‘ONE CANNOT IMAGINE1 how entirely different everything is just across the Channel from what it is in France. London, which is only a few hours distant from Paris, might be on the other side of the globe.’ So wrote Francis Wey, a cultivated French art connoisseur who visited London in the early 1850s. His Paris was a city of eight-storey apartment buildings, each with its own porter or ‘concierge’, fronted by shops. Streets were methodically numbered, odd on one side, even on the other. The sun shone through the faint smoke of wood fires on to lively public entertainments. At night cheerful cafés sparkled with light, while armed troops policed its turbulent streets. The Parisians he knew were vain, chivalrous, loud, demonstrative and fanatical. In London, by contrast, Wey found a sprawling metropolis of sturdy three-storey terraced houses, bustling docks, belching chimneys, and rain blackened by coal soot. The streets brimmed with advertising posters. The few street signs made little sense but policemen would politely offer directions. Rich men dined at home, or in about sixty grand ‘Clubs’, while the poor gathered in dreary and uninviting public houses. Londoners were proud, businesslike, taciturn and discreet. To the French ear, the English language was ‘a mere murmur punctuated by soft, hissing sounds’2. Modern readers might be surprised at the differences between the two cities Wey described. Parisians would patiently queue, Londoners would rush and barge. Young Frenchwomen were repressed, their English counterparts flirtatious.
Francis Wey knew Paris and London because he wandered their streets. His pavement-level ‘flâneur’ view of society had become fashionable by the 1840s. The flâneur is the casual wanderer who saunters about, led by no plan other than their own restless curiosity, observing what is happening in streets and alleyways. He sees what most people fail to see because they are rushing by, intent on business.
For Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century poet and essayist, the flâneur was the detached observer, the ‘botanist of the sidewalk’. Baudelaire advises us to take a seat at the pavement café and to watch passers-by. When one particular unknown face piques our interest – perhaps he looks troubled or distracted, or she is a beauty in rags, or his eyes blaze with a criminal intent – we rise and hurl ourselves ‘headlong into the midst of the throng’3 in pursuit of the ‘unknown, half-glimpsed countenance’. We leave the familiar routes of respectable workaday life for the mysterious, overlooked, crowded passageways and haunts of the underworld. Baudelaire certainly appealed to artists and bohemians. As a rule, however, historical writers – a sober lot – prefer to know where they are going. The great English historian of the nineteenth century, Lord Acton, advised scholars to ‘choose a problem’ before beginning their historical researches. This is good advice. But it is also possible to write history as a flâneur. Rather than focusing on a problem, we might choose one character from history – neither a great man nor a great woman – and decide to follow them. What might we then see that otherwise would remain overlooked?
In this book the reader will track the unknown, half-glimpsed Emmanuel Barthélemy: nineteenth-century revolutionary, conspirator, gaol-breaker, duellist, inventor and murderer. In pursuing Barthélemy we not only uncover an extraordinary life, but travel the world through which he moved. This was a world that crossed national borders and its richness is best appreciated from multiple angles. We learn how Barthélemy saw society and how society saw him. As we make our way, we look about ourselves and see a world in transformation, in the midst of revolution and counter-revolution, becoming modern. Much of what we see is surprising and unfamiliar. But we find also much that is strikingly relevant to our own times.
In 1827 an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson4, took Paris by storm when she played Ophelia in a touring performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Her Irish accent had not gone down well in London, but the literary ‘Romantics’ of France, first among them the writer Victor Hugo, were entranced. They found in Smithson’s performance and Shakespeare’s art a commingling of tragedy and comedy, violence and lyricism, high politics and low life, which seemed to speak to a dawning age of popular passions. Eighteen years later, Hugo wrote the first draft of his great novel on revolution, Les Misérables. His story of Jean Valjean, the redeemed galley convict and barricade fighter, was interrupted in 1848 by the reality of revolution and counter-revolution. When Hugo, now an exile, returned to his novel5 in January 1861, he began in a completely different register, with a meditation on the ‘June Days’, a doomed workers’ rebellion, and its enigmatic leader, Emmanuel Barthélemy. Revolutionary romanticism had come to life. This is a book about that life and the world it reveals.