3.V.1.1. 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 Chateau-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 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.