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THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA
OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
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.
These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different
aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at
the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest
war of the streets that history has ever beheld.
It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even
contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to
the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for
all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and
its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas,
of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing
body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages
battle against, the people.
Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against
demos.
These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount
of night even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel,
and those words which are intended to be insults-- beggars, canaille,
ochlocracy, populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those
who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather the fault
of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited.
For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain
and without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to
which they correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these
miseries. Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making
of Holland; the populace saved Rome more than once; and the rabble
followed Jesus Christ.
There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the
magnificences of the lower classes.
It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt,
and of all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these
miserable people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when
he uttered this mysterious saying:
"Fex urbis, lex orbis,"-- the dregs of the city,
the law of the earth.
The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds,
its violences contrary to all sense, directed against the principles
which are its life, its masterful deeds against the right, are
its popular coups d'etat and should be repressed.
The man of probity sacrifices himself, and out of his very
love for this crowd, he combats it.
But how excusable he feels it even while holding out against
it!
How he venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of
those 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.
June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact,
and almost impossible of classification, in the philosophy of
history. All the words which we have just uttered, must be discarded,
when it becomes a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which
one feels the holy anxiety of toil claiming its rights.
It was necessary to combat it, and this was a duty, for it
attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848, at bottom?
A revolt of the people against itself.
Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression;
may we, then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for
a moment on the two absolutely unique barricades of which we have
just spoken and which characterized this insurrection.
One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the
other defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before
whom these two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves
beneath the brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories
high, and seven hundred feet wide.
It barred the vast opening of the faubourg, that is to say,
three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged, cut up, divided,
crenelated, 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 14th of July. Nineteen barricades were
ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets behind
this principal barricade.
At the very sight of it, one felt the agonizing suffering
in the immense faubourg, which had reached that point of extremity
when a distress may become a catastrophe.
Of what was that barricade made?
Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished expressly,
said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others.
It wore the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred,
ruin.
It might be asked: Who built this?
It might also be said:
Who destroyed this? It was the improvisation of the ebullition.
Hold! take this door! this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece!
this broken brazier! this cracked pot!
Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn,
ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the
block of stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap,
the broken pane, the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter,
the rag, and the malediction.
It was grand and it was petty.
It was the abyss parodied on the public place by hubbub.
The mass beside the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the
broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of every sort of rubbish.
Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his potsherd.
Terrible, in short.
It was the acropolis of the barefooted.
Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense
dray was spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward,
and seemed a scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted
gayly, by main force, to the very summit of the heap, as though
the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a touch
of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless,
unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air.
This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to
the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89, the
9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on
the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The
situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to
figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If
the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build. The fury
of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless mass. What flood?
The crowd.
One thought one beheld hubbub petrified. One thought one heard
humming above this barricade as though there had been over their
hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket?
Was it a bacchanalia?
Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with
blows of its wings. There was something of the cess-pool in that
redoubt and something Olympian in that confusion.
One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the rafters
of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper, window
sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the
cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the
very refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury
and nothingness.
One would have said that it was the tatters of a people, rags
of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish
of the broom making of its misery its barricade.
Blocks resembling headsman's blocks, dislocated chains, pieces
of woodwork with brackets having the form of gibbets, horizontal
wheels projecting from the rubbish, amalgamated with this edifice
of anarchy the sombre figure of the old tortures endured by the
people.
The barricade Saint Antoine converted everything into a weapon;
everything that civil war could throw at the head of society proceeded
thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm; the carbines which
defended this redoubt, among which there were some blunderbusses,
sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the casters
from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of the brass.
This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an inexpressible
clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it was covered
with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming heads
crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns,
of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast
red flag flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack,
the roll of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter
from the starving were to be heard there.
It was huge and living, and, like the back of an electric
beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The
spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where
rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of
God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish.
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the
revolution--what?
The revolution.
It--that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding,
the unknown-- had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty
of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic; and
it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.
The faubourg shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its
stand under cover of the faubourg.
The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the
strategy of the African generals dashed itself.
Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities,
grimaced, so to speak, and grinned beneath the smoke.
The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs plunged
into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it; what was
the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species
of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain
by its enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du
Temple which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau,
if one thrust one's head bodily beyond the point formed by the
front of the Dallemagne shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond
the canal, in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville
at the culminating point of the rise, a strange wall reaching
to the second story of the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between
the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as though
the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order
to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones.
It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the
square, laid out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course,
but, as in the case of certain Roman walls, without interfering
with its rigid architecture. The entablature was mathematically
parallel with the base. From distance to distance, one could distinguish
on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which resembled
black threads. These loopholes were separated from each other
by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the eye could
reach.
All windows and doors were closed.
In the background rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare
of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible,
nothing was audible; not a cry, not a sound, not a breath.
A sepulchre.
The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with
light.
It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it,
it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful
before this mysterious apparition.
It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical
and funereal.
Science 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.
From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative
of the people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint,
sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded,
or, if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to
ensconce itself in some closed shutter, in the interstice between
two blocks of stone, or in the plaster of a wall.
For the men in the barricade had made themselves two small
cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at
one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless
powder.
Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there,
and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly
which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres
were encumbered with wounded.
One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not
see, and one understood that guns were levelled at the whole length
of the street.
Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted
canal forms at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers
of the attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this
dismal redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang
death. Some crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of
the curve of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not
project beyond it.
The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with
a shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative.
"Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.
It is made of porcelain."--At that moment, a bullet broke
the cross on his breast, and he fell.
"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.
On the fourth, they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine,
they pierced the houses, they came over the roofs, the barricade
was taken.
Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were
killed there with the exception of the leader, Barthelemy, of
whom we shall speak presently.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the
barricade of the Temple was silence.
The difference between these two redoubts was the difference
between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw; the
other a mask.
Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June
was composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first
barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.
These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the
one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy.
Cournet made the Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy the barricade
of the Temple. Each was the image of the man who had built it.
Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders,
a red face, a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere
and terrible eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the
most cordial of men, the most formidable of combatants.
War, strife, conflict, were the very air he breathed and put
him in a good humor.
He had been an officer in the navy, and, from his gestures
and his voice, one divined that he sprang from the ocean, and
that he came from the tempest; he carried the hurricane on into
battle.
With the exception of the genius, there was in Cournet something
of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity, there was in
Danton something of Hercules.
Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic
street urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman,
lay in wait for him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent
to the galleys.
He came out and made this barricade.
Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all,
Barthelemy slew Cournet.
It was a funereal duel.
Some time afterwards, caught in the gearing of one of those
mysterious adventures in which passion plays a part, a catastrophe
in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances, and in
which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy was hanged.
The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy
being who possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly
great, began in France with the galleys, and ended in England
with the gallows.
Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.
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