WE DO WELL to remember that the French government established by the February revolution of 1848 was the very first ever to include a socialist minister. And in Louis Blanc, here was a man who would be a dedicated socialist to his last days, and in 1848 he was the avowed representative of the revolutionary working class. It was an extraordinary triumph for a movement which had barely struggled into existence. Nothing like it had ever been seen.
There was widespread expectation, therefore, that the Provisional Government in France would do something for the workers. From our vantage point we are well used to the idea of governments promising heaven and the stars for ordinary people before dutifully bowing to the demands of market stability, hierarchy and the status quo. In February 1840, however, all seemed possible. It was this o’er-vaunting ambition which made the bourgeois majority of the French Provisional Government all the more anxious to reach settled waters.
In practical terms at least, something had to be done about unemployment. The number of businesses in Paris declined during the year of revolution by no less than 54 per cent. The rich were fleeing, and the luxury trade that was the mainstay of so many artisanal workshops was killed. By the spring of 1848, according to official figures, of 343,000 Parisian workers – men, women and children – 186,000 were out of work. Every day the unemployed would gather on the Champs-Élysées, set up makeshift stalls, and desperately attempt to sell or pawn their few remaining goods. ‘Dentists’ chairs, sideshows, and stalls where cutlets were fried filled the walks, also weighing machines – although,’ it was reported, ‘people did not like to get weighed1 because they were all thinner.’
Lamartine’s government had to make some kind of concession to Louis Blanc and his followers. On 28 February, ministers established a ‘Commission for the Workers’ at the Luxembourg Palace, formerly the aristocratic upper house of parliament. Representatives from the workshops and left-wing intellectuals were invited to meet, mix and discuss, a permanent committee of the working classes, seeking to represent all trades. Louis Blanc was its undisputed leader as president, with Albert as his vice-deputy. The programme issued by this ‘socialist parliament’, calling for worker-run ‘social workshops’, clearly derived from Blanc’s particular ideal, his ‘organisation of labour’. One worker representative, Martin Nadaud2, was a mason. That he ran his own collaborative team of building workers showed the potential for these social workshops. That he could only attend one meeting of the Commission, because otherwise his contractor boss would bring in a new team, showed the difficulties of realising the dream. Still, there was clearly enthusiasm. In Paris alone, 300 cooperative associations3 involving 120 trades and 50,000 members were set up during the four years of the second French Republic.
Separately from this, National Workshops were set up by the anti-socialist minister Pierre Marie. They were not the cooperative workshops envisaged by Blanc. He had wanted the organisation of individual trades, but the National Workshops admitted anyone and set tasks unrelated to the workers’ skills. Blanc later complained that they ‘humiliated the working man4, who was reduced to accept the bread which he desired to earn’. These were essentially traditional public work programmes and were modelled by the government to serve as a drilled army against the socialists. In his memoirs, Lamartine recalled how Marie organised them as ‘a praetorian army in waiting5, controlled and directed by leaders privy to the secret plans of the anti-socialist part of the government’. In the eyes of most people, however, the National Workshops subsidised idleness and incubated disorder. They did much to de-legitimise the socialist left – being a caricature of their ideals – while at the same time building up an army which could be used against it.
The National Workshops were particularly unpopular in the countryside, where peasants felt that money was being wasted on the upkeep of the dregs of Paris. Blanqui was to call the heavy tax imposed on the peasants ‘the death sentence of the Republic’6. It certainly did little to generate support for republicans in the coming elections for a Constituent Assembly. Aware that the French nation was by no means republican, Ledru-Rollin dispatched commissioners as ‘republican missionaries’7 across the country, including former secret society activists such as Félix Pyat sent to Allier and Charles Delescluze to Lille. In the short time they had before elections were held, they made little headway. The peasantry never had much love for emissaries from the city. The new language of the Republic cut little ice with rural folk. They scratched their heads, turned away, and went to the local priest for advice.
Lamartine wanted the elections to be held as quickly as possible, to validate the revolution, while Louis Blanc vociferously argued that they should be put off for as long as possible to give time for republican ideas to filter out across the countryside. This was not an entirely fanciful conceit. In 1851 it would be the peasants of the South of France who were to put up most vigorous resistance to Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état against the Republic. But in 1848, things were quite different. Time was not on the republicans’ side.
Defeated in cabinet debate, Blanc attempted to mobilise the crowd to put pressure on his fellow ministers. A large deputation, led by delegates of the workers’ Luxembourg Commission, set out to the government palace on 16 April, demanding that elections be delayed. The marchers called for the organisation of labour and shouted for the ‘abolition of the proletariat’8, so that workers might instead become independent co-owners of their cooperative enterprises. They surged forward, proudly dressed in baggy workmen’s blouses and loose-fitting trousers, in bright if dusty colours. Many brought with them the tools of their trade. Ledru-Rollin equivocated, but then authorised force to be used against the demonstrators. They were met by National Guards – one detachment, ironically, led by Blanqui’s estranged comrade, Barbès – and soldiers were brought into Paris for the first time since the fall of the monarchy. The National Guards were resplendent in tight blue uniforms with red piping and shoulder tassels. Their headwear looked like a top hat – comfortingly bourgeois – with an embossed plate on the front depicting a rooster clutching Jupiter above clasped hands. A red pom-pom set it off. With their crimson trousers, soldiers of the line were an even more impressive sight. Behind them, workers ferried from the National Workshops to support the troops shouted, ‘Down with the communists!’ Blanc’s demonstration was swiftly broken up, and when Ledru-Rollin met with its leaders, he rebuked them. Elections were adjourned only for a short time, to 23 April, with the right-wing ‘Party of Order’, led by Adolphe Thiers and strong in the provinces, winning a handsome victory.
The elections only served to stir the pot. On 4 May, Le Représentant du Peuple warned that they had done nothing to calm class conflict:
The bourgeoisie is determined to finish with the proletarian9, who in turn is determined to finish with the bourgeois, the worker wants to finish with the capitalist, the employee with the contractor, the departments with Paris, peasants with the workers. In all hearts anger and hatred, threats in every mouth. What is the cause of this discord? The elections! Universal suffrage has lied to the people.
An unarmed workers’ uprising in Rouen, in protest against the election results, was bloodily suppressed10 by the National Guard, leaving fifty-nine dead and several hundred wounded. The Rouen Court of Appeals characterised the socialist municipal workshops there as ‘a vast hotbed of insurrection’11 where ‘workers were incessantly incited against the employers, where the most perverse doctrines were taught, which can be summarised in the following words: hatred and death to the rich, to all those who own, to all friends of order and of true liberty’. The National Workshops in Paris were as yet nothing like as political, but despite Pierre Marie’s best efforts there is no doubt that they left plenty of time for underemployed workers to mutter, grumble, and increasingly to vent their bitterness. ‘Communists’ might be the target for their resentment today, but tomorrow it could just as easily be the ministers of the government.
The new government, formed after the elections and excluding the démoc-socs, wished to suppress centres of sedition in Paris itself. They moved first to close down Louis Blanc’s Luxembourg Commission. On 13 May, it held its last official session. The government did not even deign to discuss its report.
On 15 May, the streets of Paris were filled with a huge unarmed crowd of working-class men and women. They were allowed by the National Guard to penetrate into the Constituent Assembly. Surprised, the mob’s leaders had no concrete request other than that the government undertake war on Russia to restore Polish sovereignty. The cause of Poland was always close to democratic hearts in nineteenth-century Europe. But such a quixotic and cataclysmic demand was indicative of little more than confusion on the part of the insurgents. To restore some focus, Blanqui made a dramatic appearance, addressing the Assembly in his dry, caustic voice. He only briefly referred to Poland, before attacking the class oppression of the masses and demanding revenge for the massacre at Rouen. Alexis de Tocqueville, a conservative liberal, was filled with horror. He was viscerally disgusted by Blanqui’s prison pallor, his ‘sunken, withered cheeks12, white lips, and a sickly, malign, dirty look like a pallid, mouldy corpse …. He looked as if he had lived in a sewer and only just come out.’
Barbès attempted to persuade the crowd to retire, but another leader, Huber, thought by some to be a police agent, cried out, ‘The Assembly is dissolved!’ The crowd carried Barbès to the Hôtel de Ville, where he felt obliged to proclaim a revolutionary government and issued a few futile decrees. These favoured dictatorship of the working class13, with the bourgeois National Guard replaced by a ‘Workers Guard’. The National Guard had little difficulty in breaking up this émeute and arresting Barbès and other conspirators within the hour. After a few days on the run, Blanqui was also picked up and returned to prison, there to further develop the sickly complexion that so disgusted de Tocqueville.
The radical clubs had been defeated. And with that came the rapid demise of the National Workshops. On 21 June, an edict was issued ordering all their beneficiaries between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five to enlist in the army. Others without work were to be deported to the countryside. The novelist Gustave Flaubert described the reaction of the unemployed workers:
Many of them were, in fact, skilled craftsmen14 who regarded farming as degrading; in a word, it was a trap, an insult and a categorical denial of earlier promises. But if they resisted, force would be used, of that they were certain, and they were taking steps to forestall it.
There were now some 100,000 men and their families dependent on the National Workshops, far more than the drilled anti-socialist brigades of April. And they were no longer an army of reaction, but an inchoate mass increasingly influenced by socialistic ideas. A large procession took their rather incoherent demands to Luxembourg Palace, where formerly worker representatives had sat in assembly. When these met with no satisfaction, the petitioners scattered back into their quartiers with fury in their hearts.
As clouds gathered in the thundery sky, crowds massed on the Right Bank of the Seine.
At about 9 o’clock the crowds gathered at the Bastille15 and the Châtelet [in Les Halles] surged up on to the boulevard. From the Porte Saint-Denis to the Porte-Saint-Martin there was nothing but a swarming mass, dark blue, almost black, in colour, amongst which you could glimpse men with burning eyes and pale faces drawn with hunger and fired by injustice.
At ten o’clock on the night of 22 June, as rain fell from the black sky, insurrection broke out. A barricade was erected near the Porte St-Denis and on it was raised a flag inscribed ‘Du Pain ou la Morte’ (Bread or Death). Two women climbed up beside it and cried out to the people, calling on them to revolt. One of them was a well-known character in the Quartier St Denis. She stood in the wind and the rain, a strikingly beautiful figure with long black hair, wearing a light blue silk dress, and with head and arms uncovered. The soldiers were maddened by these viragos, as they saw them, stirring up bloodshed. Both women were shot down.
On the Left Bank16,17, families receiving relief through the National Workshops had been used to gathering at the Place du Panthéon to receive their meagre stipend. Now 10,000 men, women and children stood there silently in the dark. An anonymous man was hoisted up on to the shoulders of others, and he addressed the workers, calling on them to rise in rebellion. Suddenly the crowd broke up. One strong column headed across the Seine to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Another descended the rue Saint-Jacques – ‘preceded by a hundred children carrying candles’ – making for the Hôtel de Ville.
The insurrection flared. Within a couple of days more than 1,000 barricades were erected, some tottering and slipshod but many formidably engineered constructions. More than half the city, including strategic points in the centre, was under rebel control. Lacking leadership and direction they failed to seize the Hôtel de Ville, however. It was a doomed rising from the start. The insurgents had just short of 50,000 fighters, out of a working-class population of 300,000 of both sexes. There were probably just as many in the National and Mobile Guards, who with the regular army made up the 80,000 troops mobilised to crush the insurrection. Even Caussidière’s security police took sides against the rebellion.
The insurgents had no prominent political leaders. Neither Louis Blanc nor even Auguste Blanqui thought that a rising was wise – and from abroad Karl Marx also thought it untimely. This was a spontaneous rebellion of despair, but we should not forget that it was roughly bound together by the basic socialist demands of the right to work and the organisation of labour. One captured rebel interrogated by an army officer gave ‘as the reason for the revolt the desire for a democratic and social republic18 … the right of workers to form associations and to take part, according to their ability, in public and private enterprises’. This, in fact, was not a bad summation of social republicanism as it was then understood. Modern historians, jealous of their hard-won and expensive education, are far too inclined to assume that the untutored masses have no idea about politics. Actually, if people only fought in response to deprivation and desperation, they would hardly ever cease fighting.
The Constituent Assembly declared itself to be in ‘permanent session’, the old formula from the French Revolution signalling a suspension of the constitution, and granted dictatorial powers to suppress the rising to General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, himself a republican, son of a Jacobin and brother of a famously principled anti-monarchist politician who had died in 1845. Perhaps only a military leader with such an unimpeachable political pedigree could deploy full force against a popular rebellion challenging the actually existing Republic.
Cavaignac waited for the rebels to build up steam and prepared to lay siege against the rebel-held streets. The army’s artillery was to be deployed without remorse. They would sweep the streets clean with grapeshot. The regular army was supported by the largely middle-class National Guard and the Garde Mobile drawn from working-class slums. This collision of government and rebels might have been a ‘servile war’ between the classes, but it was also to a considerable extent a civil war within the working masses. Emmanuel Barthélemy had no role to play in the outbreak of the insurrection – he was not even in Paris at the time. But he would not stand aside. As soon as he learnt of this titanic duel between the workers and the government he felt compelled to join it.
Barthélemy would later write an account of his participation in the ‘June Days’ while in exile. As one might expect, it was an efficient dispatch without histrionics. He finished it on 26 December 1849, and it was subsequently published, though it was quite heavily redacted to pass the censor. It is the longest piece of prose we have from him and, in it, we hear his voice, and we look through his eyes at a turning point in history.
The piece was introduced by Barthélemy as an eyewitness account, not explicitly political in form but political in intent: ‘The insurrection of June 184819, despite the stories that have been published, is not yet sufficiently known. It is the duty of every democrat to bring their share of materials on the history of this great struggle. I shall discharge this duty by telling the events of which I have been an actor or witness.’ As the only rebel barricade commander of the June Days to leave a narrative, he had a dramatic tale to tell.
On the first day of the insurrection, the government was not too concerned. A strong force protected the Hôtel de Ville, and two insurgent barricades nearby, in the rue Blanche-Mibray, were easily taken by the National Guard. Rain fell in torrents, and it was hoped that the ardour of the rebels would be dampened. In reality, the rebellion was consolidating itself in the working-class districts. Its focus and citadel was the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, one of the oldest districts of Paris on the Right Bank of the Seine. Across the river, insurgents also held the Latin Quarter around the Panthéon. If they were to descend from the Right Bank down the rue St Denis and from the Left Bank along the rue St Jacques, they would meet on the bridge, Pont Notre-Dame, just above the Hôtel de Ville. General Cavaignac ordered his men to prevent the insurgents meeting up, and a sharp battle was fought at the Pont St Michel to block the approach from the Left Bank. It was a macabre place for a clash of arms, for it took place beside the morgue, or ‘Dead House’, where anonymous bodies retrieved from the Seine were exposed on tables so they might be identified by friends or relatives. By nightfall the barricade on the bridge that had been erected was taken by cannon, and there was a new set of corpses to add to the half-decomposed cadavers dragged from the river. General Lamoricière, meanwhile, cleared the barricades in the Faubourgs Saint-Martin, Saint-Denis and Poissonnière on the Right Bank. Despite the assistance of Cavaignac, however, he was unable to overrun the Faubourg du Temple. As darkness fell, fighting died down, and throughout the night artillery trundled towards Paris.
Barthélemy had expected an insurrection for some time. He had little confidence in the government, and so far as he was concerned, the rebellion had erupted because the workers had foolishly abandoned their barricades after February and allowed the government to break its promises. The timing of the outbreak took him by surprise. He was with his family at Vitry-sur-Seine, about four miles from the city centre, when, on 23 June, the beating of drums in the town to call up reservists alerted him to the fact that ‘Paris was in full insurrection’. Barthélemy20 mobilised for the insurgents. ‘At this unexpected news, I left immediately, despite the rain, and arrived in Paris by the barrière de Fontainebleau, which I found highly barricaded and guarded by a fairly large number of men, only some of whom were armed with rifles, mostly unloaded for lack of ammunition.’ Everywhere he went he found ‘improvised fortresses21 but poorly armed and almost completely devoid of ammunition’. At this point, on Friday, 23 June, at five o’clock, it seemed to him that the government could easily have put down the rising with 2,000 men. Yet Cavaignac, Barthélemy believed, wished for a formidable rising so that it could be fully smashed.
As Barthélemy journeyed across Paris, he came across National Guards swearing their determination to do away with the revolutionaries who had imposed themselves upon the Republic. Those on the barricades, in contrast, were thinking only in defensive terms. A captured rebel was to tell his court-martial that he and his comrades had built their defences ‘because they [the Government] wanted to send the workers away from Paris22. We did not mean any harm. We thought it was just like it had been in February.’ But it was not to be. The government was determined to destroy the insurgency, not to reach a deal with it.
After unsuccessfully trying to reach the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, Barthélemy crossed through the Paris Louvre, the Palais National and the Porte Saint-Martin, finally arriving at the Faubourg du Temple, where he met friends. This district, in the north-east of the city, flanked the Faubourg du Saint-Antoine, the epicentre of the revolt. The two districts were connected by the rue St Maur.
A British journalist and artist for the Illustrated London News saw the great barricade closing off the Faubourg du Saint-Antoine. ‘Here,’ he wrote:
I inspected the famous barricade23: it was as high as the first floor and more than ten feet deep; the top was covered with double rows of well-armed men. A small passage near the corners was left, through which I passed. When inside this barricade, I was compelled to work like everybody else at removing the pavement, only to show that I sympathise with the insurgents. After this display of bon volonté, I was at liberty, and went up the faubourg to the fifth barricade, showing my dirty palms and muddy coat every time when called upon to assist, to prove that I had contributed my share. The aspect of the faubourg was formidable: one universal feeling pervading all the population; women, old men, children, and entire families were in the street, not at their doors, but in the very middle next with the workmen.
The barricades bristled with armed men and planted flags, and the windows and house-tops were crowded with people. Like Barthélemy, many of the insurgents had originally come from outside Paris itself. It was estimated that only one seventh had been born in the city. There were jubilant shouts and worried murmurings, the clatter of barriers being reinforced under the direction of older men, and the crack of firearms being set off. The smell of cordite hung in the air.
In the Temple district itself the atmosphere was much more sober24. Here rebellion was being treated as a deadly serious business. Many of the locals worked in small metal shops in the decorative trade – sertisseurs, as Barthélemy had been. They were the elite of the June 1848 insurrection25, using their technical skills to improvise bullets – moulded in sewing thimbles – and even to construct a cannon by boring through a length of requisitioned cast iron.
The central barricade of the Temple district was notable for its formidable solidity. It was virtually a fortress, spotted with small gaps through which weapons could be fired. Victor Hugo, who observed it from behind government lines, was awestruck. In an excursus on the June Days, which he included in Les Misérables, he set down his indelible memories of the scene:
… you could see in the distance26, beyond the canal, at the very top of the street that climbs the slopes of Belleville, a strange wall … built of cobblestones. It was plumb-straight, perfectly aligned, precise, perpendicular, squared, level …. Discernible at intervals in its grey surface were almost invisible loopholes, like black threads. These loopholes were equally spaced …. Rising at the end of the street, this barrier created a dead end. A wall, still and quiet. No one to be seen, nothing to be heard. Not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre. This terrible thing was bathed in the dazzling June sunlight. It was the Faubourg du Temple barricade.
On the remaining cobbles before the barricade lay a few corpses in pools of blood. ‘I remember a white butterfly coming and going in the street,’ wrote Hugo.
François Lecuyer, a captain in the National Guard and supporter of Ledru-Rollin, was nominally in charge of the rebel barricades at the Faubourg du Temple. In his subsequent trial, Lecuyer was to claim that he had been coerced into taking command by the local workers of the National Workshops, against his protestations. ‘They would not listen to me27. I had no strength and I was overwhelmed. I resigned myself to dying as a martyr.’ Barthélemy vehemently denied that Lecuyer had done anything but take the command voluntarily. Lecuyer’s role, moreover, was purely moral. The actual direction of the struggle was organised by veteran republicans belonging to the radical clubs. Barthélemy was, of course, a Blanquist, and he was quickly operating as a de facto officer.
On Saturday morning, the second day of the insurrection, the National Assembly issued a decree: ‘Paris is in a state of siege. All powers are concentrated in the hands of General Cavaignac.’ Proclamations were posted announcing a curfew. The National Guard patrolled the streets, stopping men, searching women, and arresting street-sellers suspected of ferrying aid to the insurgents. Barked orders told residents to move back from their windows. It was an oppressive and overcast weekend. Troops, artillery and munition carts clattered through the streets. Across the city rolled the dull heavy sound of cannon firing, buildings collapsing and barricades falling in.
Military operations opened with an attack on the Panthéon on the Left Bank – a grand mausoleum for heroes of the nation – occupied by 1,500 insurgents. The area was soon a storm of musketry and cannon fire. At length, the soldiers forced their way through the Panthéon’s brass gates. Outgunned, its defenders retreated, but when they came up against a force of Garde Mobile in their rear, they laid down their arms. The great fortress of the insurrection on the Left Bank had fallen.
On the Right Bank, meanwhile, General Lamoricière, short of troops, had been unable to consolidate his victories of the previous day, and new barricades had risen in Rochechouart, St Denis and Poissonnière. These were clustered around a half-mile stretch of the old city wall, and enclosed a patch of wasteland – surrounded by commanding buildings and scattered with blocks of stone for a large hospital under construction – called the Clos St Lazare. It presented a formidable defensive stronghold for the insurgents, protecting the flank of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Fighting raged here all day. There were now two main outposts shielding the rebel heartland of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from attack: the Clos St Lazare and the Saint-Martin Canal.
Paris was now fully at war, a fratricidal struggle between republican brothers. A pro-government contemporary bemoaned the scene.
The streets of Paris have a sinister and desert aspect28 like that of a dead city. All men are in combat, all women at the windows or on the doors, seeking news. At the sound of the grapeshot, which, from minute to minute, tears the air, the whole population trembles; every woman asks herself if this is the blow which has taken from her a husband, a son, a friend. On the different sides of the struggle … what a strange and terrible spectacle, these thousands of citizens joining in the same cry of love: Fraternity! the same cry of war: Liberty! the same rallying cry: Long live the Republic!
One insurgent took aim from a window at an approaching National Guard, only to recognise him at the last minute as his own son.
From Friday to Saturday night, Barthélemy took command of the rue Grange-aux-Belles, ‘a long, straggling, miserable street’29 boasting the largest number of barricades on the Right Bank. His anchor point was the locks of the Canal Saint-Martin. This was the barrier dividing the Faubourg du Temple from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the last line of defence before the citadel of the insurrection could be penetrated by government troops. Crossing the canal, which ran through the Faubourg du Temple, was a double-level bridge; one was for carriages – and could be raised for passing boats – another was for pedestrians. Houses formed a semicircle on each side of the lock, from which streets radiated. Barthélemy ordered these approaches to be barricaded, and when the defences were ready he went scouting to check on enemy troop movements. He planned to go all the way to the Hôtel de Ville but was intercepted by National Guards at the entrance of rue Saint-Martin. His companion was captured, but Barthélemy ‘miraculously escaped arrest’30, and he returned to his post and resumed command. Despite all his efforts to organise a solid resistance, Barthélemy was aware that their position was intrinsically weak. The defenders’ gunpowder, which they were making themselves from scavenged chemicals, was of low quality and could barely serve. That his fellow insurgents could hold their positions at all, Barthélemy contended, was entirely due to the vigour of their fight.
On Saturday morning, Barthélemy had the barricades reinforced, and then he organised the disarming of people in the area who were not participating in the barricade fighting: ‘no violence took place, properties and people were respected’. Food supplies for the barricade defenders were either given voluntarily or paid for with signed vouchers. Though Lecuyer would take credit for this orderly behaviour during his trial, Barthélemy denied that he was at all responsible: ‘he himself said that his influence was zero31 outside the action of combat. If order had prevailed, it is only by the natural and spontaneous impulse of honour and probity’ that characterised the masses.
Barthélemy rejected accusations that his men had domineered and terrorised the local population. Specifically, he refuted the allegation of a retired officer, Adjutant-Major Stack, that he had been threatened with death. Barthélemy had arrested Stack and questioned him politely about his identity and profession and his reasons for being in the area. ‘He replied by giving me a false name32 and a false profession and by indicating intentions that were certainly not true. This gentleman was very pale, he was very scared and it is probably the troubled imagination that created in his mind the chimerical dangers to which he now believes himself to have been exposed.’ Though closely questioned and guarded, all prisoners were ‘treated fraternally’33. Their wounds were bandaged and they were well fed, despite the general shortage of supplies.
On the Saturday night, Barthélemy’s barricades on the Grange-aux-Belles were quiet, but a concentrated attack, led personally by General Cavaignac, fell on the barricade at St Maur, connecting the Temple and Saint-Antoine faubourgs. For three hours the defenders withstood fire from four or five pieces of cannon and hundreds of muskets. Two generals and about 400 soldiers were killed or wounded in the engagement. The assault was repulsed and the local barracks of the Garde Mobile were captured by an insurgent bayonet charge. Barthélemy denied allegations that the premises were wantonly looted. Nothing was taken except arms, ammunition and food, he said.
Barthélemy and his comrades were jubilant. Though lacking ammunition they were ‘determined to be bombarded rather than let our adversaries pass through our area’. They believed that the enemy was weakening. But they had little idea of what was happening in the rest of the city. British reporters, enjoying relative freedom of movement, were in a better situation to see the grim reality:
The line [regular army], the National Guard, and the [Garde] Mobile34 marched up with cannon to each barricade, and once its strength loosened, charged at the bayonet, killing all whom they found either in arms, or with faces blackened with [gun] powder. Few prisoners were made in this quarter, which was the scene of many a horrid and cold-blooded massacre. When the insurgents, having thrown down their arms and demanded a quarter, found they were about to be slaughtered, they would kneel down, receive the shots coolly, and die, crying Vive la Republique! … At one barricade, in the Rue Planche Mibray, forty prisoners were made. Every one was put up against the barricade and shot, amid the savage and exulting shouts of the soldiery, [Garde] Mobile and the bourgeoisie, always rabid in the hour of victory.
The vice was closing.
By Sunday morning, the third day of the insurrection, General Cavaignac had a clear plan of campaign. Two columns, one attacking through the Clos St Lazare in the north-west and the other from the Hôtel de Ville in the south, would meet in the Place de la Bastille and so cut off the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. After difficult fighting, inch by inch, the Clos Saint-Lazare fell to government troops, and the Faubourg du Temple was left exposed to attack. From the centre of the city, meanwhile, sappers and miners were being employed to tunnel under barricades. The winding streets made it near impossible to bring cannon to bear, and the insurgents had knocked through interior walls so they could pass to and fro under cover. ‘The whole neighbourhood was in fact one immense fortress35, which it was necessary to demolish stone by stone. The besiegers paid a heavy price in blood for their victory.’ A British journalist witnessed ‘heroism on both sides36 … the burning houses, the rumbling work of the miners, the steady platoon fire of the insurgents, the charges, the retreats, the ambuscades and feints … [an] awful and terrible struggle’.
One by one they fell and the insurgents, beaten from one stronghold, retreated to another.
The two columns met at the Place de la Bastille, with only the canal blocking their entry into the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Paris held its breath. The anarchist thinker, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – who thought the insurrection inopportune but in a just cause – perched in a house opposite the Canal Saint-Martin to admire the ‘sublime horror’ of the cannonade37 to come.
Around 9 a.m., Barthélemy was interrupted while he was interrogating a sergeant taken prisoner overnight. He was told that an attack force had presented itself with artillery on the Grange-aux-Belles street on the Right Bank of the Saint-Martin Canal. ‘I immediately headed there, and after dodging a couple of gunshots from the front line, I opened fire.’
A battle lasting about six hours ensued. Artillery fire rained down on their barricade, but ‘there were no casualties thanks to the poor aim of the artillery that was vomiting upon us a rain of useless bullets and projectiles’. The commander leading the enemy attack column attempted a flanking action, bypassing the greatest strength of barricade defenders, by over-running the barricade at the locks on the canal. Here Barthélemy’s men lacked ammunition, and in much confusion, the fighters defending the barricade retired to the rue St Maur. ‘This was a terrible moment,’ remembered Barthélemy. Only five men remained, including Barthélemy, to fend off the combined efforts of the regular soldiers, the Garde Mobile and the National Guard.
Red-hot balls whistled all around38. Within a quarter of an hour, one of the defending fighters had been hit in his upper chest, another square in the forehead, and a third had his right arm broken near the shoulder. Still the attackers did not dare launch a bayonet charge to seize the barricade. They assumed that the paucity of fire from the other side was due to ‘calculated prudence’ rather than a lack of fighters. Barthélemy and the one other fighter still standing continued to hold back for more than two hours the hundreds of men and horses facing them, until they had used up all their own ammunition and that of their fallen comrades. Only then did they retire, carrying back the wounded and leaving the dead on the battlefield. The onslaught had been intense. Three houses were nearly entirely destroyed and the bridge across the canal was ‘liberally festooned’ with bullets and cannonballs. Arriving back ‘in the middle of those who had abandoned us,’39 recalled Barthélemy, ‘we saw that indeed they completely lacked ammunition, and if they had tried to stay with us they would have been exposed to withering fire without the ability to retaliate’.
Barthélemy approached Lecuyer, the nominal commander, to angrily ask why the cartridges he had requested during the fight at the Grange-aux-Belles barricades had not arrived. Lecuyer protested that he lacked ammunition himself. The command was, in Barthélemy’s opinion, ‘in an indescribable state of disorder’. Men had been demoralised by the arrival of a mysterious letter from the centre of Paris carrying news of retreats and massacres. ‘Lecuyer was prepared to enjoy the benefits of victory,’ wrote Barthélemy scornfully, ‘but not to suffer the consequences of the defeat that was becoming increasingly inevitable.’ Lecuyer’s men, suspecting him of wishing to desert, were maintaining an active surveillance on him. ‘I heard on that occasion a worker say: “It is you who made me build the barricades and provoke the Mobiles. Now we are nearing defeat, you will share the common fate because if you try to abandon us the last ball [bullet] will be for you.”’ Barthélemy commented: ‘It was probably this threat40, well deserved by Lecuyer, which made him say that he had been forced to take part in the insurrection. He should have remembered that it was made on Sunday evening, when there was no longer any possible doubt on the outcome of events.’
The insurgents no longer had sufficient ammunition with which to fend off the well-provisioned army of General Lamoricière. Lecuyer was in full nervous collapse, so Barthélemy ‘resolved to use every honourable means41 to save the men who had taken part in the action on the left bank of the canal’. Barthélemy left Lecuyer and returned to the barricade at the Grange-aux-Belles. In his absence, however, it had been abandoned by its worker defenders and had been overrun. While he and the insurgents had protected local property, Barthélemy observed, the National Guard had ransacked neighbouring houses. Barthélemy searched out and located some loaded guns and powder in a nearby house, and with these staged a counter-attack on the Grange-aux-Belles barricade. Knowing the area well, he led a team, dodging through houses and knocking through walls, to appear suddenly behind the enemy. The National Guard retreated in disorder, with only a few wounded on both sides. At this point, Barthélemy claimed, he was in a position to cut off and kill a National Guard detachment, but he exercised mercy and allowed them to retreat unmolested.
The suddenness of the surprise counter-attack convinced the government forces that the insurgents under Barthélemy’s command had more ammunition than they actually held. Some of them decided to negotiate an honourable surrender for the rebels, if they could. After about an hour, five National Guardsmen, commanded by Lieutenant Boucher, approached in order to demand arrangements to end the fighting42.
The parley between both parties was cordial, and Barthélemy and two comrades returned with Boucher to meet with the colonel commanding the line infantry, a man called Blanchard. The regular soldiers, stationed on the right bank of the canal with their cannons pointing towards the bridge, had not changed their position since the beginning of the battle. They were greatly agitated to see three armed insurgents approach and their first instinct was to fire on them, but Captain Ribot, Lieutenant Boucher and several other officers dampened their fury. ‘I knew from that moment,’ wrote Barthélemy43, ‘that Lieutenant Boucher, animated by the desire to end the civil war, had opened negotiations without consulting anything but his generous sentiments.’
Having exchanged a few words with Colonel Blanchard, Barthélemy was introduced to General Lamoricière, who had established his headquarters at the Café Amand. As Barthélemy recalled: ‘The general received us politely44 and asked me what it was I wanted from him. I replied that I wanted to know the government’s intentions with regard to citizens who had taken up arms to defend the Faubourg du Temple. Lamoricière told me that if we wanted to continue the resistance, it would be ruthlessly crushed, and if instead we wanted to surrender, he would intervene for us with the head of the Executive Power [Cavaignac].’
Barthélemy did not consider this to be the guarantee he required – that it would protect the lives and liberty of his men and perhaps thousands of civilians. He refused the conditions offered. An argument ensued, in which Lamoricière warned Barthélemy that the Garde Mobile had the rifles, powder and bullets to force an unconditional surrender. Barthélemy responded with a bluff: ‘We too have weapons45 and I hope that they will be strong enough to confront the dangers that threaten us.’ Barthélemy and his party left the general carrying with them a proclamation from General Cavaignac. This acknowledged that the rebels believed themselves to be ‘fighting for the welfare of the working classes’46 and called on them to return ‘to the arms of their country’. The aftermath of the June days, Barthélemy would remark bitterly, showed the true value of Cavaignac’s embrace.
Back at the barricades at the Grange-aux-Belles and the canal locks, Barthélemy formed his men into a circle, and in their midst read out Cavaignac’s offer. He told his attentive audience that he doubted the merciful intentions of the government, and that personally he would not surrender. It was said that the rebel band cheered his defiance. ‘Those who were about to die saluted him,’47 a radical journalist would later write. Barthélemy resigned his post, allowing his men to shift as best they could, but determined to fire the few cartridges he had left as a simple combatant.
The men dispersed, each attempting to find their own escape. As Monday morning dawned, government troops broke into houses and swarmed over the barricades from the upper floors, to find the defences all but abandoned. Only a few stubborn fighters remained. The Garde Mobile commander, in his subsequent report, boasted of inflicting ‘cruel losses’48 and capturing armed insurgents ‘whom we shot immediately and without stopping’. As they advanced, firing wildly, the local population, of both sexes and all ages, fled in terror. One man, La Villette, was shot down merely because he was wearing a red blouse, the normal garb for his profession as sailor. Barthélemy blamed the massacre on the virulence of newspaper articles written during the battle:
All these stories of men sawn in two by the insurgents49, d’eau-de-vie [brandy] and poisonous bullets, fists and feet cut off, heads still wearing their hats planted on stakes, or transformed into lamps, around which cannibals danced the ‘saraband’; this deluge of accusations of looting, rape, and murder … at the height of the struggle, whipped the victors onto bloody revenge against the vanquished. The wretches who wrote these articles must have on their conscience a heavy weight.
The Temple district was the second-last insurgent stronghold to fall. Its conquerer, General Lamoricière, moved on to the rue de la Roquette, penetrating like a dagger into the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Resistance finally collapsed. At half-past-one on Monday afternoon, General Cavaignac announced that the rising had been suppressed. Antoine Sénard, president of the National Assembly, announced the news: ‘It is all over, gentlemen, thank God!’50
Barthélemy, having stashed his weapon, tried to return to the centre of Paris via the Faubourg Saint-Martin. There he was spotted by Captain Ribot of the National Guard, with whom he had amicably parleyed when attempting to negotiate a surrender. ‘Unhappily, I called to him,’51 remembered Ribot. ‘What are you doing here? I am compelled to arrest you.’ Barthélemy was taken into custody and led away to the Town Hall in the 5th arrondissement. Yet Ribot had remembered his chivalrous behaviour which had saved the lives of the outmanoeuvred National Guard detachment at the Grange-aux-Belles barricade. This, Barthélemy believed, saved his own life. Other prisoners were being simply shot out of hand, if for no other reason than to make room for more prisoners who were being crowded into the cellars of the Tuileries or the military forts.
There were martyrs on both sides. Officers had led government forces from the front and suffered accordingly. ‘Never had the battles of the empire been so murderous,’52 wrote an eyewitness: ‘fifteen years of war in Algeria had scarcely cost as many generals and superior officers as those four days of civil war.’ General Brea, a hero of the Napoleonic wars, had been captured by insurgents, abused, and was about to be released when approaching National Guards panicked his captors and they buried his own sword into his belly. Archbishop Affre, attempting to mediate, was killed by a random shot. Violent suppression of suspects after the rising further embittered feeling: ‘From that day forward53 a river of blood separated the socialist workers from the republican bourgeoisie.’
Alexander Herzen, an aristocratic Russian exiled from his country for his revolutionary beliefs and resident in Paris in 1848, had seen the ‘gloomy faces of the men dragging stones’ to make the barricades, the ‘women and children … helping them’. Herzen kept away from the fighting, but he wrote of what he witnessed in Paris in the aftermath:
After the slaughter which lasted for days, silence descended, the calm of the siege …. The bourgeoisie was triumphant. And the houses in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine were still smoking … the interiors of rooms laid bare gaped like stone wounds …. But where are the owners, the tenants, where are they? No one gave them a thought. Here and there were men scattering sand in the streets, but the blood nevertheless kept oozing through …
Herzen tasted the bitter cud of righteous fury. ‘Moments like these make one hate for a whole decade, seek revenge all one’s life. Woe to those who forgive such moments!’ But how was one to bear the blasting of hope? Did one retreat into fanaticism or shed youthful illusions?
Which is better? It is hard to tell54.
One leads to the bliss of lunacy.
The other to the unhappiness of knowledge.
Herzen, as we shall see, came to know Barthélemy well. It is certain that Barthélemy did not forgive. Whether he lived in the bliss of lunacy or the unhappiness of knowledge is not so easy to say.