IT WAS A chill February morning that Barthélemy was taken from his cell for transportation to the galleys1 – a life of hard labour ahead of him. Barthélemy and his fellow convicts were told to wait at the low doors leading out into the prison court. At midday, they heard a large gate being opened, and the trundling of a cart, escorted by soldiers and rattling with chains. In an instant, both the prisoners assembled for transport and those watching from their cells burst into mocking raillery and loud laughter. The galley sergeants threw down the chains from the top of the cart and stretched them across the yard, testing each link as they went. When all was ready, the inner doors were thrown open, and the galley convicts pushed out before the cart. Shouting from the prison cells swelled, echoing around the walls, and we can imagine Barthélemy – a young rebel already made famous by his well-publicised trial – being saluted by his comrades: ‘Farewell, citzen!’
The convicts were called out by name alphabetically, and put in pairs. They exchanged their worn-out prison clothes for thin linen uniforms, shivering in the cold weather of midwinter, as in groups of twenty or so they were led to the corner of the yard where the chains, attached to the cart, were laid out in wait. Every two feet along there hung another short chain which ended in a heavy hinged iron collar. The prisoners were ordered to sit on the ground, as two prison blacksmiths, with portable anvils, riveted ‘hard, unheated metal with heavy iron hammers’ around their necks. This was ‘a frightful operation, and even the most hardy turned pale! Each stroke of the hammer, aimed on the anvil resting on their backs, makes the whole form yield; the failure of its aim, or the least movement of the head, might launch them into eternity.’
The men were then loaded on to the wagons, sitting back to back with their feet dangling over the side. Escorted by mounted gendarmes and guards on foot they passed through Paris, gazing bitterly at abusive crowds who jeered at them as they went by. With heavy wheels turning and fetters clanking, Barthélemy began his long journey – three or four weeks of travelling – to the galleys.
Barthélemy was to spend nearly the next nine years in the Breton port of Brest as a ‘galley convict’. As the name suggests, galley prisoners had originally been press-ganged into the navy. Though they no longer put to sea, they were still under the navy’s authority, imprisoned in ‘bagnes’ – decommissioned hulks or, in the case of Brest, an old building in the port town.
The bagnes were profit-making institutions and convicts were paid a small stipend for their labour. These prisoners, amounting to about 3,200 in Brest, were required to work for a certain number of hours, but otherwise they were more or less left to themselves by the naval guards, who acted only as sentinels on the perimeter to prevent escape. All prisoners – the forçats – had their heads shaved and were branded on the right shoulder for ease of identification. Barthélemy would always carry his mark: the letter T for ‘forced labour’ – travaux forcés – and P for a life sentence – à perpétuité. They wore a loose-fitting jacket of dirty red serge, yellow trousers, and a cap, the colour of which designated the severity of the offence. Condemned as he was to life imprisonment, Barthélemy’s was green. The most fractious convicts were heavily loaded with shackles fastened to a ring riveted around the leg. However, most prisoners were left relatively free. As soon as they had completed their allotted task for the day they were allowed to return to their cell to do what they wanted. Some had writing desks; others employed themselves in handicrafts, making toys out of coconuts and horsehair. They could sell these to earn a little extra money. The daily food allowance included a pint of wine, a measure of biscuit, or half a loaf of brown bread. Forçats were daily marched out to work in the town, and were a well-known sight around Brest, even itemised as an entertaining diversion in a holiday guide published for English tourists. The Hand-Book for Travellers in France noticed with equable interest that the prison wings featured cannons loaded with grapeshot pointing inwards. In the event of ‘tumult or rebellion’2 the cannon ‘would enfilade the chamber, and sweep it from end to end’. Close supervision was thereby rather unnecessary.
Despite these small freedoms, Victor Hugo imagined the galley prisoner’s grim life: ‘3, to be searched by the warder, beaten by the galley-sergeant, to wear hobnailed shoes on his bare feet and allow the shackles on his leg to be checked morning and night by the guard on patrol with his hammer, to endure the curiosity of strangers … Oh, what misery!’ And survival for prisoners was no straightforward matter: the annual mortality rate by the 1840s ran at about 3 per cent per year.
Nonetheless, the bagnes can justly be thought of as brutal but roughly egalitarian colonies. Prisoners were not under micro-control; they could chat, went out to labour in the docks or surrounding factories during the day, and sometimes were even allowed to stay outside the prison overnight. The naval administrator, Maurice Alhoy, claimed in the 1840s that prisoners in the bagnes ate better than free men and enjoyed the ‘relative tranquillity’ of ‘happy criminality4 [in] an establishment of charity in favour of thieves and assassins’. The left-wing author, Eugène Sue, even surmised that hardened criminals would commit murder to secure transfer from the central prisons to the bagnes because of ‘the riotous life they lead’5 there. This of course was exaggerated, but in its rough and coercive cooperation, the bagne in some respects must have reminded Barthélemy of his schooling. Curiously enough, it was probably the closest he ever came to working in something like a large-scale industrial enterprise; not much less appealing a place of work than the grim factory mills of early industrial England.
We know very little of Barthélemy’s time in the bagne6, but the records that do exist suggest that his conduct was considered to be good. It seems likely that it was here that he educated himself – he would later be a ready writer able to read sophisticated literature – and perhaps practised his noted oratorical skills. It must also have been during these years that he gained his skills as an ‘engineer-mechanic’, as he would be described thereafter. Probably he worked in the naval armoury in Brest and picked up a good deal of military art, in particular an expertise with firearms.
Monsieur Masse, a captain in the navy, was willing to speak well of Barthélemy’s character during his years of incarceration. In future years, when his reputation was being traduced by political rivals, Masse spoke up for him:
Since the condemnation of Barthélemy7, in 1839, I have made enquiries about his conduct of the authorities of Brest, and I am bound to say they agreed to a man that he was gifted with an admirable temper, a heroic bravery, and the utmost straightforwardness. When I was holding a situation there, I heard from M. Severain, a commissioner in the Navy, a very respectable man, as can be easily ascertained, that Barthélemy, on December 18, 1842, threw himself in the sea to save the life of one of the port officers, whose name is M. Barthe.
Barthélemy not only took lives, he saved at least one, with coolness and courage in the face of danger.
With convicts, including political offenders, organised as labourers in large-scale factory work, it is not surprising that some revolutionaries saw in the prisoners promising material for making revolution. In the 1840s, the idea of the convict-as-revolutionary was most associated with the German artisan communist, a tailor called Wilhelm Weitling. ‘Every person who is sorely oppressed and who has the courage to take from the superfluity of others for his basic needs and who is prepared to defend his action proudly and publicly before the courts, and before the people, I call a communist,’ he wrote in 1842. For Weitling, the proletarian thief was an instinctive revolutionary: ‘Their communism is from the heart8, and they are committed to it.’
Weitling was a rarity in being a socialist writer of genuine working-class background. In contrast to Barthélemy, who was a thoroughgoing rationalist, Weitling was mystical in his beliefs, but he was nonetheless a hard-bitten veteran of struggle. When Heinrich Heine, the German poet, democrat and socialist sympathiser, met with Weitling, he was disconcerted by his sense of revulsion. Heine had expected to find a modern-day version of John of Leydon, a tailor and fanatically radical Protestant who had been barbarously martyred by the German aristocracy in 1536. But he was guiltily irritated when his condescension to this proletarian hero was not reciprocated by appreciation of his own cultural and educational superiority:
What particularly offended my pride9 was the fellow’s utter lack of respect while he conversed with me. He did not remove his cap and, while I was standing before him, he remained sitting …. I, who had made an exalted cult of the dead tailor, now felt an insurmountable aversion for this living tailor, Wilhelm Weitling, though both were apostles and martyrs in the same cause.
Barthélemy would also disconcert democrats who idealised the working class in principle but found them difficult to deal with in person. This is not an uncommon characteristic of the middle-class radical, nor is it one we should be too hard on, for it can be difficult to connect with those distant from us, no matter how much we may respect or admire them. Heine, as always, was refreshing in his candour.
Weitling was temporarily a hero for those German comrades of Blanqui and Barthélemy in the League of the Just who had escaped to London after the failure of the 1839 rising. Exposure to the relatively free political conditions of Britain and the mass working-class movement there of the semi-legal Chartists – who since 1838 had been campaigning for the male working classes to have the vote – gradually pushed these German communists away from the methods of secret society conspiracy. This was accelerated by their coming into contact with two German communist intellectuals, friends and admirers of Heine, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Karl Marx, born in the Rhineland in 1818, was a powerfully built, barrel-chested man of unusual intellectual ability, boasting thick black hair and a full beard. After a carousing youth, he had settled down into married life, but remained fully committed to radical journalistic activity. At first sceptical of socialist ideas, he had come to believe that only common ownership of the means of production could allow individuals real autonomy and freedom. ‘Modern universal intercourse10 can be controlled by individuals … only when controlled by all.’ Marx was converted to this socialism primarily by French thinkers, but he looked to industrial Britain with its modern working class as the society with the greatest potential for socialist transformation. Marx brought a rigorous academic philosophy to his thinking. Frederick Engels, who had lived in Manchester in the early 1840s, contributed an intimate knowledge of the industrial proletariat. (Unusually for middle-class radicals Engels did not find genuinely working-class comrades at all abject; indeed, he took two of them as common-law wives, Lizzie Burns and then her sister Mary. Marx and his wife Jenny, however, were always rather snooty towards the Burns sisters.) Engels was slightly younger than Marx, having been born in Bremen in 1820. A tall, lithe man with fair hair and a military bearing, Engels was a lover of women, song and wine. Supremely self-confident, he deferred to no one but Marx, and could rather aggravate colleagues by his unwillingness to listen. His boundless good humour and zest carried him above any grumblings, however. Not just politics but common liking for sometimes rather laborious parody and jest bound the two men in partnership. Together they came to think of themselves as not just the leaders of a party, but virtually a party in themselves. It need hardly be said that these two men were to become the unrivalled giants of the international socialist movement.
Marx and Engels, however, were rather hostile to mainstream socialist thinking at the time, which was based upon the cooperative workshop. They saw this, not inaccurately, as an artisan style of socialism. Being well-versed in political economy, they were convinced that attempts by worker-run cooperatives to exchange their products equitably with one another would simply lead to the re-emergence of trading, market relations, profiteering, and ultimately the whole panoply of exploitative capitalism. Instead, Marx and Engels put their faith not in the artisan, who ultimately wanted to secure the workshop as a small-scale property, but in the proletariat, those who had no possession other than their ability to work for wages. As this proletariat was not chained down by individual property it could escape narrow horizons. For wage-workers, their hunger for possession extended far beyond the isolated workshop or farm, and extended to society as a whole, as only a complete reordering of society could free them from their bondage to the capitalist employers. Proletarian revolution, in the first instance, would mean the state taking over broad swathes of productive property – certainly large factories and landed estates – to smash the power of the capitalist class. Where it would go from there was left opaque by Marx and Engels, though they seemed to think that large-scale nationalisation was the logical way forward.
The French socialist Louis Blanc was much more definite that state intervention would be a limited phase. Blanc proposed that the state would establish and in the first instance finance worker-run ‘social workshops’, but that these would become self-supporting and effectively independent within a year or two. ‘Someday, if the dearest hope of our heart is not mistaken,’11 Blanc predicted, ‘a day will come when a strong and active government is no longer needed, because there will no longer be inferior and subordinate classes in society. Until then, the establishment of a tutelary authority is essential.’ He meant by ‘tutelary authority’ a temporary state authority over workers to educate them in the ways of self-reliance.
Marx and Engels were not unsympathetic to Blanc’s point of view, but they did not like the idea of the state educating society. Only ‘revolutionary practice’ – the process of struggle and self-organisation – would develop working-class capacities12. Moreover, they believed that cooperatives could only be transitional to a nationally and even internationally planned economy. Refusing to peer too far into the future, however, they emphasised the necessity of suppressing bourgeois power and forming the proletariat as a self-conscious class able to dominate society. They called this the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Impressed by Marx and Engels’ learning and commitment, the German revolutionaries in London, led by Karl Schapper, in 1847 agreed to convert their League of the Just into the Communist League, and they formally abandoned ‘hankering after conspiracy’13, becoming instead ‘a pure propaganda society’. They invited Marx and Engels to write a manifesto for this new organisation. The Manifesto of the Communist Party – now better known as the Communist Manifesto – was published in early 1848, focusing on the proletariat and class struggle. When it finally appeared, after much prevaricating by Marx, the Manifesto made relatively little impact. It was to become, however, one of the most famous publications of the modern age.
In France itself, the secret societies seemed to have been definitively defeated. Inside the prison of Mont St Michel, Blanqui and Barbès fell out acrimoniously, ensuring the dissolution of what was left of the ‘Society of Seasons’. The leading socialists now were Étienne Cabet, who disavowed politics altogether, arguing that workers should establish communist colonies on the open frontier of the American West, and Louis Blanc, who favoured public agitation for a democratic ‘social Republic’ – though he thought that women were too much under the influence of priests to have the vote – and won a considerable reputation with his 1839 work, The Organisation of Labour. Just as Blanqui provided Barthélemy with his model for revolution, so too would Blanc inspire him with a vision for the future. Blanc and other democratic socialists established a newspaper called La Réforme. This had connections with secret society veterans, but its focus was on open propaganda and education in favour of socialism. They had a sympathiser in the French parliament in the person of Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, who would occasionally speak up for their cause. Even Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, declared their own tendency to be allied to these French Social Democrats14. The liberal republicans in France, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the plight of the workers, but determinedly favoured the inviolability of individual private property and rejected common ownership. They gathered around the National newspaper and their leader was the romantic poet, Alphonse de Lamartine. For now, however, both liberals and socialists could work together in opposition to the French monarchy. The failure of the potato crop in 1846 and a poor grain harvest in 1847 spread misery, and the shaky foundations of order began to crumble away. Revolution loomed.