The Invention of Paris (48 page)

What followed is one of the most famous revolutionary images: the cart pulled by a white horse, the heap of bodies lit up by a torch held by a child, the circuit round the centre of Paris to shouts of ‘Revenge! They're butchering the people!' On the morning of the 24
^th
, ‘the troops, who had
bivouacked in the rain with their feet in the mud, their minds troubled and their bodies numb with cold, perceived with the first glimmers of dawn a bold and resolute multitude, flocking in through Rues Saint-Martin, Rambuteau, Saint-Merri, du Temple and Saint-Denis, where barricades had been raised at a number of places'.
⁷⁰

Tocqueville, who had heard nothing of this, left home in the early morning.

As soon as I had set foot in the street I could for the first time scent revolution in the air . . . The boulevard along which we passed presented a strange sight. There was hardly anyone to be seen, although it was nearly nine o'clock in the morning; no sound of a human voice could be heard; but all the little sentry boxes the whole way along that great street seemed on the move, oscillating on their bases and occasionally falling with a crash, while the great trees along the edge came tumbling into the road as if of their own accord. These acts of destruction were the work of isolated individuals who set about it silently, methodically and fast, preparing materials for the barricades that others were to build . . . Nothing that I saw later that day impressed me so much as that solitude in which one could, so to speak, see all the most evil passions of humanity at work, and none of the good ones.
⁷¹

It is clear here what Tocqueville saw as the ‘good passions'. A little later, he crossed an infantry column retreating to the Madeleine: ‘Their ranks were broken and disorderly, and they marched with hanging heads, shamefaced and frightened. Whenever one of them left the main body for an instant, he was immediately surrounded, caught, clasped, disarmed and sent back; all this in the twinkling of an eye.'
⁷²
These were the troops of General Bedeau, falling back from the Bastille to the Tuileries via the boulevards. On that day, at nine in the morning, the insurgents held four of the strategic points that the forces of order were supposed to defend at any price: the Bastille, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Place des Victoires and the Pointe Saint-Eustache. The Prefecture of Police and the Hôtel de Ville were taken without a struggle. Only a company of the 14
^th
Regiment of the line, badly informed about the development of events, got themselves killed at the Palais-Royal. Turgenev noted that the only serious fighting in the February days was on the Place du Palais-Royal.
⁷³
‘Two companies of regular army
regiments occupied the position that forms the left wing of the Château d'Eau. This building . . . could only be destroyed by cannon. It was from there that the troops fired on the people positioned opposite in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, and whose own shots only hit the stonework . . . Finally, they made their way into the royal stables, carriages were rolled under the windows of the army post and set on fire.'
⁷⁴
By one o'clock, the king had abdicated and left the Tuileries for Saint-Cloud, repeating in a daze: ‘Like Charles X, like Charles X!' The insurgents invaded the Tuileries, the royal throne was carried to the Bastille and burned. This was the end of the first phase of the revolution, which for Tocqueville was ‘the shortest and the least bloody that the country had known'.

Throughout the following days, calm reigned in the streets. ‘I went around very easily in a cab,' Apponyi noted on 27 February, ‘the barricades were still in place, but a wide enough space was left for a carriage to pass. So I could go to Rothschild's; it would be impossible to depict the terror of the bankers and notaries, they were in a deplorable state.' The self-proclaimed Provisional Government met in the Hôtel de Ville, in unprecedented conditions:
⁷⁵
for two weeks, until 5 or 6 March, it deliberated under the direct pressure of the crowd that massed there. Every minute the debates were interrupted by the clamour of popular delegates. The nascent power was beset by mistrust, the swindle of July 1830 was still too close to be forgotten. It was in these conditions that the affair of the red flag developed on the evening of the 25
^th
, suddenly revealing the hidden antagonisms. Lamartine:

The arches, the courts, the steps of the great staircase, the Salle Saint-Jean, were strewn with dead bodies . . . Bands of senseless men and ferocious boys sought here and there for the dead bodies of horses, drowned in
the pools of blood. They passed cords around their breasts, and dragged them, with laughter and howling, over the Place de Grève, and then threw them into the vault at the foot of the staircase [of the Hôtel de Ville].
⁷⁶

At the head of the ‘seditionists', a worker named Marche spoke:

His face, blackened by the smoke of powder, was pale with emotion; his lips trembled with rage; his eyes, sunk beneath a prominent brow, flashed fire . . . He rolled in his left hand a strip of ribbon or red stuff. He held in his right hand the barrel of a carbine, the butt-end of which he struck with force upon the floor at every word . . . He spoke not as a man, but in the name of the people, who wished to be obeyed, and did not mean to wait . . . He repeated . . . all the conditions of the programme of impossibilities which the tumultuous cries of the people had enjoined it to accept and to realize on the instant: the overthrow of all known society; the destruction of property and capitalists; spoliation; the immediate installation of the proletarian into the community of goods; the proscription of the bankers, the wealthy, the manufacturers, the bourgeois of every condition above the wage-earners; a government, with an axe in its hand, to level all the superiorities of birth, competence, inheritance, and even of labour;
in fine
, the acceptance, without reply, and without delay, of the red flag, to signify to society its defeat; to the people, their victory; to Paris, terror; to all foreign governments, invasion: each of these injunctions was supported by the orator with a blow of the butt of his musket on the floor, by frantic applause from those who were behind him, and a salute of shots fired on the square.
⁷⁷

Lamartine, who speaks of himself in the third person in this
History
, ends up making his famous speech – an essential marker in republican genealogy – on the red flag, ‘which had only made the tour of the Champs-de-Mars, drawn through the blood of the people', whereas the tricolour ‘has made the circuit of the world, with the name, the glory, and the liberty of the country'. Apponyi was very grateful to him for having carried the day: ‘We owe this victory to the courage and unheard-of devotion of M. de Lamartine, who spent sixty hours without eating or drinking, without sleeping . . . he was everything and did everything with a miraculous force
of mind and body.' It was in this way, wrote Herzen, that ‘the flag of the people, waved under fire, the flag of democracy, of the future Republic, was rejected . . . and the flag that served as shop-sign for seventeen years to Louis-Philippe, the flag behind which the Municipal Guard fired on the people, the flag of the royalist bourgeoisie, was taken as the standard of the new republic . . . As soon as the bourgeoisie learned of the affair of the tricolour flag, the shops opened, and they were lighter of heart. For this concession, they had to make one in return, and agreed to recognize the Republic.'
⁷⁸

The confrontation rapidly moved to new ground, and the big affair became the date of the election to the Constituent Assembly. The bourgeois parties tried to have the vote set for as early as possible, whereas the republican left wanted time for an election campaign that would address the new electors, especially in the provinces.
⁷⁹
On 17 March, 150,000 demonstrators came to calmly demand the postponement of the elections: ‘From every quarter, from every faubourg, from the whole banlieue, groups of workers converged on the Place de la Révolution [de la Concorde]. They had neither the dress nor the physiognomy of men torn from their workshops by riot . . . Soon an enormous organized column covered the great avenue of the Champs-Élysées, from the railings of the Tuileries to the barrier of the Étoile.'
⁸⁰
The procession, in which the flags of Poland, of Italian and German unity and the green flag of Ireland could be seen, set out for the Hôtel de Ville along the quays of the Seine. Some fifty delegates, including Blanqui, Raspail, Cabet and Barbès, were received by the Provisional Government. Blanqui spoke, demanding the removal of troops and the postponement of elections. Lamartine eloquently lied: ‘There are no troops in Paris, aside perhaps for some fifteen hundred or two thousand men, divided between the external positions, to protect the city gates and the railways, and it is false that the government has any thought of bringing them into Paris . . . The Republic, internally, wants no other defenders than the armed people.'
⁸¹
Louis Blanc, hesitating between the people and the government, succeeded in aborting the movement that had begun,
by siding with the established power. Proudhon remarked that he used the same terms as Guizot to characterize the demonstrators.
⁸²
Finally, the ballot would only be delayed for two weeks, an insufficient time to ‘call the people to meetings, enlighten them, conduct their political education', as Blanqui said during the Bourges trial.

On Sunday, 16 April, a week before the date set for the elections, a crowd of workers gathered on the Champ-de-Mars to choose its officers for the National Guard. Here and there the question of elections was heatedly discussed. A delegation left for the Hôtel de Ville, to take the proceeds of a collection, but Ledru-Rollin had sounded the call to arms, and the astonished workers had to pass between the bayonets of the bourgeois National Guard and the Mobile Guard to reach the Maison du Peuple. In the evening, the National Guard of the
beaux quartiers
patrolled the streets with shouts of ‘Down with the communists! Death to Blanqui! Death to Cabet!'

But there was a section of the elegant bourgeoisie that had learned their habits from Blanqui's club, the Société Républicaine Centrale, in the hall of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers:

Parisian society, after the first reaction of consternation, and still too disturbed to renew its customary gatherings and pleasures, ran from club to club . . . Blanqui's club was in favour with people who had this kind of curiosity. The boxes and galleries where in previous years people had come to hear in rapt communion the masterpieces of musical art, were besieged every night by a singularly mixed and noisy crowd. They recognized each other at a distance, and greeted one another with a hasty gesture, lost as they were in this crowd in workmen's clothes whom many believed to be armed.
⁸³

The members of the Société Républicaine Centrale included Charles Baudelaire, who published in March, together with Champfleury and
Toubin, the two issues of
Le Salut public
. It was certainly in this hall that Baudelaire drew the pencil portrait of Blanqui that Walter Benjamin mentions, in the singular intuition that leads him to compare the poet and the man in black: ‘The solitude of Baudelaire as a counterpart to that of Blanqui'; ‘the enigmatic stuff of allegory in one, the mystery-mongering of the conspirator in the other'. And in Baudelaire's ‘The Litany of Satan': ‘You who give the outlaw that calm and haughty look/That damns the whole multitude around his scaffold', Benjamin sees ‘the dark face of Blanqui shine through between the lines'.

A few days later, after the feast of Fraternité, Blanqui predicted that ‘the fruit of this fraternity between the bourgeoisie and its army will be a Saint Bartholemew of the proletarians'.
⁸⁴
The
journée
of 15 May was a prelude to this – along with the events in Rouen, where the National Guard fired on an unarmed demonstration of workers. The clubs had decided on a big demonstration in support of Poland. Blanqui was opposed to this, as the proceedings of the Bourges trial note:

M. Blanqui . . . explained that after having resisted the demonstration, he was forced to accept it and took part. ‘The point is,' he said, ‘that handling the popular element is not like commanding a regiment that stands ready, arms in hand, to which you say “march” and it marches, “stop” and it stops. No, gentlemen, it isn't like this at all, and I had to accept this popular invasion in support of Poland.'

Setting off from the Bastille, the demonstration headed towards the Madeleine via the boulevards, crossed the Place de la Concorde, and reached the Palais-Bourbon where the new Constituent Assembly had met for the first time a week or so ago. Blanqui, Barbès and Raspail were there; Tocqueville as well, who had been elected deputy for the Manche in his constituency of Valognes:

The sitting began like any other; and, what was very odd, twenty thousand men had surrounded the Chamber before any sound from outside had indicated their presence. Wolowski was at the rostrum; he was mumbling between his teeth some platitude or other about Poland when the people suddenly demonstrated how close they were by a terrible shout which, bursting through all the windows at the top of the Chamber, left open on account of the heat, fell upon us as if it came from the sky . . . the doors of the galleries burst open with
a crash; a flood of people poured into them, filled them, and soon overflowed them. Pressed forward by the crowd following them . . . the first arrivals climbed over the balustrades . . . they let themselves down at the sides of the walls and jumped the last five or six feet into the middle of the Assembly . . . While one group of the people fell into the hall, another, composed mainly of the leaders of all the clubs, invaded us through every door. These latter carried various emblems of the Terror, and they waved a lot of flags, some of them with a red cap on top . . . Some of our invaders were armed . . . but not one seemed to have a fixed resolve to strike us . . . there seemed to be no obedience to a common leader; it was a rabble, not a troop. I did see some drunks among them, but most of them seemed to be prey to a feverish excitement . . . they were dripping with sweat, although the nature and state of their clothing should have made the heat not particularly disagreeable, for sometimes a good deal of naked skin was showing . . . Throughout this disorder the Assembly remained passive and motionless on its benches, neither resisting nor giving way . . . Some members of the Mountain fraternized with the people, but furtively and in whispers.
⁸⁵