Arcis, which, except for the Quai Pelletier [between the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont d'Arcole], is occupied largely by monthly and nightly boarders, and by the population that this class of establishment attracts. Thanks to the new Rue Rambuteau, the Beaubourg quarter which was in no less disturbing a situation will receive a little sunlight. The main streets of this arrondissement are commercial, and have no need to be widened to become still more so.'
¹⁵⁸
Some of these expelled workers crowded into the
neighbouring quarters – the centre of the Île Saint-Louis, ‘so well populated in previous times, but which now has no more of a middle-class population than do the houses that border the quays', the surroundings of the Place Maubert, already dangerous – but others left to settle further out, in Belleville or the northern slopes of Montmartre.

The insurrection of June 1848 took place in an unusual setting, and this new topography reflects the great changes of the industrial age. Though it began around the Panthéon, this was not because the workers hoped to bring with them the youth of the schools. On that memorable night of 22 June, when, despite the torches, the faces of the tremendous crowd remained drowned in shadow as in Daumier's drawing
L'Émeute
, they only met on the big square there because it was familiar: every evening since February this was where the wages of the National Workshops had been paid. In the ascending phase of the insurrection, it is true, the workers invaded the centre of Paris and crossed the traditional quarters of revolt quite close to the Hôtel de Ville. But this offensive was made from bases in the faubourgs to the north, east and south. It was to these quarters that they retreated when the push towards the centre failed, and it was there that they fought to the bitter end. During the final week of May 1871, despite the further transformations of the city in the meantime, the Fédérés defended themselves in the same streets, the same squares and the same crossroads, and perhaps it was even the same cobbles that were used twice over to build barricades described in the same terms at an interval of twenty-three years, on Rue Saint-Maur, Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, the Barrière des Amandiers or the entry to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.