1848 (31 page)

The greatest tragedy of the French revolution of 1848 then followed. The build-up to the agony of the June days began when the Executive Commission closed down the Luxembourg Commission, which had, it was alleged, ‘spread the poison of their theories'
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among the unemployed in the public works. Preparations were then made to disband the National Workshops: they were put under investigation from 20 May. A committee of inquiry found that they employed a hair-raising 115,000 people and argued that they were a threat to social order, an assumption given some weight by the fact that three-quarters of the demonstrators on 15 May were National Workshop employees. The royalist Comte de Falloux, a member of the commission, concluded that the public works were ‘from the perspective of industry, nothing less than a permanent strike costing 170,000 francs a day . . . from a political point of view, the active source of menacing agitation'.
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In what was widely regarded as a first step towards closing them down, their manager, Émile Thomas, was dismissed on 27 May. The moderates seemed to be ready for a final reckoning with the radical left. The new prefect of police reported that ‘all the citizens who have industrial or commercial interests prefer a violent confrontation to letting things drag on . . . It is said that, when faced with all the various abuses resulting from the National Workshops, the government should have taken decisive steps.'
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On 20 June the National Assembly finally took the widely anticipated and much-feared step and dissolved the National Workshops, ordering that the workers be either drafted into the army, or sent to drain marshes in the Sologne.

The response of the unemployed was immediate: ‘Work,' wrote the foremen of the workshops, ‘who will give it to us if not the state at a time when industry has everywhere closed its workshops, shops and factories?'
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There were demonstrations every night on the boulevards, demanding not only the ‘right to work' but a democratic and social republic. They also called for the shady figure of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. These protests gathered momentum until Thursday 22 June, when two columns of protesters - totalling eight hundred people - marched through Paris. They shouted that they would not be sent to the Sologne and would take up arms against the National Assembly. From their chants, it was clear that they expected support from the Mobile Guard (
garde mobile
), which was recruited from young, unemployed men shortly after the February revolution, partly to counterbalance Caussidière's well-drilled police force. There were also cries of ‘Napoleon forever! We won't go!' After midday, the two crowds dispersed, but they agreed to reassemble on the square outside the Panthéon at 6 p.m. Within an hour of the appointed time, the space was crammed with some five thousand agitated workers, who set off, again in two columns, to rally the working-class suburbs of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel to the south and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine across the river to the east. By nine o'clock, police estimated that the latter column alone numbered between eight and ten thousand people. This overwhelming mass of protesters then regrouped once more at the Panthéon. Flaubert's friend Maxime du Camp was walking home that night when he heard an ominous noise ‘from the depths of the rue Saint-Jacques, drowned in darkness':

 

The social fear shrouded the city. The massive crowd gathered below the darkened dome of the Panthéon and listened to delegates from the National Workshops, including one named Louis Pujol - who told them to prepare for the following day. By 11 p.m., the workers had dispersed, but only to gather their strength for the collision to come.
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The authorities were well aware that the protests were gathering pace, but they did little to stop them. Caussidière went so far as to ask: ‘did they allow the riot to grow in order to destroy the worker insurgents in one blow?'
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None other than Karl Marx, writing shortly after the events, claimed that, after the insurrection of 15 May, the National Assembly was bent on a final resolution: ‘
Il faut en finir!
This situation must end! With this cry the National Assembly gave vent to its determination to force the proletariat into a decisive struggle.' For Marx, the Assembly's decisions regarding the workers were deliberately provocative.
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It does seem that the decree dissolving the National Workshops was hasty: even the liberal monarchist newspaper
Le Constitutionnel
- no great supporter of the public works - baldly stated on 23 June that ‘more effort could have been made . . . to prepare opinion for the announcement; more prudence could have been shown'. It specifically criticised the government for issuing the decree without any attempt to reassure those affected.
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It is true, as Caussidière and Marx suggested, that the insurrection was given time and space to develop. But this was probably not due to any desire to have a bloody collision with the left. Although there were certainly plenty of conservatives who relished the prospect of settling scores, when the insurrection gathered momentum the most outspoken opponent of the workshops, the Comte de Falloux, tried to rush through parliament a package of welfare reforms; hardly the action of a man hell-bent on confrontation.
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Rather, the initial space given to the uprising was the price of the authorities' strategy for dealing with the anticipated protests. The lessons of February 1848 had been that when troops or militia were used as police - dispersed in small detachments to keep order on the streets and prevent the construction of barricades - the insurgents easily isolated and disarmed them. The minister of war, General Louis Eugène Cavaignac, who had put the Paris military garrison on a state of alert at noon on 22 June, therefore intended to deal with any insurrection by concentrating his forces in three strong columns, each with infantry, artillery, National Guards and the Mobile Guard. These would smash their way into the heartlands of the uprising from the outside. All this may have made sense from a military perspective, but, as Alexander Herzen later despairingly cried, ‘At that moment everything could still have been prevented - the republic saved - and with it the freedom of Europe; there was still time to make peace . . . But the stupid and clumsy government did not know how to do this.'
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Early in the morning of 23 June, some seven to eight thousand workers marched unopposed on to the Place de la Bastille, where Pujol, seizing on the symbolism of the location, called on the workers to bare their heads and kneel ‘at the tomb of the first martyrs of liberty'. His stern voice carried across the respectful silence: ‘The revolution is to begin anew,' he told the sea of bowed heads. ‘Friends, our cause is that of our fathers. They carried on their banners these words: Liberty or Death. - Friends!
Liberty or Death!
'
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The crowd arose and thundered back: ‘Liberty or death!' Pujol solemnly led the crowd to begin its work of building barricades. ‘I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them,' wrote Herzen later. He passed by some workers joining a student in singing ‘The Marseillaise': ‘the chorus of the great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one's soul', but, ominously, the Russian socialist could also hear the clatter of artillery being moved across the river. He saw General Bedeau scanning the ‘enemy' positions with his field-glasses.
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By the end of the day, almost all of eastern Paris was held by the insurgents, whose numbers have been estimated at somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000, as against 25,000 regular troops and the 15,000-strong Mobile Guard. Many of the members of this latter militia were pitifully green - some no more than sixteen years old. As it was recruited from among the same unemployed workers as the insurgents themselves, few people believed that it would be reliable. The National Guard, democratised under the Second Republic, had been swollen to an impressive 237,000, but the thoroughly frightened rank and file proved less than courageous in their response to the call to arms.
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Maxime du Camp was one of the few who joined his battalion: many of his comrades, he charitably put it years later, ‘pushed prudence to excess'.
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In fact, the more middle-class units (which tended to be based in the westernmost districts of the city) were the most likely to see their members respond to the drum beat. The units from the central districts, with their substantial population of master-craftsmen and shopkeepers, were severely thinned by an ‘excess of prudence'. Their reluctance to fight did not indicate cowardice but rather reflected their social position: this lower middle class had been severely affected by the economic crisis and, while having a stake in law and order, it had no desire to get enmeshed in a struggle against people who were often their customers, employees and neighbours. Of 64,000 National Guards from the central arrondissements, only 4,000 turned out. Meanwhile, thousands of men from the legions of the working-class eastern districts actually defected to the insurgents. Of the 7,000 National Guards in Belleville, 3,000 joined the uprising. The balance, therefore, was not necessarily tipped in the government's favour.

There were last-ditch efforts at mediation. François Arago stood before the barricade on the rue Soufflot near the Panthéon, trying to persuade the insurgents to stand down. The bitter reply showed that the barricade was not just a military fortification but could symbolise the great social division within the republican movement: ‘Monsieur Arago, we are full of respect for you, but you have no right to reproach us. You have never been hungry. You don't know what poverty is.'
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Arago sadly withdrew, convinced that ‘force must decide'.

The first deaths came at noon on 23 June, when the barricade at the Porte Saint-Denis was attacked by National Guards. It is said that two beautiful prostitutes hoisted up their skirts and, taunting the troops with obscenities, dared them to fire. They were immediately cut down in a hail of bullets.
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The National Guards managed to overcome the defences, but only after losing thirty men in some bitter fighting.

In the end the government prevailed over the insurrection because it had superior firepower. Lamartine, who joined the fighting at twilight, saw the cannon sent by Cavaignac levelling the fortifications in the north-eastern Faubourg du Temple. He counted ‘four hundred brave men, killed or mutilated, [who] strewed the faubourg'. It was carnage. Cavaignac himself supervised the successful attack on one particularly stubborn barricade on the rue Saint-Maur. In his absence none other than Ledru-Rollin - no socialist, but certainly a left-wing republican - had telegraphed the provinces on his behalf asking for the help of their National Guard units against the uprising. This was ample illustration of how sharply the republicans were divided over the June days and how isolated the insurgents were even from those who might have sympathised with their plight. Ledru-Rollin's appeal would be met with an instant and enthusiastic response. The opportunity - if any ever really existed - for conciliation had rapidly passed. When the socialists Louis Blanc and Victor Considérant proposed appealing to the rebels to put down their weapons, they were silenced by a deputy who roared: ‘One doesn't reason with insurgents, one defeats them!'
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That night, many deputies slept fitfully in the chamber, where Cavaignac also established his headquarters.

When the National Assembly reconvened at 8 a.m., some of these bleary-eyed and shaken politicians suggested a withdrawal of the legislature to the suburban palace of Saint-Cloud. The more pusillanimous - or alarmist - deputies even suggested a wholesale flight to Bourges. The foreign minister, Jules Bastide, confided to the British ambassador, the Marquis of Normanby, that no member of the government could be sure that they would live to see the end of this day. Tocqueville hastily scribbled a note to his wife, advising her to leave the city.
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In this atmosphere of near panic significant numbers of deputies - republican and monarchist alike - agreed that strong government was needed to weather the crisis. Cavaignac was the obvious candidate. An experienced soldier of impeccably republican credentials of the
National
ilk, he was seen by his fellow moderates as a saviour who would protect the republic against the double-headed serpent of social revolution and royalism.

Even the monarchist deputies, assembled in their club on the rue de Poitiers, backed the general, perhaps seeing in authoritarianism the prelude to the destruction of the Second Republic and the first step towards bringing back the monarchy. At 10 a.m., the thoroughly frightened Assembly - after a mere twenty-five minutes of debate - invested Cavaignac with executive power. This meant he had absolute military authority in the capital, but he was also virtual dictator of France. Preoccupied with the insurrection, though, he kept on the existing ministers, although the Executive Commission was dissolved and a state of siege declared in Paris. Maxime du Camp recalled the deep impression that this last decree made: ‘we sensed that we were about to follow a serious, unique and determined direction'. The normally jostling Paris boulevards were now ‘a desert . . . here and there several stray dogs ran off, as if they themselves were frightened by so much solitude'.
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