The Invention of Paris (56 page)

Those who rejoice to see the city so calm today, stuck in the continuum of the Bergsonian time of domination and boredom, could still find themselves in for a shock one day. Better than any other, the history of Red
Paris illustrates Benjamin's remark that the time of the oppressed is by nature discontinuous. In the course of the battles of July 1830, stupefied observers agreed in maintaining that in many districts of Paris the insurgents had set fire to the clocks on monuments.

 

1
Étienne Raczymow, in
Belleville, belle ville
.

2
Laurent Goldberg, in ibid.

3
‘The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honour of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organizing police-hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labour. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris' (Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France',
The First International and After
[Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974], p. 217).

4
Louise Michel,
La Commune, histoire et souvenirs
(Paris: La Découverte, 1999).

5
Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray,
A History of the Paris Commune of 1871
, trans. Eleanor Marx.

6
Ibid. Wroblewski managed to escape from this hell, reached London and joined the General Council of the International.

7
The French authorities, for their part, had established special sections attached to the appeal courts to judge those arrested by the French police for ‘any offence promoting communism, anarchy, social and national subversion, or rebellion against the legally established social order'. The Paris special section had its offices in the Palais de Justice.

8
‘At midday, with Speidel, to Brinon's embassy on the corner of Rue Rude and Avenue Foch. The little palace where he received us is said to belong to his wife who is Jewish, which did not prevent him from making fun of “
youpins
” at the lunch table' (Ernst Jünger, 8 October 1942,
Journal de guerre
[Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979–80]).

9
Jünger, on the Propaganda-Staffel, did not have to sign such orders, but Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the general in command, with his ‘nice way of smiling' (ibid., 10 March 1942) and his great knowledge of Byzantine history, did indeed – though he committed suicide after the bomb attempt on Hitler in July 1944.

10
Michel,
La Commune, histoire et souvenirs
.

11
Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘Dans l'honneur et la dignité',
Les Temps modernes
, June 1948.

12
E. & J. de Goncourt,
Journal
, 19 March 1871.

13
Ibid., 15 May 1871.

14
Du Camp,
Les Convulsions de Paris
.

15
Cited in
Les Reporters de l'Histoire. 1871: la Commune de Paris
(Paris: Liana Levi / Sylvie Messinger, 1983). Quotations without other reference in the following pages are taken from this book.

16
Nor were children forgotten here: ‘All these stunted and unhealthy creatures, half wolf and half ferret, who have been prematurely depraved by a free collective life that poorly inspired poets have sought to glorify [Victor Hugo!], who draw the etymology of their common name from the public way where they roam like errant dogs, all these “
voyous
”, in a word, threw themselves into battle with the curiosity, recklessness and impetus of their age' (Du Camp,
Les Convulsions de Paris
).

17
Cited by Michel,
La Commune, histoire et souvenirs
.

18
‘If only the Commune had listened to my warnings! I advised its members to fortify the northern side of the heights of Montmartre, the Prussian side, and they still had time to do this; I told them beforehand that they would otherwise be caught in a trap . . .' Karl Marx, letter to E. S. Beesly, 12 June 1871.

19
Michel,
La Commune, histoire et souvenirs
.

20
Ibid.

21
Victor Hugo, letter to C. Vacquerie, Brussels, 28 April 1871.

22
All the following quotations are taken from Michel,
La Commune, histoire et souvenirs
.

23
Charles Delescluze was a law student when he was wounded in 1830 in a republican uprising. He took part in all the insurrectional
journées
under the July monarchy, and had to go into exile in Belgium until 1840. In 1848, having sided with the June insurgents, he was sentenced to a fine of 11,000 francs and three years in prison for articles against Cavaignac and the massacres. After staying in England, he returned secretly to Paris in 1853, was captured, deported to Belle-Île in Corsica and then to Cayenne. After his return in 1860, he founded
Le Réveil
, whose first issue brought him a fine and a further prison sentence. In August 1870 he was once more imprisoned, and his paper suspended, for having protested against the declaration of war. With the fall of the Empire he was elected mayor of the 19th arrondissement, but resigned in protest at the cowardice of the provisional government. The failure of the January 1871 uprising led once more to the suspension of his paper and his imprisonment, but with the legislative elections he was triumphantly elected in Paris with over 150,000 votes. During the Commune, he was one of the few representatives of the ‘Jacobin' tendency to take the side of the revolution against that of the Assembly, of Paris against Versailles – as opposed to Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, and Schoelcher. Elected to the council of the Commune by the 9
^th
and 19
^th
arrondissements, he resigned his seat in the Assembly. He was on the commission for foreign relations, the committee of public safety, and finally, on 11 May, when the situation became critical, he agreed to become the delegate for war.

24
Cited from Lissagaray,
A History of the Paris Commune
.

25
Ibid.

26
Ibid.

27
Vallès,
L'Insurgé
.

28
Pierre de L'Estoile,
Journal pour le règne de Henri III
.

29
See Alain Corbin and Jean-Marc Mayeur (eds),
La Barricade
, proceedings of a colloquium organized on 17–18 March 1995 by the Centre de Recherches en Histoire du XIXe Siècle and the Société d'Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997). The following unreferenced quotations are taken from this work.

30
As described by Jacques Rancière,
On the Shores of Politics
(London: Verso, 2007), p. 5.

31
‘The first decree established the suppression of press freedom in its various forms; it was the quintessence of all that had been elaborated in the cubbyholes of the police department over fifteen years. The second decree reworked the electoral laws. Thus the two primary freedoms, the freedom of the press and electoral freedom, were radically harmed; this emanated not from an iniquitous though legal action of a corrupt legislative authority, but by decree, as in the days of royal whim' (François-René de Chateaubriand,
Memoirs
, Book 31, chapter 8).

32
Letter from a Paris bookseller of the time, cited in Paul Chauvet,
Les Ouvriers du livre en France, de 1789 à la constitution de la Fédération du livre
(Paris: PUF, 1956).

33
Chateaubriand,
Memoirs
, Book 32, ch. 3.

34
Ibid. Tocqueville criticized General Bedeau in 1848 in the following terms: ‘I have always noted that the men who most easily lose their head and generally show themselves the weakest in days of revolution are men of war.'

35
Dubech and D'Espezel (
Histoire de Paris
, Paris, 1926) note that the route of Marmont's three main columns corresponds to the course of the major works undertaken by Rambuteau under Louis-Philippe: widening and levelling of the boulevards, cutting of Rue Rambuteau to connect the Innocents to the Bastille, and improvement of the quays along the Seine. Haussmann did not invent the ‘strategic embellishment' of Paris.

36
Chateaubriand,
Memoirs
, Book 32,
chapter 3
.

37
Ibid.

38
‘The Nation . . . cannot recognize as constituent power either an elective chamber appointed during the existence and under the influence of the dynasty that has been overthrown, or an aristocratic chamber which as an institution is directly opposed to the sentiments and principles that have put arms in its hand' (
La Révolution
, 8 August 1830, cited by Jeanne Gilmore,
La République clandestine, 1818–1848
[Paris: Aubier 1997]).

39
‘There were present fifteen hundred men well packed together in a small hall which had the appearance of a theatre. The citizen Blanqui, son of a member of the Convention, made a long speech against the
bourgeoisie,
the shopmen who had elected as king Louis-Philippe, “
la boutique incarnée
”, and that in their own interests, not in those of the people –
du peuple qui n'était pas complice d'une si indigne usurpation.
It was a speech full of wit, honesty and anger' (Heine,
Letters from Paris
).

40
Georges Weill,
Histoire du parti républicain en France, 1814–1870
(Paris: Alcan, 1928). Attending the funeral of Casimir Perier, who died of cholera in 1832, Heine wrote: ‘My neighbours who saw the procession spoke of the obsequies of Benjamin Constant. As I have been only a year in Paris, I only know the grief which the people felt on that day from description. Yet I can imagine what such popular suffering must be, as I had not long before seen the burial of the former bishop of Blois, or the Grégoire of the Convention. There were, indeed, no grand officials, no infantry or cavalry. . . no cannon, no ambassadors with gay liveries, no official pomp. But the people wept. There was the suffering of sorrow on every face, and though it rained like bucketsful from heaven, all heads were uncovered, and the crowd harnessed itself before the hearse, and drew it to Montparnasse' (
Letters from Paris
, 12 May 1832).

41
‘The Royalists, full of excellent qualities, but sometimes foolish and often provocative, never considering the consequences of their actions, always thinking to re-establish the Legitimacy by choosing to wear a coloured cravat or a flower in their buttonhole, caused deplorable scenes' (Chateaubriand,
Memoirs
, Book 34,
chapter 2
).

42
Martin Nadaud,
Léonard, maçon de la Creuse
(Bourganeuf, 1895; republished Paris: La Découverte, 1998).

43
George Sand,
Correspondance
(Paris: Garnier), vol. 1.

44
‘Brussels expelling the Nassaus as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French prince and giving herself to an English prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin . . .' (Hugo,
Les Misérables
, Volume Four, book 1,
chapter 4
).

45
Chevalier, introduction to
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
.

46
See Georges Canguilhem,
Idéologie et Rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie
(Paris: Vrin, 1988). It is not hard to understand this phenomenon. Cholera patients generally died from dehydration. Broussais's ‘anti-inflammatory' methods (leeches, bloodletting) could only be disastrous.

47
Hugo,
Les Misérables
, Volume Four, book 10,
chapter 3
. Hugo wrote a long time after the events, but he drew closely on the documentary sources, and his account corresponds to contemporary witnesses such as Rey-Dussueil.

48
Ibid.

49
Heine,
Letters from Paris
, 16 June 1832.

50
The Célestins barracks, rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century, still houses the cavalry of the Republican Guard. The Île de Louviers was not at that time connected to the Right Bank (it corresponds today to the land surrounding the administrative building of the Ville de Paris, between Boulevard Morland and the Quai des Célestins). This was a yard for timber brought down the Seine for construction and firewood. Boulevard Morland was then a quay and the Arsenal was on the water's edge.

51
Hugo,
Les Misérables
, Volume Four, book 10,
chapter 3
.

52
This armourer showed resilience, as his shops were pillaged at each insurrection. In
Things Seen
, Hugo tells how on 24 February 1848 ‘forty men at a time pushed the bus in one fell swoop against the shop-window.' There is still a Lepage armourer on the Place du Théâtre-Français.

53
Its uniform was black, with a red pompom on the shako. Young people were attracted by this elegant costume, and as they were less petit-bourgeois than their elders, the artillery of the National Guard had to be dissolved on several occasions during those years.

54
Baudelaire: ‘You whose clear eye sees the deep arsenals/Where the tribe of metals sleeps in its tomb' (‘The Litany of Satan').