The Invention of Paris (57 page)

55
Rey-Dussueil,
Le Cloître Saint-Merry
(Paris: Ambroise Dupont, 1832). Rue des Arcis is Rue Saint-Martin south of the transverse axis of Rue de la Verrerie–Rue des Lombards. It was certainly the great barricade of Saint-Merri that served as a model for the barricade of Rue de la Chanvrerie in
Les Misérables
, that which Jean Valjean defends and where Gavroche dies. See Thomas Bouchet, ‘La barricade des Misérables', in Corbin and Mayeur (eds)
La Barricade
. It was also at Saint-Merri that the republican Michel Chrestien died a heroic death in
Lost Illusions
.

56
Rey-Dussueil,
Le Cloître Saint-Merry
.

57
Nadaud,
Léonard, maçon de la Creuse
.

58
Rue Transnonain disappeared with the cutting of Rue de Turbigo and the widening of Rue Beaubourg, but some of its houses were absorbed in the latter, on the even-numbered side.

59
Under ‘April 1834, days of'. In ‘Some French Caricaturists', which dates from 1857, Baudelaire describes the famous lithograph by Daumier: ‘In a poor, mean room, the traditional room of the proletarian, with shoddy, essential furniture, lies the corpse of a workman, stripped but for his cotton shirt and cap; he lies on his back, at full length, his legs and arms outspread. There has obviously been a great struggle and tumult in the room, for the chairs are overturned, as are the night-table and the chamber-pot. Beneath the weight of the corpse – between his back and the bare boards – the father is crushing the corpse of his little child. In this cold attic all is silence and death' (Baudelaire,
The Mirror of Art
), p. 163.

60
This strange friendship (Armand Carrel had been a volunteer with the Spanish republicans in 1823, and had thus fought the French troops that Chateaubriand had been involved in sending) is one of many signs that Chateaubriand was not a run-of-the-mill reactionary as is often believed.

61
Rancière,
On the Shores of Politics
.

62
‘The groups were divided into Weeks and Months. The three Months that formed a Season received their orders from a leader who was known as Spring. Each month comprised four Weeks led by a July. The weeks were made up of six members under the leadership of a Sunday. The leaders went unseen, and Blanqui did not attend the general meetings . . . This was the hidden conscription and secret recruitment of the army of revolt' (G. Geffroy,
L'Enfermé
).

63
Hugo, ‘1839: Diary of a Passer-By During the Riot of the Twelfth of May',
Things Seen
.

64
Heinrich Heine,
Lutèce
(Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855). Another foreigner in Paris, Alexander Herzen, gave a similar diagnosis: ‘Capital gave its votes to the government, and the government lent its bayonets to the defence of all the abuses of capital. They had a common enemy: the proletariat, the worker . . .' (
Lettres de France et d'Italie
, 10 June 1848).

65
Rodolphe Apponyi,
De la Révolution au coup d'État
,
1848–1851
(Paris: Plon, 1913; republished Geneva: La Palatine, 1948). Apponyi was from an old Hungarian family, and the cousin of the Austrian ambassador to Paris. As secretary to the embassy, he lived in Paris from 1826 to 1852. His diary, very lively and written in impeccable French, gives the point of view of a worldly and cultivated diplomat, a champion of order but lacking in ferocity.

66
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Recollections
(London: Macdonald, 1970), p. 26.

67
‘It was three o'clock when M. Guizot appeared at the door of the House. He entered with his firmest step and haughtiest bearing, silently crossed the gangway and mounted the tribune, almost throwing his head over backwards for fear of seeming to bow it; in two words he announced that the king had entrusted M. Molé with the formation of a new government. I have never seen such a piece of melodrama' (Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 32).

68
Daniel Stern (the Comtesse d'Agoult),
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
(Paris: Librairie internationale, 1850–3).

69
Guizot lived in the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères, on the corner of Rue des Capucines and Boulevard des Capucines; hence the guard that evening. Rue Basse-du-Rempart, as we have seen, ran parallel to Boulevard des Capucines at a lower level, divided from it by a small wall and a metal railing.

70
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848.

71
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 36.

72
Ibid., p. 39.

73
Ivan Turgenev, ‘Monsieur François',
The Fortnightly Review
, 1 Nov 1911, pp. 946–961.

74
Louis Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution, février-juin 1848
(Paris: Au Bureau du peuple, 1848).

75
This was formed by the deputies Dupont de l'Eure, François Arago, Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, Garnier-Pagès, Crémieux and Marie, and three non-parliamentarians, Louis Blanc, Flocon and Albert – an engineer, member of the Société des Nouvelles Saisons and ‘a representative of the working class' (Marx). ‘Why had the fate of the people, only liberated just a moment ago, fallen precisely into the hands of these men? Did they know anything of the needs and aspirations of the people, had they risked death for them, was it they who had won the victory? Or perhaps they had some new and fertile thought? No, a hundred times no. They occupied these positions because they were bold enough to claim them, not on the barricades but in a newspaper office, not on the place of struggle but in the conquered Chamber of Deputies' (Alexander Herzen,
Lettres de France et d'Italie
, 10 June 1848).

76
Alphonse de Lamartine,
History of the French Revolution of 1848
(Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), trans. Durivage & Chase.

77
Ibid. (Translation modified.)

78
Herzen,
Lettres de France et d'Italie
, 10 June 1848.

79
The new electoral law provided for universal (male) suffrage, which meant millions of new electors. ‘M. Ledru-Rollin did not find France republican enough. He wanted to have the time to inflate from all sides, by the organ of his clubs, the spirit of demagogy' (
Histoire de la chute du roi Louis-Philippe, de la République de 1848 et du rétablissement de l'Empire, 1847–1855
[Paris: Plon, imprimeur de l'Empereur, 1857]).

80
Garnier-Pagès,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
(Paris: Pagnerre, 1861–72).

81
Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution
.

82
Geffroy,
L'Enfermé
. In his
Pages d'histoire de la révolution de Février
, Louis Blanc wrote: ‘I perceived among those attending unknown figures whose expression had something sinister about it.'

83
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
. In the long list of clubs that opened up at that time, the most important were that of Barbès (Club de la Révolution), which met at the Palais-National (former Palais-Royal), that of Raspail (Club des Amis du Peuple) in the Marais and that of Cabet on Rue Saint-Honoré. But there were many more, such as the Club des Amis des Noirs, the Société Démocratique Allemande, the Club des Blessés et Combattants de la Barricade Saint-Merri, the Club des Condamnés Politiques, those of the Démocrates de Belleville, the Émigrés Italiens, the Français non Naturalisés and the Fraternité du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, as well as the Vésuviennes, the only club reserved for women.

84
Ménart,
Prologue d'une révolution
.

85
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, pp. 115–8.

86
In the proceedings of the Bourges trial, Blanqui explains: ‘It is certainly true that I had come despite myself, shrugging my shoulders, and that even so I had given a speech with perfect composure. A man of politics is always able to do this. . . . If we had wanted to overthrow the Assembly, I beg you to believe that we would have acted quite differently. We have some experience of insurrections and conspiracies, and I assure you that we would not have spent three hours chatting in an Assembly that we intended to overthrow.'

87
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 118.

88
It is interesting to compare Tocqueville's description with that of another opponent of Blanqui, Victor Hugo: ‘Blanqui had stopped wearing a shirt at this point. He wore the same clothes as he had for twelve years, his prison clothes, rags that he displayed at his club with a sombre pride. He only renewed his shoes, and his gloves which were always black . . . There was in this man something of a broken aristocrat trampled underfoot by a demagogue . . . A fundamental aptness; no hypocrisy. The same in private and in public. Rough, hard, severe, never laughing, repaying respect with irony, admiration with sarcasm, love with disdain, and inspiring extraordinary devotion. A sinister figure . . . At certain moments this was no longer a man, but a kind of gloomy apparition that seemed to embody all the hatreds born from all the miseries' (
Things Seen
).

89
Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte',
Surveys from Exile
, p. 228.

90
Lamartine,
History of the French Revolution of 1848
.

91
Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution
.

92
Ibid.

93
Pierre Gaspard, ‘Aspects de la lutte des classes en 1848: le recrutement de la garde nationale mobile',
La Revue historique
, 511, July-September 1974. Through an irony of history, their uniforms were manufactured by the Association Fraternelle des Tailleurs, two thousand tailors who had come from all sides and worked in the abandoned premises of the debtors' prison of Clichy (Rancière,
The Nights of Labor
).

94
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 130.

95
Rapport de la Commission d'enquête sur l'insurrection qui a éclaté dans la journée du 25 juin et sur les événements du 15 mai.

96
For the sake of comparison, a correspondent of Eugène Sue wrote to him: ‘Your Chourineur . . . earns too little. If you were well informed, you would know that a good barge-worker earns 7 or 8 francs per day, and that 35 sous [1.75 francs] is what is paid to a streetsweeper' (Cited by Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
).

97
‘Business went from bad to worse; Lamartine was completely overwhelmed, the public finances were in a deplorable state, bankruptcies followed one another at an inconceivable rate, metallic currency became so rare that every effort was made to obtain it . . . What also struck several people here was the lack of money to travel, for with the exception of Rothschild, no banker paid out any more, and even the richest people had only one or two hundred francs at their disposal' (Apponyi,
De la Révolution au coup d'État
).

98
Maurice Vimont,
Histoire de la Rue Saint-Denis
(Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1936).

99
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 136.

100
F. Pardigon,
Épisodes des journées de juin
(London, 1852).

101
Histoire des journées de juin
, anonymous pamphlet (Paris: Martinon éditeur, 5 Rue du Coq-Saint-Honoré, 1848).

102
This was then on Rue de Jérusalem, a small street on the Île de la Cité that disappeared under Haussmann. People said ‘Rue de Jérusalem' to mean the police, as we say today ‘the Quai d'Orsay' or ‘the Élysée'.

103
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 138.

104
Histoire des journées de juin
.

105
Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution
.

106
Cited by Maïté Bouyssy in his introduction to Maréchal Bugeaud,
La Guerre des rues et des maisons
(Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 1997). Soldiers were not alone in their humanist vision of colonial war. Tocqueville: ‘I have often heard in France, from men whom I respect but do not approve of, that they find it bad to attack unarmed men, women and children. In my view, these are unpleasant necessities, but ones that any people that wants to make war on the Arabs will be obliged to accept' (Cited by A. Brossat,
Le Corps de l'ennemi
, Paris: La Fabrique, 1998).

107
Histoire des journées de juin
.

108
Ibid. The 4
^th
arrondissement at that time was the Les Halles quarter.

109
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
. Remember that this author was a woman, the Comtesse d'Agoult. In
Things Seen
, Hugo describes this episode in a manner both intimate and hostile: ‘The National Guard, irritated more than intimidated, advanced in a rush to the barricade. At that moment, a woman appeared on top of the barricade, young, pretty, wild-haired and terrible. This woman, who was a prostitute, lifted her dress up to her belt and shouted to the National Guards, in the horrible brothel language that one always has to translate: “Cowards, fire on the belly of a woman if you dare!” Events now took a terrifying course. The National Guard did not hesitate. A platoon-fire toppled the wretched woman; she fell with a loud scream. There was a horrible silence, both on the barricade and from the attackers. Suddenly a second woman appeared. This one was still younger and prettier: almost a child, scarcely seventeen years old. What a wretched situation! She too was a prostitute. She lifted her dress, showed her belly, and cried: “Shoot, you brigands!” They shot. She fell in a hail of bullets on the body of the first. It was thus that the war began.'