THE EBULLITIONS OF OTHER DAYS.
Nothing is more extraordinary than the commencement of a riot, for everything breaks out everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it prepared? No. Where does it issue from? From the pavement. Where does it fall from? The clouds. At one spot the insurrection has the character of a plot, at another of an improvisation. The first-comer grasps a current of the mob and leads it whither he pleases. It is a beginning full of horror, with which a sort of formidable gayety is mingled. First there is a clamor; shops are closed, and the goods disappear from the tradesmen's windows; then dropping shots are heard; people fly; gateways are assailed with the butts of muskets, and servant-maids may be heard laughing in the yards of the houses and saying, "There's going to be a row."
A quarter of an hour had not elapsed: this is what was going on simultaneously at twenty different points of Paris. In the Rue St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, twenty young men, with beards and long hair, entered a wine-shop and came out a moment after carrying a horizontal tricolor flag covered with crape, and having at their head three men armed, one with a sabre, the second with a gun, and the third with a pike. In the Rue des Nonaindières, a well-dressed bourgeois, who had a large stomach, a sonorous voice, bald head, lofty forehead, black beard, and one of those rough moustaches which cannot be kept from bristling, publicly offered cartridges to passers-by. In the Rue St. Pierre Montmartre bare-armed men carried about a black flag, on which were read these words, in white letters: "Republic or death." In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue Montorgueil, and Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags, on which could be distinguished in gold letters the word "Section," with a number. One of these flags was red and blue, with an imperceptible parting line of white. A weapon factory in the Boulevard St. Martin and three gunsmiths' shops—the first in the Rue Beaubourg; the second, Rue Michel le Comte; and the third, Rue du Temple—were pillaged. In a few minutes the thousand hands of the mob seized and carried off two hundred and thirty guns nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four sabres, and eighty-three pistols. In order to arm as many persons as possible, one took the musket, the other the bayonet. Opposite the Quai de la Grève young men armed with muskets stationed themselves in the rooms of some ladies in order to fire; one of them had a wheel-lock gun. They rang, went in and began making cartridges, and one of the ladies said afterwards, "I did not know what cartridges were till my husband told me." A crowd broke into a curiosity-shop on the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, and took from it yataghans and Turkish weapons. The corpse of a mason killed by a bullet lay in the Rue de la Perle. And then, on the right bank and the left bank, on the quays, on the boulevards, in the Quartier Latin, and on the Quartier of the Halles, panting men, workmen, students, and sectionists read proclamations, shouted "To arms!" broke the lanterns, unharnessed vehicles, tore up the pavement, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees, searched cellars, rolled up barrels, heaped up paving-stones, furniture, and planks, and formed barricades.
Citizens were forced to lend a hand; the rioters went to the wives, compelled them to surrender the sabre and musket of their absent husbands, and then wrote on the door in chalk, "The arms are given up." Some signed with their own names receipts for musket and sabre, and said, "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayoralty." Isolated sentries and National Guards proceeding to their gathering-place were disarmed in the streets. Epaulettes were torn from the officers, and in the Rue du Cimetière St. Nicolas an officer of the National Guard, pursued by a party armed with sticks and foils, found refuge with great difficulty in a house, where he was compelled to remain till night, and then went away in disguise. In the Quartier St. Jacques the students came out of their lodging-houses in swarms, and went up the Rue Sainte Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrès, or down to the Café des Sept Billards in the Rue des Mathurins; there the young men stood on benches and distributed arms; and the timber-yard in the Rue Transnonain was pillaged to make barricades. Only at one spot did the inhabitants offer resistance,—at the corner of the Rue Sainte Avoye and Simon le Franc, where they themselves destroyed the barricade. Only at one point too did the insurgents give way; they abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue du Temple, after firing at a detachment of the National Guard, and fled along the Rue de la Corderie. The detachment picked up on the barricade a red flag, a packet of cartridges, and three hundred pistol bullets; the National Guards tore up the flag, and carried off the strips on the point of their bayonets. All this which we are describing here slowly and successively was going on simultaneously at all parts of the city, in the midst of a vast tumult, like a number of lightning flashes in a single peal of thunder.
In less than an hour twenty-seven barricades issued from the ground in the single quarter of the Halles; in the centre was that famous house No. 50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her hundred-and-six companions, and which, flanked on one side by a barricade at St. Merry, and on the other by a barricade in the Rue Maubuée, commanded the three streets, Des Arcis, St. Martin, and Aubry le Boucher, the last of which it faced. Two square barricades retreated, the one from the Rue Montorgueil into la Grande Truanderie, the other from the Rue Geoffroy Langevin into the Rue Sainte Avoye. This is without counting innumerable barricades in twenty other districts of Paris, as the Marais and the Montagne Sainte Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant, in which a gate could be seen torn off its hinges; and another near the little bridge of the Hôtel Dieu, made of an overthrown vehicle. Three hundred yards from the Préfecture of Police, at the barricade in the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man distributed money to the artisans; at the barricade in the Rue Grenetat a horseman rode up and handed to the man who seemed to be the chief of the barricade a roll, which looked like money. "Here," he said, "is something to pay the expenses,—the wine, etc." A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from one barricade to another, carrying the passwords; and another, with drawn sabre and a blue forage-cap on his head, stationed sentries. In the interior, within the barricades, the wine-shops and cabarets were converted into guard-rooms, and the riot was managed in accordance with the most skilful military tactics. The narrow, uneven, winding streets, full of corners and turnings, were admirably selected,—the vicinity of the Halles more especially, a network of streets more tangled than a forest. The society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, taken the direction of the insurrection in the Sainte Avoye district, and a plan of Paris was found on the body of a man killed in the Rue du Ponceau.
What had really assumed the direction of the insurrection was a sort of unknown impetuosity that was in the atmosphere. The insurrection had suddenly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized nearly all the garrison posts. In less than three hours the insurgents, like a powder-train fired, had seized and occupied on the right bank the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, all the Marais, the Popincourt arms-factory, the Galiote the Château d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank the Veterans' barracks, Sainte Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the powder manufactory of the Deux Moulins, and all the barrières. At five in the evening they were masters of the Bastille, the Lingerie, and the Blancs-Manteaux; while their scouts were close to the Place des Victoires and menaced the Bank, the barracks of the Petits-Pères and the Post-office. One third of Paris was in the hands of the revolt. On all points the struggle had begun on a gigantic scale, and the result of the disarmaments, the domiciliary visits, and the attack on the gunsmiths' shops, was that the fight which had begun with stone-throwing was continued with musket-shots.
About six in the evening the Passage du Saumon became the battle-field; the rioters were at one end and the troops at the other, and they fired from one gate at the other. An observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to have a near look at the volcano, found himself caught between two fires in the passage, and had nothing to protect him from the bullets but the projecting semi-columns which used to separate the shops; he was nearly half an hour in this delicate position. In the mean while the tattoo was beaten, the National Guards hurriedly dressed and armed themselves, the legions issued from the Mayoralty, and the regiments from the barracks. Opposite the Passage de l'Ancre a drummer was stabbed; another was attacked in the Rue du Cygne by thirty young men, who ripped up his drum and took his sabre, while a third was killed in the Rue Grenier St. Lazare. In the Rue Michel le Comte three officers fell dead one after the other, and several municipal guards, wounded in the Rue des Lombards, recoiled. In front of the Cour Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red flag, bearing this inscription, "Republican Revolution, No. 127." Was it really a revolution? The insurrection had made of the heart of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, and colossal citadel; there was the nucleus, there the question would be solved; all the rest was merely skirmishing. The proof that all would be decided there lay in the fact that fighting had not yet begun there.
In some regiments the troops were uncertain, which added to the startling obscurity of the crisis; and they remembered the popular ovation which, in July, 1830, greeted the neutrality of the 53d line. Two intrepid men, tried by the great wars, Marshal de Lobau and General Bugeaud, commanded,—Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols, composed of battalions of the line enclosed in entire companies of the National Guard, and preceded by the Police Commissary in his scarf, went to reconnoitre the insurgent streets. On their side, the insurgents posted-vedettes at the corner of the streets, and audaciously sent patrols beyond the barricades. Both sides were observing each other; the Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated, night was setting in, and the tocsin of St. Mary was beginning to be heard. Marshal Soult, the Minister of War at that day, who had seen Austerlitz, looked at all this with a gloomy air. These old sailors, habituated to correct manœuvres, and having no other resource and guide but tactics, the compass of battles, are completely thrown out when in the presence of that immense foam which is called the public anger. The wind of revolutions is not favorable for sailing. The National Guards of the suburbs ran up hastily and disorderly; a battalion of the 12th Light Infantry came at the double from St. Denis; the 14th line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the military school had taken up position at the Carrousel, and guns were brought in from Vincennes.
Solitude set in at the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was full of serenity.