IN FRANCE, POLITICAL developments were hurtling toward a historic denouement. Since the expulsion of Ledru-Rollin and his party of démoc-socs from France in June 1849, the conservatives of the Constitutional and then the National Assembly had had it all their own way. The ‘party of order’ pushed on with piously religious and repressive legislation. They forced through a limitation of the suffrage so that most workers were disenfranchised and unable to vote. President Louis Napoleon adroitly positioned himself as a defender of the lost democratic rights. His intention was not, however, to restore a constitutional democracy but to angle for supreme power. He was his uncle’s nephew, and had never hidden his desire to restore the Napoleonic Empire.
As president, Louis Napoleon was head of the armed forces, and there was many a soldier who identified his lustrous family name with military pride and glory. The Assembly, shot through with contempt for the masses, was in no strong position to oppose the ambitions of a democratically elected head of state and president who retained considerable support amongst the people. Admittedly, republican opposition was rising, but Louis Napoleon had his strong-arm supporters, the ‘10 December Society’1, to thrash with sticks any who dared oppose him too loudly. Most of all, Louis Napoleon’s propaganda emphasised the ruinous political and class divisions within France, suggesting that only he could preserve the country from civil war.
On 21 September 1851, Barthélemy was deputed to welcome to England Louis Kossuth, hero of Hungary’s defeated revolution against Austrian rule, on behalf of the émigré ‘Republicans, Revolutionists, Socialists’. Kossuth’s reply to Barthélemy’s address was affable, but mentioned in passing the conflict of opinions dividing the people of France. The implication was clear: French democracy was not yet capable of sustaining itself. Barthélemy could not forbear from retorting:
You have spoken of the divisions which agitate France. These divisions are not so numerous as you seem to think and as the journals of the government represent. There have been in France, as throughout the world, but two parties, the one of men who produce without possessing, and the other of men who possess without producing. There is in this unquestionable fact an attack upon natural justice; and the socialists are the republicans who combat this iniquity – their adversaries are those who defend it.
This was a rather undiplomatic rebuttal to a stalwart republican, and Barthélemy softened it: ‘The present is neither the time nor the place2 to discuss socialism, and I comprehend that your mission may not be to apply the principles of your own country, where all that is practicable is, as you have said, the Republic based upon universal suffrage, with the solidarity of peoples.’ But if Hungary was not ready for socialist class struggle, in Barthélemy’s view France certainly was.
Shortly after this, Barthélemy again smuggled himself back into France. It is quite likely that he went in the company of his Blanquist comrade, Vidil. Barthélemy managed to keep his movements secret, however, while Vidil’s were quickly exposed. Early in November 1851, Vidil arrived in Paris ‘with the design of organising an insurrection, and executing a project still less avowable’, as the government let it be known, presumably the assassination of Louis Napoleon. Vidil and another Blanquist, Goute, formerly a master tanner at Blois, were arrested on 7 November at the lodgings of Vidil’s mistress. Papers were discovered, including three passports under false names. Other papers led to a search of the lodgings of a mechanic called Guerin, at Montmartre, where a large quantity of firearms were found along with bomb-making materials and an ‘infernal machine’, ‘capable of discharging fifteen projectiles at the same time’.
Following the passport trail, police tracked down another man called Dupostel to a wine shop in the Faubourg du Temple. Ammunition and a number of letters of compromising character were seized. Police also descended upon Madame Antoine3, Blanqui’s sister, who tried to burn incriminating letters and papers before they could be seized. She was prevented, and amongst them was found a copy of Blanqui’s ‘famous’ message, the ‘Warning to the People’. In the aftermath, the police descended upon a secret organisation, the Jeune Montagne, associated with the Vidil plot. Firearms were seized, along with ammunition, badges and ‘an enormous quantity of socialist writings of the worst kind’. Those arrested were chiefly of the working class. Their aim had been to recruit supporters in the army, the strategy favoured by Barthélemy’s German comrade, August Willich.
On 2 December 1851, Louis Napoleon unleashed his forces against the fragile Republic. Under the pretext of the presence of dangerous refugees from London being found in Paris, the capital was flooded with soldiers. At five in the morning, officers were informed that they were to close down the National Assembly. This was a violation of the constitution, but not one officer demurred. Generals loyal to the Republic – including Cavaignac and Lamoricière, who had led the repression of the June Days – were put under arrest. Two battalions disarmed the guard at the National Assembly and occupied the building. Opposition politicians were roused from their beds and marched into custody. Seventy-eight civilians, ‘known for the energy of their Republican convictions, and feared as “Chiefs of barricades”’, were scooped up. By 7 a.m., the initial operation was virtually complete, and proclamations announcing a new regime were being posted around Paris. This was the classical coup d’état4 of the nineteenth century: the state apparatus had broken the constitution that restrained it.
Louis Napoleon’s move did provoke some physical opposition: barricades were built in Paris and there were serious outbreaks of violence in the provinces. The surviving Jeune Montagne gave leadership5 to peasant resistance in the south of France. Twenty-six thousand démoc-socs were detained and martial law was put in place in thirty-two departments until the end of March 1852. Military force and the President’s promise to restore universal male suffrage at length proved sufficient to suppress resistance. People could vote, but only for those prepared to support the new regime, and the government would be a creature of Napoleon, not of the elected representatives. The police repressed political opposition. Napoleon was able to secure 7,439,216 votes in a plebiscite to legitimise the new regime, as against 640,737 cast against. In November 1852, following another referendum, Louis Napoleon was declared Napoleon III, ‘hereditary Emperor of the French’.
As Louis Napoleon carried out his seizure of power and his soldiers cleared the streets, a group of republican ‘Representatives’ of the National Assembly, along with workers and journalists, met at the home of Frédéric Cournet on the rue de Popincourt: a two-storey building, still under construction, arranged round a little square courtyard. They assembled on the first floor, sitting on stools cushioned with straw in a large room with low ceiling and whitewashed walls. Victor Hugo, positioned between fireplace and stairway, presided. Reports were given on the popular mood. The news was not good. A workman, leaning against the mantelpiece, muttered in a low voice to one of his comrades: there was no counting upon the people. If they tried to fight, it would ‘be doing a crazy thing’6. ‘One after another, our hopes were extinguished,’ recalled Hugo. ‘But, as I thought, this was all the more reason why we should astonish and arouse Paris by some extraordinary spectacle … by the audacity of an immense devotion.’ He proposed that they gather the following morning at the Café-Roysin in the nearby Faubourg Saint-Antoine, once the shops had opened: ‘There must be people in the streets7, that they may see us, that they may know who we are, that the glory of our example may meet every eye and thrill every heart.’ The next morning the politicians gathered uncertainly on the street for an act of heroic demonstration.
They erected a barricade on the rue Sainte Marguerite. Frédéric Cournet, a naval hero turned republican activist, took charge of its construction. But it was an unimpressive sight, a meagre jumble of stones and carts clearly intended to be little more than symbolic. The pavements were left unblocked. One of the insurgent leaders, Charles Baudin, stood atop the barricade. He was barracked by a gaggle of Bonapartist workers, who shouted their scorn at these politicians only concerned for their daily stipend as members of the National Assembly. ‘Down with the twenty-five francs!’ they jeered. Baudin turned to stare at them: ‘You will see how one can die8 for twenty-five francs.’
A small battalion of the 19th Regiment of the line was sent to disperse the protest. It was evident, as soon as they turned up, that the insurrectionists did not wish to fight. Their leaders, including the burly Cournet towering above the rest, drew themselves up in front of the barricade, all wearing their official insignia as elected members of the Assembly. They did not take cover, and Cournet ordered their followers to lower and conceal their muskets. There followed a tense stand-off.
With a copy of the constitution in his hand, one of the National Assembly representatives, Victor Schoelcher, began to speak to the soldiers. He appealed to their sense of duty, telling them that they were not mere mercenaries; their first loyalty was to the law and the constitution, not to the commander-in-chief. Schoelcher was interrupted by a shot from the barricade, wounding a soldier. The regiment’s commanding officer lost his patience and ordered his soldiers to fire a volley. There was a crash of gunfire, and Baudin9 fell with two bullets in his head. One other insurgent, a workman, was also killed, and others were wounded by the hail of lead.
This was now a fight in earnest. The insurgents dashed behind the barricade and began to return fire, killing a soldier and the officer who had ordered the fusillade. Meanwhile, a macabre scene played out around the mortally wounded figure of Baudin. An officer of the line and Frédéric Cournet grappled in an attempt to pull him over to their respective sides. Backed by the bayonets of his men, the officer won this grisly tug-of-war, and four soldiers carried Baudin away. Rioting escalated until suppressed on 4 December.
It was a half-hearted struggle, even now, and nothing like as substantial as the June Days insurrection. Louis Napoleon’s hope for a near bloodless coup, however, was dashed on 4 December. As workers were being repressed in the east of Paris, a column of soldiers under the command of Canrobert lost discipline and opened fire in the bourgeois boulevards. Bullets poured forth for ten minutes and well over one hundred were killed in the fire zone. In a ferocious polemic against Louis Napoleon, Victor Hugo wrote bitterly of ‘the inoffensive inhabitants of Paris, the citizens who are not in any way mixed up with the fighting’ being ‘shot down without warning10 and massacred merely for the sake of intimidation’. This slaughter would not be forgiven. Louis Napoleon, who more than anything wished to be loved by the people, was bitterly disappointed. Future dictators would revel in such brutality as expressions of iron will. But for the second Napoleonic Empire, it was an indelible stain.
Not uncommonly, historical turning points only fix their meaning when they are fictionalised. Imaginative treatment gives emotional charge and dramatic narrative to the hurly-burly of events. It was the great novelist Victor Hugo, a blockbusting writer for all classes, who wove together the street battles of this period. In so doing he transfigured Barthélemy into the very personification of the unyielding revolutionary. In his famous novel, Les Misérables, Hugo compared the ferocious resistance of the June Days to the much less impressive rebellion of December 1851 – and he had witnessed both. In so doing, he made the names of both Emmanuel Barthélemy and Frédéric Cournet legends and archetypes: Barthélemy’s plebeian seriousness and action as against Cournet’s rhetorical defiance and windy playacting:
That barricade at the Faubourg du Temple11 [of June 1848], defended by 80 men against 10,000, held out for three days …. Not one of the 80 ‘cowards’ attempted to escape. All were killed except their leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall have more to say.
The Saint-Antoine barricade [of December 1851] was a place of thunderous defiance, the one at the Temples a place of silence. The difference between these two strongholds was the difference between the savage and the sinister, the one a roaring open mouth, the other a mask. The huge, mysterious insurrection of June ’48 was at once an outburst of fury and an enigma: in the first of these barricades the Dragon was discernible; in the second, the Sphinx.
These two strongholds were the work of two men, Cournet and Barthélemy, and each bore the image of the man responsible. Cournet of Saint-Antoine was a burly broad-shouldered man, red-faced, heavy-fisted, daring, and loyal, his gaze candid but awe-inspiring. He was intrepid, energetic, irascible and temperamental, the warmest of friends and the most formidable of enemies. War and conflict, the melee, were the air he breathed, they put him in high spirits. He had been a naval officer, and his voice and bearing had the flavour of sea and tempest – he brought the gale with him into battle. Except for genius there was in Cournet something of Danton, just as, except for divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.
Barthélemy, of the Temple, was thin and puny, sallow-faced and taciturn, a sort of tragic outcast who, having been beaten by a police officer, waited for the chance and killed him. He was sent to the galleys at the age of 17, and when he came out he built this barricade …. Barthélemy at all times flew one flag only, and it was black.
Hugo’s striking diptych, first published in 1862, immediately entered into historical consciousness as a true description of the June Days. It had its errors. Few described Barthélemy as puny, and of course he had not killed the policeman in 1839. The ‘black flag’ had been unfurled by the canuts rebels of Lyon in 1832 and 1834. It was a symbol of proletarian anguish and desperate revolt. Hugo wished to identify Barthélemy with the people of the abyss, not ideologues but workers driven by ferocious instinct. This certainly underestimated Barthélemy’s political consciousness.
But these caveats did not matter. Hugo’s depiction was soon taken as the ultimate representation of the June Days. It was forgotten by many that the Saint-Antoine barricade battles actually referred to a later time, after the June insurgents had been extirpated, killed, repressed or dispersed.
In 1879, the republican newspaper Mot d’Ordre recalled that when the fighting of June 1848 was over, and the heroic proletariat ridden down by the forces of the bourgeoisie, the red flag which had been hoisted on the formidable barricade defended by Cournet, and the black standard which had floated over Barthélemy’s redoubt in the Faubourg du Temple, were picked up from among the corpses and carried to the Constitutive Assembly, where the representatives greeted them with jeering applause. For years they had been left forgotten in the garret of the palace, a heap of old, faded and blackened rags covered in dried blood wound over half-broken flagstaffs12 still pitted with bullet holes. In 1879 they were recovered as a revered memorial for the new Republic. Of course, the two men had not actually fought in the same insurrection. But Barthélemy’s fortitude and Cournet’s braggadocio had entered into the historical record more powerfully than mere fact.
Radicals had seen in the proletariat an unbending defiance. The failure of the workers of Paris to effectively resist the coup, however, dealt a heavy and demoralising blow to this mythology. Another novelist inspired by 1848, but turned by it in the direction of cynical intelligence rather than grand psychodrama, was Gustave Flaubert. In his 1869 novel, L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert put into the mouth of one of his characters, Charles Deslauriers, a typically middle-class exasperation with the fickle working class. ‘Oh, I’ve had my belly full of that bunch13, kowtowing to Robespierre’s guillotine, Napoleon’s jackboot, Louis Philippe’s umbrella, a rabble who’ll swear undying allegiance to anyone who’ll toss them a crust of bread to fill their guts.’ The novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, defends the workers, but weakly. ‘As for the workers, they have got a right to complain because … the only thing you ever gave them was words, words and still more words! … In fact, the Republic seems to me to have run out of steam. Who knows, perhaps progress can only be achieved by an aristocracy – or by one man? Initiative always comes from above! The masses aren’t yet grown-up, whatever people claim.’ Here Flaubert captured the thinking of those who unwillingly agreed with Louis Napoleon when he wrote that ‘the nature of [modern] democracy is to personify itself in one man.’14
We can see here an ever-present danger to representative democracy. Political parties, it is commonly felt, represent their own particular class factions and interest groups, as well as those oddities who find a career in politics to be satisfying. But they do not represent, either singly or together, the ‘national will’. Normal politicians are rarely taken, at their own estimation, as being entirely committed to the national collective good, as evidenced by their overcompensating and wearisome patriotic flag-waving. Who has not heard, in the pub or the office, the complaint that ‘politicians are all in it for themselves’? ‘Not in our name,’ is the cry of the street demonstration. No doubt political parties, or at least their leadership groups, are mortal, and often need a good shove to be moved on to the political graveyard (or corporate lecture circuit). But there is always a risk that suspicion of politicians can curdle, and there emerges a leader claiming to represent not so much a party as a national ‘movement’. Such a leader eschews the politics of policy-formulation, which implies balancing between interest groups, and instead relies upon charisma and leadership.
It is all too easy for such movements to represent themselves as being above mere sectional parties, and to ventriloquise the voice of the people. Not for nothing do they have a fondness for the referendum and the plebiscite. They will emphasise that which brings the nation together, and that which excludes those unfortunates who are seen as outsiders, interlopers or subverters of the nation. They offer an enticing vision of unity and inclusiveness, all the more attractive to societies deeply divided by class, ethnicity or religion. In the mid-nineteenth century, revolutionary democrats were obsessed by Napoleon III and what he represented. Usually they would diminish and deprecate him. Victor Hugo called him ‘Napoleon the Little’. Marx dismissed him as a ridiculous caricature of his illustrious uncle. In reality, they were afraid. They perceived, if dimly, a popular Bonapartism that would darken into twentieth-century fascism. Authoritarian populism is hardly absent in our own time.
In France, the Solidarité républicaine15 organisation, a coalition of socialists and radical republicans, with the Blanquist Martin Bernard as president and the neo-Jacobin Charles Delescluze as secretary, had been confident that they could win the next scheduled elections in 1852. The coup d’état shattered their hopes. From his prison cell, Blanqui was distraught at the failure of the masses to oppose Napoleon’s destruction of the revolution. Characteristically, he pinned the blame on the lack of a determined insurrectionary leadership. As he wrote to Barthélemy, ‘To say that no one was to be found anywhere to rally this mob. What a depressing experience!’16 He was particularly pessimistic because he saw France as the very fount of revolution in Europe. If reaction was triumphant in France, revolution had no chance anywhere else. ‘When France falls back, Europe becomes lax.’17 Barthélemy blamed the poor showing of republicans against Napoleon’s coup on the imprisonment of Blanqui. ‘I don’t doubt that had Blanqui been able to join the organisation18 we have formed in London,’ he wrote to Willich, ‘the events of second December would have found a republican organisation ready to resist.’ He said the same to Blanqui’s mother:
If I had been able to execute the project I intended19 to execute myself at Belle-Île, your son, when he came to London, might have completed the already powerful organization which I had begun, and which … I am sure, would have averted the shame of recent events. If we had Blanqui in our midst, his presence would have eliminated petty rivalries and retied the bonds of union between men whom envy had divided. The party would have prepared itself for the struggle which everyone had foreseen, and Bonaparte would have found not a crowd but an army on the battlefield of 4th of December.
For Barthélemy, the presence of a determined, ruthlessly realistic organisation of revolutionaries, based upon charismatic unity, was ultimately crucial to preserve the gains of revolution.
Frederick Engels looked upon the failure of the French proletariat to effectively resist the destruction of the Republic with frustration but also a wry amusement. Absurdity had finally replaced serious revolutionism. In a letter to Marx, written from Manchester, he sarcastically compared Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power to the analogous coup of his great-uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, on the ‘18th Brumaire’, as the revolutionary calendar of the 1790s had dated it.
The history of France has entered a stage of utmost comicality. Can one imagine anything funnier than this travesty of the 18th Brumaire, effected in peacetime with the help of discontented soldiers by the most insignificant man in the world without, so far as it has hitherto been possible to judge, any opposition whatsoever? … It’s enough to make one despair. And now there’s no longer even a National Assembly to foil the great schemes of this unappreciated man … Appalling, a prospect devoid of conflict!
In this private letter, Engels let rip his disgust at the failure of the French masses to effectively resist the coup. They had been fooled by Napoleon’s promise to restore universal male suffrage, even though this would mean empty votes with no direct influence on government. Engels had grown tired of those who would celebrate ‘the people’. And those who would seek to lead them were but pale shadows of the great leaders of the French Revolution.
‘But the people, the people!’20 The people don’t care a damn about this whole business. [They] are happy as children over the franchise accorded to them and which, indeed, they will probably make use of like children … after what we saw yesterday, there can be no counting on the peuple, and it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce, Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf [Louis Napoleon] together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte].
Characteristically, the one comfort for Engels was the demoralising effect he expected the coup to have on their rivals in the emigration: ‘The news from France must have had a jolly effect on the European émigré rabble. I’d like to have witnessed it.’ We all of us take comfort where we may, and in extremis Schadenfreude is not to be sniffed at.
Engels here had compared Barthélemy to Saint-Just, the youthful, plebeian, idealistic but unrelentingly stern Jacobin revolutionary of the French Revolution. Saint-Just had famously defined ‘revolutionary government’ as a regime of force and domestic terror to bend all the forces of the nation against the threat of counter-revolution, both internal and external. But, in the view of Engels, Barthélemy was little more than a pale shadow cast by the reputation of Saint-Just.
Marx was evidently struck by what he read in Engels’ letter. Never one to let a good idea go to waste, he repurposed the comparison, and in his 1852 publication The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon he casually attributed it to the better-known German philosopher, Georg Hegel, as mentioned by Engels. In so doing, he created one of his most famous phrases, which has resonated ever since, but left Barthélemy as a silent and overlooked presence:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce21. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.
For Marx, the pathetic outcome of the 1848 revolution was evidence enough that revolutionaries of the nineteenth century should finally leave the great French Revolution behind them. Jacobin politics was exhausted22. No doubt Marx did not consider Barthélemy well enough known to include him in this work for public consumption. But perhaps, also, he did not think it entirely right to number Barthélemy amongst the figures of casual comedy. For Barthélemy had not been sitting on the sidelines when Louis Napoleon launched his coup.
When fighting in Paris broke out to resist Louis Napoleon’s soldiers, Barthélemy was in the thick of it. We have no detailed account of his participation, but most likely he had returned to his old stamping ground of the Marais and Temple district. On Wednesday, 3 December, barricades went up and soldiers were pelted with paving stones. General Magnan, Commander of the Troops of Paris, ‘resolved to leave the insurrection to itself for some time23, to allow it an opportunity to take up its ground, to establish itself upon it, and finally to form a compact mass which I would come up and fight with’. The troops were ordered to return to the barracks and wait. By the following day, large bodies of rioters were on the streets in the districts of Saint-Antoine, Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin: the core of the revolt was the Temple district. By noon, about a hundred barricades had been erected, but the workers had few weapons, having been disarmed after the June Days. Magnan then launched his 30,000 troops in a three-pronged assault:
The barricades, attacked with cannon in the first place, were carried at the bayonet. All that part of the city lying between the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Martin, Pont Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville, was ploughed in all directions by our columns of infantry; the barricades were carried and destroyed; the insurgents dispersed and slain …. Assailed at once on every side … hemmed in, as in a network of iron … [the] insurrection had been subdued on the ground chosen by itself.
Most of the fighting was over within two hours, though there were mopping-up operations to intimidate diehards and the populace in general.
As the resistance fell apart, Vassel, an ex-officer of the 9th Hussars, since won to the Republic, sought Barthélemy out as an experienced street fighter. Vassel had changed into the civilian clothes of a bourgeois after fighting against the coup, but the authorities were closing in. ‘I need to hide, save me!’
‘Willingly,’ replied Barthélemy. ‘Come to one of my friends, Besançon. He will hide you at his home.’
Barthélemy and Vassel went to Besançon’s house, where they found him with a young woman named Mademoiselle Goldsmith. Besançon received the two arrivals gladly. With a cheerful demeanour he turned to Vassel: ‘I leave you with Mademoiselle, who will keep you company; I have an extremely urgent affair outside; I am leaving.’
Two hours later, when the treacherous Besançon returned in the company of police, it became clear that a trap had been set. Barthélemy and Vassel were arrested. According to Charles Hugo, both men somehow escaped24, though he gives no more details. Vassel must have been recaptured25, for he was in fact transported to an overseas penal colony, amnestied years later, and in 1862 was still active as a secret society revolutionist. Barthélemy, however, apparently made good his getaway, smuggling himself from France to Germany and, ultimately, Switzerland26. His having so narrowly eluded the authorities, while others were snatched, must surely have created suspicions in the minds of Barthélemy’s revolutionary comrades. Was he allowed to go free in return for passing information to the police? But in the confusion of the coup d’état, it seems just as likely that Barthélemy had enough experience, skill and – most importantly – luck to avoid the dragnet.
Switzerland was a centre for many Italian and French refugees, including Félix Pyat, a radical republican journalist, who went about Geneva disguised as a Moor. He would later become notorious for writing a pamphlet calling for the assassination of the Emperor Napoleon III. The mood of émigrés here was one of preparation for armed struggle. While in the country, Barthélemy devoted himself to the military arts. Beside his bed he kept a copper plate, and every morning he would practise firing27 at it with a pistol. He studied weapons manufacture, his remarkable mechanical aptitude and sharp intelligence put to work in the invention of a specialised gun28, which automatically loaded as it was fired, enabling a succession of bullets to be rattled off at a single target. It was with such a weapon that he dreamt of assassinating Napoleon III.
Cold-blooded certainly, but Barthélemy’s projected terrorism was not the slaughter of innocents as indulged in by the death-cult Islamist fanatics in our own time. Rather, it followed the logic of Saint-Just’s icy rationalism: a monarch or pretender to the throne, and his satraps, were at war with society, and must take the consequences. Such a conclusion was quite unjustifiable, but it had a certain perverse logic. The enemy was not to be allowed any repose. As Barthélemy wrote to Willich after the coup, he ‘found himself unable to resign himself to allowing Louis Napoleon to enjoy his triumph in peace’29. In early July 1852 a number of French and German newspapers reported the arrest of conspirators in Paris. They were mainly workers, some of whom who had participated in the June uprising. They had been planning to assassinate the Emperor. Engels was not alone in suspecting the involvement of ‘sinister Barthélemy’30. His priority remained, however, springing Blanqui from prison. His inability thus far to pull off this daring escapade was deeply frustrating. ‘You cannot believe what sorrow I feel,’31 he wrote to Blanqui’s mother. ‘I always roll this project in my head, without being able to find the way to overcome the obstacle, always the same, which has already failed me once: lack of money.’ He decided, therefore, to return to the recently expanded exile community in London. ‘The events of December,’ he wrote hopefully, ‘have had to modify a little the antipathies of certain men32 whom I shall see again in the company of new men, proscrits of the 2nd of December [coup d’état]. I’ll try again.’
It was not all work and worry for Barthélemy while he sojourned in Switzerland, however. He met and had an affair with an Italian actress, his ‘beloved Maria’33, and for a time they lived together. This led to tittle-tattle on the international grapevine: revolutionaries are no more immune to gossip than anyone else. Barthélemy’s friends in London wrote to him of the chatter about his lover being passed around by Frédéric Cournet, the leader of the insurrection against Napoleon’s coup in 1851, and now an exile. ‘What a pity,’ Cournet is supposed to have said, ‘that this most socialist of socialists34 should have let an actress keep him!’ It did not help that some believed Barthélemy’s mistress35 to be an agent of the French police. Barthélemy was enraged at these ungracious imputations, and it was with a vengeful heart that he made his way back to England from the Continent in October 1852.