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_ In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all
minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation
an indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long
been ripe for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles
a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark
to fall, and the shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark
was the death of General Lamarque.
Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,
under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field
and the bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had
been valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy,
his predecessor, after upholding the command, he upheld liberty;
he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of the people
because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the
populace because he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company
with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of Napoleon's marshals in petto.
The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence. He hated
Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude;
and, for seventeen years, he majestically preserved the sadness
of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to intervening events.
In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword
which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days.
Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the
word country.
His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss,
and by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction.
Like everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt.
This is what took place.
On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June,
the day appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
which the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect.
This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors.
They armed themselves as best they might. Joiners carried off
door-weights of their establishment "to break down doors." One of them
had made himself a dagger of a stocking-weaver's hook by breaking
off the hook and sharpening the stump. Another, who was in a fever
"to attack," slept wholly dressed for three days. A carpenter named
Lombier met a comrade, who asked him: "Whither are you going?"
"Eh! well, I have no weapons." "What then?" "I'm going to my
timber-yard to get my compasses." "What for?" "I don't know,"
said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted some
passing artisans: "Come here, you!" He treated them to ten sous'
worth of wine and said: "Have you work?" "No." "Go to Filspierre,
between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you
will find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms.
Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say,
running from one house to another, to collect their men.
At Barthelemy's, near the Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the
Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air.
They were heard to say: "Have you your pistol?" "Under my blouse."
"And you?" "Under my shirt." In the Rue Traversiere, in front
of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulee,
in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered together.
Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained more than
a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him "because
they were obliged to dispute with him every day." Mavot was killed
on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant.
Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle,
seconded Mavot, and to the question: "What is your object?"
he replied: "Insurrection." Workmen assembled at the corner of
the Rue de Bercy, waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary
agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged
almost publicly.
On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun,
General Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official
military pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions,
with draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards,
with their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin.
The hearse was drawn by young men. The officers of the Invalides
came immediately behind it, bearing laurel branches. Then came
an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the sectionaries of the
Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of
all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish flags,
tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of banner,
children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who were
on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their
paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries,
nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres,
without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout,
again a column. Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed
with a pair of pistols in full view, seemed to pass the host
in review, and the files separated before him. On the side alleys
of the boulevards, in the branches of the trees, on balconies,
in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men, women, and children;
all eyes were filled with anxiety. An armed throng was passing,
and a terrified throng looked on.
The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed
with its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could
be seen in the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their
trumpets at their head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded,
all in readiness to march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin
des Plantes, the Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street;
at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Greve half
of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille;
the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre
full of artillery. The remainder of the troops were confined
to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the environs
of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing
multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty
thousand in the banlieue.
Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege. Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked
out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating
him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained unknown,
announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people.
That which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority
of those present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection.
Here and there, also, in that multitude given over to such violent
but noble emotions, there were visible genuine visages of criminals
and ignoble mouths which said: "Let us plunder!" There are certain
agitations which stir up the bottoms of marshes and make clouds
of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to which "well drilled"
policemen are no strangers.
The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house
of the deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille.
It rained from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng.
Many incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column,
stones thrown at the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony
with his hat on his head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag
and dragged in the mire, a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword
at the Porte Saint-Martin, an officer of the 12th Light Infantry
saying aloud: "I am a Republican," the Polytechnic School coming
up unexpectedly against orders to remain at home, the shouts of:
"Long live the Polytechnique! Long live the Republic!" marked the
passage of the funeral train. At the Bastille, long files of curious
and formidable people who descended from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
effected a junction with the procession, and a certain terrible
seething began to agitate the throng.
One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that fellow with a
red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire."
It appears that this red beard was present, at another riot,
the Quenisset affair, entrusted with this same function.
The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted.
The crowd, surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have
presented the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and
whose tail spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille,
and was prolonged on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A
circle was traced around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace.
Lafayette spoke and bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching
and august instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.
All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance
in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
Exelmans quitted the procession.
This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it.
From the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of
those clamors which resemble billows stirred the multitude.
Two prodigious shouts went up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--
Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young men, amid the declamations
of the throng, harnessed themselves and began to drag Lamarque
in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and Lafayette in a
hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.
In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was
noticed that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died
a centenarian afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776,
and who had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine
under Lafayette.
In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set
in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland.
The men who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of
them at the corner of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!"
The dragoons advanced at a walk, in silence, with their pistols
in their holsters, their swords in their scabbards, their guns slung
in their leather sockets, with an air of gloomy expectation.
They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage
in which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and
allowed it to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment
the dragoons and the crowd touched. The women fled in terror.
What took place during that fatal minute? No one can say.
It is the dark moment when two clouds come together. Some declare
that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was heard in the direction
of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger was given by a child
to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were suddenly discharged:
the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron, the second killed
an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her window,
the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed:
"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron
of dragoons which had remained in the barracks up to this time,
was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue
Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.
Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down,
a fusillade breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom
of the bank, and pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in,
the timber-yards of the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand,
bristle with combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired,
a barricade begun, the young men who are thrust back pass the
Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run, and the municipal guard,
the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their swords, the crowd
disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to all four
quarters of Paris, men shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down,
flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK TENTH - THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832: CHAPTER IV. The Ebullitions of Former Days
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK TENTH - THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832: CHAPTER II. The Root of the Matter
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