THE ENGLISH WERE proud of their freedoms, their prosperity, and their plain-speaking. John Bull, the national stereotype, was a plump yeoman of cheerful demeanour, candid expression, red cheeks and unshorn chin. The French, in contrast, were caricatured as skinny, malnourished and forever conspiring to overthrow their mildly oppressive if inefficient government. The bohemian fashion for facial hair in Paris seemed to suggest a kind of mask behind which revolutionary ideas lurked. ‘As for the beards, there is no end to them,’1 wrote William Makepeace Thackeray of the French, ‘and Nature, though she has rather stinted the bodies and limbs of the French nation, has been very liberal to them of hair.’
The new regime could see behind the mask. Having been made by revolution, Louis Philippe’s government knew it could be unmade by one. That sombre respect for national institutions that characterised English public opinion could hardly be found in France. Thackeray, visiting theatres in Paris, was struck by the audiences. ‘They laugh at religion2, they laugh at chastity, they laugh at royalty.’ There was little positive enthusiasm for Louis Philippe’s monarchy. Governmental ministers, aware of popular discontent in Paris, established a Municipal Guard in the capital, 3,200 strong. Though gorgeously attired, wearing bronze helmets embossed with the Gallic rooster, decorated with leopard skin and finished off with a crimson plume tufted on the front and a horsehair mane at the back, the Municipal Guard soon developed a vile reputation for violence and thuggery in working-class districts.
By 1839, the rank-and-file of the Society of Seasons, established the year before, was pressing hard for an insurrection to be launched as soon as possible. Barthélemy, aged sixteen, was no doubt one of these militants. As an outlet for their enthusiasm, and to test the political water, the Seasons leadership of Blanqui, Armand Barbès and Bernard authorised a protest outside the parliamentary Chamber on 4 April. When the republicans gathered to harass Louis Philippe’s legislators, however, they were set upon by the police. The notorious Municipal Guard led the charge. Barthélemy endured a savage thrashing. ‘A policeman, who was with his comrades including several dressed in plain clothes, grabbed me and beat me3 with his baton.’ Years later he still bore scars from the attack4 and was seen to be missing a finger.
As Alexander Herzen, a Russian who would befriend Barthélemy, later heard the story, Barthélemy had been stopped by a gendarme ‘and as he began to say something the gendarme gave him a punch in the face with his fist. Barthélemy, who was being held by a municipal, tore himself away, but could do nothing. This blow awakened the tiger in him. Barthélemy – an eager, good-humoured young working lad – got up the next day transformed.’5 We may doubt that Barthélemy was quite so naive before this encounter. Members of the Society of Seasons, after all, saw themselves as part of a dedicated revolutionary elite. It was not in Barthélemy’s nature to endure a humiliating assault without bearing a grudge.
Barthélemy was certainly not dissuaded from his revolutionism by the police beating he had endured. Preparation for a rising was now taking up much of his time, and the metal workshop took distant second place. On 4 May, his master, Monsieur Loigelot, finally lost patience and, due to yet another absence from work, dismissed Barthélemy. Barthélemy did not return to his parents but instead lodged at number 11, rue Michel-le-Comte, with Prosper Dufour, a fellow sertisseur. This was a very narrow street, only eighteen or nineteen feet wide, with houses looming on either side. As he lay in bed, Barthélemy could see no more than a yard or two of sky. But he had things on his mind, dreaming of overthrowing the king and re-establishing the glorious Republic.
The signal for action was finally given on 12 May 1839. About 500 answered Blanqui’s summons, including some foreigners resident in Paris, mostly German, organised in the sympathising League of the Just. At about 2.30 p.m. that afternoon, a detachment of rebels led by Martin Bernard and Blanqui occupied the Hôtel de Ville, that traditional focal point of insurrection, and disarmed the small guard there. Their call of ‘To arms!’ was greeted mostly with confusion by the public, and only a few hundred fell in with the rebels. Barricade fighting broke out, but the cause was hopeless from the outset. By the end of the day government troops had recovered full control. In all, about a hundred were either killed in action or subsequently died of wounds, thirty of them soldiers.
Just under three hundred rebels were put on trial6. Many of them were men like Barthélemy: nearly 87 per cent were working class, mostly artisan; 54.5 per cent were born outside Paris, usually from neighbouring districts; 37 per cent worked in the high-quality metalworking trades. Those members of the League of the Just who had fought with the rebels fled abroad, many winding up in London, where in 1840 they organised a Workers Educational Society. They were to become the Communist League, for which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels would write their famous Communist Manifesto in 1848.
By the time the insurrection had broken out, however, Barthélemy was already in police custody. At about 9.30 a.m. on the day of the rising, a sergent-de-ville of the Municipal Guard, a fifty-eight-year-old ex-soldier called Zôphirin Beudet, was patrolling the Boulevard Saint-Martin, a thoroughfare in the north of the city where raised pavements showed where the city ramparts used to be. He saw a young man approaching him with what appeared to be a firearm in his hand7. Before Beudet knew what was happening, the gunman had raised his weapon and fired at him from point-blank range. Most of the shot was taken by Beudet’s left arm and absorbed by the folds of his heavy cloak and overcoat. Beudet was stunned, and it fell to civilians to chase after and overpower the assailant.
Monsieur Duprat, an upholsterer living in the Faubourg du Temple, was passing by on the boulevard when he heard a gunshot. He turned and saw a policeman shouting that he had been wounded and a young man fleeing the scene. He ran after Barthélemy, for it was he, and grabbed him. Monsieur Touzelin, a tailor, heard the cry, ‘Stop the murderer!’ and grabbed Barthélemy’s gun arm. A dagger, with a shortened serrated blade, tumbled to the ground from under Barthélemy’s workman’s blouse. Barthélemy was ‘pale but calm’. He did not actively resist but tried to shake off their hands. Both witnesses recalled his words: ‘Do not abase me!’
When Gabet, the police commissioner, arrived on the scene, he found on Barthélemy three cartridges, similar to those with which the gun was loaded, containing large lead shot. This was buckshot rather than bullets and unlikely ammunition for an assassination attempt. Gabet asked Barthélemy if he really thought that these cartridges would kill. ‘No doubt!’ replied Barthélemy, ‘had I not fired a blank as I did.’
Also found on Barthélemy was a fragment of the Vieux Cordelier newspaper – published by Camille Desmoulins during the French Revolution to criticise the Terror – and paper placards written in his own hand. The first read, ‘People, arm yourselves with daggers to punish your executioners! Strike without fear – blood calls out for blood, and they have shed yours without pity.’ On the second piece of paper, King Louis Philippe’s father – who had gone so far as to change his name so as to win the favour of radicals during the revolution – was berated. ‘Philippe Egalité was a wretch, his son is a perjurer and a murderer. The history of his reign is written with the blood of victims of Pont d’Arcole, Place de la Bourse and rue Transnonain.’
These were referring to notorious episodes of police repression. On 29 July 1832, early-morning commuters had been horrified to see long trails of blood and a scrabble of footprints on the Pont d’Arcole, a bridge over the river Seine. Neighbours had been awakened, between midnight and one o’clock, by screams. Looking through their windows they made out a scene of sergents-de-ville on the bridge savagely beating people and then, allegedly, rolling the corpses of those they had killed into the river. The truth eventually emerged out of the confused and terrified reports of eyewitnesses. The day before, young people had been visiting the graves of street fighters who had fallen in the revolution of July 1830. To round off their republican stations, they visited the Pont d’Arcole, associated with the heroic death of a young revolutionary hero, and stood about in pairs on the bridge singing the republican ‘Marseillaise’. Within minutes, both sides of the bridge were sealed off by the police. The young republicans, now trapped, were ferociously set upon, suffering heavy blows from police batons, swords and bayonets. Certainly they were very badly beaten8, though there was never sure evidence that anyone had been murdered and thrown off the bridge.
The second episode referred to on Barthélemy’s placard had taken place in March 1834. Republicans – including Blanqui – had defied the new government press laws by publicly selling their newspapers on the Place de la Bourse. When the authorities moved in, bloody clashes ensued, with rioting continuing until mounted police arrived. Police force was heavy-handed9, and one worker appears to have been killed.
The third episode was the most infamous of all. In April 1834, the massive rebellion of silk workers in Lyon triggered rioting across the country and a formidable republican rebellion in Paris. On 14 April, near a barricade in the street of Transnonain, an infantry captain was wounded by a shot fired from a window. In response, all the inhabitants of number 12 Transnonain, from where it was assumed that the shot had been fired, were massacred by the military. This slaying of twelve men, women, children and infants was immortalised in Honoré Daumier’s stark and compelling lithograph depicting a slaughtered family. The Massacre de la rue Transnonain10 entered into popular memory as an indictment against the forces of order. These were the horrors which infuriated Barthélemy, and which he was sure would encourage the people of Paris to join the insurrection of that May. Martyrology and iconic art probably are necessities for any successful insurrection; but this time there were not enough to tip the balance.
After his arrest, Barthélemy was held in the Conciergerie, a Parisian version of the Tower of London, located in the middle of Paris on the Île de la Cité. This had been a mediaeval Royal Palace in the Gothic style, before being converted into a prison. It was a large and sombre building, ‘sullen-looking, dark, and grey, pierced by iron-grated windows’. During the French Revolution it held prisoners awaiting the guillotine, including Danton, Robespierre and Saint-Just. Now those due for trial lay in underground cells, or paced about a prison yard located below ground level. It was considered to be the most insalubrious prison in Paris. When the river rose, the prison floor would flood with black mud, and the walls continuously streamed with condensation. Prisoners had to pay eighteen francs for the privilege of a bed, and even then had to wait a fortnight for one. The Conciergerie was located just beside the courts of justice and the writer Honoré de Balzac described the procedure when inmates were required for court appearance. ‘When the hour of trial strikes11, the sheriffs call the roll of the prisoners, the gendarmes go down, one for each prisoner, and each gendarme takes a criminal by the arm; and thus, in couples, they mount the stairs, cross the guardroom, and are led along passages to a room … where sits the … Assize Court.’ On 20 December 1839, it was Barthélemy’s turn.
He faced three judges, one of whom, Monsieur Férey, presided. Férey would himself question the defendant and any witnesses. The defence and prosecution lawyers, in their robes, would present closing statements. A jury had been gathered to hear not only Barthélemy’s case, but all cases that came before the court’s quarterly session. They would have the power to declare him innocent or guilty. Barthélemy stood in the dock with a policeman on either side. Close by him were benches for the public. Barthélemy’s family, no doubt distraught, sat amongst them.
The trial attracted international attention12 because it was thought to be the first instance of an attempt at assassinating a police officer in France. The defendant appeared with his hair cut in republican fashion13 – shoulder length – though still too young to sport either a beard or moustache. He was wearing the clothes in which he had been arrested: a dark and heavy coat and a bright white linen necktie over a working man’s blouse. As ever, he was immaculately tidy.
Barthélemy, who was defended by Monsieur Paillet of the Bar Association, was quick and ready with his replies during the Président’s examination. He showed no fear and cast a cold eye across the court. He denied that the shooting had been a calculated assassination attempt. ‘I am neither disruptive nor criminal,’ he insisted, but he would certainly defend the republican cause come the day of danger. Barthélemy explained that he had been carrying arms on behalf of a secret society from one hiding place to another. It seems more likely that he was on his way to an insurrectionary muster in preparation for the uprising planned for later that afternoon. Barthélemy, however, was not going to give too much information away. When instructed by the Président of the court, Monsieur Férey, to ‘make known the person to whom [the weapons] belong’, he replied, ‘No one will know that but myself.’ Barthélemy would be no mouchard, no informer.
Barthélemy claimed that when carrying out his mission he had chanced across Zôphirin Beudet, whom he recognised as the policeman who had beaten him on 12 May. Barthélemy explained that he had been overcome with sudden fury. He darted behind one of the stone sentry boxes on the boulevard. ‘Recognising the man who had hit me I felt beside myself, and yielding to a first impulse, I loaded the gun and I shot him.’ Barthélemy admitted that there had been no immediate provocation, though he dismissed the prosecution’s assertion that Beudet could hardly have been the man responsible for assaulting him with a cane because he lacked two fingers. ‘I do not think a man who is missing two fingers is unable to handle a cane with his remaining three fingers,’ responded Barthélemy wryly. ‘I could use a cane perfectly with three fingers; let alone someone who has a long history [of doing so].’
Barthélemy was anxious not to have his secret society implicated in a tawdry assassination campaign against policemen. It was not republican ideals, he said, that had made him carry out the attack. ‘I would not do anything that may dishonour a cause that I believe in too much to want to degrade.’ Nor was Barthélemy carrying out a vendetta against policemen in general. ‘Certainly I would not have the madness to go alone to declare war on all sergents-de-ville who are in Paris.’ He had only been seeking to vent his fury as an individual on an individual. Pointing out that his pistol had been loaded not with bullets but rather with lead shot, Barthélemy claimed, ‘I did not intend to kill him, but only to punish him.’ It was put to him that he had in fact fired towards Beudet’s heart. Barthélemy denied this: ‘I fired at random …. Anger does not calculate.’
Barthélemy may have confessed to the attack, but he was far from being apologetic, despite the splenetic outbursts of the court president:
Président. – You dare to arrogate to yourself punishment of law on the agents of authority? You belong to a secret society but you refuse to divulge the source of your weapons, which consists not only a gun, but a dagger. You tell coldly and with an inexplicable impassivity what happened, showing neither repentance nor remorse, not even regret.
Barthélemy. – I have nothing with which to reproach myself.
There were gasps in the audience at Barthélemy’s imperturbable retort.
In summing up the case, the prosecuting Avocat-Général addressed the court on the nature of the revolutionary societies. At certain times, he instructed his audience, the revolutionaries thought themselves strong enough to descend en masse in public and engage the state in a sort of general battle. This had been the case in June 1832 and April 1834, when there had been insurrections in Lyon and in Paris. In May 1839, there had been another such attempt, though already weakened and reduced in its chances of success by the growing indifference of the country. Revolutionaries, therefore, were being driven to undertake acts of terror alone.
The Avocat-Général reminded the court of recent assassination attempts. Guiseppe Fieschi in July 1835 had attempted to kill Louis Philippe by firing an ‘infernal machine’ of twenty-five gun barrels, bound by a steel band, primed to go off simultaneously as the King passed in a procession along the Boulevard du Temple. The King was merely grazed but all around him, ‘the pavement and roadway were strewn with men and horses dead and dying’. Eighteen people were killed14 in the onslaught – including women and children – and forty-two were wounded. Louis Alibaud the same year lunged into Louis Philippe’s carriage and fired at him from point-blank range with a newly invented ‘cane gun’. The King escaped death only because he was bowing his head to acknowledge a guard. There had been no fewer than six assassination attempts in total, but all had failed. (Never let it be thought that nineteenth-century heads of state lacked courage; or, at any rate, they had need of it.) Now, the Avocat-Général continued, the focus of the revolutionaries was in the opposite direction. Instead of attacking the elites, they were targeting their subalterns. In his view, therefore, Barthélemy’s attack was part of an orchestrated campaign against the agents of the Crown.
We may doubt this proffered argument whilst admiring the cogency of its presentation. Blanqui, Barthélemy’s leader, was opposed to regicide and terrorism. As we have seen, it is much more likely that Barthélemy had been on his way to a gathering for the insurrection when he came across the policeman who had assaulted him so brutally, and that he reacted in a passion. Young men in their teens are not remarkable for their self-control.
The Avocat-Général went on to address Barthélemy’s age: he would be seventeen by Christmas. That such a youthful man should be charged with so a serious crime was reflective of the times. ‘We always hear talk of progress,’ he remarked sardonically, ‘we are concerned that this is a progress in evil.’ Adolescents were being drawn into political crime. ‘Today we see children of thirteen and fourteen years old engaging in acts that seem placed at the extreme limit of despair. We also see the most serious crimes against persons committed by young people. We see them led astray by a republican ideal of maniacal and impractical equality to attack anything that may put obstacles to their disordered passions.’ These were ‘individuals in whom respect for all things is lost; they first defy their fathers, then their masters. Difficult apprentices become bad citizens. They move from being insolent with their masters to insulting their King. Ultimately we arrive at this point; they see in a police officer a man must be killed because he is a symbol of repression, the image of the law to which they refuse to submit.’ The Avocat-Général wound up by calling for Barthélemy to be found guilty, with the aggravating circumstance that he had attacked a policeman carrying out his legal duties.
Barthélemy’s defence lawyer, Monsieur Paillet, denied any premeditation and urged indulgence ‘towards a child led astray by fanaticism’. He pointed to Barthélemy, ‘an industrious and honest worker, a model worker … next to him a perfectly respectable family’. The court should keep their severity for those ‘who ferment such dangerous doctrines in young heads’.
Monsieur Ferey, Président of the Court, then summed up, and the jury – all male and respectable property owners – retired to deliberate. When they returned they found Barthélemy guilty of attempted murder on the person of Zôphirin Beudet, but dismissed the question of premeditation and the aggravating circumstance. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the police. The Avocat-Général asked that Articles 2 and 504 of the Penal Code be applied, meaning that Barthélemy be sentenced to death. Given his youth and the jury’s verdict, however, he was sentenced to exposure on the pillory – which would see him being chained to a post on the street to invite the derision of passers-by – before being bound to forced labour for life. Barthélemy ‘listened to this judgment15 with an unalterable composure’ and ‘calmly took up his hat on the bench behind him, and followed the gendarmes below to the Conciergerie’. A few months later, in February 1840, Barthélemy’s sentence of public humiliation was lifted16, and he was sent directly to the galleys.
Barthélemy had managed to convince the Assize Court of the Seine that his attack on Beudet was a personally motivated outburst. Later, when talking to fellow revolutionaries, he was to change his story. The shooting, he claimed ten years afterwards in 1849, had indeed been an attempted assassination. Zôphirin Beudet had been deliberately targeted because he was an ex-member of a republican secret society and as such was condemned to death by the Blanquist revolutionaries as an agent provocateur. The designated assassin had been chosen by lot17, and quite by chance it had fallen to Barthélemy.
We may doubt the story. Why would such an assassination, motivated by revenge, be carried out on the morning of a planned insurrection? It ran the risk of revealing the plans of the Society of Seasons. His original story seems much more likely, though. We can see why Barthélemy, who wished to be taken as a self-disciplined revolutionary, may have been tempted to rewrite his past. Barthélemy was, indeed, a focused revolutionary, but one with a fiery temper. He would not tolerate those who would lay hands upon him to do him violence. ‘Do not abase me,’ he had said to those passers-by who had seized him after the shooting. There is perhaps no better insight into this young worker’s psychology.