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THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out
of a riot. Everything bursts forth everywhere at once.
Was it foreseen? Yes.
Was it prepared?
No. Whence comes it?
From the pavements. Whence falls it?
From the clouds.
Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there of
an improvisation.
The first comer seizes a current of the throng and leads it
whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is mingled
a sort of formidable gayety.
First come clamors, the shops are closed, the displays of
the merchants disappear; then come isolated shots; people flee;
blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres, servants can
be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying: "There's
going to be a row!"
A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was
taking place at twenty different spots in Paris at once.
In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men,
bearded and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a
moment later, carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with
crape, and having at their head three men armed, one with a sword,
one with a gun, and the third with a pike.
In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois,
who had a prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty
brow, a black beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will
not lie flat, offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.
In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried
about a black flag, on which could be read in white letters this
inscription: "Republic or Death!"
In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue Montorgueil, Rue
Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be distinguished
in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of these
flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.
They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the
second in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple.
In a few minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and
carried off two hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled,
sixty-four swords, and eighty-three pistols.
In order to provide more arms, one man took the gun, the other
the bayonet.
Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets
installed themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose
of firing. One of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and
set about making cartridges.
One of these women relates:
"I did not know what cartridges were; it was my husband
who told me."
One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vielles
Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.
The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay
in the Rue de la Perle.
And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on
the boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles,
panting men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations
and shouted:
"To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones,
rough slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.
They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this.
They entered the dwellings of women, they forced them to hand
over the swords and guns of their absent husbands, and they wrote
on the door, with whiting: "The arms have been delivered";
some signed "their names" to receipts for the guns and
swords and said:
"Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's office."
They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in
the streets on their way to the Townhall.
They tore the epaulets from officers.
In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the
National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and
foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only
able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.
In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of
their hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe
du Progress, or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the
Rue des Mathurins. There, in front of the door, young men mounted
on the stone corner-posts, distributed arms.
They plundered the timber-yard in the Rue Transnonain in order
to obtain material for barricades. On a single point the inhabitants
resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc,
where they destroyed the barricade with their own hands.
At a single point the insurgents yielded; they abandoned a
barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on a detachment
of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la Corderie.
The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a package
of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National Guardsmen
tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.
All that we are here relating slowly and successively took
place simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of
a vast tumult, like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap
of thunder. In less than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang
out of the earth in the quarter of the Halles alone.
In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which was the
fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which,
flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on
the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets,
the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher,
which it faced.
The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the Rue
Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin
on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable barricades
in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Genevieve;
one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible a porte cochere
torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of the Hotel-Dieu
made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed
and overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.
At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed
man distributed money to the workmen.
At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat, a horseman made his
appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be the commander
of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of silver.
"Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses,
wine, et caetera."
A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade
to barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword,
a blue police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior,
beyond the barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were
converted into guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted
after the most scientific military tactics. The narrow, uneven,
sinuous streets, full of angles and turns, were admirably chosen;
the neighborhood of the Halles, in particular, a network of streets
more intricate than a forest.
The Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said,
undertaken to direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye.
A man killed in the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his
person a plan of Paris.
That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising
was a sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection
had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other
seized nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three
hours, like a train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had
invaded and occupied, on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty
of the Place Royale, the whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms
manufactory, la Galiote, the Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets
near the Halles; on the left bank, the barracks of the Veterans,
Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the powder magazine of the
Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five o'clock in the evening,
they were masters of the Bastille, of the Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux;
their scouts had reached the Place des Victoires, and menaced
the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks, and the Post-Office. A third
of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.
The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points;
and, as a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers'
shops hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with
the throwing of stones was continued with gun-shots.
About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became
the field of battle.
The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.
They fired from one gate to the other.
An observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone
to get a near view of this volcano, found himself in the passage
between the two fires. All that he had to protect him from the
bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which separate the
shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly half
an hour.
Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard
armed in haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the
regiments from their barracks.
Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a blow
from a dagger.
Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty young
men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword.
Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the
Rue-Michelle-Comte, three officers fell dead one after the other.
Many of the Municipal Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue
des Lombards, retreated.
In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards
found a red flag bearing the following inscription:
Republican revolution, No. 127.
Was this a revolution, in fact?
The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of
inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.
There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question.
All the rest was nothing but skirmishes.
The proof that all would be decided there lay in the fact
that there was no fighting going on there as yet.
In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added
to the fearful uncertainty of the crisis.
They recalled the popular ovation which had greeted the neutrality
of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and
General Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous
patrols, composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire
companies of the National Guard, and preceded by a commissary
of police wearing his scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the
streets in rebellion.
The insurgents, on their side, placed videttes at the corners
of all open spaces, and audaciously sent their patrols outside
the barricades.
Each side was watching the other. The Government, with an
army in its hand, hesitated; the night was almost upon them, and
the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make itself heard.
The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had seen
Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.
These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having
as resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are
utterly disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which
is called public wrath.
The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and
disorder. A battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis,
the 14th of the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of
the Military School had taken up their position on the Carrousel;
cannons were descending from Vincennes.
Solitude was formed around the Tuileries.
Louis Philippe was perfectly serene.
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