1848 (32 page)

The government forces, supported by cannon, pressed on with the grim work of reducing the barricades to splinter and rubble. Du Camp's National Guard unit was hurled against a barricade in the northern suburb of the Faubourg Poissonnière through a maelstrom of spinning metal: ‘bullets fell so thickly around us, and with such a repeated, shrill noise, that I remember stopping and looking at the ground . . . the paving stones were marked with brilliant, blue, metallic spots, traces of lead which grazed them as they drew new momentum'. In this hornets' nest du Camp shuddered with ‘a violent shock to my leg, as if I had been hit with a thick whalebone cane'. His lower leg had been splintered and his boot filled with blood. With masterful understatement, he recalled that it made him feel ‘melancholic'.
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It is harder to piece together the experience of the struggle from the insurgents' perspective. In the first place, many of them were killed - in both the fighting and the repression that followed - while others simply wanted to escape the brutal retribution that came after and, having managed to melt away, kept quiet. Those insurgents whose voices were heard were mostly recorded in the distinctly unsympathetic surroundings of magistracy interrogation cells. Unsurprisingly, most of the captive insurgents were coy about their role in the uprising and their political commitment. One accused claimed that, having been plied with drink, he was led to a barricade by the insurgents and told to shoot. ‘Hell,' the insurgent claimed to have replied, ‘who at?' When asked why he eventually fired at the forces of order, he pleaded, ‘I was carried away, like lots of others. The ones who wouldn't go along with them got called idlers and were maltreated . . . A man like me up from the country, who had never heard these things talked about, had never seen anything, and who couldn't read or write - a man like me is easily led astray.'
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It is, of course, entirely plausible that some insurgents were press-ganged or misled, but such testimony should be treated with caution. Those captured faced the possibility of death, transportation or imprisonment - reason enough to play down one's commitment to the uprising. The leadership of the insurrection, meanwhile, was unabashed in giving political reasons for its inception. One leader, who had been imprisoned under the July Monarchy for his political activities, explained bluntly to his interrogators what he meant by a ‘social Republic': ‘I mean a republic with social reforms . . . free and compulsory education and the organisation of work through association; . . . that the worker receives the product of his labour, a proportion of which is at present taken away from him by the man who provides the capital.'
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The rank and file did not lack political influences, either. After 15 May delegates from the abolished Luxembourg Commission had made contact with the elected representatives of the National Workshops and, along with the clubs, they held a common ideology in the call for a ‘democratic and social republic'.
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It was just that, among the mass of the insurgents, the meaning of the term was far from clear. Furthermore, many still cried out for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon's enigmatic heir, who had been elected to the National Assembly on 4 June and was regarded by some as the people's champion.

The insurgents were well aware of republican and socialist rhetoric, but they often used it only loosely to give expression to their far deeper social distress. This was illustrated by the interrogation of Louis Bocquet, an unemployed hat-maker who had found sustenance in the National Workshops. He had been captured while wielding a sabre on a barricade near the Pont Saint-Michel (agonisingly close to the Palais de Justice, which probably explains the prosecutor's zeal in questioning him). While he admitted only that he had once attended a political club, he made no bones about the fact that he and others planned to ‘raise and defend the barricades in order to name [parliamentary] representatives who would perhaps be nobler or who might have done their duty better'. Having admitted this much - which was already enough to condemn him, as the prosecutor certainly thought - one might have expected him then to expand defiantly on his
démoc-soc
motives, but he revealed little else other than stating simply that ‘our rights [were] being repressed'. When pushed, Bocquet's main concern appeared to have been that ‘the workers should not leave Paris and it was a result of that resolution . . . that I did all that I could to prevent them from going'.
⁴¹
For many workers, the National Workshops comprised one of the few meaningful gains of the February revolution, and these were torn from them: it was this, rather than any fully developed
démoc-soc
ideology which gave the uprising its rather blunt political edge. In his memoirs, Caussidière hit the mark when he called the June days ‘that insurrection of despair'.
⁴²
The insurgents were drawn not only from those workers disbanded from the National Workshops but from among those fifty or sixty thousand who had arrived in Paris seeking to learn a trade or, failing that, to find assistance in the public works, but who had been turned away from both, the first because of the economic downturn, the second because of the rules that no migrants from the provinces were to be admitted. Their participation in the uprising was an expression of their desperation and resentment. The strong presence among the insurgents of these poorest and most deprived of all workers also explains why so many of those arrested had addresses in the worst slums. This bleak landscape of social despair is compounded by the fact that a large number of those who joined the uprising were married, older workers with children, whose families would suffer enormously if they lost a husband or father to death, prison or exile. Their presence on the barricades indicated the depth of distress.
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Moreover, the uprising did not secure political leadership from sympathisers within the institutions of the Second Republic. Neither the clubs (under pressure since 15 May) nor the parliamentary leadership of the republican left (many of whom had already been arrested or cowed) put themselves at the head of the uprising. So while there were some sympathetic noises coming from the radical politicians, no one who was either close to the centre of power or at the forefront of the radical revolutionary movement was willing to make sincere efforts on the insurgents' behalf. On the contrary, on 23 June, Louis Blanc tried to persuade them to stand down: ‘the counter-revolution has been sighing for an opportunity to crush [the Second Republic] . . . defeat is almost certain; nothing is primed for success'.
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He later stated that the political clubs were thrown into utter confusion and that among the socialist newspapers there ‘reigned a poignant uncertainty'.
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In fact, much of the left was caught off guard. Among them was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the great anarchist thinkers (and later a friend and associate of Herzen), who had just been voted into the National Assembly (in the same round of by-elections in which Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and Victor Hugo secured their seats), largely thanks to working-class Parisian votes. But the June days, from which he remained aloof, showed how out of touch Proudhon was with his constituents. ‘No, Monsieur Sénard', he frankly declaimed later to the president of the National Assembly, ‘I was not a coward in June, as you have said in insulting me in front of the Assembly; I was, like you and so many others, an imbecile.'
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Blanc probably expressed the views of most of the socialist politicians when he wrote: ‘I was consternated. What side should I take? I thought the best thing to do was go to the Assembly, where I could at least be of some use in opposing violent measures which by their nature would aggravate or complicate the situation.'
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This was the furthest that most socialist politicians dared go.

The fighting continued into Sunday 25 June. A tragic casualty that day was Monseigneur Affre, the archbishop of Paris, who tried to intercede: he courageously stood in front of the barricade that blocked the entrance to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, clutching copies of a conciliatory proclamation that Cavaignac, at the urging of both Caussidière and Sénard in the National Assembly, had drafted that morning. As Affre spoke, firing inexplicably erupted, and a bullet from the government side tore through his body. As he died, he uttered, ‘May my blood be the last to be shed', then passed from this world into conservative iconography as a martyr, a victim of revolutionary brutality. Atrocities were certainly committed: as he tried to dislodge the last resistance centred on a formidable barricade on the Place d'Italie, General Jean de Bréa tried to parley, but he was seized and taken prisoner by the insurgents. When asked for advice on how to deal with this particular crisis, Cavaignac's chilling response was: ‘The Republic cannot be sacrificed for the life of an imprudent general.'
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While the barricade was stormed, nothing could save Bréa's life: the insurgents had heard rumours (which were only too true) that the Mobile Guards were executing prisoners and, in retaliation, they had already shot the general and his aide-de-camp dead.

The newspapers multiplied the scale and magnified the horror of such atrocities. The liberal, monarchist
Constitutionnel
told its readers that

 

Provincial newspapers, which drew much of their information from the Parisian broadsheets, reprinted these stories as fact. That such tales were widely believed illustrated the depth of the divisions that had opened up in French society: between rich and poor, moderate and radical, Parisian and provincial. It was but a short step from demonising the insurgents to arguing that the street-fighting was nothing less than a struggle between ‘anarchy' and ‘civilisation'. On 29 June,
Le National
gave its verdict: ‘on one side there stood order, liberty, civilisation, the decent Republic, France; and on the other, barbarians, desperados emerging from their lairs for massacre and looting'.
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Yet, while the insurgents certainly committed some atrocities, the forces of order similarly killed captured rebels in cold blood or (to use the official parlance) while the prisoners were ‘attempting to escape'.
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Estimates of those summarily slaughtered range from a conservative 150 to a socialist 3,000 (the guess of Karl Marx): the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Most of these killings were by the vengeful civilian militias, the Mobile Guard and the National Guard, rather than the regular army, whose officers did their best to protect the prisoners. Unlike the mass executions that followed the Communard uprising of 1871, they do not seem to have been official policy. Rather, Marx claimed that ‘the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it underwent by unheard of brutality'.
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One of Flaubert's characters, old Monsieur Roque, volunteering with the provincial National Guard, relishes his sentry duty outside the lock-up that lay beneath the riverside terrace of the Tuileries. The prisoners, ‘packed together chaotically in the filth, black with powder and coagulated blood, shaking with fever and shouting with rage', beg for bread. Roque's response is to fire his musket into the seething mass of humanity.
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At least 1,500 workers lay dead and some 11,727 more were arrested and held in hastily improvised jails while awaiting transportation or imprisonment. Some 6,000 were released within a few days, others were freed in a trickle over the next couple of years, and 468 were eventually deported to Algeria. Paris hospitals admitted 2,529 wounded people, but there were probably considerably more men and women who tried to tend to their wounds at home, for fear of capture. On the government side, the army, the National Guard and Mobile Guard lost over nine hundred men. For those on the left, the June days were the ‘victory of reaction'. Caussidière bristled at the ‘theatrical' celebrations of the moderates in the National Assembly ‘while they were gathering the dead in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine'.
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The insurrection gave the left its martyrs. In the evening of 26 June Herzen and his friends

 

In this antagonistic climate it was natural for onlookers, some fearfully, others hopefully, to see the June days as a class conflict. Tocqueville later wrote:

 

He claimed that the June insurrection was different from all other uprisings since 1789 because ‘its aim was not to change the form of government, but to alter the social order. It was not, in truth, a political struggle . . . but a class conflict, a sort of “servile war”.'
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From the other side, Marx - naturally - agreed that the June days amounted to a class struggle: it was ‘the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was joined between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order.'
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It is true that one of the main consequences of the June days was to sharpen antagonisms, but not necessarily those that existed between strictly defined ‘proletarian' and ‘bourgeois' classes. The insurgents were mostly craft workers in the small-scale, artisan trades such as tailoring, shoemaking, furniture-making and metalworking, but there were also clerks and shopkeepers - a lower middle class that made up some 10 per cent of those arrested. Large numbers of unskilled workers and builders fought too, as did some workers from modern industrial plants, such as railway workshops. The wide social base of the revolt indicates the extent of the economic distress that was shared by so many people in the mid-century crisis.
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