The Invention of Paris (58 page)

110
Histoire des journées de juin
. The 8
^th
arrondissement comprised the northern part of the Marais, the 11
^th
the Luxembourg, and the 12
^th
, as we have seen, the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.

111
Pardigon,
Épisodes des journées de juin
.

112
The Place de Cambrai was in front of the Collège de France, before Rue des Écoles was driven through. Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins was off Rue Saint-Jacques, not far from this.

113
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
.

114
The old Hôtel-Dieu, on the edge of the small arm of the Seine, in the square where Charlemagne's statue now stands, had an extension on the Left Bank, to which it was joined by a covered bridge. This is no doubt where the battery was placed.

115
Pardigon,
Épisodes des journées de juin
.

116
Marouk,
Juin 1848
.

117
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
.

118
Ibid.

119
Histoire des journées de juin
.

120
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
.

121
Ibid.

122
Tocqueville,
Recollections
.

123
Hugo,
Things Seen
.

124
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 148.

125
Histoire des journées de juin
.

126
Histoire de la chute du roi Louis-Philippe, de la République de 1848
.

127
Tocqueville,
Recollections
.

128
To understand his account, you have to imagine these places before the opening of the Place de la République, the Boulevard Voltaire, etc.

129
Tocqueville,
Recollections
, p. 158.

130
Hugo,
Things Seen
.

131
Marouk,
Juin 1848
.

132
Auguste Blanqui, ‘Adresse au banquet des travailleurs socialistes', 3 December 1848.

133
Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution.
On the role of the Mobile Guards in this repression, Hippolyte Castille notes: ‘The little men with green epaulettes resembled weasels with their snouts in blood' (
Les Massacres de juin
[1857]).

134
Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution
.

135
On the echoes of the June days in literature, see Oehler,
1848. Le Spleen contre l'oubli
.

136
Cited by Marouk,
Juin 1848
. These directives were indeed applied: ‘In the little wood close to the Passage Ronce [in Ménilmontant], unarmed men were shot on the pretext that their hands smelled of powder' (Ménard,
Prologue d'une révolution
).

137
‘Right from the first night of the battle, massacres were organized in the Luxembourg. Captured insurgents were brought there in batches of twenty. They were forced to their knees and then shot. After these executions, the garden was closed for two weeks. The pools of blood that gave evidence of the slaughter had to be well hidden' (Marouk,
Juin 1848
).

138
Some recent writers, such as Dolf Oehler, have drawn on this passage (and others) to present Flaubert as vaguely sympathetic to the insurgent workers. I believe however that his political ideas are shown very well on the same page of
A Sentimental Education
: ‘Aristocracy had the same fits of fury as low debauchery, and the cotton cap did not show itself less hideous than the red cap.' He expressed his disgust of the people still more strongly at the time of the Commune (see his letters to George Sand).

139
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
. In
Le Prolétariat
, Victor Marouk commented on the inauguration of the statue of Ledru-Rollin in 1885, on the Place Voltaire (now Léon Blum): ‘Speeches will be delivered, recalling the titles of this famous republican to public honour. Newspapers . . . will tell us of the tribune and his superb speeches, of the member of the Provisional Government, the father of universal suffrage, the defender of the Constitution, banished under the Empire. Orators and journalists will certainly refrain from mentioning the Ledru-Rollin of reaction and the firing squads, the Ledru-Rollin of 16 April 1848 and the June days.' And he concluded: ‘The sons of those shot will keep their distance from this apotheosis of the man of the firing squad.'

140
Cited in Marouk,
Juin
1848.

141
‘Out of parliamentary stupidity, I failed in my duty as representative. I had eyes to see, and I did not see . . . Elected by the people, and a journalist of the proletariat, I should not have left this mass without leadership and advice. A hundred thousand fighting men deserved that I should have concerned myself with them. That would have been better than to bury myself in your offices' (P. Proudhon,
Confessions d'un révolutionnaire
[Paris: Lacroix & Verboeckhoven, 1868]; written between 1849 and 1851).

142
Blanqui,
Adresse au banquet des travailleurs.

143
Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France',
Surveys from Exile
, p. 60.

144
Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer
(Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998). Compare Pardigon's exclamations: ‘Prisoners so despised and execrated! Surplus men, whose valueless lives are hurled randomly into the ocean of destruction.'

145
Stern,
Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
.

146
The man who had stood up to Lamartine at the time of the red flag affair.

147
Lahr – a German – and Daix were guillotined on 17 March 1849 for the ‘murder' of General Bréa. The next day, Delescluze wrote in his newspaper,
La Révolution démocratique et sociale
: ‘Crazy people! They've erected a new political scaffold. . .'

148
The present Rue Saint-Martin, formerly Rue des Lombards, first became Rue des Arcis, then between the Tour Saint-Jacques and the Seine it was Rue Planche-Mibray, a medieval name derived from the planks put down to cross the
bray
, i.e., the mud of the streets.

149
Maréchal Bugeaud,
La Guerre des rues et des maisons
; Auguste Blanqui,
Instructions pour une prise d'armes; L'Éternité par les astres, et autres textes
, edited by Miguel Abensour and Valentin Pelosse (Paris: La Tête de Feuilles, 1972).

150
Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses.

151
Even apart from epidemics, Villermé notes how ‘Rue de la Mortellerie has four and a half times as many deaths as the quays of the Île Saint-Louis, where the inhabitants live in roomy and well-ventilated apartments' (
La Mortalité en France dans la classe aisée, comparée à celle qui a lieu parmi les indigents
[Paris, 1827]).

152
La Bédollière,
Les Industriels
(Paris, 1842).

153
Le Journal des débats
, 27 August 1830.

154
Report by Achille Leroux, BNF, Fonds Enfantin, MS 7816, cited by Rancière,
The Nights of Labor
.

155
Cited by Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
.

156
Cited by T. J. Clark,
The Absolute Bourgeois, Artists and Politicians in France, 1848–1851
(London: Thames and Hudson: 1973), p. 29. Leleux's painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1849.

157
Tocqueville,
Recollections
. This passage deserves to be quoted at greater length: ‘the eagerness for material enjoyment that, spurred by the [republican] government, increasingly excited this multitude, and the democratic malaise of envy that was silently at work; the economic and political theories that began to come to light and tended to give the impression that human misery was the work of laws and not of Providence, and that poverty could be abolished by changing the basis of society'.

158
‘Rapport de la Commission des Halles', 1842. Cited by Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
.

159
Hippolyte Babou,
Les Prisonniers du 2 décembre, mes émotions, mes souvenirs
(Paris, 1876).

160
Before dispersing, the members of the Constituent Assembly had voted a credit for sending an expeditionary force to Italy, with the mission of supporting the Italian republicans in their revolt against Austria. But this little army, commanded by Oudinot, was then used to attack the Roman republicans and restore the power of the pope.

161
The book was published by Calmann-Lévy, in the midst of the Mac-Mahon affair. Hugo placed at the start of the book the words: ‘This book is more than topical; it is urgent. I am publishing it. V.H., 1 October 1877.' The first printing was of 165,000 copies.

162
Hugo,
Les Misérables
, Volume Five, book 1,
chapter 1
.

163
Ibid.

164
Hugo,
The History of a Crime
, chapter 17, trans. Joyce and Locker.

165
Victor Hugo,
Actes et paroles
, I, ‘Avant l'exil', in
Politique
,
Notes Annexes de V. Hugo
(Paris: Laffont).

166
‘Your law is a law with a mask . . . That is your custom. When you forge a chain, you say: “Here is a freedom!” When you make a proscription, you cry: “Here is an amnesty!” . . . You are not believers, but sectarians of a religion that you do not understand. You are presenters of holiness. Don't involve the church in your affairs, your tricks, your doctrines, your ambitions.'

167
‘But rise up then, Catholics, priests, bishops, men of religion sitting in this Assembly; rise up, it is your role! What are you doing on your benches?'

168
On the morning of 2 December, Babou and a group of his friends met Pierre Leroux, who said to them: ‘You young people! Laugh like we do and buy whistles; the coup d'état will end up in ridicule' (
Les Prisonniers du 2 décembre
).

169
Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte',
Surveys from Exile
, p. 233.

170
Millière was shot on the steps of the Panthéon on 26 May 1871. He had refused to kneel, and died shouting: ‘Long live humanity!' In
The History of a Crime
, published in 1877, this passage is clearly a later addition. I read many years ago the memoirs of a Soviet writer of the great era – I can't remember which – who recalled how much that cry of ‘Long live humanity!' had struck him as a young man.

171
Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', p. 235.

172
‘The Twenty-five francs': an expression of contempt denoting the deputies by their daily remuneration. The wage paid by the National Workshops, we recall, was two francs for a man and one franc for a woman. The following day, to the workers of the faubourg who asked him if he really thought that they would get themselves killed to keep him in his twenty-five francs, Baudin made the famous reply before climbing on to the barricade: ‘You will see how someone dies for twenty-five francs.'

173
This law of 31 May 1850 abolished in practice the universal suffrage proclaimed in February 1848: to be an elector now needed a permanent household, whereas the majority of workers were migrants. The posters of the coup d'état promised the return of universal suffrage.

174
Auguste Blanqui,
L'Éternité par les astres, hypothèse astronomique
, cited by Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 114.

175
Jacques Rancière,
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy
(University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Crossing the swarming scene that is Paris . . .
– Baudelaire, ‘Little Old Ladies',
Les Fleurs du mal

But the majority of men make their way through Paris in the same manner as they live and eat, that is, without thinking about it . . . Ah! to wander over Paris! What an adorable and delightful existence is that! Flânerie is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; flânerie is life.

– Balzac, ‘The Physiology of Marriage'

‘There gathers here everything that is great in terms of love or hate, of emotion and of thought, of knowledge and of power, of both happiness and unhappiness, of the future and of the past . . . Here is created a new art, a new religion, a new life; it is here that the creators of a new world are merrily at work.' In his Paris chronicles for the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung
, Heine heightens the colours of Paris to contrast with the darkness of Austro-Prussian reaction; but for all that, Paris of this time was indeed the first city of the Western world, and it was no accident that another immigrant German Jew would pursue the traces of this a century later, and title the exposé of the great work that he projected, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century'.
¹

During Heine's Paris years – between
Adolphe
and
Madame Bovary
, between Géricault's
Wounded Hussar
and Manet's
Dead Toreador
, between the completion of the Madeleine and of the Gare du Nord – the system of literature that had held sway in France for the last two centuries, and was already beginning to crack, splintered completely. I shall try here to trace the stages, over a period of something under a century, of this general rejection of genres, boundaries and hierarchies, a rejection in which Paris represents far more than a context, a mere favourable milieu. As the para-digm
of the ‘modern' city in which ‘the obelisks of industry spew against the firmament their coalitions of fumes', whose population was constantly growing, where gas lighting was replacing oil lamps and old streets were being mercilessly destroyed, Paris played at this time the role of detonator. Formerly, when the action of a book was set in Paris, the city simply served as an abstract or stylized backdrop: you could search in vain for precise details of Paris locations in
The Princess of Cleves, Manon Lescaut
or
La Vie de Marianne
. But now, in streets that were named and described – which was already a decisive break in the literary status of the metropolis – a red-haired beggar-woman might cross paths with an adulterous countess, a great surgeon, an Auvergnat water-carrier, a ragpicker, a future minister or a policeman (Vidocq, Javert, Peyrade), not to mention a bankrupt lawyer. The hierarchy of genres, according to which certain forms were naturally designed for particular social strata, could no longer hold out. Through newspaper supplements that were sold in the streets, the novel invaded fashionable salons, libraries, and the back rooms of wineshops. Everything could become the subject of drama, verse, story or song, and all subjects were equal here, so much so that there was no longer any compulsory relationship between form and content. Vague intermediate zones would disrupt the borders between art and what was traditionally not accepted as art. In 1857, Hippolyte Babou could write without blaspheming that ‘when Balzac lifts the roofs or penetrates the walls in order to clear a space for observation . . . you speak insidiously to the porter, you slide along fences, you make little holes in partitions, you listen at doors, you focus your eye-glasses at nighttime on the silhouettes dancing in the distance behind lighted windows; you act, in a word, what our prudish English neighbours call the “police detective”.'
²
And it was ‘in an obscure library in Rue Montmartre' that the narrator of
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
met a certain Dupin, the first amateur detective in literature – not in London nor in New York, but in Paris where Poe had never set foot.