Bab Bab 300 · THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA O

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’état_ 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 façade; 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 cesspool 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 Château-d’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 biscaïen 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-cochères 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, Barthélemy, 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, Barthélemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine

barricade; Barthélemy 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.

Barthélemy, 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, Barthélemy

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, Barthélemy

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.

Barthélemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.