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_ 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. _
Read next: VOLUME V: BOOK FIRST - THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS: CHAPTER II. What Is to Be Done in the Abyss if One Does Not Converse
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME: CHAPTER IV. Gavroche's Excess of Zeal
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