บทที่ บทที่ 270 · 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-cochères, 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 Nonaindières, 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 moustaches 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 Jeûneurs, 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 Grève, 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

Vieilles-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 Cimitière-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 Café du Progrèss, or

descended to the Café 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 Maubuée, 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-Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant,

where was visible a porte-cochère torn from its hinges; another near

the little bridge of the Hôtel-Dieu made with an “écossais,” which had

been unharnessed and overthrown, three hundred paces from the

Prefecture of Police.

At the barricade of the Rue des Ménétriers, 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 cætera.” 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

Château-d’Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,

the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pélagie, 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-Pères 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

Michel-le-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 manœuvres 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.