The Invention of Paris (54 page)

In the final number of
Le Peuple constituant
, in the aftermath of June 1848, Lamennais predicted that ‘the men who have become ministers of reaction, its devoted servants, will not delay in reaping the reward held out to them, which they have only too richly deserved. Expelled with contempt, bent under shame, cursed in the present and the future, they will go and join the traitors of all centuries.' This was a keen observation. The Second Republic was now on life support. In its two final somersaults, the first marking the end of the parliamentary regime and the second a hopeless struggle against Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état, ‘the people were at the windows, only the bourgeois in the street', as Baudelaire's friend Hippolyte Babou put it.
¹⁵⁹

The first of these
journées
, 13 June 1849 – a date chosen not entirely by chance – was a simulacrum of insurrection led by the bourgeois-radical Montagne party, increasingly disturbed by the attitude of the president of the Republic elected in December 1848, Louis Bonaparte. Its pretext was the expedition to Rome.
¹⁶⁰
On 11 June, Ledru-Rollin demanded the prosecution of the president of the Republic and his ministers for having violated the constitution by attacking the liberty of another people. The royalist-clerical majority of the Legislative Assembly rejected the demand. The Montagne then decided on a nonviolent demonstration. Its supporters gathered without weapons at the Château d'Eau, at midday on the 13
^th
, and set off via the Boulevards towards the Assembly. But when they reached Rue de la Paix, Changarnier's cavalry arrived to disperse them. The leaders of the Montagne then met at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and decided to establish there a ‘National Convention', under the protection of the artillery of the National Guard commanded by Guinard, the same man who had directed the cannon fire against the insurgents in Rue Saint-Jacques the previous year. Attempts to start a real insurrection in the neighbouring streets failed, and by the late afternoon the whole business ended in confusion and ridicule. The Montagne was proscribed, Ledru-Rollin, Considérant and Louis Blanc fled abroad, and other leaders were brought before the High Court. June 1849 was, as Marx put it, the nemesis of June 1848.

The resistance to the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 was a far more serious affair, in which many people were killed, contrary to the impression given by the relativist historiography of today, which is completely oriented to the rehabilitation of Louis Bonaparte. The events can be followed hour by hour, thanks to a prodigious historic document from one of the leaders of the resistance: Victor Hugo's
The History of a Crime
, written in Brussels between December 1851 and May 1852, ‘with a hand still hot from the struggle against the coup d'état', and subtitled ‘the testimony of an eyewitness'.
¹⁶¹

On the subject of Hugo, I am convinced that his political trajectory, the opposite of the customary progress from generous youth to reactionary old age, was determined by the June days. Hugo had been a royalist when he wrote
Hernani
, a peer of France under Louis-Philippe, and when he was elected very young to the Académie Française he referred disparagingly in his acknowledgement speech to the
populace
, as opposed to the
people
– ‘the ochlocracy rises against demos', as he would later write about the June days.
¹⁶²
At the decisive moment, he joined the supporters of a show of strength, demanding that the National Workshops be closed. But during the days of insurrection, Hugo, usually so quick to seize the opportunity for writing, showed astonishing discretion, describing only two episodes of the struggle among those most often cited, and in fairly conventional terms. Almost nothing on the repression, a more or less passing note on the famous cellars of the Tuileries, those of Pardigon and Père Roque. And on his personal role – he was as we saw one of the deputies charged with going to the firing line to support the failing morale of the bourgeois National Guard – Hugo was evasive. He still insisted that efforts of mediation should be made. On Boulevard Beaumarchais, 24 June, ‘I believed I had to make an effort to cease, if it were possible, the flow of blood'.
¹⁶³
Or again: ‘I was one of the sixty Representatives sent by the Constituent Assembly into the middle of the conflict, charged with the task of everywhere preceding the attacking column, of carrying, even at the peril of their lives, words of peace to the barricades, to prevent the shedding of blood, and to stop the civil war.'
¹⁶⁴

But the reality seems to have been rather different. In September 1848, before the second council of war in Paris, Hugo testified: ‘We had just attacked a barricade on Rue Saint-Louis [now Rue de Turenne] from where very vigorous firing had been directed since the morning, costing us a number of brave men; when this barricade was taken and destroyed, I went alone to another barricade, placed across Rue Vieille-du-Temple, and very strong.'
¹⁶⁵
Le Moniteur
reported on 11 July 1848:

Today, M. Victor Hugo and M. Ducoux brought to the National Assembly and presented to the president an intrepid National Guard of the 6
^th
legion, M. Charles Bérard, wounded in taking the flag of the barricade at the Barrière des Trois-Couronnes [now the site of the Couronnes
Métro station]. Charles Bérard was one of those who had accompanied Messrs Victor Hugo and Galy-Cazalat last Saturday in attacking and taking the barricades of the Temple and the Marais, an attack that only took place, as is known, after M. Victor Hugo had exhausted all efforts at mediation.

Thus, after his efforts to get the insurgents to capitulate by the power of his words, Hugo took part in the fighting, without however actually ordering charges and volley-fire, like Lamartine or Arago. He witnessed the shooting of prisoners, the mass arrests, and the manhunts in the streets. But he says not a word about any of this, and I see this silence as expressing a sense of guilt for having been on the side of the murderers in what he would call the ‘fatal' June days. And the rest of his political life can be seen as one long effort to restore himself in his own eyes.

First of all there was that extraordinary series of speeches, from July 1848 in the Constituent Assembly, then in the Legislative Assembly: for the freedom of the press, against the state of siege, against the death penalty, for secular education,
¹⁶⁶
against the deportations,
¹⁶⁷
on poverty:

There are in Paris, in these faubourgs of Paris that the wind of revolt used to arouse so readily, there are streets, houses, sewers, in which families, whole families, live on top of each other, men, women, girls and boys, only having for bedding, for covering, I almost said for clothing, infected and fermenting rags, gleaned in the outlying mud, the dunghill of the city, where human creatures bury themselves alive to escape the winter cold.

In
Les Misérables
, which Hugo began in 1845, abandoned in 1848 because of the revolution, took up again in 1860 and finished at Hauteville House in 1862, the fifth volume opens with a chapter titled ‘The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple'. Hugo apologized for this insertion, totally foreign to the rest of the book: ‘The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies can name do not belong to the
period in which the action of this work is laid.' There follows the parallel between the two fortresses, that at the entrance to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, ‘ravined, jagged, cut up, divided, crenellated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there, powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the formidable place which had seen the 14
^th
of July' – and that of the Faubourg du Temple, where ‘it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Silence and gloom met there. One felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre. One looked at it and spoke low.' The only reason for this extraordinary chapter is a homage to the June insurgents, to their cause and their courage (‘“The cowards!” people said. “Let them show themselves. Let us see them! They dare not! They are hiding!” The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days . . . Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there.'). And Hugo delivers, as a confession, his feeling about his own role in June: ‘This is one of the rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.'

It is this Hugo who would play such a major role in the resistance to Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état. A price was put on his head, which did not displease him, as he held it his duty to get himself killed during these
journées
. He says this briefly and without self-glorification: ‘He [Jules Simon, at the moment of the massacre on Boulevard Montmartre] stopped me. “Where are you going?” he asked me, “You'll get yourself killed. What do you want, then?” “Just this,” I said. We shook hands and I continued to advance.' But due to an error of timing, it was Baudin who died in his place on the barricade of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. That is what would always haunt him; Baudin was his other self.

Dark as a December night, without the accusing rhetoric of
The Chastisements
or
Napoleon the Little, The History of a Crime
can be read at three different levels. The first is that of a historical description of the events of 2
^nd
to 6
^th
December 1851. The starting point (‘The Ambush') is one of surprise: the rumour of a coup d'état has been going for so long that no one still believes it. ‘People laughed at the notion. They no longer said “What a crime!”
but “What a farce!”'
¹⁶⁸
But on the night of 1 December, regiments that had gone over to Bonaparte took up positions around the Assembly. The prefect of police summoned the forty-eight police commissioners of Paris: ‘It was a question of arresting at their own homes seventy-eight Democrats who were influential in their districts, and dreaded by the Élysée as possible chieftains of barricades. It was necessary, a still more daring outrage, to arrest at their houses sixteen Representatives of the People.' The Imprimerie Nationale was requisitioned in order to print posters announcing the decree dissolving the Assembly: ‘The compositors were in waiting. Each man was placed between two gendarmes, and was forbidden to utter a single word, and then the documents which had to be printed were distributed throughout the room, being cut up in very small pieces, so that an entire sentence could not be read by one workman.' At six in the morning, the troops began to mass on the Place de la Concorde. The arrested deputies and the tricolour republican generals, the killers of June 1848 – Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Bedeau – crossed the deserted city in a police van en route to the prison of Mazas, ‘a lofty reddish building, close to the terminus of the Lyon railway, [which] stands on the waste land of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine'.

In the course of the morning, the troops invaded the Assembly and expelled the deputies. Some sixty representatives of the left, including Hugo, met in an apartment on Rue Blanche and proclaimed Bonaparte outside the law. The right, a larger group, met in its own headquarters, the
mairie
of the 10
^th
arrondissement, and voted the deposition of Bonaparte. (‘The decree of deposition taken up and countersigned by us added weight to this outlawry, and completed the revolutionary act by the legal act . . . Some of those men who were termed “men of order” muttered while signing the degree of deposition, “Beware of the Red Republic!” and seemed to entertain an equal fear of failure and of success.') The Vincennes chasseurs came and took away the two hundred and twenty representatives – Hugo gives a list of names – from the
mairie
to the Orsay barracks. ‘Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and the February revolution.'
¹⁶⁹
During this time, the left deputies, who had spent the whole day wandering from one refuge to another, decided to raise the Faubourg Saint-Germain the next day. (‘The evening wore a threatening aspect. Groups were formed on the Boulevards. As night advanced they grew larger and became mobs,
which speedily mingled together, and only formed one crowd. An enormous crowd, reinforced and agitated by tributary currents from the side streets, jostling one against another, surging, stormy, and whence ascended an ominous hum.') The following day (‘The Massacre'), ‘Louis Bonaparte had not slept. During the night he had given mysterious orders; then when morning came there was on this pale face a sort of appalling serenity.' The centre of Paris, the Marais, the Saint-Honoré quarter and that of Les Halles were covered with barricades. The coup d'état seemed to be stalling. But suddenly in the afternoon there was carnage on Boulevard Montmartre. (‘In the twinkling of an eye there was butchery on the boulevard a quarter of a league long . . . A whole quarter of Paris was filled with an immense flying mass, and with a terrible cry. Everywhere sudden death. A man is expecting nothing. He falls . . . To be in the street is a Crime, to be at home is a Crime. The butchers enter the houses and slaughter . . . One brigade killed the passers-by from the Madeleine to the Opéra [Rue Le Peletier], another from the Opéra to the Gymnase; another from Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle to the Porte Saint-Denis; the 75th of the line having carried the barricade of the Porte Saint-Denis, it was no longer a fight, it was a slaughter. The massacre radiated – a word horribly true – from the boulevard into all the streets . . . Flight? Why? Concealment? To what purpose? Death ran after you quicker than you could fly.') The fourth day (‘The Victory') saw the end of a hopeless struggle, the death of Denis Dussoubs at a barricade on Rue du Cadran, the continuation of massacres and pursuit, the prisoners piled up – yet again – in the Tuileries cellars, below the terrace along the waterfront (‘They called to mind that in June, 1848, a great number of insurgents had been shut up there, and later on had been transported'), from where three hundred and thirty-seven would be taken out the next day to be shot in the courtyard of the École Militaire.