PART 2

Everything in this notebook (chapters I-II) was written in Sorrento at various dates in November and December of 1850 and January, February, and March of 1851.

CHAPTER 1

My judgment of the causes of February 24 and my thoughts as to what would emerge from it.

So the July Monarchy fell—fell without a fight, in the presence of the victors rather than under their blows; they were as astonished by their victory as the vanquished were by their defeat. Since the revolution of February I have several times heard M. Guizot and even M. Molé and M. Thiers say that surprise was the only reason for the collapse, which should be regarded as a pure accident, a mere stroke of fortune. In reply I have often been tempted to quote Alceste’s response to Oronte in Molière’s Misanthrope: “Pour en juger ainsi, vous avez vos raisons.”¹¹ For those three men had led France under Louis-Philippe for eighteen years, and it was difficult for them to admit that the king’s bad policies had paved the way to catastrophe and toppled him from the throne.

Not having the same grounds for belief, I do not of course entirely share their view. I do not claim that accidents played no role in the February revolution, because in fact they played an important one, but they were not the whole story.

I have known literary men who have written history without taking part in government, and I have known political men whose only concern has been to shape events without a thought to describing them. I have often remarked that the former see general causes everywhere, while the latter, who daily experience myriad disconnected occurrences, readily imagine that everything can be attributed to specific incidents and that the little strings they are constantly pulling are the ones that move the world. Both are surely wrong.

I hate absolute systems that see all historical events as dependent on grand first causes linked together in ineluctable sequence, thus banishing individual human beings from the history of the human race. I find such theories narrow in their pretensions of grandeur and false beneath their air of mathematical truth. With all due respect to the writers who invent such sublime theories to feed their vanity and facilitate their work, I believe that many important historical facts can be explained only by accidental circumstances, while many others remain inexplicable, and finally, that chance—or, rather, that skein of secondary causes that we call chance because we cannot untangle them—plays a major part in everything that takes place on the world stage. But I also firmly believe that chance accomplishes nothing for which the groundwork has not been laid in advance. Prior facts, the nature of institutions, the cast of people’s minds, and the state of mores are the materials out of which chance improvises the effects we find so surprising and terrible to behold.

The February revolution, like any other great event of the kind, was born of general causes fertilized, as it were, by accidents. It would be as superficial to say that it derived inevitably from general causes as to ascribe it solely to accidental ones.

The industrial revolution, which for thirty years had made Paris the leading manufacturing city in France, enticed within its walls a vast new population of workers; with work on fortifications came another population, of local farmers now out of work; the passion for material pleasures, spurred by the government, which increasingly incited this multitude; the latest economic and political theories, which tended to accredit the idea that human misery is a consequence of laws rather than the work of Providence and that poverty can be eliminated by changing the basis of society; the contempt in which the governing class, and especially its leaders, were held, a contempt so widespread and so profound that it paralyzed the very people who had the greatest interest in maintaining the power that was being overthrown; the centralization that reduced the work of revolution to seizing control of Paris and of the ready-made machinery of government; and last but not least, the instability of everything—institutions, ideas, mores, and people—in an unstable society that had already been turned upside down by seven great revolutions and a host of minor upheavals in a period of less than sixty years—these were the general causes without which the revolution of February would have been impossible.

The principal accidents that led to the revolution include a maladroit dynastic opposition, which sought reform but paved the way for riot; the repression of that riot, at first too harsh, then abruptly abandoned; the sudden disappearance of all the old ministers, who took the levers of power with them, leaving the new ministers unable to find, let alone seize, the means to control the chaos; the errors and undisciplined thinking of the new ministers, who failed so abysmally to restore the power that they had so adroitly undermined; the hesitations of the generals and the absence of the only royal family members who enjoyed any measure of popularity or displayed the slightest ability; and above all the senile imbecility of King Louis-Philippe, a weakness that no one could have predicted and that remains almost unbelievable even today, despite having been laid bare by the event.

I have sometimes asked myself what might have provoked this extraordinary and sudden collapse of the king’s faculties. Louis-Philippe had spent his life in the midst of revolution and surely lacked neither experience nor courage nor intelligence, though on that fateful day all three certainly deserted him. The cause of his weakness, I think, was simply that he was overwhelmed by surprise. He was laid low before he understood what was happening. The February revolution was unforeseen by everyone, but by him most of all. No warning came to him from without, because for several years his mind had found refuge in the proud solitude that afflicts many princes after a long and happy reign, which causes them to mistake good fortune for genius and therefore to stop listening to anyone, because they believe they have nothing more to learn.

Furthermore, Louis-Philippe was deceived, as I said earlier his ministers were, by the misleading light that history casts on the present. One could compile a striking catalog of errors that have arisen one after another in response to other errors committed in dissimilar situations. Think of Charles I, driven to arbitrary rule and violence in England by the progress of the opposition under the benign rule of his father. Then think of Louis XVI, determined to endure everything because Charles I had perished out of unwillingness to endure anything. After which Charles X provoked a revolution because he took Louis XVI’s weakness as an example not to follow. And finally, Louis-Philippe, the most perspicacious of all, thought he could remain on the throne by perverting the law without violating it and assumed that if he remained within the limits of the Charter, so would the nation. To corrupt the people without confronting them; to deform the spirit of the constitution without changing the letter; to set the country’s vices one against another; to quietly drown revolutionary passion in love of material gratifications—these elements constituted the idea that governed his life. It soon became not just his leading idea but his only one. It enveloped him. He lived it. And when he suddenly discovered that it was wrong, he was like a man awakened in the middle of the night by an earthquake, who divines in the darkness that his house is collapsing and the ground is crumbling beneath his feet and feels lost and bewildered in the midst of unforeseen universal ruin.

Today I am free to sit back in my armchair and contemplate the causes that led to the events of February 24, but that afternoon I had other things on my mind, namely, the events themselves—not what produced them but what would follow.

It was the second revolution I had witnessed in seventeen years. Both had distressed me, but the impressions left by the second were far more bitter than those left by the first.

For Charles X I had felt a certain hereditary affection to the very end, but the king fell because he trampled on rights I held dear, and I hoped at the time that his fall would not extinguish liberty in France but rather revive it. On that day, however, liberty seemed dead. Although the royal family that fled meant nothing to me, I felt that my own cause was lost.

I had spent the best years of my youth in a society that seemed to be recovering its prosperity and grandeur as it regained its liberty. In it I had conceived the idea of a moderate, regulated liberty disciplined by faith, mores, and laws. I felt the charms of that liberty. It became my life’s passion. I felt that I could never be consoled for its loss, but now I saw that I must give it up.

I had acquired too much experience of men to be satisfied with vain words. I knew that while a great revolution can establish liberty in a country, several revolutions in succession can make any regulated liberty impossible for a very long time. Although I still had no idea what would come of this latest revolution, I was already certain that nothing that came of it would satisfy me, and I anticipated that no matter what fate was in store for our nephews, ours was now to live out what remained of our miserable lives between the alternative reactions of license and oppression.

I rehearsed in my mind the history of the past sixty years and smiled bitterly at the illusions we nursed at the end of each phase of our long revolution; at the theories that thrived on those illusions; at the learned daydreams of our historians; and at the many ingenious but erroneous systems with which we attempted to explain a present that we still perceived only dimly and to predict a future that we could not perceive at all.

The constitutional monarchy succeeded the Ancien Régime. The Republic succeeded the monarchy. The Empire succeeded the Republic. The Restoration succeeded the Empire. Then came the July Monarchy. After each of these successive transformations, people said that the French Revolution, having completed what they presumptuously called its work, was over. They said it and believed it. Alas! I had myself hoped it was true during the Restoration and again after the government of the Restoration fell. And now the French Revolution has begun anew, for it remains the same revolution as before. The farther we go, the more obscure its end becomes. Will we—as prophets as unreliable perhaps as their predecessors assure us we will—achieve a social transformation more complete and more profound than our forefathers foresaw or desired, or than we ourselves can yet conceive? Or must we end simply in intermittent anarchy, that chronic and incurable malady that old nations know so well? I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end. I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the shore and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever.

I spent the rest of that day [with Ampère], my colleague at the Institute¹² and one of my best friends. He had come to see what had happened to me in the ruckus and to ask me to dinner. At first I tried to console myself by persuading him to share my grief, but I soon recognized that his impression was different from mine and that he saw the unfolding revolution with a different eye. Ampère was an intelligent man and, better yet, a man of generous heart, easy to get along with and dependable. He was loved for his good nature and liked for his witty, amusing conversation, which avoided nastiness and was filled with pointed remarks, [none of which aimed very high, to be sure,] but all of which were very pleasant to listen to. Unfortunately, he could not resist transporting the wit of the salon into literature and the literary spirit into politics. What I mean by literary spirit in politics is the error of valuing what is ingenious and new rather than what is true, what makes an interesting scene rather than what serves a useful purpose. It is responding to the talent and elocution of the actors rather than to the consequences of the play. And last but not least, it is to base one’s judgments on impressions rather than reasons. Needless to say, this defect is not confined to academicians. Indeed, the entire nation is rather prone to it, and the French people as a whole often judge politics as if it were literature. Ampère, who was the soul of kindness and whose membership in a coterie affected him only to the extent that it increased the warmth of his feeling for his friends, had nothing but contempt for the toppled government, whose recent actions in favor of the Swiss ultramontanes had irritated him greatly.¹³ His hatred for those Swiss and especially for their French friends was the only hatred I ever knew in him. Bores terrified him no end, but in the depths of his heart he detested only the devout. To be sure, the latter had offended him very cruelly and very clumsily, because he was not their natural adversary, and there is no better proof of their blind intolerance than the fact that they inspired such fierce hatred in a man as Christian as Ampère—Christian, I would say, not by faith but by intention, taste, and, I daresay, temperament. Ampère therefore easily consoled himself for the fall of a government that had served his detractors so well. Among the insurgents he had seen signs of selflessness and even generosity, as well as courage; the popular emotion had won him over.

I realized that not only did he not share my feelings but he actually took a diametrically opposed view. All the feelings of indignation, pain, and rage that had been accumulating in my heart since that morning therefore suddenly erupted against Ampère, and I addressed him in such violent terms, terms that only a friend as devoted as he could have excused, that I have since then felt rather ashamed whenever I think about it. Among other things, I recall saying: “You have no idea what is going on. You judge events as if you were a spectator in the crowd, or a poet. What you call the triumph of liberty is its ultimate defeat. I am telling you that these people, whom you so naively admire, have just proved that they are incapable and unworthy of living as free men. Show me what experience has taught them. What new virtues has it bestowed on them? What inveterate vices has it eliminated? No, I tell you, they are the same as they always were: just as impatient, thoughtless, and contemptuous of the law as ever; just as easily led astray by powerful voices and as rash in the face of danger as their forebears. They have not improved with time but have remained as frivolous in serious matters as they used to be in pointless pursuits.” After much shouting, we both agreed to let the future judge, for the future is an enlightened and upright arbiter—but, alas, it always arrives too late.

CHAPTER 2

Paris the day after February 24, and the days that followed.—Socialist character of the new revolution.

Resumed in Sorrento in October 1850

The night passed without incident, although shouts and rifle fire continued to be heard in the streets. These were the sounds of triumph, however, not of combat. At daybreak I went out to see what the city looked like and find out what had become of my two young nephews. They were being educated at the time in a seminary for children, an educational institution that hardly prepared its pupils to live in revolutionary times like ours and provided no security on a day of insurrection. The seminary was located on rue de Madame,¹⁴ behind the Luxembourg, so that I had to travel across a good swath of Paris to get there.

I found the streets quiet and even half-deserted, as one ordinarily finds them on a Sunday morning, when the rich are still asleep and the poor are taking their rest. From time to time I did encounter the previous day’s victors along the way, but most were headed home and unconcerned with passersby. In the few open shops I saw bourgeois who seemed not so much frightened as astonished, like spectators at the end of a play still trying to figure out what it had really been about. Now that the people had abandoned the streets, the most common sight was soldiers, either alone or in small groups, all unarmed and headed home. The defeat they had just suffered had left them with vivid and durable feelings of shame and anger. This would become obvious later on but for the time being was not apparent. Pleasure at regaining their freedom seemed to dominate any other feelings these young men may have had. They looked carefree and walked with a free and easy step, like schoolboys on vacation.

The younger pupils’ seminary had not been attacked or disturbed in any way. In any case, my nephews were no longer there, having been sent to their maternal grandmother’s house the previous evening. I therefore headed home by way of the rue du Bac to see whether Lamoricière, who was living there at the time, had indeed been killed the day before, as his aide-de-camp had announced after seeing him fall. Only after his servants recognized me did they admit that their master was in the house and allow me in to see him.

I found this uncommon man, about whom I will have more than one occasion to speak in what follows, stretched out on his bed and reduced to a state of immobility at odds with his nature and desires. His head was half broken open, bayonets had repeatedly pierced his arms, and his limbs were battered and paralyzed; otherwise he remained the same man as always, with his impassioned mind and indomitable heart. He recounted what had happened to him the day before and the thousand perils from which he had escaped only by miracle. I strongly advised him to remain at rest until his wounds healed, and for a considerable time thereafter, rather than risk his person and his reputation for no good reason in the chaos to come. This was no doubt good advice to give to a man so in love with action, and so used to acting, that after doing whatever is necessary and useful he is always ready to embark on harmful and dangerous adventures rather than do nothing at all, yet like most advice that runs counter to a man’s natural bent, it was also quite ineffective.

I spent all afternoon walking around Paris.

Two things struck me above all others that day: the first was that the just-completed revolution had been not just primarily but solely and exclusively a popular uprising that had bestowed all power on “the people” in the strict sense of the term, meaning the classes that work with their hands.

The second was how little hatred, or for that matter any other keen passion, the lower classes thus suddenly invested with sole mastery displayed in the first flush of victory.

Although the working classes often played the leading role in the events of the First Republic, they had never guided those events or exerted sole mastery over the state in either fact or law. The Convention contained perhaps not a single man of the people. It was full of bourgeois and men of letters. The war between the Mountain and the Gironde¹⁵ was led on both sides by members of the bourgeoisie, and at no time did the triumph of the former transfer power exclusively into the hands of the people. The revolution of July was made by the people, but the middle class, which instigated and led it, reaped the finest fruits. By contrast, the revolution of February seemed to have been made entirely outside and against the bourgeoisie.

In this great clash, the two principal parts of French society had finally separated, and the people, set apart, remained in sole possession of the government. This was unprecedented in the annals of our history. To be sure, similar revolutions had taken place in other countries at other times, for the history peculiar to any period, even today, no matter how new and unprecedented it seems to contemporaries, is in essence always a reflection of the ancient history of humankind. Florence in the late Middle Ages offered a small-scale version of what had just occurred here: the noble class was initially supplanted by the bourgeois class, which in turn was driven out of government, at which point a barefoot gonfalonier led the people in the establishment of a republic. In Florence, however, this popular revolution had specific and temporary causes, while here it was the result of long-standing causes so general that after sowing turmoil in France, there was good reason to believe that those same causes would wreak havoc in the rest of Europe as well. This time the goal was not simply the victory of a party. People sought to establish a social science, a philosophy, and I might almost say a common religion that could be taught to and understood by everyone. The old picture thus took on a truly novel aspect.

Throughout that day in Paris I did not see a single representative of the former forces of law and order, not a single soldier, gendarme, or policeman. The National Guard itself had vanished. Only the common people were armed, and they alone guarded public buildings, stood watch, issued orders, and meted out punishment. It was extraordinary and terrifying to see this immense city, so full of riches, entirely in the hands of those who owned nothing at all—or, rather, it was the entire nation that was now in their hands, for thanks to centralization, whoever rules in Paris commands France. Accordingly, the other classes were truly terrified. I do not think they experienced terror of such magnitude at any point in the Revolution, and the only terror to which it can be compared, I believe, is that which the civilized cities of the Roman world must have felt when they found themselves suddenly subject to the power of the Vandals and Goths.

Since nothing similar had ever been seen, many people expected unprecedented acts of violence. I never shared those fears, however. What I saw led me to anticipate strange disturbances and novel crises in the near future, but I never believed the rich would be pillaged.

I knew the people of Paris too well to ignore the fact that their first instincts in revolutionary times are usually generous. In the immediate aftermath of victory they like to boast of their triumph, display their authority, and play at being great men. Meanwhile, some sort of government is usually established, the police return to their posts and the judges to their benches, and when at last our great men wish to descend once more to the familiar realm of petty and wicked human passions, they are no longer free to do so and must resume living as ordinary decent citizens. Furthermore, we have spent so many years in insurrection that we have developed a kind of morality of disorder and a special code for days of insurrection. Under these exceptional laws, murder is tolerated and devastation permitted, but theft is strictly prohibited, though regardless of what anyone says, this does not prevent considerable theft from occurring on such days, for a society of rioters is no different from any other society, in which one always finds scoundrels who privately thumb their noses at the morality of the group and are contemptuous of its code of honor as long as they can get away with it. What reassured me, moreover, was the thought that the victors had been as surprised by victory as their adversaries by defeat. Their passions had not had time to become inflamed or embittered by battle. The government had fallen without being defended or defending itself. It had long been fought, or at any rate vigorously condemned, by the very people who in the depths of their hearts most regretted its downfall.

For the previous year, the dynastic opposition had lived in deceptive intimacy with the republican opposition, taking identical actions for contrary reasons. The misunderstanding that facilitated the revolution made it milder when it occurred. The monarchy disappeared, the battlefield seemed empty. The people no longer had a clear idea of what enemies remained to be pursued and defeated. The former objects of their wrath were gone. The clergy had never fully reconciled with the new dynasty and looked unmoved on its destruction. The old nobility applauded, no matter what the consequences might be. The former had suffered from the intolerant system of the bourgeoisie, the latter from its pride. Both despised or feared its government.

It was the first time in sixty years that the priests, the old aristocracy, and the people shared a common sentiment—of rancor, to be sure, and not affection. This nevertheless meant a great deal politically, since in politics friendships are almost always based on shared hatreds. Only the bourgeois were truly vanquished that day, but even they had little to fear. Their government had been exclusive rather than oppressive, corrupting but not violent, and it was more despised than hated. In any case, the middle class is never a compact subset of the nation or a distinct part of the whole. It always participates to some degree in the other classes and in some places merges with them. This lack of homogeneity and precise limits makes the government of the bourgeoisie weak and uncertain, but it also makes the bourgeoisie itself impossible to grasp and in a sense invisible to those who would attack it when it ceases to govern.

Taken together, these causes were responsible, I believe, for the popular languor, which I found as striking to behold as the people’s omnipotence. This languor was all the more evident because it contrasted so noticeably with the bombastic vigor of popular expression and the terrible memories it aroused. M. Thiers’s Histoire de la Révolution, M. de Lamartine’s Les Girondins, and other less celebrated but quite well known books and, to an even greater extent, plays had rehabilitated the Terror and in a sense made it fashionable. Thus the tepid passions of the day were made to speak with the inflamed rhetoric of 1793, and the names and deeds of illustrious criminals were constantly on the lips of people who had neither the energy nor the sincere desire to emulate them.

It was socialist theories—what I previously called the philosophy of the February revolution—that would later ignite genuine passions, embitter jealousies, and stir up class warfare. Although passions were initially less disorderly than one might have feared, in the aftermath of the revolution an extraordinary agitation and unprecedented disorder of popular thinking became apparent.

On February 25 a thousand peculiar theories poured from the minds of innovators into the minds of the crowd. Everything remained standing except the monarchy and the parliament, and it seemed that the shock of revolution had reduced society itself to dust and opened up a competition to decide what should be erected in its place. Everyone had a plan. One man published his in the newspapers, another posted his in one of the posters that soon covered countless walls, and still another windily harangued anyone who would listen. One aimed to destroy the inequality of wealth, another the inequality of education, while a third proposed to level the oldest of inequalities, that between man and woman. Specifics were proposed for the treatment of poverty and remedies for the malady of labor, which had afflicted mankind from the beginning.

These theories were highly diverse, often contradictory, and sometimes hostile to one another, but all aimed beyond government at government’s very basis in society and therefore shared the name “socialism.”

Socialism will remain the defining characteristic and most redoubtable memory of the February revolution. Seen in perspective, the republic will appear to have been a means, not an end.

It is not the intent of these Recollections to discover what gave the February revolution its socialist character. I will simply say that it should not have surprised observers as much as it did. Had they not noticed that the condition of the people had long been improving and that its importance, education, desires, and power had been increasing steadily? The common man’s comfort had also improved, but less quickly, and that improvement now stood close to the limit that can be achieved in an old society where people are many and places few. How could the poorer classes, inferior yet powerful, not think of escaping their poverty and inferiority by making use of their power? They had been trying to do so for sixty years. They had initially tried to help themselves by changing all the institutions of politics, but after each change they found that their lot either had not improved or had improved far more slowly than the eagerness of their desires could tolerate. It was inevitable that they would sooner or later discover that what kept them down was not the constitution of the government but the immutable laws that constitute society itself, and it was then only natural to wonder whether they might have the power and the right to change those laws as well, as they had changed the others. Consider in particular property, which is the bedrock of our social order: since all the privileges that once covered and concealed the privilege of property had been destroyed, while property itself remained the principal obstacle to equality and its only apparent sign, was it not inevitable that people who owned none would not necessarily abolish it but at least think about abolishing it?

This natural anxiety of the popular mind, this inevitable agitation of the people’s desires and thoughts, and these needs and instincts of the crowd in a sense constituted the canvas on which the innovators sketched a profusion of monstrous and grotesque designs. Their designs may be judged to be ludicrous, but nothing is worthier of the serious attention of philosophers and statesmen than the canvas on which they worked.

Will socialism continue to be shrouded by the contempt in which the socialists of 1848 are so rightly held? I ask the question without answering it. I have no doubt that the laws that constitute our modern society will in the long run be subject to many modifications. In essential respects they already have been. But will they ever be destroyed and replaced by others? It seems impracticable. I will say no more, because the more I study what the world used to be like, and the more I learn in detail about the world of today, when I consider the prodigious diversity one finds in it, not only in regard to laws but also in regard to the principles that underlie the laws and the different forms that the right of property has taken and continues to exhibit today, despite what people say, I am tempted to believe that what some call necessary institutions are often only the institutions to which we are accustomed, and that when it comes to the constitution of society, the realm of the possible is far wider than the people who live in any particular society imagine.

CHAPTER 3

Uncertainty of former parliamentarians concerning what attitude to take. My own reflections on what I ought to do and my resolutions.

In the days that followed February 24, I did not seek out or see the political men from whom the events of that day had separated me. I felt no need to do so, and to tell the truth, no desire. Instinctively, I recoiled from thinking about the wretched parliamentary milieu in which I had lived for ten years and watched the seeds of revolution germinate.

I also judged that at that point any sort of political conversation or combination was merely pretension. As insubstantial as the rumors that set the crowd in motion may have been, the movement had become irresistible. I sensed that we were in the midst of one of those great democratic floods that drown any individual or party that attempts to erect a dike against them, and during which for a period of time there is nothing to be done other than to study the general character of the phenomenon. I therefore spent all my time in the street with the victors, as if I worshiped at the altar of fortune. I neither paid homage to nor asked anything of the new sovereign, however. Nor did I even address it. I simply looked and listened.

After a few days, though, I resumed contact with the vanquished. I saw former deputies, former peers, men of letters, men of business and commerce, and landowners, who in the parlance of the day began to be referred to as “idle.” The revolution seemed no less extraordinary when thus viewed from on high than when seen from below. In this group I encountered a great deal of fear but as little genuine passion as I had seen elsewhere, along with a singular resignation and above all an absence of hope, indeed almost an absence of any thought, of renewed support for the government that had just fallen. Although the February revolution was the shortest and least bloody of all our revolutions, it had filled the hearts and minds of the vanquished with an impression of its omnipotence more powerful than that created by any of the others. I think this was primarily because those hearts and minds were devoid of political beliefs and passions, so that all that remained after so many miscalculations and so much useless agitation was a taste for well-being—a sentiment very tenacious and very exclusive but also very mild, which can easily accommodate to any form of government as long as it is allowed to satisfy itself.

What I perceived, then, was a universal effort to adapt to the event that fortune had improvised and win the sympathies of a new master. Big landowners were pleased to point out that they had always been enemies of the bourgeois class and always on the side of the people. Priests rediscovered the dogma of equality in the Gospels and assured us that they had never lost sight of it. The bourgeois themselves recalled with a certain pride that their fathers had been workers, and when they were unable, owing to the inevitable obscurity of the genealogies, to trace their origins back to an actual manual laborer, they tried at least to root their fortune in some rough-hewn ancestor who had raised himself by his own bootstraps. They took as much care to put this forebear in the limelight as they might have taken to hide him a short while earlier, for the vanity of man is such that it can take a variety of forms while retaining its essential nature. The coin has two sides yet remains the same coin.

Fear was at that point the only true passion left, so instead of breaking off relations with relatives who had thrown themselves into the new revolution, people sought closer relations with them. Many families turned to members they had previously regarded as black sheep. If one was fortunate enough to have a cousin or brother or son whose dissolute ways had led to ruin, one could be sure that the erstwhile wastrel now stood on the verge of success. If, moreover, he had made a name for himself by advancing some wild theory, his ambitions would know no limit. Most of the government’s commissars and sub-commissars were people of this sort. Relations who had previously gone unmentioned and whose families might in the old days have had them locked up in the Bastille or, more recently, sent off to work as public officials in Algeria suddenly became the glory and mainstay of the entire clan.

As for King Louis-Philippe, his irrelevance could not have been greater if he had been a member of the Merovingian dynasty. Nothing made a greater impression on me than the profound silence that suddenly enveloped his name. Not once did I hear it mentioned either among the people or higher up the social ladder. The former courtiers I saw did not speak of him and I believe had truly put him out of their minds. So powerfully had the revolution distracted them that this prince had vanished from their thoughts. Some will say that this is what becomes of any king who is toppled from his throne. More noteworthy, however, is the fact that even his enemies had forgotten him: they did not fear him enough to slander him, and perhaps not even enough to hate him—if not a greater misfortune then at least a rarer one.

I do not wish to recount the history of the revolution of 1848. I am simply trying to retrace my actions, my ideas, and my impressions over the course of revolutionary events. I will therefore skip over the first few weeks after February 24 and turn to the period immediately prior to the general elections.

The moment had come when people had to decide whether they wished to observe this singular revolution as private individuals or take part in events themselves. On this point I found the former party leaders divided. To judge by the incoherence of their language and the instability of their views, one might have thought they themselves were of two minds. Nearly all were politicians shaped by the discipline and constraints of constitutional liberty. In the midst of their habitual intrigues a great revolution had taken them by surprise, and they reminded me of boatmen used to navigating exclusively on inland waterways but now suddenly cast upon the open sea. In this new adventure the knowledge they had acquired from their short voyages was more troublesome than useful, and they often seemed more baffled and uncertain than their passengers.

M. Thiers on several occasions stated his opinion that there was no choice but to run for office and win, while on other occasions he said it would be best to stay out of the elections. I do not know whether the reason for his hesitation was his alarm at the dangers that might follow the election or his fear of not being elected.

Rémusat, who was always so clear about what could be done and so obscure about what should, explained the good reasons for staying home and the no less good reasons for participating. Duvergier was frantic. The revolution had destroyed the balance-of-powers system to which his mind had clung so tenaciously for so many years, and he felt as though he were suspended in midair. Meanwhile, the duc de Broglie had not peeked out from under his cloak since February 24, and it was in that posture that he awaited the end of society, which he took to be imminent. Although M. Molé was the oldest of all the former parliamentary leaders, or perhaps for that very reason, he alone remained resolute in the conviction that there was no choice but to take an active role and attempt to lead the revolution. Perhaps his longer experience had taught him that in troubled times the role of spectator is dangerous. Perhaps the prospect of once again having something to lead rejuvenated him and hid the danger of the undertaking from his eyes. Or perhaps having so often bent this way and that under so many different regimes, his resolve had been stiffened even as his thinking had become more supple and indifferent to the nature of his master. As for me, as one might imagine, I very carefully considered what course I should take.

Now I would like to consider the reasons I had at the time for making the choices I did, which I will set forth as straightforwardly as possible. But it is difficult to write accurately about oneself. Most people who write memoirs disclose their serious missteps and dubious inclinations only when they mistake the former for positive achievements and the latter for laudable instincts, as sometimes happens. For example, Cardinal de Retz, seeking to portray himself in what he takes to be the glorious role of a shrewd conspirator, confesses his plan to assassinate Richelieu and recounts his hypocritical devotions and charities lest we fail to recognize his cleverness. He speaks not because he loves truth but because his twisted mind unwittingly betrays his corrupt heart.

But even a writer who wishes to be sincere rarely succeeds in such an enterprise. The fault lies primarily with the public, which likes writers to accuse themselves but will not tolerate self-praise. Even friends will often find admirable candor in a writer who speaks ill of himself and unbearable vanity in one who recounts his good works, so that sincerity becomes a thankless task, all loss and no profit. The main difficulty, though, lies in the subject itself. The writer is too close to himself to see clearly. He easily loses himself amid the myriad views, interests, ideas, tastes, and instincts that caused him to act as he did. The tangle of narrow paths that remain obscure even to those who use them obscures the broad highways the will actually took on its way to its most important decisions.

I will nevertheless try to find my way through this labyrinth. It is only fair to take the same liberties with myself that I have already allowed myself to take with so many others.

So I will begin by saying that when I plumbed the depths of my heart in regard to the revolution, I was somewhat surprised to find a certain relief mingled with some surprise and a kind of joy mixed with all the sadness and fear the event occasioned. This terrible event pained me on behalf of my country but clearly not on my own. On the contrary, I felt I breathed more freely after the crisis than before. I had always felt constrained and oppressed in the parliamentary milieu that had just been swept away. It had left me feeling constantly disappointed both in others and in myself. To begin with my disappointment in myself, it did not take me long to discover that I did not have what it took to play the brilliant role I had dreamed of. Both my qualities and my defects stood in my way. Not virtuous enough to command respect, I was too honest to engage in the petty stratagems that quick success required. Note, moreover, that there was no cure for my honorable character, for it was so intimately connected with my temperament as well as my principles that without it I would have been nothing. Whenever I was obliged to speak on behalf of a bad cause or to pursue a wrong course, all my talents and passions deserted me, and I confess that nothing consoled me more for the lack of success that was often the reward for my honesty than the certainty that as a scoundrel I would never be anything but clumsy and mediocre. I wrongly believed that I would be as successful on the podium as I had been with my book. The writer’s skill is more of a hindrance than a help to the orator, however. Nothing resembles a good speech as little as a good chapter. I quickly realized this and recognized that I was classed among the speakers who are correct, ingenious, and sometimes profound but always cold and therefore impotent. I have never completely overcome this shortcoming. The problem is surely not that I lack passion, but on the podium my passion for speaking the truth always temporarily extinguishes all the others. I also learned in the end that I had absolutely none of the skills necessary to rally and lead large numbers of people. I have never been an agile speaker except in direct conversation and have always been inhibited and silent in crowds. The problem is not that in the right circumstances I am incapable of saying or doing things to please the crowd, but that is hardly enough. In political warfare great battles are rare. The essence of the party leader’s profession is to mingle constantly with his supporters and even his adversaries. He must be present and expansive on all occasions and must constantly raise or lower himself to match the intellectual level of his interlocutors. He must debate and argue unremittingly, repeat the same things over and over in a thousand different forms, and deal constantly with the same subjects.

Of all these things I am profoundly incapable. Discussing things that do not interest me much is awkward, and discussing those that interest me a lot is painful. For me, truth is such a rare and precious thing that once I have found it, I do not like to subject it to the vagaries of debate: I am afraid of extinguishing the light by waving the candle about. As for frequenting people, I know so few that I am incapable of doing so in a habitual and general way. Anyone who does not impress me with some rare quality of mind or feeling is in a sense invisible to me. Mediocre men, like men of quality, have noses, mouths, and eyes, but I have never been able to recall their individual features. I am always asking the names of people I see every day but forget repeatedly. Although I feel no contempt for them, I do not have much to do with them; I treat them as I treat clichés, which I respect because they rule the world, but they bore me profoundly.

What finally repelled me was the mediocrity and monotony of the parliamentary proceedings of my day, as well as the petty passions and vulgar perversity of the men who pretended to shape and guide them.

I sometimes think that although different societies have different mores, the morals of the politicians who run things are everywhere the same. What I am sure of is that in France all the party leaders I have known have struck me as more or less equally unworthy of leading, some owing to defects of character or real education and most for lack of any virtue whatsoever. Seldom did I discover in any of them the disinterested desire for the good of others that, for all my flaws and weaknesses, I see in myself. I therefore found it as difficult to join them as to stand alone, as difficult to obey as to lead, and in the end I nearly always lived in gloomy isolation, where I was seen as aloof and consequently misjudged. Imaginary qualities as well as flaws were regularly attributed to me. I was credited with a shrewdness and depth that I did not possess and therefore accused of ambitious cunning. My discontent with myself, my boredom, and my reserve were mistaken for arrogance, a defect that makes more enemies than the greatest of vices. Because I was silent, people believed me to be devious and underhanded. Some took me for an austere character, a sullen and bitter person, which I am not, for I often waver between good and evil with a spineless indulgence that comes close to weakness, and I forget insults so quickly that some might accuse me of lacking spirit for my readiness to overlook an affront rather than efface it with a manly response.

This cruel misunderstanding not only caused me pain but also diminished my abilities below their natural level. There is no one for whom approval is healthier than it is for me, and no one who needs the esteem and confidence of the public more in order to achieve the things of which he is capable. Are the extreme lack of confidence in my own strength and the need to seek proof of my own worth in the thoughts of others consequences of true modesty? I think they are rather signs of a great pride, which is as restless and anxious as the mind itself.

But what did most to sap my hopes and strength during the nine years I had spent in politics to that point was my constant uncertainty about what was most important to do each day. Even today this remains my most frightful memory of that period. My doubts stem, I think, from the nebulousness of my thoughts rather than any failure of courage. I never hesitate to take the most arduous path if I can see clearly where it leads. But in a world of petty dynastic parties that differed little as to ends and hardly at all as to means, about which they were equally mistaken, which path would lead to an honorable or even just a useful outcome? Where lay truth and where falsehood? Which were the wicked people and which the good? In those days I was never sure, and even today I cannot say with confidence. Most party men did not allow themselves to be daunted or discouraged by such doubts. Some never experienced them and still do not. Such men are often accused of acting without conviction. My experience suggests that this was far less frequent than people imagine. These men merely had a faculty that is precious and at times even necessary in politics, to create temporary convictions in accordance with their passions and interests of the moment, so that they are able to do honorably things that are not very honorable. Unfortunately, I was never able to see things in such artificial and self-interested ways, nor could I easily persuade myself that what was to my advantage was also consistent with the general good.

This parliamentary milieu, in which I had suffered all the miseries just described, had been destroyed by the revolution. It had ignored distinctions among the old parties and obliterated them all indiscriminately, deposing their leaders and destroying their traditions and discipline. What emerged was admittedly a chaotic and confused society but also a society in which shrewdness was less necessary and less prized than selflessness and courage; in which character was more important than eloquence or the ability to manipulate men and most importantly no place remained for a doubting mind: this way lay the country’s salvation, that way its ruin. There was no doubt about which path to follow. We could now advance in broad daylight, supported and encouraged by the crowd. True, the road seemed dangerous. But my mind is so constructed that it is less afraid of danger than of doubt. I felt in any case that I was still in the prime of life. I had no children and few needs, and above all I had at home the support—so rare and precious in a time of revolution—of a devoted woman whose firm and penetrating mind and innately noble soul would be equal to any situation and unperturbed by any setback.

I therefore made up my mind to plunge into the arena and to stake my fortune, tranquility, and life on defending not a particular government but the laws that constitute society itself. My first goal was to get elected, and I left immediately for my native Normandy to introduce myself to the voters.

CHAPTER 4

My candidacy in the département of La Manche.—Description of the province.—The general election.

The département of La Manche is populated almost exclusively by farmers. There are no large cities, few factories, and no places where workers congregate in large numbers except for Cherbourg. At first the revolution passed almost unnoticed. The upper classes offered no resistance, while the lower classes barely knew it was happening. Generally speaking, agricultural populations are slow to feel a change in the political winds and reluctant to renounce previous commitments. They are the last to stand and the last to sit back down.

My steward, a semi-peasant, reported what transpired in the region after February 24: “People say that if Louis-Philippe was sent packing, it was his fault and he deserved it.” For them, that was the whole moral of the play. But when they heard about the disorder that reigned in Paris, the new taxes that would be imposed, and the fears of a general war; when they saw commerce at a standstill and money seemingly disappearing underground; and above all when they learned that the principle of property was under attack, they realized that something more was at stake than the fate of Louis-Philippe.

The fear that had previously been confined to the upper echelons of society now extended down into the depths of the population, and a universal terror took hold of the country.

This was the state in which I found things when I arrived in the middle of March. I was immediately struck and pleasantly surprised by what I saw. To be sure, demagogues had stirred up the workers in the towns, but in the countryside all landowners, regardless of background, ancestry, education, or means, had banded together into what seemed to be a single class. The rancorous differences of opinion and rivalries of caste and wealth that had once divided them were no longer visible. Envy and pride no longer divided the peasant from the rich man or the noble from the bourgeois. Mutual confidence, respect, and goodwill reigned. Property had created a kind of fraternity among those who possessed it. The wealthy were the elder brothers, the less wealthy the younger, but all saw themselves as members of the same family with a common interest in defending their shared legacy. Since the French Revolution had vastly expanded ownership of the land, the family seemed to encompass the entire population. I had never seen anything like it, nor had anyone else in living memory. Experience proved that this unity was not as solid as it seemed and that the old parties and different classes had simply followed parallel paths without ever merging into one. Fear had affected them as a mechanical pressure affects solid bodies, which may stick together as long as pressure continues to be applied but fall apart as soon as it is removed.

In this initial period, moreover, I saw no sign of political opinions in the narrow sense of the term. It seemed that the republic had overnight become not simply the best form of government one could imagine for France but the only form. Dynastic hopes and regrets were consigned to oblivion so thoroughly that no one could remember they had ever existed. The Republic respected people and property and was seen as legitimate. What struck me most in the wake of all I have just described was the universal hatred and terror that Paris inspired for the first time. In France, provincials feel about Paris and the central government of which it is the seat much as the English feel about the aristocracy: at times they complain about it impatiently, and often they envy it, but at bottom they love it because they hope to bend its power to their own advantage. This time, Paris and the people who spoke in its name had so abused their power and seemed to take so little heed of the rest of the country that the idea of throwing off the yoke and at last acting and thinking for themselves occurred to many people relatively unaccustomed to such boldness. Of course these were vague and timid desires, ephemeral and clumsy passions that never inspired in me much hope or fear. These new feelings were subsequently channeled into electoral enthusiasms. People wanted to go to the polls and vote for enemies of Parisian demagogy, which they saw not as the normal exercise of a right but as the least dangerous way of confronting the master.

Universal suffrage, by Honoré Daumier, c. 1850

I had stopped at the small town of Valognes, which was the natural center of my influence, and as soon as I knew how things stood in the region, I set about preparing my candidacy. I quickly noticed something I have often observed in other circumstances: the surest road to success is not to want it too much. I eagerly hoped to be elected, but with the situation as difficult and critical as it was, I readily accepted that I might not be, and this calm anticipation of failure left my mind tranquil and clear and enabled me to maintain my self-respect and scorn the madness of the times as I would never have been able to do had I been consumed by the passion to succeed.

The region filled with roving candidates who hawked their republican protests on one platform after another. I refused to speak before any voters other than those who lived in the vicinity of my property.

Each small town had its club, and each club asked candidates to explain their views and actions and endorse the club’s preferred policies. I refused to respond to any of these insolent interrogations. My refusals, which might have seemed arrogant, were instead taken as signs of dignity and independence vis-à-vis the new sovereigns, and I gained more plaudits for my rebelliousness than others did for their obedience.

I accordingly limited my campaign to the publication of a circular, which I arranged to have posted throughout the département. Most of the hopefuls had revived the venerable usages of 1792. They “fraternally” addressed their fellow “citizens.” I had no desire whatsoever to cloak myself in such cast-offs of the Revolution. I opened my circular by addressing the voters as “messieurs” and concluded by proudly assuring them of my respect. “I do not come before you to solicit your votes,” I wrote. “I come only to submit myself to the orders of my country. I asked to represent you in peaceful and easy times. Honor prevents me from refusing to represent you in a time of turmoil that may become a time of danger. That is the first thing I have to say.” I added that to the end I had been faithful to the oath I had sworn to the monarchy but that the Republic, which had come into being without my cooperation, would have my energetic support. I would not merely tolerate its existence; I would actively support it. I then continued: “But what republic are we talking about? Some people think that ‘republic’ means a dictatorship in the name of liberty; that a republic should not only change political institutions but reshape society itself. Others believe that a republic should be aggressive and propagandistic. I am not that kind of republican. If you are, I will be of no use to you, because I do not share your view. But if you understand the Republic as I do, you can be sure that I will wholeheartedly dedicate myself to the triumph of a cause that is mine as well as yours.”

People who are unafraid in revolutionary times are like princes in the army: with ordinary actions they make an extraordinary impression, because they occupy a special position unlike any other and therefore enjoy great visibility. My circular met with a success that was surprising even to me. Within a few days it made me the most popular man in La Manche and focused everyone’s attention on me. My old political adversaries, the conservatives and agents of the former government who had fought me most persistently and whom the Republic had overthrown, all hastened to assure me that they were prepared not only to nominate me but to follow my advice in every respect.

Meanwhile, a preelection meeting was held of voters from the Valognes district. I appeared alongside the other candidates. The meeting took place in a building normally used as an open market. The chair sat behind a desk at one end of the structure, and a schoolteacher’s chair had been converted into a sort of podium alongside it. The chairman, a high-school science teacher in Valognes, addressed me in a loud, authoritative, but respectful tone: “Citizen de Tocqueville, I will read you the questions that have been addressed to you and that you are expected to answer.” To which I calmly replied, “Mr. Chairman, I am ready.”

A parliamentary orator whom I prefer not to name once said to me, “You see, my dear friend, there is only one way of speaking well from the podium: when you go forward to speak, you have to persuade yourself that you’re more intelligent than anyone else.” That has always seemed to me easier said than done when addressing one of our more important political bodies. In this case, however, the advice seemed to me easier to follow, and I took advantage of it. Without assuming that I was more intelligent than everyone else, I nevertheless quickly realized that I was the only one with a good knowledge of the facts at issue and a clear idea of what kind of political language people wanted to hear. It would have been difficult to be clumsier or more ignorant than my opponents proved to be. They pummeled me with questions they believed to be challenging but nevertheless left me very free, while I answered in ways that were not always very clever but invariably struck them as crushing. The principal area in which they thought they could outmaneuver me concerned the banquets. It was no secret that I had wanted nothing to do with those dangerous demonstrations. My political friends had been very critical of me for abandoning them at the time, and any number of them continued to hold my stand against me, even though the revolution showed I had been right—indeed, perhaps because it showed I had been right. “Why did you desert the opposition on the banquet issue?” they asked me. I answered forthrightly: “I could offer a pretext, but I prefer to give my real reason. I did not want the banquets because I did not want a revolution, and I venture to say that almost none of the people who attended the banquets would have done so if they had foreseen, as I did, what would follow. The only difference I see between you and me is that I knew what you were up to, but you didn’t.” Before thus professing disbelief in revolution, I had professed my faith in the Republic. The sincerity of the former profession seemed to confirm the sincerity of the latter. The audience laughed and applauded, my adversaries looked foolish, and I emerged triumphant.

In the minutes of that meeting I find the following question and answer, which I reproduce here because they reveal the preoccupations of the moment as well as my true state of mind.

Q. “If a riot were to break out around the National Assembly and people with bayonets were to burst into the Chamber, do you swear to remain at your post and if need be die there?”

A. “My presence here is my answer. After nine years of constant and futile effort to steer the recently fallen government toward a more liberal and honorable course, I would have preferred to return to private life until the storm had passed. But my honor forbade me to do so. Yes, I believe as you do that there may be perils in store for those who would seek to represent you faithfully, but along with peril there is glory, and it is because there is peril as well as glory that I am here.”¹⁶

I had won over the farmers of the département with my circular, and I won over the workers of Cherbourg with a speech.¹⁷ Two thousand of them had come together for a so-called patriotic dinner. Having received a very polite but pressing invitation to attend, I did so.

When I arrived I saw a line of marchers about to leave for the place where the banquet was to be held. At the head of the line stood my former colleague Havin, who had come from Saint-Lô expressly to preside over the event. It was our first encounter since February 24. That day I saw him offer his arm to the duchesse d’Orléans, and the following morning I learned that he had become the Republic’s commissioner in the département of La Manche. I was not surprised by this, because I knew him to be one of those restless and ambitious men who had found themselves stuck in opposition for ten years, when their intent was simply to use the opposition as a stepping-stone. How many such men had I known—men tormented by their virtue and in despair because they found themselves condemned to spend the best years of their lives criticizing the vices of others for want of an opportunity to revel in their own, circumstances having offered them no chance to abuse power other than in their imaginations! During their lengthy abstinence, most had developed such a huge appetite for places, honors, and money that it took no genius to foresee that at the first opportunity they would devour power like gluttons and show themselves to be none too choosy about the moment or the morsel. Havin was typical of these men. The provisional government had made him the partner, not to say the subordinate, of another former colleague of mine in the Chamber of Deputies, M. Vieillard, who subsequently became famous as a special friend of Prince Louis-Napoléon. Vieillard was a deserving republican, as it were, because he had been one of seven or eight republicans elected to the Chamber under the monarchy. He was also one of those republicans who had been a fixture in the salons of the empire before turning to demagogy. In literature an intolerant classicist, in religion a Voltairian, he was a rather pretentious but very kind and decent man and even something of a wit. But in politics he was extraordinarily dense. Havin used him. Whenever he wished to strike at one of his enemies or reward one of his friends, he seldom failed to employ Vieillard, who allowed himself to be used as an instrument. Havin thus hid behind Vieillard’s honesty and republicanism, which he used as a shield, much as a sapper pushes his protective apparatus in front of him when laying his mines.

Havin seemed barely to recognize me. He did not invite me to take my place in the procession. I therefore chose a modest spot among the crowd and upon arriving at the banquet hall took a seat at an obscure table. Soon the speeches began. Vieillard read from a very appropriate written text. Havin then read a second speech, which was rather well received. I was eager to speak as well but was not on the list and wasn’t sure how to insert myself into the order of the day. When one of the “orators” (for all the speakers that day thought of themselves as orators) alluded to the memory of Colonel Briqueville, I found my opening. I asked for the floor, and the audience indicated its desire to hear me. Once perched on the rostrum, or rather on the throne, which stood more than twenty feet above the audience, I felt somewhat intimidated, but I quickly recovered and delivered a rather touching address that I could not possibly reconstruct today. I know only that it was more or less appropriate to the occasion and expressed the kind of warmth that seldom fails to emerge from the disorder of an improvised address, a quality quite sufficient to ensure its success before a popular assembly—or any assembly, for that matter. For it cannot be repeated too often that speeches are made to be heard rather than read, and the only good ones are those that move their listeners.

This speech of mine met with loud cheers and total success, and I admit that it was sweet to avenge myself this way against my former colleague, who had sought to take advantage of what he took to be fortune’s favors.

If I’m not mistaken, it was between this time and the elections that I traveled to Saint-Lô as a member of the Conseil général.¹⁸ A special session of the council had been scheduled. Its composition was still as it had been under the monarchy: most of the members had bowed to the wishes of Louis-Philippe’s officials and were among those who had done most to earn that prince’s government the contempt of people in our region. The only thing I recall from that trip to Saint-Lô was the striking servility of those erstwhile conservatives. They not only did nothing to oppose Havin, upon whom they had heaped so many insults over the previous ten years, but fawned on him as assiduous courtiers. They praised him with their words, justified him with their votes, and approved his actions with gentle nods. They even spoke well of him among themselves lest some indiscretion betray their true feelings. I have seen more impressive specimens of human baseness but none more perfect. As petty as this episode was, I think it deserves to be fully aired. Subsequent events further highlighted the perfidiousness of these men: a few months later, after the shifting tides of popular opinion had brought the conservatives back to power, they immediately resumed their attacks on the same Havin with vehemence and at times extraordinary injustice. As their fear waned, their previous hatred reemerged, exacerbated by the memory of their obsequiousness.

Meanwhile, the general elections drew near, and the outlook grew gloomier with each passing day. All the news from Paris suggested that the capital was in constant danger of falling into the hands of armed socialists. There were doubts that they would allow elections to take place or refrain from forcing their will on the National Assembly. In many quarters, National Guard officers were already being forced to swear that they would attack the National Assembly if it came into conflict with the people. The provinces grew increasingly alarmed, but at the same time resolve stiffened in the face of danger.

I spent the last days before the election at my neglected, beloved estate in Tocqueville. It was my first visit since the revolution, and I knew it might be my last. Upon arriving I was overwhelmed by such intense and peculiar feelings of sadness that traces remain vividly engraved on my memory among the other vestiges of that time. No one was expecting me. The empty rooms in which I found only my old dog to welcome me, the bare windows, the jumble of dusty furniture, the cold fireplaces, the stopped clocks, the gloomy look of the place, the damp walls—all of these things presaged abandonment and ruin. I had often thought that this tiny corner of the earth, hidden among the hedges and meadows of the Norman bocage, was the most charming hermitage imaginable, but in the state of mind I was in that day it seemed to me a desolate wilderness. Yet through the desolation I glimpsed, as if from within a tomb, the sweetest, most joyful images of my past life. That man’s imagination is more colorful and vivid than reality is something I admire. I had just witnessed the fall of the monarchy and subsequently observed the most dreadful and bloody scenes. Yet none of those tragic events affected me more poignantly or profoundly than the sight of my ancestral home and the memory of the peaceful, happy days I had spent there, innocent of how precious they were. It was then and there that I tasted the true bitterness of revolution.

The local people had always been kind to me, but this time I found them affectionate as well. Never was I treated with more respect than after posters bluntly proclaiming equality appeared on every wall. We were supposed to vote as a body in the town of Saint-Pierre, one league from our village. On the morning of the election, all the voters—the entire male population above the age of twenty—assembled in front of the church. The men lined up double file in alphabetical order. I took the place that corresponded to my name, because I knew that in democratic times and countries one cannot place oneself at the head of the people but must be placed there by others. Pack horses and carts followed this long procession, bearing the crippled and sick who wished to accompany us. Only the women and children remained behind. When we reached the top of the hill that overlooks Tocqueville, we stopped for a moment. I knew that people were expecting me to speak, so I stood on a mound next to a ditch and, with everyone gathered around in a circle, said a few words inspired by the circumstances. I reminded those good people of the gravity and importance of what they were about to do. I advised them not to allow themselves to be accosted or diverted by people in town who might try to lead them astray. Instead, we should remain together as a body, each man in his place, until everyone had voted. “No one should go indoors to eat or dry off (for it was raining that day) before doing his duty.” They loudly proclaimed that they would do as I asked, and they did. Everyone voted together, and I have reason to believe that nearly all voted for the same candidate.

Immediately after voting myself, I took my leave, climbed into a carriage, and set out for Paris.

CHAPTER 5

First meeting of the Constituent Assembly.—Character of this Assembly.

I stopped at Valognes just to say good-bye to some of my friends. Several of them had tears in their eyes when we parted, for it was widely believed in the provinces that deputies would be exposed to great danger in Paris. Some of the good people I talked with told me that if the National Assembly were attacked, they would come to Paris to defend us. I regret that at the time I took these to be empty words, because those good people actually did come, along with many others, as will be seen in what follows.

It was not until I arrived in Paris that I learned I had received 110,704 of the roughly 120,000 votes cast in the election. Of the colleagues elected with me, most had been members of the dynastic opposition. Only two had professed republican opinions before the revolution: in the jargon of the day, they were what people called républicains de la veille, or “precocious republicans.”

The results were similar in most parts of France.

There have been revolutionaries more vicious than those of 1848, but none stupider. They had no idea either how to take advantage of universal suffrage or how to do without it. Had they held elections immediately after February 24, when the upper classes were still stunned and the people still more astonished than discontented, they might have obtained the Assembly their hearts desired. Had they boldly established a dictatorship, they might have clung to it for a while. But even as they submitted themselves to the judgment of the nation, they did everything they could to alienate it. They threatened the people even as they subjected themselves to the people’s judgment. They frightened citizens with the boldness of their plans and the violence of their language yet incited resistance with the indecisiveness of their actions. They behaved as though they were the people’s guardians but made themselves its dependents. Instead of opening up to new members after their victory, they jealously closed ranks and seemed to set themselves an insoluble problem, namely, how to establish majority rule against the wishes of the majority.

Following examples from the past without understanding them, they foolishly imagined that bringing the masses into politics would be enough to secure their allegiance to the cause and that to win the people’s love for the Republic it would suffice to grant rights without procuring profits.

They forgot that their predecessors had not only granted the vote to all peasants but also ended the tithe, eliminated compulsory labor service, abolished other seigneurial privileges, and divided the property of the old nobility among the former serfs, while they themselves could do nothing of the kind. By instituting universal suffrage, they thought they were summoning the people to support the revolution, whereas in fact they were arming the people to oppose it. I am nevertheless far from believing that it would have been impossible to inspire revolutionary passions, even in the countryside. In France, every farmer owns some plot of land, and most are burdened by heavy debt. Their enemy was no longer the noble but the creditor, so it was the creditor who should have been attacked. The revolutionaries should have promised to abolish debt rather than property. The demagogues of 1848 did not think of this expedient. They proved to be much less clever than their predecessors, though no more honorable, for they were as violent and unjust in their desires as the latter had been in their acts. But to commit acts of violent injustice, a government needs more than the will or even the capacity: the mores, ideas, and passions of the time must be propitious as well.

The elections therefore produced a majority opposed to the party that had made the revolution, as was only to be expected. Yet that party was surprised and pained by the results. When its candidates were rejected, it fell into depression and rage. It complained, at times mildly, at other times rudely, that the nation was ignorant, ungrateful, mad, and hostile to its own good. It reminded me of Molière’s Arnolphe saying to Agnès,

Pourquoi ne m’aimer pas, madame l’impudente?¹⁹

What was no laughing matter, however, was the state of Paris on my return, truly sinister and terrifying.

In the city I found a hundred thousand armed workers, formed into regiments, out of work, dying of hunger, but their heads filled with vain theories and chimerical hopes. I saw a society severed in two: those who owned nothing were united in common envy, those who owned something in common anxiety. Between these two broad classes no bond or sympathy remained; everywhere the idea took hold that conflict was inevitable and imminent. The bourgeois and the people (for these ancient noms de guerre had been revived) had already come to blows in Rouen and Limoges, with contrasting outcomes. In Paris, hardly a day went by without threats or damage to property owners’ income or capital. In some cases capitalists were asked to put people to work even though commerce had come to a halt, while in other cases they were asked to let their tenants pay no rent even though the landlords had nothing else to live on. When possible the owners of property gave in to these tyrannical demands but tried to profit from their weakness by publicizing it. I recall reading in one newspaper a letter to the editor that still strikes me as a model of vanity, cowardice, and stupidity artfully combined:

To the editor: I avail myself of your newspaper to inform my tenants that in the interest of putting into practice the principles of fraternity that should guide the actions of all true democrats, I shall forgive to any tenant who asks next month’s rent.

Nevertheless, a dark despair had taken hold of this oppressed and threatened bourgeoisie, and that despair slowly turned into courage. I had long despaired of a gradual and peaceful settlement of February’s revolutionary movement, believing that it would come to an abrupt end only after a great battle had been fought in Paris. I said as much in the immediate aftermath of February 24. What I saw then persuaded me that such a battle was not only inevitable but also imminent and that we should seize the first opportunity to strike.

The National Assembly finally met on May 4. Up to the last minute there were doubts that it would be able to do so. I firmly believe that the most ardent of the demagogues had been tempted on several occasions to forgo the legislature, but they did not dare. They were crushed by the weight of their own dogma of popular sovereignty.

I should have a vivid image of how that first session of the Assembly went, but my memory is somehow blurred. It is a mistake to think that only the grand and important events are engraved in our minds. It is rather the peculiar details that make certain images more memorable than others. What I remember is just that we shouted “Vive la République!” fifteen times during the session, each deputy trying to outdo the others. Similar incidents have occurred in many other legislative bodies, and it is common for one party to exaggerate its sentiments in order to embarrass its adversary, while the latter avoids the trap by feigning sentiments it does not feel. Both sides therefore felt pressure to exaggerate the truth or even deny it. I believe, however, that in this case the cries on both sides were sincere, but the thoughts behind them were different or even contradictory. Everyone at that point wanted the Republic to survive, but some sought to use it to attack their enemies, others to defend themselves. The newspapers that day spoke of enthusiasm in the Assembly and the crowd. There was a great deal of noise, to be sure, but no enthusiasm. Everyone was too preoccupied with what would come next to be distracted by any sentiment at all.

The provisional government had decreed that representatives should dress as members of the Convention had, wearing in particular the white jacket with creased collar that actors playing Robespierre on stage inevitably wore. At first I thought this fine idea must have been the brainchild of Ledru-Rollin or Louis Blanc, but I later learned that it was a product of Armand Marrast’s florid literary imagination. Of course no one obeyed the decree, not even its author. Only Caussidière dressed as prescribed. This attracted my attention, though I knew him no better than most of the others who would call themselves Montagnards in homage to the memory of 1793.²⁰ He was a very large, very fat man with a triangular head sunk deeply between his shoulder blades. His eyes were cunning and mischievous, while the rest of his face radiated friendliness. In short, he was a shapeless mass of matter enclosing a mind subtle enough to turn grossness and ignorance to advantage.

Throughout the next day and the day after, the members of the provisional government paraded to the podium one after another to tell us what they had done since February 24. Each of them had much good to say about himself and even some good to say about his colleagues, though it would be difficult to find a group of men who hated one another more cordially. Quite apart from the political hatreds and jealousies that divided them, they struck me as men suffering from the peculiar irritation that afflicts travelers who are forced to endure one another’s company aboard ship during a long and stormy crossing despite an absence of any mutual sympathy or understanding. Nearly all the parliamentarians with whom I had lived for years turned up at this inaugural session. With the exception of M. Thiers, who had failed to win election, the duc de Broglie, who I believe did not run, and Messieurs Guizot and Duchâtel, who had fled, all the celebrated orators and most of the well-known babblers of the previous political regime were present, yet they seemed bewildered. They felt isolated and suspect. They aroused fear and were afraid. In politics these two contraries commonly coexist. At that time these men had none of the influence they would soon regain thanks to their talent and experience. The rest of the Assembly was filled with novices, as if we had just emerged from the Ancien Régime, for thanks to centralization there had been no political life outside the two Chambers, so that anyone who had not been either a peer or a deputy scarcely knew what an assembly was, let alone how one was supposed to speak or behave in one. They were profoundly ignorant of everyday routines and commonplace customs. They were inattentive at crucial moments but listened carefully to unimportant matters. I recall that on the second day all the newcomers crowded around the podium and called for total silence so that they could hear the reading of the minutes of the previous session, thinking that this insignificant business was of the utmost importance. Nine hundred English or American farmers chosen at random would have made a more convincing political body, I am sure.

Again imitating the National Convention, the deputies with the most radical and revolutionary views chose to sit on the highest benches. They were very uncomfortable up there, but they earned the right to call themselves Montagnards, and since men are always keen to fill their minds with pleasant fantasies, they boldly boasted of their resemblance to the well-known scoundrels whose name they had taken.

These Montagnards quickly divided into two quite distinct groups: the old-school revolutionaries and the socialists. There were many shades of difference, however, and the dividing line was never clearly defined. Nearly all who were Montagnards in the narrow sense had some socialist ideas in their heads, and the socialists readily approved the revolutionary inclinations of the other Montagnards. Yet the differences between them were sufficiently deep that they could not always agree, and this is what saved us. The socialists were the more dangerous of the two groups because they more fully reflected the true character of the February revolution and the passions it unleashed. But they were more men of theory than men of action, and to overthrow society from their armchairs they would have needed the practical energy and knowledge of insurrection that only their comrades fully possessed.

From where I sat, I could easily hear what was said and above all see what was done on the Montagnard benches. I had the opportunity to study rather closely the men who inhabited that part of the Chamber. For me it was like discovering a new world. We console ourselves for our lack of knowledge of foreign countries by telling ourselves that at least we know our own, but we are wrong, for there are always regions we have not visited and races of men of which we know nothing. I felt this strongly at the time. It was as if I were seeing these Montagnards for the first time, for their idiom and manners were so strange to me. They spoke a jargon that was neither the French of the ignorant nor that of the literate but suffered from the defects of both, for it was full of coarse words and ambitious turns of phrase. An endless stream of personal insults and humorous barbs emanated from the Montagnard benches. Jocular quips jockeyed with sententious judgments, and the tone varied from the ribald to the pretentious. These men were clearly no more at home in the tavern than in the salon. I suspect they had polished their manners in the in-between space of the cafés and nourished their minds solely on newspapers. In any case, it was the first time since the beginning of the revolution that men of this sort had manifested themselves in any of our assemblies. Their kind had previously been represented only by isolated and obscure individuals who had been more concerned with hiding their presence than with flaunting it.

Two other features of the Constituent Assembly struck me as being as novel as this one, though quite different from it.

The body contained a far larger number of big landowners and even nobles than any of the Chambers chosen during the period when money constituted the necessary qualification for voting as well as winning. It also included a religious party larger and more powerful than during the Restoration. I counted three bishops, several vicars-general, and a Dominican, whereas Louis XVIII and Charles X had managed only to secure the election of a single abbot.²¹

The main reasons for the presence of so many landowners were two: the abolition of the cens, or property qualification for voting, which meant that some voters were beholden to the rich, and the recognition of a threat to property, which led some people to choose those who had the greatest interest in defending it as their representatives. The election of ecclesiastics stemmed in part from similar causes but also from something even more noteworthy, namely, the quite unexpected revival of religious concerns throughout much of the nation.

The revolution of 1792 had cured the upper classes of irreligion. It had revealed, if not the truth of religion, then at least the social utility. This lesson was lost, however, on the middle class, who had inherited the political authority of the upper classes and become their rival. Indeed, the middle class had become more unbelieving as the upper classes had grown more devout. The revolution of 1848 did for the bourgeoisie on a small scale what the revolution of 1792 had done for the nobility: in 1848 the bourgeoisie suffered the same reverses, the same terrors, and the same reversal of fortune. It was the same scene as in 1792 but in miniature and painted in less vivid and no doubt less durable colors. The clergy had facilitated this conversion by detaching itself from all the old political parties and resurrecting the true ancient spirit of the Catholic clergy, which is to be loyal to the church alone. Hence it readily embraced republican opinions while extending the warrant of its traditions, mores, and hierarchy to long-standing interests. It was accepted and cherished by all. The priests who came to the Assembly were shown a good deal of respect, which they earned with their common sense, moderation, and even modesty. Some of them even tried to speak from the podium, but they failed to master the political language of the day. They had been out of practice for too long. All their speeches turned into homilies.

Besides, universal suffrage had turned the country upside down without bringing any worthy new figure into the limelight.

I have always believed that no matter what electoral procedure a country adopts, most of the exceptional men available will ultimately be elected. The influence of the voting system is felt mainly on the less remarkable people who make up the bulk of any political body. The strata from which these people are drawn and the attitudes they display will vary widely with the electoral system chosen. The composition of the Constituent Assembly fully confirmed this belief. I already knew nearly all the leaders, but the back benches were filled with people unlike any I had seen before.

All things considered, this Assembly was better than any I had seen previously. There were more sincere, disinterested, honest, and above all courageous men in it than in the Chambers of Deputies in which I had sat before. The Constituent Assembly had been elected to deal with the civil war. This was its chief merit, and as long as the fight continued, it remained great. Only after victory was achieved did it lapse into wretchedness, collapsing under the burden of triumph.

I chose my place on the left side of the hall, on a bench from which it was easy to hear the speakers and reach the podium. Many of my old comrades joined me there: Lanjuinais, Dufaure, Corcelle, Beaumont, and a number of others sat nearby.

I want to say a word about the hall itself, although everyone is familiar with it. A description is needed to make my account intelligible, and while this monument of wood and plaster is likely to outlast the republic of which it served as the cradle, I do not believe that it will last long, and when it has been destroyed, some of what happened in it will be difficult to comprehend.

The hall was an impressively large rectangle. At one end stood the chairman’s desk and the podium. Nine tiers of benches rose along the other three walls. In the middle, in front of the podium, a vast empty space resembled the arena of an amphitheater, except that it was rectangular rather than round. Hence most of the audience could only glimpse the speaker from the side, and the only deputies who directly faced the speaker sat very far away. This arrangement encouraged inattentiveness and disorder, because the deputies who lacked a good view of the podium spent most of their time calling out to and threatening one another rather than listening, while the few who had a good view of the speaker found it hard to hear him.

Large windows at the very top of the room opened directly on the outside and allowed in air and light. A few flags furnished the only ornament on the walls. Fortunately, there had not been enough time to add the pallid allegories on paper or canvas with which the French like to fill their monuments even though those who understand them find them insipid, while the people find them incomprehensible. The overall impression was one of a vast space, cold, solemn, and almost sad. Seats were provided for nine hundred members, a larger assembly than any that had been seen in France for sixty years.

I felt immediately that the atmosphere of this Assembly suited me well, and despite the gravity of events, I experienced a sense of well-being I had never known before. For the first time since entering public life, I felt that I was being carried along by a majority in a direction congenial to my taste, reason, and conscience—a most pleasant new sensation. I divined that this majority would reject the socialists and Montagnards but sincerely wished to maintain and organize the Republic. I agreed with it on these two important points. I had absolutely no faith in monarchy and felt no affection or regret for any prince, and I had no cause to defend other than that of liberty and human dignity. My only aims were to protect the ancient laws of society from the innovators with the help of the new force that the government could derive from the republican principle; to ensure the triumph of the obvious will of the French people over the passions and desires of the Paris workers; and thus to defeat demagogy with democracy. Never had a goal seemed nobler or clearer to me. It may be that the risks that had to be run in order to attain it made it even more attractive to me, because I have a natural inclination for adventures. Great and imminent danger is not at all to my liking, but a touch of danger lends zest to most of life’s actions.

CHAPTER 6

My relations with Lamartine.—His equivocations.

Lamartine was then at the peak of his renown. Everyone who had been hurt or frightened by the revolution—that is, the majority of the nation—saw him as a savior. He was elected a member of the National Assembly by Paris and eleven départements.²² I do not believe that any other leader ever inspired as much enthusiasm as he did then. Until you have seen how love can be spurred by fear, you have no idea of the insane ardor of which men are capable. The deputies who came to Paris eager to repress the revolution’s excesses and fight the demagogic party all looked to him as their sole leader and expected that he would unhesitatingly agree to spearhead their attack on the socialists and demagogues. They soon realized that they were mistaken and that Lamartine did not see his role in such simple terms. Granted, his position was quite complex and difficult. Others forgot, though he did not, that he had contributed more than anyone else to the success of the February revolution. Terror had erased this memory from the popular mind, but the restoration of order would inevitably revive it. It was easy to foresee that once the current that had brought things to their present state subsided, an opposing current would drive the nation in the opposite direction more quickly and farther than Lamartine could or would go. The success of the Montagnards would ruin him straightaway, but their complete defeat would render him useless, and sooner or later power could and would slip from his hands. He therefore anticipated that for him victory would be almost as damaging and dangerous as defeat.

Indeed, I believe that if Lamartine had, on the first day, resolutely taken the lead of the immense party that sought to slow and control the revolution and succeeded in leading it to victory, his triumph would soon have buried him. He would not have been able to stop his army in time, and it would quickly have left him behind and delivered itself into the hands of other leaders.

No matter what he did, I do not think he could have held on to power for long. I believe that his only choice was to win glory by saving the country even if it meant losing his power. But Lamartine was certainly not one to sacrifice himself in this or any other way. Among the selfish and ambitious men I have known, I do not think I ever met anyone who gave less thought to the public good than he. I have known many men prepared to stir up the country for their own advantage—a common failing. But he was the only one who seemed to me prepared to turn the world upside down for his own amusement. I have never known anyone less sincere or more totally contemptuous of the truth. But contemptuous is not the right word: he never honored truth sufficiently to be concerned about it in any way whatsoever. In speech and on paper he wove in and out of the truth without noticing what he was doing. At every moment his only concern was to create a certain effect.

I had not seen Lamartine since the events of February 24. I caught a first glimpse of him on the eve of the Assembly’s opening session, when I came to choose my seat in the new hall, but we did not speak. He was flanked by several of his new friends. When he saw me, he pretended to have something to do at the other end of the hall and hastened off in that direction. He later had Champeaux (who was part friend and part factotum) tell me that he hoped I would not take offense at his having avoided me, because his position obliged him to treat former deputies this way, and that in any case there was a place marked out for me among the future leaders of the Republic; we should wait until the difficulties of the moment had been dealt with, however, before speaking directly. Champeaux also said that he had been instructed to seek my opinion about the current state of things. I readily shared my views with him, but to no purpose. A certain indirect relationship was thus established between me and Lamartine by way of Champeaux. The latter came often to let me know on behalf of his patron what was in the works, and I sometimes called on him in the small apartment he was then living in on the top floor of a house in the rue Saint-Honoré, which he used for receiving suspect visitors even though he had an official apartment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I usually found him surrounded by people looking for favors, for every regime in France is plagued by political beggars. Their numbers increase even after revolutions that go after corruption, because every revolution ruins a certain number of people, and in this country a ruined man inevitably turns to the state for help getting back on his feet. The crowd included beggars of all sorts attracted to Champeaux by the fleeting reflection of Lamartine’s power. I remember, among others, a certain chef—presumably not a distinguished representative of his profession—who was determined to work for Lamartine, to whom he referred as the president of the Republic. “But he is not president yet,” Champeaux protested. The man replied: “Even if he is not yet president, as you say, he will be, and it is not too soon to think about staffing his kitchen.” To get rid of this insistently ambitious kitchen assistant, Champeaux promised to bring his name to Lamartine’s attention as soon as Lamartine became president, and the poor man went away happy, no doubt dreaming of the quite imaginary splendors of the ovens he would soon be tending.

Although Champeaux was quite vain, garrulous, and boring, I saw a great deal of him in those days because by talking with him I gained a better idea of Lamartine’s ideas and plans than I could have gleaned from listening to Lamartine himself. Lamartine’s intelligence shone through Champeaux’s stupidity like the sun through smoked glass: the brightness was dimmed, but you could see the thing itself more clearly than with the naked eye. I quickly divined that everyone in this world had a head as filled with dreams as that of the cook I just described, and Lamartine himself was already savoring the delights of sovereign power even as it slipped through his fingers. The tortuous path he was following would ultimately lead to his defeat, for he was attempting to dominate the Montagnards without crushing them and to slow the revolutionary blaze without extinguishing it, thereby making the country secure enough to merit his blessing but not secure enough to be forgotten. What he feared above all was that leadership of the Assembly might once again fall into the hands of the former parliamentary leaders. This, I think, was his dominant passion, as became clear in the great debate on the organization of executive power. The pedantic hypocrisy that led the parties to conceal their interests behind general theories was never more glaringly apparent. The spectacle was not uncommon, but it was more striking this time because the needs of the moment forced each party to hide behind theories that were utterly alien or even contrary to their spirit. The former royalist party argued that the Assembly ought to govern itself and choose the ministers, thus coming close to demagogy, while the demagogues insisted that executive power ought to be entrusted to a standing committee, which would appoint and supervise all agents of government—a system not unlike that of the monarchy. What all this verbiage signified was simply that one side wished to keep Ledru-Rollin out of power, while the other wanted to bring him in.

The nation at this point saw Ledru-Rollin as the bloody symbol of the Terror. In the nation’s eyes he was the embodiment of evil, while Lamartine was the embodiment of good, and on both counts the nation was wrong. Ledru-Rollin was merely a great big, highly sensual, highly impulsive boy devoid of principles and nearly devoid of ideas, lacking true courage of mind or heart but not really malicious either, because by nature he wanted the best for everyone and was incapable of cutting an enemy’s throat except as historical reminiscence or a gesture to his friends.

The outcome of the debate hung in doubt for quite some time. Barrot turned the tide against us by making a very fine speech in our favor. I have seen many such surprises in parliamentary battles. Parties consistently make the same mistake because they think only of the pleasure they take from the words of their great orators and never of the danger that those words may goad their adversaries into action.

When Lamartine, who had previously been silent and indecisive, heard the former leader of the left speak out brilliantly and forcefully for the first time since February, he suddenly made up his mind and asked to speak. “You must understand,” Champeaux told me the next day, “that the main thing was to prevent the Assembly from passing a resolution on Barrot’s recommendation.” Lamartine therefore took the floor and as always spoke brilliantly.

The majority, which had already begun to follow Barrot, reversed course on hearing Lamartine (for this Assembly was more easily swayed by the deceptive power of eloquence than any of the others I have known; it was also inexperienced and innocent enough to seek reasons for its actions in the speeches of its orators). Lamartine thus carried the day but missed his opportunity because suspicions about him born that day soon grew and toppled him from the height of his popularity more quickly than he had risen. Those suspicions solidified the next day, when Lamartine backed Ledru-Rollin and forced the hand of his own allies by insisting on having Ledru-Rollin as his colleague on the executive committee.

The Assembly and the nation reacted with indescribable disappointment, terror, and rage.

I fully shared the latter two feelings. I saw clearly that Lamartine had turned off the path that would have taken us out of anarchy, and I could not imagine the abyss to which the tortuous path he was now on would lead. There was no way of knowing where leaps of imagination unlimited by reason or virtue might take us. I had no confidence in Lamartine’s common sense or disinterestedness, and in fact I thought him capable of anything except a cowardly act or a vulgar speech.

I confess that the June Days did somewhat change my opinion of the way he conducted himself. They showed me that our adversaries were more numerous, better organized, and more determined than I had thought.

For two months Lamartine had seen only Paris, where he lived, as it were, inside the revolutionary party, so he naturally exaggerated the power of that party and the inertia of France and thus strayed beyond the bounds of truth. I cannot be sure that I didn’t exaggerate an opposing set of ideas, however. The correct road to follow seemed so clear and obvious to me that I was unwilling to admit that anyone could mistake it by error. It was clear to me that one should hasten to take advantage of the moral force the Assembly derived from being elected by the people: we should boldly seize the government and devote all our effort to consolidating its power. Any delay would diminish our strength and increase that of our adversaries.

Indeed, it was in the six weeks between the convening of the Assembly and the June Days that the workers of Paris grew bold enough to resist, took heart, organized, obtained arms and ammunition, and prepared to fight. It is possible, however, that Lamartine’s equivocations and partial connivance with the enemy, which destroyed him, saved us. The effect was to divert and divide the leaders of the Mountain. The old-school Montagnards, who were kept in the government, broke with the socialists, who were excluded. If they had been united by a common interest and motivated by common despair before our victory rather than afterwards, it is doubtful that we would have won. We nearly perished when we confronted the revolutionary army without its leaders, so I wonder what would have happened if those leaders had appeared and the insurrection had enjoyed the support of a third of the National Assembly.

Lamartine saw these dangers more closely and clearly than I, and I now think that fear of engendering a mortal conflict influenced his behavior as much as ambition. I should have known this at the time from listening to Mme de Lamartine, whose fears for her husband’s safety and that of the National Assembly were exaggerated. “Be careful,” she said whenever she saw me, “not to push things to extremes. You do not know the strength of the revolutionary party. If we attack it, we will all die.” I have often regretted that I did not cultivate Mme de Lamartine’s friendship, because I have always appreciated her authentic virtue, but she had nearly all the faults that can go along with virtue and, without altering its character, make it less agreeable: a domineering character, considerable pride, and a mind that was righteous but also inflexible and sometimes rude, so that it was as impossible not to respect her as it was to like her.

CHAPTER 7

May 15, 1848

The revolutionary party had not dared to object to the Assembly’s meeting but did not wish to be dominated by it. On the contrary, it intended to keep the Assembly on a tight leash and to obtain by compulsion what sympathy refused to provide. Already the clubs were assailing the deputies with loud threats and insults. When it comes to political passions, the French are as rationalistic as they are unreasonable, so these assemblies of the people were busily manufacturing principles that could later be used to justify acts of violence. The argument was that the people always stand above their representatives and never completely relinquish their political will—a true principle from which was drawn the very false conclusion that the workers of Paris were the French people. From the time of our first session a great but nebulous agitation had reigned in much of the city. Crowds gathered every day in the streets and squares, surging to and fro like waves in a storm. The approaches to the Assembly were constantly occupied by throngs of menacing idlers. A demagogic party has so many heads, and chance plays such a large, and deliberation such a small, part in its actions, that it is virtually impossible to say what the party wants after the fact or what it wanted before. In any case, my opinion at the time, which has not changed, was that the leading demagogues had no intention of destroying the Assembly and still sought only to pressure it into serving their ends. The attack they led against it on May 15 seemed to me intended to frighten that body rather than bring it down. It was in any case an equivocal undertaking of the sort one sees so often in times of popular agitation, in which the promoters themselves are careful not to spell out any precise plans or goals in advance so that they can either stop at a peaceful demonstration or push on toward full-scale revolution depending on how the events of the day unfold.

An attempt of this kind had been expected for a week, but when an assembly or an individual becomes accustomed to living in a state of constant alarm, it becomes incapable of distinguishing among the ubiquitous signs of danger the one that says a threat is truly imminent. We knew only that there was an important popular movement in favor of Poland, which was vaguely worrisome, but no more.²³ The members of the government were no doubt better informed and more fearful than the rest of us. But they hid their fears as well as their information, and I was too far from the inner circle to penetrate the secret thoughts of those inside. I therefore arrived at the Assembly on May 15 with no inkling of what was about to occur. The session began like any other. What was very strange was that twenty thousand men already encircled the hall, yet no noise from outside revealed their presence. Wolowski was at the podium, mumbling some platitude or other about Poland between his teeth, when a terrifying cry from the people outside made it clear that they were coming. The sound, entering the Chamber from all sides through the upper windows, which had been left open because of the heat, fell on us as though from on high. I would never have imagined that a chorus of human voices could produce such a tremendous din, and not even the sight of the crowd itself, when it invaded the Chamber, made as much of an impression on me as that roar, which could be heard before the people from whom it emanated could be seen.

Several deputies, yielding to their initial reaction of curiosity or fear, rose from their seats. Others shouted “Sit down!” Everyone sat back down, planted themselves firmly on their benches, and shut their mouths. Wolowski resumed his speech and continued to hold forth for quite a while. I believe it was the first time in his life he had ever been listened to in silence. The audience, however, was listening not to him but to the crowd, whose murmur grew ever more distinct as it drew near.

Suddenly, one of our quaestors,²⁴ Degousée, mounted the steps to the podium, pushed Wolowski aside without a word, and said, “Against the wishes of the quaestors, General Courtais has just ordered the mobile guards defending the gates of the Assembly to sheathe their bayonets.”²⁵ After uttering these few words, he said no more. This Degousée was a fine fellow, but he cut a most sinister figure and had the most resonant voice you can imagine. Together, the news, the man, and the sound of his voice created a strange impression. The Assembly became agitated for a moment but immediately calmed back down. There was nothing to be done. The crowd forced its way into the Chamber.

Lamartine, who had left the Chamber when the noise first manifested itself, now reappeared at the door, looking alarmed. He rapidly crossed the wide center aisle and regained his seat as if pursued by an invisible enemy. A few men of the people followed almost immediately. They stopped on the threshold of the Chamber, surprised to find the huge assembly of deputies all seated. At the same moment, as on February 24, the doors of the galleries burst open and people flooded in, first filling the seats and then overflowing the balcony itself, as the early arrivals, pressed by others behind them who could not see what was happening, were forced over the balustrades and left hanging some ten feet above the floor before ultimately jumping into the midst of the deputies from a height of five or six feet. As each body thudded onto the floor, I at first took the sound for the rumble of distant cannon fire. While part of the invading crowd thus tumbled into the Chamber, another part, made up mainly of club leaders, burst through the various doors of the hall. They carried symbols of the Terror and waved a multitude of flags, some of which were topped with the red cap.²⁶

The crowd instantly filled the large empty space in the middle of the Chamber, and as more and more people squeezed into the area, some began to move up the narrow aisles that lead between the benches from the floor to the upper corridors of the Chamber. More and more people squeezed into these tiny spaces, as agitated as ever. Amid all the tumult and commotion, the dust grew so thick and the heat so stifling that I might have gone out for a breath of air had only the public interest been at stake; but honor kept us nailed to our seats.

Some of the invaders were armed, while others appeared to be carrying concealed weapons, but none seemed to have made up his mind to strike us. In their faces I saw astonishment and maliciousness but not hostility. For many the dominant motive seemed to be a wish to satisfy common curiosity, because in all our uprisings, even the bloodiest, many who participate are partly scoundrels, partly spectators who come for the show. In any case, no single leader seemed to command obedience. It was a mob, not an army. Among the crowd were some drunks, but most seemed in the grip of nothing more than feverish excitement spurred by enthusiastic shouts from outside and suffocating heat, crowding, and discomfort within. The demonstrators were dripping with sweat, although many of them, being slovenly dressed, probably did not find the heat terribly oppressive.

In the midst of the commotion one could occasionally make out an explicit threat. Some men shook their fists and referred to us as their servants, a word they repeated over and over. For days the ultrademocratic papers had been referring to the representatives of the people as their servants, and these ruffians seemed to like that idea. A moment later I had an opportunity to observe how vividly and sharply such images can be etched on the popular mind. I heard a man wearing a smock and standing next to me say to his friend, “Do you see that vulture down there? I’d love to wring his neck.” When I looked in the direction he was pointing, I saw that he was referring to Lacordaire, who was wearing the habit of a Dominican and sitting on the upper left benches. Though the sentiment was vile, the comparison struck me as admirable. The priest’s long, bony neck and shaved head ringed with dark hair protruded from his white hood, and with his narrow face, aquiline nose, and gleaming, close-set eyes staring fixedly, he did indeed resemble a bird of prey more than any human creature I had ever seen.

While this chaos unfolded, the Assembly remained passive and immobile on its benches, neither resisting nor capitulating, silent and firm. Some Montagnards fraternized with the people, but furtively and in muffled tones. Raspail had commandeered the podium and was prepared to read a petition from the clubs. A young deputy named d’Adelsward rose and said, “By what right does Citizen Raspail claim the floor?” Angry cries were heard. A few men of the people went after d’Adelsward, but they were stopped and turned back. With considerable effort Raspail persuaded his friends to grant him a moment of silence so that he could read out the clubs’ petition, or rather orders, which commanded us to declare ourselves immediately in favor of Poland.

“Hurry, we are awaiting your answer,” people shouted on all sides, yet still the Assembly gave no sign of life. The din from the impatient, tumultuous, and unbearably loud crowd in any case gave us an excuse not to answer. President Buchez, whom some saw as a scoundrel and others as a saint but who on that day at least was a great dunce, rang his bell as hard as he could to call for silence, as if at that moment the silence of that huge crowd were not more to be feared than its shouts.

It was at this point that I saw come to the podium a man whom I saw only that one time but whose memory has filled me with disgust and horror ever since. He had hollow, withered cheeks and pale lips and looked sickly, nasty, and filthy, with the sallow pallor of a rotting corpse. No linen was visible beneath the old black frock coat that clung to his frail, emaciated limbs. He looked as though he had just emerged from a sewer. This, I was told, was Blanqui.

After saying a word about Poland, Blanqui turned abruptly to domestic affairs, demanding vengeance for what he called the Rouen massacres. In menacing terms he evoked the misery in which the people had been left and accused the Assembly of inflicting new wrongs. Having roused the audience with these words, he returned to Poland and followed Raspail in calling for an immediate vote.

The Assembly remained in place while the people continued to mill about, shouting a thousand contradictory things, and the chairman kept ringing his bell. Ledru-Rollin tried to persuade the crowd to withdraw from the Chamber, but by this point no one exercised any authority over the multitude. Ledru came close to being hooted off the platform.

The commotion resumed and grew, feeding on itself, as it were, for the people were no longer sufficiently in control of themselves to realize that a moment’s restraint would be needed to attain their goal. After a lengthy interval, Barbès at last mounted, or rather leapt, to the podium. He was one of those men who are so thorough a blend of the demagogue, the madman, and the knight that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends—a type that cannot see the light of day in any society less sick and disturbed than ours. In him, however, I think the madman had the upper hand, and his madness turned furious whenever he heard the voice of the people. When exposed to popular passions, his mind would begin to boil as surely as water boils when placed on a fire. From the moment the crowd invaded the Chamber I had kept an eye on him. I regarded him as the most fearsome of our adversaries because he was the craziest, the least self-interested, and the most resolute of all. I had watched him mount the platform on which the chairman sat and stand there for a long time without moving as he scanned the Chamber with an anxious eye. I had noticed and pointed out to my neighbors the alteration of his features, his livid pallor, and his nervous habit of twisting his mustache between his fingers. He was the very image of indecision, though already leaning toward an extreme solution. At last Barbès made up his mind. He would epitomize the people’s passion and ensure their victory by giving explicit expression to their purpose. In breathless staccato phrases he demanded “that the Assembly immediately and forthwith dispatch an army to Poland, impose a tax of 1 billion francs on the rich, order the evacuation of all troops from Paris, and prohibit any call to arms against the people. Otherwise, the representatives shall be declared traitors to the fatherland.”

Had Barbès succeeded in securing a vote on his motion, I think we would have been lost, for if the Assembly had accepted his proposal, we would have dishonored and disarmed ourselves, and if, as was more likely, we had rejected it, we would have risked having our throats slit. But not even Barbès could obtain a moment of silence long enough to compel a vote. The colossal clamor that ensued after he had pronounced his final words did not abate. It just went on and on in a thousand different voices. Barbès tried in vain to quell the din, failing despite potent assistance from the chairman’s bell, which we could hear ringing all the while, sounding like a death knell.

This extraordinary session lasted two hours. The Assembly stood its ground, with one ear cocked for the noise outside, awaiting the arrival of help. But the city of Paris seemed dead. Though we listened intently, not a sound was to be heard from that direction.

Our passive resistance vexed the people and drove them to despair. It was as if their furor bounced off the cold, featureless surface we presented to them. They waved their arms and screamed their rage but got nowhere for their efforts. Contradictory slogans filled the air: “Let’s get out of here!” shouted some. “Organize labor!” screamed others. “A Ministry of Labor!” “Tax the rich!” “We want Louis Blanc!” People ultimately came to blows at the foot of the podium to see who would be allowed to speak. Five or six orators would go up at the same time and all speak at once. As is always the case in riots, the ludicrous vied with the terrifying. The heat was so stifling that many in the vanguard of the invasion left the hall. They were immediately replaced by others waiting at the doors for a chance to enter. A fireman in uniform came down the aisle adjacent to the bench I was sitting on. “We can’t get them to vote!” someone shouted to him. “Wait,” he replied. “Lemme at them! Lemme at them! I’ll tell them what they need to do!” With that he pulled his helmet down over his eyes, secured it with chinstraps, charged into the crowd, bulldozing aside anyone who stood in his way, and mounted the podium, imagining that he would feel as much at ease there as upon a rooftop, but words failed him and he stood there without uttering a word. People shouted, “Speak, fireman, speak!” But he said nothing and was ultimately driven from the platform. At that moment, several people hoisted Louis Blanc onto their shoulders and paraded him around the hall in triumph, holding him by his tiny legs. He tried vainly to escape, twisting and turning every which way, unable to free himself from their grip and speaking all the while in a strident, gasping voice. He reminded me of a snake whose tail has been trapped under a stick. Ultimately they set him down on a bench below mine, and I heard him shout, “Friends, the right you’ve just won. . . .” The remainder of his speech was lost in the din. I was told that Sobrier had been carried about a short distance away in much the same manner.

A very tragic event nearly put an end to this saturnalia. The galleries at the far end of the hall gave way, falling more than a foot under the weight of the multitude and threatening to dump some of the throng into the hall, causing many to flee in terror. This alarming incident briefly halted the commotion, whereupon I heard for the first time the distant sound of drums calling the troops to arms in Paris. The crowd heard the same sound and gave out a prolonged cry of rage and terror. “Why the call to arms?” shouted Barbès, beside himself and once again at the podium. “Who is responsible? Those who gave the order shall be declared outlaws!” The people shouted: “We have been betrayed! To arms! To the Hôtel de Ville!”

The chairman was driven from his seat—or, if one accepts the version he has been giving out since that time, he voluntarily allowed himself to be driven from his seat. A club leader named Huber climbed onto the chairman’s desk and unfurled a flag topped by the red cap. He had apparently just recovered from a long epileptic fit brought on by the excitement and heat and had come forward immediately after emerging from his nightmarish derangement. His clothes were still in disarray, and he looked anxious and haggard. He twice shouted, “In the name of the people deceived by its representatives, I declare that the National Assembly is hereby dissolved!” As brassy as a trumpet, his voice descended from on high and filled the hall, dominating all the other noise.

Deprived of its chair, the Assembly dispersed. Barbès left for the Hôtel de Ville with the most intrepid of the clubmen.

Not everyone was pleased to see the session end this way. I heard men of the people in my vicinity say with sorrow, “No, no, this is not what we want.” Many sincere republicans were in despair. I was approached in the midst of the commotion by Trélat, a revolutionary of the dreamy and sentimental type who had conspired throughout the monarchy on behalf of the Republic and who was also a talented physician and director of one of the leading mental hospitals in Paris despite being slightly daft himself. With tears in his eyes, he effusively took my hands and said: “Oh, sir, what a misfortune this is, and how strange to think that the leaders are madmen, authentic madmen! I have seen or treated them all. Blanqui is mad, Barbès is mad, Sobrier is mad, and most of all Huber is mad. They’re all mad, sir, and should all be in my Salpêtrière rather than here.” He would surely have added himself to the list if he had known himself as well as he knew his former friends. I have always believed that in revolutions, and especially democratic revolutions, madmen—genuine madmen, not those referred to metaphorically as mad—have played a very important political role. What is certain, in any case, is that a touch of madness is not out of place in such times and often contributes to success.

Although the Assembly dispersed, you can take it for granted that it did not regard itself as having been dissolved. It did not even see itself as defeated. Most of the members who left the Chamber did so with the firm resolve to meet elsewhere soon. They said as much to one another, and I am convinced that they were indeed determined to do so. For myself, I decided to remain, in part owing to the curiosity that irresistibly draws me to places where exceptional things are happening, in part because, as on February 24, I believed that the strength of an assembly to some extent lies in the hall in which it meets. I therefore remained and witnessed the chaotic and grotesque scenes that followed, but these are of no interest or consequence. Amid much chaos and shouting, the crowd tried to form a provisional government. It was a parody of February 24, just as February 24 had itself been a parody of other revolutionary scenes.

This had been going on for quite some time when I thought I heard above the noise an unusual sound, which seemed to be coming from the interior of the palace. I have a keen ear, so it did not take me long to make out the sound of a drum beating the charge while advancing toward us. In these times of civil discord, everyone has learned the language of these martial instruments. I ran immediately to the door through which the new arrivals were about to enter.

It was in fact a drum, followed by forty or so mobile guards. These young men plunged resolutely into the crowd, but no one was sure at first what they had come to do. They soon disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd, but behind them came a dense column of national guardsmen, who hurried into the hall with piercing cries of “Long live the National Assembly!” I attached my deputy’s card to my hat and followed them in. They first cleared the podium of five or six speakers all talking at once, unceremoniously pushing them down the steps leading up to the platform. On seeing this, the insurgents at first sought to resist. Then panic gripped them. They clambered up the empty benches, stumbling in the footwells, headed for the outer corridors, and from there jumped into the courtyard through the open windows. Within a few minutes, only national guardsmen remained in the hall, and shouts of “Long live the National Assembly!” shook the walls.

The Assembly itself was absent, but little by little the members, who had dispersed around the neighborhood, hurried back. Members shook hands with the guardsmen and embraced one another before returning to their benches. The national guardsmen shouted “Long live the National Assembly!” and the deputies shouted “Long live the National Guard and the Republic!”

No sooner was the hall recaptured than General Courtais, the man originally responsible for our peril, had the unbelievable impudence to show his face. The guardsmen greeted him with angry cries. He was seized and dragged to the foot of the podium. As he passed by me, I saw that he looked deathly pale amid the gleaming swords. I thought the guardsmen were about to slit his throat and shouted with all my might, “Take his epaulettes but don’t kill him!” And that is what they did.

At this point Lamartine returned. I never found out what he did in the three hours during which we were occupied by invaders. I had glimpsed him during the first hour. He was sitting on a bench below mine combing hair glued together by sweat with a small comb he had taken from his pocket. The crowd then shifted, and I never saw him again. Apparently, he went to one of the interior rooms of the palace, which had also been invaded by the people, in the hope of addressing the crowd, but he met with a very hostile reception. The next day someone recounted some curious details about this scene, which I would repeat here had I not resolved to write only about what I witnessed personally. I am assured that he then withdrew to another palace under construction at the time and destined to become the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He would certainly have done better to assume command of the National Guard and come to our rescue. I think he suffered one of those fainthearted moments that afflict even the bravest of men (and he was one of them) if possessed of a vivid and active imagination.

By the time he returned to the Chamber, he had regained his energy and eloquence. He told us that his place was not in the Assembly but on the street and that he was going to march on the Hôtel de Ville and put down the insurrection. It was the last time I heard him applauded without reservation. To be sure, the deputies were applauding not Lamartine alone but the victory. The shouting and hand-clapping merely echoed the tumultuous passions with which our hearts still brimmed. Lamartine exited. The drums that had beaten the charge half an hour earlier now beat the march. The national guardsmen and mobile guards still among us formed up and followed him out. The Assembly, still missing many members, resumed its session. It was six o’clock. I returned home briefly to eat and then went back to the Chamber, the Assembly having declared itself in permanent session.

We soon learned that the members of the new provisional government had been arrested. Charges were lodged against Barbès and that aged imbecile Courtais, who deserved nothing more than a thrashing. Many people wanted to add Louis Blanc’s name to the list. He courageously sought to defend himself. He had just barely escaped the wrath of the national guardsmen at the door. His clothes were torn, soiled, and in disarray. This time he did not ask for the stool on which he customarily stood in order to lift himself a hair above the top of the podium (for he was practically a midget). He even forgot about the effect he wished to produce and concentrated exclusively on what he had to say. Despite that, or rather because of it, he momentarily succeeded in making his case. Only on that day did I believe he possessed any talent, because I do not regard as talent the ability to turn brilliant but empty phrases, which are like fine engraved dishes with nothing on them.

The day’s excitement had left me so worn out, moreover, that I have only a vague, blurred memory of that nighttime session. I will therefore say no more about it, because I wish to render here only my personal impressions. For further details about the sequence of events, the Moniteur is a better source.

CHAPTER 8

The Festival of Concord and preparation for the June Days

The revolutionaries of 1848, unable or unwilling to imitate the bloody follies of their predecessors, often consoled themselves by imitating their more absurd nonsense instead. For instance, they conceived the idea of staging vast allegorical festivals for the people.

Despite the frightening state of public finances, the provisional government decided to set aside a sum of 1–2 million francs to celebrate a Festival of Concord on the Champ-de-Mars.

According to the program for the event, which was published in advance and then followed to the letter, the Champ-de-Mars was to be filled with figures representing a variety of personages, virtues, political institutions, and even public services. France, Germany, and Italy were to be depicted as joining hands; Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity as well. Also to be represented were Agriculture, Commerce, the Army, the Navy, and above all the Republic, the latter on a colossal scale. There was to be a car drawn by sixteen plow horses. According to the program, this was to be of a simple, rustic design, yet it would transport three trees: an oak, a laurel, and an olive, symbols of strength, honor, and abundance, respectively. It would also carry a plow surrounded by stalks of wheat and flowers. Peasants and maidens clad in white would surround the car and sing patriotic songs. We were also promised oxen with gilded horns, but these did not materialize.

The National Assembly had not the slightest desire for any of these fine things. Indeed, it worried that the vast gathering of people that could not fail to materialize on such an occasion might lead to dangerous mischief.

It therefore delayed the opening of the festival as long as possible. Once the preparations were complete, however, there was no going back, and the opening was set for May 21.

On that day I went early to the National Assembly, which was to march as a body to the Champ-de-Mars. I had pistols in my pockets, and in talking with my colleagues I discovered that most of them were also carrying concealed weapons. One had a cane with a sword, another a dagger, and nearly all had some hidden means of self-defense. Edmond Lafayette showed me a peculiar type of weapon. It consisted of a ball of lead sewn into a short leather strap that could easily be fastened to one’s arm. One might call such a weapon a portable skull-breaker. Lafayette assured me that many of the deputies had begun carrying weapons like this, especially after May 15. This is how we went to the Festival of Concord.

Dark rumors predicted that great danger awaited the Assembly when it passed through the crowd on the Champ-de-Mars on the way to the reserved reviewing stand at the École Militaire. The truth is that it would have been quite easy to stage an attack on the deputies as they made their way to the spot on foot and virtually unguarded. What kept us safe was in fact the fresh memory of the victory of May 15—this was our only real protection, and it was enough. In any case, the French never do two things at once. Although they frequently attend to different things, they always focus exclusively on one thing at a time. I cannot think of a single case in which an insurrection occurred in the midst of a festival or even a ceremony. On that particular day the people seemed wholly preoccupied with the fiction of their happiness, setting aside for the time being the memory of their miseries and enmities. They were animated but not unruly. The program had stipulated that the atmosphere should be one of fraternal confusion. And the confusion was indeed extreme, but there was no disorder, because we are strange people: we cannot do without discipline when things are in good order, but in the midst of revolution it apparently becomes unnecessary. The sight of such popular joy delighted the sincere moderates among the republicans and made them rather sentimental.

With the foolishness that seldom fails to mar the virtue of honorable democrats, Carnot said, “Believe me, my dear colleague, one should always trust the people.” My answer, as I recall, was rather brusque: “Oh? Why weren’t you saying that on the eve of May 15?” The executive committee occupied one part of the immense reviewing stand that had been erected alongside the École Militaire, and the National Assembly occupied another part. The order of march was arranged so that the emblems of various nations passed before us first, which took a great deal of time because of the “fraternal confusion” called for by the program. Then came the car and finally the white-clad maidens. There were at least three hundred of them, and they wore their virginal costumes in such a virile manner that one could easily have mistaken them for boys dressed as girls. Each girl had been given a large bouquet, and these were gallantly tossed at us as they passed. But these brawny girls were probably more accustomed to beating the wash than to distributing flowers, so the bouquets pounded down on us like hailstones, most uncomfortably.

A tall girl stepped forward from the group and, standing in front of Lamartine, recited an ode in his honor. Gradually, as she recited, she became so animated that her face was twisted into fearsome contortions. Never had enthusiasm looked more like epilepsy. When she finished, the people nevertheless insisted that Lamartine embrace her. She offered up two plump cheeks dripping with sweat, which he barely and none too graciously kissed.

The only serious part of the festival was the review of the troops. I have never in my life seen so many armed men in one place, and I doubt that many people have seen more. Beyond the crowd of curious onlookers, the Champ-de-Mars was filled that day with an entire nation in arms. The Moniteur put the number of national guardsmen and regular troops at three hundred thousand, which seems exaggerated to me, but I doubt that it was fewer than two hundred thousand.

The sight of those two hundred thousand bayonets is permanently engraved on my memory. The men who carried them were squeezed tightly together so as to fit into the space between the embankments bordering the Champ-de-Mars, and from our relatively low vantage point we could see them only horizontally, so they presented to the eye a smooth and slightly undulating surface that reflected the sunlight and made the Champ-de-Mars look like a vast lake of liquid steel.

All the regiments filed past us one by one. In that armed multitude there were more muskets than uniforms.

Only the units from the wealthy neighborhoods contained large numbers of national guardsmen in military attire. The first to appear, they shouted “Long live the National Assembly!” The units from the faubourgs alone formed long columns, and while they wore mostly jackets and blouses, that did not prevent them from striking a very martial attitude. As they passed before us, most of them shouted “Long live the democratic republic!” or sang La Marseillaise and Les Girondins. Then came the units from the banlieues, made up of illarmed and ill-equipped peasants wearing blouses, as did the workers from the faubourgs but with an entirely different spirit, evident from their gestures and shouts. The battalions of the Mobile Guard chanted many slogans that left us anxious and wondering about the intentions of these youths, or rather children, who at that point more than anyone else held our fate in their hands.

The line regiments that closed the march filed past in silence.

It was with a heart full of sadness that I witnessed this lengthy spectacle. Never before had so many weapons been placed in the hands of the people. As you can well imagine, I did not share the foolish confidence or stupid joy of my friend Carnot. Indeed, I foresaw the day when all those bayonets gleaming in the sun would be raised against one another, and I sensed that the two armies we had just reviewed would soon be engaged in civil war. That day I also heard frequent shouts of “Long live Lamartine!” Yet his great popularity had already begun to wane. One could almost say it had vanished. But in every crowd there are many individuals slow to catch on, who continue to feel yesterday’s enthusiasm, like the provincials who take up Parisian fashions just as the Parisians are abandoning them.

Lamartine himself was quick to flee these final rays of his setting sun. He left well before the ceremony was over. He seemed anxious and tired. Many other deputies, also overcome by fatigue, followed suit, and by the time the review ended, the benches on the reviewing stand were nearly empty. It had begun early in the morning and did not end until dark.

It is fair to say that the whole period from the May 21 review until the June Days was filled with anxiety at what was coming. The army and the National Guard responded daily to new alerts. Craftsmen and bourgeois ceased to live at home and moved, armed, into the public squares. Everyone hoped against hope to avoid a conflict, yet all shared a vague sense that conflict was increasingly inevitable. The National Assembly was so obsessed with the idea that it was as if the words civil war had been written on the four walls of the Chamber.

All parties made great efforts of prudence and patience to prevent or at least delay the crisis. The deputies who were at bottom the most hostile to revolution carefully refrained from expressing their antipathies and sympathies. Those who had been parliamentary orators held their tongues lest their voices give offense. They abandoned the podium to newcomers, who made little use of it because the great debates were over. As is the case in any assembly, the most disturbing issues were the least discussed, but every day gave proof that these issues had not been forgotten. All sorts of ways to alleviate the people’s misery were proposed and discussed. Even socialist systems of various kinds were willingly examined, and everyone made a good-faith effort to find in each of them something applicable or at least compatible with the venerable laws of society.

Meanwhile, the National Workshops continued to fill. Already their population had swelled to more than one hundred thousand. We felt that we would be done for if we kept them but perish if we did away with them. The burning issue of the National Workshops was discussed every day, but superficially and timidly. We touched on it repeatedly but never dared to confront it head on.

It was obvious, moreover, that outside the Assembly, the various parties, though afraid of conflict, were actively preparing for it. The wealthier units of the National Guard gave banquets for the army and the Mobile Guard, during which they incited one another to unite in the common defense.

Meanwhile, the workers in the faubourgs secretly stockpiled the ammunition that would later enable them to sustain combat for a considerable period. The provisional government had taken steps to provide them with a large number of muskets. Not a single worker was without at least one, and some had several.

The danger was apparent both near and far. In the provinces, Paris aroused indignation as well as irritation. For the first time in sixty years, people dared to broach the idea of resisting the capital. They armed themselves and encouraged one another to go to the aid of the Assembly. Thousands of letters streamed in, congratulating the Assembly for its victory on May 15. The collapse of commerce, ubiquitous hostility, and fear of socialism increasingly aroused hatred of the Republic. That hatred was expressed most freely through the secret ballot. Voters had to go to the polls again in twenty-one départements. They generally chose men who in one way or another stood as symbols of the monarchy. M. Molé was elected in Bordeaux, and M. Thiers in Rouen.

It was at this point that the name Louis-Napoléon suddenly burst onto the scene. This prince was elected in Paris and several départements simultaneously. He received the votes of republicans, legitimists, and demagogues alike, for the nation was then like a flock of frightened sheep running every which way and following no particular path. On hearing of Louis-Napoléon’s election, little did I suspect that a year to the day later I would be his minister.

I admit that I viewed the return of the former leaders of parliament with a good deal of apprehension and regret—not because I underestimated their talent and know-how but because I feared that their approach would drive the moderate republicans who were moving in our direction into the arms of the Montagnards. Furthermore, I knew them only too well not to believe that once they were back in politics, they would want to lead and would be unwilling to save the country unless they were in charge. But such ambition seemed to me premature and dangerous. Our role, and theirs, was to help the reasonable republicans govern without seeking to do so indirectly ourselves and above all without seeming to want to.

Personally, I had no doubt that we were on the eve of a terrible struggle. I did not fully understand the dangers, however, until I conversed around that time with the celebrated Mme Sand. I saw her at the home of an English friend of mine, a member of Parliament named Milnes, who was in Paris at the time. Milnes was a bright fellow who did and, what is rarer, said many foolish things. How many people have I known with two dissimilar profiles, one utterly unlike the other—a wit on the one hand and a fool on the other. Milnes was always infatuated with someone or something. At the time he was dazzled by Mme Sand, and despite the gravity of events, he was eager to give a literary luncheon in her honor. I attended that luncheon shortly before the June Days, the recollection of which has not erased but rather revived my memories of the occasion.

The company was far from homogeneous. In addition to Mme Sand, I met a young English lady whose name I have forgotten but whose pleasant and modest demeanor made an impression on me and who must have found the company rather unusual: a few rather obscure writers and Mérimée. Several of the guests did not know one another, while others knew one another only too well. This, if I am not mistaken, was the case with Mme Sand and Mérimée. A short while earlier they had enjoyed a quite tender but also quite ephemeral relationship. Indeed, I am assured that they conducted their romance in accordance with Aristotle’s rules, obedient to the unities of day and place. Unaware of this history, our host from across the Channel inadvertently invited both of them without warning either one. To their surprise, they thus found themselves together for the first time since their adventure. And since Mme Sand greatly begrudged Mérimée both his rapid success and his failure to capitalize on it, there was initially great embarrassment on both sides, but they soon got over it and for the rest of the evening gave no further sign of discomfort.

Milnes sat me next to Mme Sand. I had never spoken to her, nor do I think I had ever even seen her (because I had spent very little time in the world of literary adventurers that she inhabited). Once, a friend of mine had asked her what she thought of my book on America. “Monsieur,” she said, “I am in the habit of reading only books given to me by their authors.” I had a strong prejudice against Mme Sand because I detest women who write, especially those who disguise the weaknesses of their sex behind a theory rather than drawing our attention to what they are truly like. Despite that, I liked her. I found her features rather massive but her expression admirable. Her entire spirit seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, abandoning the rest of her face to mere matter. What most impressed me was the discovery that she possessed the natural appeal common to all great minds. She exhibited a genuine simplicity of manners and language, mingled perhaps with a slight affectation of simplicity in her dress. I confess that had she been a bit more ornately dressed, she would have looked simpler in my eyes. We spoke for a full hour about public affairs; in those days one could speak of nothing else. In any case, Mme Sand was in a way a political man at that point. What she said about politics made a great impression on me; it was the first time I had spoken directly and familiarly with someone who was willing and able to tell me some of what was going on in our adversaries’ camp. Parties never know one another: they come together, they feel one another out, they come to grips, but neither sees the other. Mme Sand painted a singularly vivid and detailed portrait of the state of the Paris workers, their organization, their number, their arms, their preparations, their thoughts, their passions, and their terrifying determination. I thought it was a caricature, but it was not, as ensuing events made clear. She herself seemed afraid of the people’s triumph and in rather solemn terms expressed pity concerning the fate that awaited us. “Try, Monsieur, to persuade your friends not to drive the people into the street by provoking or offending them, just as I hope to persuade my allies that patience is a virtue. Because if fighting breaks out, believe me, you will all die.” With those consoling words, we parted, and I have not seen her since.

CHAPTER 9

June Days

(Sorrento.)

I come at last to the June insurrection, the greatest and strangest uprising in French history and perhaps in all history. Greatest because for four days more than one hundred thousand men were involved in the fighting, and five generals died. Strangest because the insurgents fought without battle cries, without leaders, without flags, yet with marvelous coordination and a military expertise that surprised even the most experienced officers.

What also sets the June insurrection apart from all similar events of the past sixty years is that its goal was not to change the form of government but to alter the order of society. In truth, it was not a political struggle (in the usual sense of the word) but a class combat, a sort of slave rebellion. The June insurrection gave as much meaning to the events of the February revolution as the socialist theories that had inspired its ideas. Or, rather, it stemmed directly from those ideas, as the son from the mother, and one should see the event as a sudden blind but powerful effort on the part of the workers to escape from the necessities of their condition, which had been described to them as one of illegitimate oppression, and with the aid of the sword to cut a path to that imaginary well-being that had been dangled in front of them as their ultimate right. It was this mix of greedy desires and misguided theories that first gave rise to the insurrection and then made it so formidable. These poor people had been assured that the property of the wealthy had somehow been stolen from them. They had been assured that the inequality of wealth was not only incompatible with morality and society but also contrary to nature. Prompted by need and passion, many believed this. This obscure and mistaken conception of justice, combined with brute force, infused the insurrection with an energy, a tenacity, and a power it could never have achieved on its own.

It should once again be noted that this terrible insurrection was not the work of a small number of conspirators but the uprising of one entire segment of the population against another. Women played as great a role as men. While the men fought, the women prepared and carried munitions, and when surrender became inevitable, the women were the last to give in.

The passions these women carried into combat were those of housewives. They counted on victory to make their husbands richer and allow them to raise their children. They loved this war as they might have loved a lottery.

The strategic acumen of the multitude can be explained by the warlike nature of the French, long experience of insurrections, and above all the military training that most lower-class men receive. Half the workers in Paris have served in the military and show no reluctance to take up arms. Veterans are always well represented in riots. On February 24 Lamoricière was twice surrounded by enemies and owed his life to insurgents who had fought under him in Africa, for whom memory of the camps overcame the furious passions aroused by civil war.

As everyone knows, the closing of the National Workshops was what instigated the uprising.

It would have been risky to disperse this formidable militia at one stroke, so a decision was made to dispatch a few workers at a time to the provinces. But they refused to go. On June 22 large gangs of them roamed around Paris, chanting in monotone, “We won’t go! We won’t go!” Delegations were dispatched to present the workers’ imperious demands to the executive committee, and when those demands were rejected, it was announced that the workers would take up arms the following day. All signs indicated that the long-awaited crisis had finally arrived.

As one might expect, the news plunged the Assembly into a state of deep anxiety. The day’s agenda remained unaltered, however. The deputies continued to debate a trade law and, what is more, listened to the discussion despite the emotion. To be sure, the issue was quite important and the speaker quite eminent. The government had proposed to purchase all the railroads. Montalembert was against it. His case was good, but his speech was excellent. I do not think I ever heard him speak so well either before or since. To be sure, I was on his side this time, but even his adversaries agreed that he outdid himself. He attacked vigorously but without his usual snarls and insults. A certain fear tempered his natural insolence and set limits to his taste for paradox and his belligerent personality. Like so many other brilliant talkers, he exhibited far more temerity of language than boldness of heart.

The session ended without any discussion of what was going on outside, and the deputies dispersed.

On the twenty-third, as I was making my way earlier than usual to the Assembly, I saw a large number of omnibuses around the Madeleine. From this I gathered that barricades had begun to be erected in the streets. This was confirmed when I arrived at the palace. There was still doubt, however, that a serious armed uprising was under way. I decided to see for myself, and Corcelle and I set out on foot for the Hôtel de Ville. In the narrow streets thereabouts I saw people assiduously building barricades. They went about their work with the skill and method of engineers, prying up only those paving stones needed to build a thick, very solid, and quite tidy wall, usually taking care to leave a small opening adjacent to the building walls for people to circulate. Eager to gather information about the state of the city as quickly as possible, Corcelle and I agreed to separate. He went one way and I another. His excursion nearly ended badly. He told me afterward that after making his way past several half-built barricades without difficulty, he was eventually stopped at one when the people who were building it noticed the fine gentleman in a black suit and very white linen gingerly making his way through the filthy streets around the Hôtel de Ville. When this suspicious observer, with his placid, curious air, stopped to watch them, they decided to put him to work. In the name of fraternity they asked for help with their labors. Corcelle was as brave as Caesar, but he rightly judged that under the circumstances it would be best to accede quietly to this request. Soon he found himself lifting paving stones into place, one atop the other, as best as he could. Fortunately, his natural clumsiness and carelessness served him well, and the insurrectionists soon sent the useless laborer on his way.

No such adventure befell me. I explored the streets of the Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis neighborhoods without encountering any barricades to speak of, though the commotion was extraordinary. On the way back, on the rue des Jeûneurs, I saw a national guardsman covered with blood and bits of brain. He was very pale and on his way home. I asked him what was going on, and he told me that his battalion had just come under heavy fire, at point-blank range, near the porte Saint-Denis. One of his comrades, whose name he mentioned, had been killed alongside him: this was the source of the blood and debris with which he was covered.

I headed back toward the Assembly, surprised that I had not seen a single soldier along my entire route. Not until I reached the Palais-Bourbon did I finally see substantial columns of infantry on the march, followed by artillery. Lamoricière, mounted and in full uniform, rode at the head. Never had I seen a more resplendent image of martial passion and, I am tempted to say, joy. It was not just his natural impetuousness that drove him that day but also his ardor to avenge himself for the dangers and insults he had been made to endure in February.

“What will you do?” I asked. “There has already been fighting at the porte Saint-Denis, and barricades are going up all around the Hôtel de Ville.”

“Patience,” he replied. “We’re on our way there. Do you think we’d be foolish enough on a day like today to disperse the troops among the narrow streets in the faubourgs? No! Certainly not. We will allow the insurgents to concentrate their forces in the districts we cannot control, and then we will go and destroy them. They will not escape this time.”

As I made my way to the Assembly a terrible storm drenched the city. I had a slight hope that the bad weather would save the day. Indeed, the weather would have been enough to put an end to an ordinary riot, because the people of Paris would rather fight in good weather and are more afraid of rain than of grapeshot.

I soon gave up that hope. The news grew more worrisome by the minute. The Assembly, which had hoped to resume its regular business, had difficulty keeping abreast of developments. Disturbed but not yet defeated by the commotion in the streets, it first suspended the agenda, then reinstated it, then suspended it again before finally abandoning it to concentrate exclusively on the civil war. Several deputies went to the podium to recount what they had seen in Paris. Others suggested possible courses of action. Falloux, speaking for the public assistance committee, proposed a decree to dissolve the National Workshops and was applauded. Time was wasted in useless conversations and speeches. Precise information was lacking. There were repeated calls for the executive committee to report on the state of Paris, to no avail. There is nothing more pathetic than a legislative body in a moment of crisis with no government in sight. It is like a cripple, still full of passions and desires but condemned to thrash about like an infant, incapable of doing anything to satisfy its needs. At last two members of the executive committee appeared. They announced that although the situation was perilous, they hoped to snuff out the insurrection before nightfall. The Assembly declared itself in permanent session and adjourned until the evening.

When the session resumed, we learned that Lamartine had been met with rifle fire at every barricade he had attempted to approach. Two of our colleagues, Bixio and Dornès, had been fatally wounded while trying to speak to the insurgents. Bedeau had been shot in the thigh at the entrance to the faubourg Saint-Jacques. Many noted officers had already been killed or incapacitated. One deputy, Considerant, proposed a concession to the workers. At these words the Assembly, which was agitated and upset but not weak-willed, erupted in anger: shouts of “Order!” could be heard from all corners of the Chamber. “Such talk is not admissible until victory is ours!” The rest of the evening and part of the night were spent in vague talk, listening and waiting. Toward midnight Cavaignac appeared. The executive committee had placed all military power in his hands that afternoon. In short, sharp phrases, using simple, precise language, he recounted the principal events of the day, announced that he had ordered all the regiments stationed along the railway lines to march on Paris, and said that all nearby National Guard units had been placed on alert. He concluded by saying that the insurgents had been pushed back to the barriers and that he hoped to be in control of the city soon. The tired, exhausted deputies left a small committee on duty and adjourned until the next morning at eight o’clock.

On leaving the tumultuous Chamber, I found myself at one in the morning on the Pont Royal. From there I looked out at Paris, enveloped in darkness and sleeping calmly, and found it difficult to persuade myself that everything I had seen and heard since that morning had really taken place and was not a pure figment of my imagination. The streets and squares were absolutely deserted—not a sound, not a cry. One might have thought that a hardworking people, tired from the day’s toil, had gone to bed and would resume its tranquil labors on the morrow. The serenity of the night eventually took possession of me. I managed to persuade myself that we had already won, and on returning home I quickly fell asleep.

I woke up rather late. The sun had already been above the horizon for several hours, because these were the longest days of the year. On opening my eyes I heard a sharp metallic sound that shook our windows and was then quickly swallowed by the city’s silence. “What was that?” I asked. My wife replied: “Cannon fire. I’ve been listening to it for nearly an hour. I didn’t think I should wake you, because you’re no doubt going to need all your strength today.” I dressed quickly and left. All around, drums were beating the call to arms. The day of the great battle had truly arrived.

National guardsmen streamed from their homes, weapons in hand. The ones I saw seemed full of energy, for the cannon fire that brought the brave ones into the streets kept the others indoors. But they were in despair. They believed they had been either misled or betrayed by the executive committee, which they roundly cursed. For the armed forces to be so extremely distrustful of their leaders struck me as a most worrisome symptom. Continuing on my way, I met at the top of the rue Saint-Honoré a crowd of workers anxiously listening to the cannon fire. They wore blouses, which of course serve them as battle uniforms as well as regular working attire. Although they had no weapons, one could see in their eyes that they were quite ready to take up arms. With barely contained joy they observed that the cannon fire seemed to be drawing closer, which meant that the insurrection was gaining ground. By this point I divined that the entire working class was engaged in the fight, some with their hands, others with their hearts. There was plenty of evidence to confirm it. The spirit of insurrection had indeed gotten into every part of the working class, as blood circulates throughout the body. It was present in neighborhoods where there was no fighting as well as in those where there was. It had penetrated into our homes, enveloping us on all sides as well as above and below. Even where we thought of ourselves as masters, domestic enemies multiplied. An atmosphere of civil war had engulfed the city, and no matter where one went, there it was. At this point I am going to break my self-imposed rule not to report the testimony of others in order to relate a story I heard a few days later from my colleague Blanqui. Although quite inconsequential in itself, it wonderfully reveals the spirit of the time. Blanqui had hired the son of an impoverished provincial to serve as a domestic in his home. On the eve of the insurrection, a Thursday, as the boy served the family dinner, Blanqui heard him say, “On Sunday we’re the ones who’ll be eating chicken wings.” Whereupon a girl who also worked in the house chimed in, “And we’ll be wearing the fine silk gowns.” What better illustration of the popular state of mind than this childish portrait of naive greed? To top it off, I will add that Blanqui was careful not to let on that he had overheard these youngsters: they frightened him. It was not until after the victory that he dared send the uppity young man and the presumptuous young woman back to the hovels from which he had plucked them.

At last I reached the Assembly. Deputies were pouring in even though it was well before the time set for the session. The sound of cannon fire had brought them together.

The palace looked like a battleground. Troops were camped all around, and artillery was aimed at all the avenues leading in to the spot.

I found the deputies very determined but very worried, and I must confess that there was good reason to be. Despite the contradictory reports, it was easy to see that we were dealing with the most widespread, best-armed, angriest insurrection ever seen in Paris. From the National Workshops, as well as from a number of rebel gangs made up of men recently dismissed from those same shops, came disciplined, battle-hardened soldiers and leaders. The insurrection was growing by the minute, and it was hard to believe that it would not triumph in the end, as all the great insurrections of the previous sixty years had triumphed.

Against all these enemies we could muster only the battalions of the bourgeoisie, some regiments that had been disarmed in February, and twenty thousand undisciplined young men of the Mobile Guard, all of whom were sons, brothers, or relatives of insurgents and whose loyalties remained in doubt.

It was our own leaders who frightened us most, however. We deeply distrusted the members of the executive committee. In this respect, I found that the Assembly shared the sentiments I had just witnessed among members of the National Guard. We doubted the loyalty of some and the ability of all. They were also too numerous and too divided to act in full accord and too much men of the pen and the podium to act effectively even when they agreed.

Yet we triumphed over this quite formidable insurrection. What made it so terrifying, moreover, was precisely what saved us. Never has this famous sentence been more relevant: “We would have died had we not come so close to death.”²⁷ Had the revolt been less radical in character and less ferocious in appearance, most of the bourgeois would likely have remained in their homes. France would not have rushed to our aid. The National Assembly itself might have surrendered. At the very least, a minority of its members would have advised it to do so, and this would have seriously sapped the body’s energy. The nature of the insurrection was such, however, that any negotiation with it seemed utterly out of the question. From the beginning there was no choice but to vanquish or die.

For the same reason, no prominent person was willing to assume the leadership role. Insurrections—those that succeed—usually begin without a leader but always end with one. This one ended without finding a leader. All the lower classes joined in, but the movement never extended beyond them. Not even the Assembly’s Montagnards dared to speak in its favor, and several spoke against it. They had not yet given up hope of achieving their goal by other means. In addition, they feared that a victory for the workers would soon prove fatal to themselves. The blind, greedy, vulgar passions that caused the people to take up arms frightened them. Indeed, those passions were almost as fearsome to those who sympathized with but did not entirely surrender to them as they were to those who rejected and combated them.

The only men who might have led the June insurgents had foolishly allowed themselves to be prematurely captured on May 15 and were forced to listen to the sounds of combat through the walls of their prison at Vincennes.

Though preoccupied with public affairs, I was again tormented by worry about my young nephews. They had been sent back to the children’s seminary, and I reckoned that the insurrection would come quite close to where they were living, if it was not already there. Since their parents were not in Paris, I decided to go look for them. I again set out to make the long trek from the Palais-Bourbon to the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Along the way I encountered several barricades that had been erected during the night by advanced rebel scouts scattered from the ranks of insurgents, but they had been abandoned or retaken after daybreak.

A diabolical music resounded through these neighborhoods, a mixture of drums and trumpets—cacophonous, discordant, wild sounds I had never heard before and have never heard since. It was the general call to arms, heard only in situations of extreme danger, to call all available troops to their stations.

Everywhere national guardsmen emerged from their homes, while workers in blouses scowled as they listened to the general call and the sound of the cannon.

The fighting had not yet reached the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, although it was very close. I took my nephews with me and returned to the Chamber.

As I drew near the Assembly and found myself among the troops guarding it, an old woman pushing a vegetable cart stubbornly blocked the way. I finally asked her rather rudely to move. Instead of doing so, she left her cart and attacked me so savagely that I had difficulty protecting myself. Her hideous, terrifying expression horrified me because it so clearly revealed the furor inspired by demagogic passions and the rage unleashed by civil war. I mention this minor incident because I saw it at the time, reasonably I think, as a telling symptom. In times of violent crisis, even actions that have nothing to do with politics take on aspects of the ambient chaos and anger; the attentive eye cannot miss these, and they are reliable indicators of the general state of mind. Great public uprisings create an overheated atmosphere that causes specific passions to flare up or boil over.

I found the Assembly in an uproar over a thousand sinister rumors. The insurrection was gaining ground everywhere. Its focal point—the heart of the uprising, as it were—was behind the Hôtel de Ville. From there it extended its increasingly long arms right and left into the Paris faubourgs and threatened soon to ensnare us in its grip as well. The cannon drew noticeably closer. Accurate news reports were joined by a thousand false rumors. Some said our troops were running out of ammunition, others that some of our forces had laid down their weapons or gone over to the insurgents.

M. Thiers asked Barrrot, Dufaure, Rémusat, Lanjuinais, and me to go with him to a private office. There he said: “I know something about insurrections. Believe me, this is the most terrifying we have yet seen. In one hour the insurgents may be here, and we will all be killed one at a time. Don’t you think it would be a good idea for us to agree to propose to the Assembly, whenever we think it necessary to do so, and before it is too late, to recall the troops so as to protect us and allow us to leave Paris together and move the seat of the Republic to a place where we might call the army and all the national guardsmen of France to our aid?” He said this in a very animated way and with more emotion, perhaps, than ought to be shown in an hour of great danger. I saw that he was haunted by the ghost of February. Dufaure, who had a less lively imagination and who in any case was unwilling to make common cause with people he disliked even to save himself, made a derisive face and phlegmatically replied that it was premature to discuss such a plan, that we could talk about it later, and that our situation did not strike him as so desperate that we needed to consider such an extreme measure, the mere contemplation of which would weaken us. He was certainly correct, and his comment ended the meeting. I immediately dispatched a few lines to my wife to let her know that the danger was mounting by the minute and that all of Paris might fall into the hands of the rebels, in which case we would be obliged to leave in order to continue the civil war from another location. I urged her to leave at once for Saint-Germain by rail while it was still possible and to wait there for further word from me. I asked my nephews to deliver the letter and returned to the Assembly.

The business at hand was to vote on a decree that would place Paris in a state of siege, end the powers of the committee, and replace it with a military dictatorship under General Cavaignac.

The Assembly knew that this was precisely what it wanted. It was an easy thing to do, it was urgent, and yet it did not get done. The general will was repeatedly diverted from its destination by petty interruptions and trivial motions. Assemblies are quite prone to a specific variety of nightmare in which a strange, invisible force invariably comes between the thought and the action, at the last moment preventing the former from realizing itself in the latter. Who could have imagined that it would be Bastide who would finally make up the Assembly’s mind? Yet it was.

Jules Bastide, by Honoré Daumier, 1849

I have heard him talking to himself, quite rightly reminding himself that when it came to speaking, he was lost after pronouncing the first fifteen words of any speech. But as I had seen on other occasions, when the circumstances are right the artless speaker can sometimes have a greater effect than the finest orator. The artless man comes to the podium with but a single idea—the idea of the moment; he encapsulates it in a single sentence and emblazons it on the podium as though it were an inscription writ in large letters, which everyone can see and immediately recognize as his own. With his long, honest, doleful countenance Bastide faced us and said with a pained air: “Citizens, in the name of the fatherland, I beg you to vote at once. We are told that the Hôtel de Ville may be taken within the hour.”

These few words put an end to the debate. The decree was passed in the blink of an eye.

I objected to the clause that placed Paris in a state of siege. This was more an instinctive reaction than a mature consideration. I am by nature so contemptuous of and horrified by military tyranny that when I heard talk of a state of siege, those sentiments welled up in me and dominated my anxiety regarding the present danger. I therefore committed an error of judgment, which fortunately found few imitators.

Supporters of the executive committee bitterly insisted that its adversaries, the supporters of General Cavaignac, had deliberately spread dark rumors to hasten the vote. If Cavaignac’s supporters really did resort to such deceptive tactics, I am happy to forgive them, for the steps taken as a result proved indispensable to saving the country.

Before adopting the decree I mentioned, the Assembly had passed another by acclamation, stating that the families of those who fell in battle would receive state pensions and their children would be adopted by the Republic.

It was decided that sixty members of the Chamber, chosen by the committees, would fan out across Paris, inform the national guardsmen of the various decrees just issued by the Assembly, and try to restore their confidence, for they were said to be flagging and discouraged.

Instead of immediately naming commissioners, my committee became bogged down in an endless discussion of the resolution just passed by the Assembly, which some attacked as futile or dangerous. This wasted a great deal of time. With one brief statement I finally put an end to this ridiculous blather: “Gentlemen, the Assembly may be wrong, but let me remind you that the resolution was adopted publicly, and therefore it would be disgraceful for the Assembly to retreat and disgraceful for us not to abide by its decision.”

We proceeded at once to a vote. As I expected, I was unanimously elected a commissioner. Cormenin and Crémieux were chosen to be my colleagues, and Goudchaux was added as well. The latter was not as well known at the time, although in his way he was the most distinctive of the three. He was both a radical and a banker—a rare combination—and thanks to his intimate familiarity with business had managed to put a veneer of reasonable ideas over the crazy theories that filled his mind, although in the end those ideas always bubbled to the surface. With his plump cheeks, thick red lips, and the short chubby body of a cook in a respectable household, nothing about his appearance revealed that he was a Jew, though he was one on both his father’s side and his mother’s. To have found a man more vain, irascible, querulous, petulant, and emotional would have been impossible. He could not discuss the problems of the budget without shedding a tear, yet no little man was ever more valiant.

Because our committee had wasted so much time in useless debate, the other delegations had already left with the guides and escorts who were to have accompanied us. After putting on our sashes, we set out anyway and proceeded alone and somewhat haphazardly toward inner Paris, advancing along the right bank of the Seine. The insurrection had progressed to the point where we saw batteries of artillery in action between the Pont des Arts and the Pont-Neuf. The national guardsmen who watched us anxiously from the top of the embankment doffed their hats as a sign of respect and plaintively called out, “Vive l’Assemblée nationale!” No king was ever more heartily acclaimed: their cry was clearly heartfelt and a token of unfeigned sympathy. We passed through the checkpoints and had reached the Carrousel when I noticed that Cormenin and Crémieux were drifting off to the right, toward the Tuileries. I heard one of them, I no longer remember which, saying, “Where can we go? What can we usefully accomplish without guides? Wouldn’t it be best just to remain inside the Tuileries gardens? Several reserve battalions are stationed there. We can announce the Assembly’s decrees to them.”

“Certainly,” the other replied. “Indeed, that way I think we’ll be carrying out the Assembly’s instructions more faithfully than our colleagues, because what can you say to men already engaged in action? It’s the reserves who need to be prepared to take their turn on the front lines.”

I have always found it quite interesting to observe involuntary manifestations of fear in intelligent men. Stupid people display their fear crudely, in all its nakedness, but others know how to cover it up with a veil so fine and delicately woven of such tiny, plausible deceptions that there is a kind of pleasure in contemplating the ingenious work of the intellect.

A stroll in the Tuileries was not for me. I had set out in a rather nasty frame of mind. The wine having been poured, as the saying goes, I thought it had to be drunk. I therefore turned to Goudchaux and pointed out to him the direction our colleagues had taken. “I see them,” he answered in a rage. “So I’m going to leave them and proclaim the Assembly’s decrees without them.” Together, we headed for the next checkpoint. Cormenin and Crémieux soon caught up with us, a little ashamed of their detour. We came next to the rue Saint-Honoré, the sight of which made perhaps a deeper impression on me than anything else I saw during the June Days. The street, normally so noisy and full of people, was at that moment more deserted than I had ever seen it, even at four in the morning on a winter day. As far as the eye could see, not a living soul was in evidence. Shops, doors, and windows were hermetically sealed. Nothing presented itself to the eye, and nothing stirred. Nor could anything be heard—not the clatter of a wheel, the beat of a hoof, or a man’s footstep. In an abandoned city the only audible sound was that of the cannon. Yet the houses were not empty: as we advanced, we could see through the windows terrified women and children, their faces pressed to the panes, peering out at us.

Near the Palais-Royal we came at last upon a big National Guard post, and our mission began. When Crémieux realized that all he had to do was talk, he caught fire. He apprised the soldiers of what had just taken place in the National Assembly and ended with a bravura flourish that drew considerable applause. We assembled an escort and continued on our way. For quite some time we wandered the tiny streets in the vicinity until we came to the large barricade at the rue Rambuteau, which, not yet having been taken, blocked our way. From there we returned via [illegible]. In every one of these small streets we saw blood from the recent fighting, and occasional clashes could still erupt at any moment, because it was a war of ambushes with no fixed theater of operations, and the fighting was constantly doubling back on itself. Fire might come from a garret window when you least expected it, and if you went into the house after being fired on, you might find the rifle but not the sniper, who had fled through the back door while you were breaking down the front. Therefore the national guardsmen had orders to open all shutters and shoot anyone who appeared, an order they took so literally that they nearly killed several curious onlookers who stuck their noses out because they had caught a glimpse of our sashes. In the course of our rounds, which lasted two or three hours, we made at least thirty speeches. When I say “we,” I mean Crémieux and myself, because Goudchaux was not capable of speaking about anything other than finance, while Cormenin has of course always been as mute as a fish. To tell the truth, almost the entire burden of the day fell on Crémieux. He filled me, I won’t say with admiration, but with wonder. Janvier said of Crémieux that he was an “eloquent louse.” If only he had seen him that day, wrapped in a long sash that wound around his short frame in several directions, tired, rumpled, his face covered with a mask of dust glued to his skin by sticky sweat, puffing and shouting but always coming up with new clichés, or rather new turns of phrase, to say what he had already said before, sometimes repeating with gestures what he had just said in words, sometimes in words what he had just said with gestures, always eloquent, always warm, always applauded. I don’t think anyone has ever met, and I doubt that anyone has ever imagined, an uglier or more loquacious man.

I noticed that when we told the national guardsmen that Paris had been placed under a state of siege, they were pleased, and when we told them that the executive committee had been overthrown, they let out cries of joy. No people has ever been so at ease with being deprived of its freedom and its government. It had taken less than two months for Lamartine’s popularity to decline to this point.

Whenever we finished speaking, the troops would surround us. They would ask if we were quite sure that the executive committee was no longer in operation. We had to show them the decree to satisfy them.

What I noticed most of all was the staunch determination these men showed. We had come to encourage them, and it was rather they who encouraged us. “Stand firm at the National Assembly,” they cried, “and we will stand firm here. Courage! No negotiations with the insurgents! We will put down this riot. It will all end well.” We had never seen the National Guard so steadfast before, and I think it would have been a mistake to expect it to be that way again, because its courage was born of necessity and desperation; it stemmed from circumstances that are unlikely to occur a second time.

Paris that day resembled one of those cities of antiquity heroically defended by their citizens because they knew that if the city fell, they themselves would be dragged into slavery.

On our way back to the Assembly, Goudchaux left us. “Now that we have accomplished our mission,” he said, clenching his teeth and speaking with a half-Alsatian, half-Gascon accent, “Now I vant to go fffight a little.” He said this in such martial tones, so at odds with his peaceful appearance, that I could not prevent myself from smiling.

He did indeed go fight, from what I’ve heard, and so well that his modest paunch might have been pierced in two or three places if fate had so decided. I returned from my mission confident that we would win. What I saw as I approached the Assembly convinced me of it.

Via all routes not controlled by the insurgents thousands of men from all over France rushed to our aid. Thanks to the railroads, reinforcements were already arriving from fifty leagues around, even though the fight had only begun the night before. On the next day and the days that followed, people arrived from a hundred or two hundred leagues away. These men came from all classes of society. Among them were many peasants, many bourgeois, and many large landowners and nobles, all mixed together indiscriminately in the ranks. They were haphazardly and inadequately armed, but on arriving in Paris with their matchless ardor, they presented a spectacle as strange and unprecedented in our revolutionary annals as the insurrection itself. By this point it had become obvious that we would ultimately win, because the insurgents could not count on fresh troops, while we could draw reserves from all over France.

On the place Louis XV, surrounded by armed residents of his canton, I ran into my relative Le Peletier d’Aunay, who had been vice president of the Chamber of Deputies during the final years of the monarchy. He neither wore a uniform nor carried a musket and was armed only with a small ceremonial épée with a silver handle, which hung at his side over his coat, suspended from a white cloth bandolier.

I was moved to tears at the sight of this respectable, white-haired gentleman with his martial accouterments. “Won’t you come to dinner this evening at my home?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “What would the brave men with me say, knowing that I have far more to lose than they do if the insurrection triumphs, if I were to leave them here to take my pleasure with you? So no, thank you. I will share their meal and sleep in their bivouac. The only thing I ask is that you do what you can to speed delivery of the bread ration we were promised, because we have had no food since this morning.”

I returned to the Assembly at about three o’clock, I think, and did not go out again.

The rest of the day was taken up with accounts of the fighting. New things were happening, and fresh reports were arriving every moment. The arrival of volunteers from a certain département was announced. Prisoners were brought in. Flags taken from the barricades were displayed. Acts of bravery and heroic declarations were discussed. There were constant reports that this or that prominent person had been killed or wounded. Ultimate victory still hung in the balance.

The president convened the Assembly only for brief sessions, with long intervals in between, and he was right to do so, because assemblies are like children: idleness seldom fails to make them do or say many foolish things. Each time we reconvened, he personally informed us of everything that had been learned for certain while we were adjourned. The president in this case was of course Sénard, a celebrated Rouen attorney, a courageous man but one who became so accustomed at an early age to the playacting that is the daily fare in our courtrooms that he had lost the ability to express his true feelings, if by chance he had any. In recounting acts of courage he invariably added some bombast of his own, and he described what I believe were his true emotions in sepulchral tones, with a quavering voice and a tragic hiccup that made him seem like an actor. Never have the ridiculous and the sublime been so intimately combined, the sublime in the deeds being narrated and the ridiculous in the narrator.

It was quite late at night by the time we disbanded to get some rest. The fighting had ended but was due to start up again the next day. The insurrection was everywhere contained but nowhere quelled.

CHAPTER 10

More on the June Days

The porter of the house we were living in on the rue de la Madeleine had a very bad reputation in the neighborhood. An old soldier, he was a slightly daft, good-for-nothing drunkard who spent all his time in the tavern when he wasn’t beating his wife. One might say that he was a born socialist, or rather a socialist by temperament. The initial successes of the insurrection had intoxicated him. On the morning of the day in question, he made the rounds of the neighborhood taverns and among other nasty things said he would kill me when I returned home that evening, if I ever did. He even displayed the long knife he intended to use. A poor woman who overheard his threats hastened in great distress to warn Mme de Tocqueville. Before leaving Paris, my wife sent me a note recounting the story and begging me not to return home that evening but to sleep instead at the nearby home of my father, who was away. Although I promised myself that I would do as she advised, when I left the Assembly at midnight I found that I was in no mood to keep my word. I was exhausted and had no idea whether I would find a bed prepared for me anywhere but in my own home. In any case, I did not believe in advertised murders, and I was in that exalted state of mind that often follows periods of prolonged emotion. I therefore went up to my own door and knocked, having taken the precaution of cocking the pistols I had taken to carrying in those unhappy times. None other than the suspect porter himself responded to my knock, and as he carefully slid the bolts back into place behind me, I asked him whether all the other tenants had returned home. He answered laconically that they had all left Paris that morning and only the two of us remained in the house. I would have preferred a different person for sole companion, but there was no turning back. I therefore looked him straight in the eye and ordered him to walk ahead of me and light the way. At one of the doors in the courtyard he stopped and said he had heard a suspicious sound coming from one of the sheds. He asked if I would help him investigate the source and then started down the path to the shed in question. It was all beginning to look very suspicious to me, but having come this far, I thought it best to continue. I therefore followed him but kept a close eye on his every move, having made up my mind to put him down like a dog at the first sign of mischief. And we did hear the very strange noise he had mentioned. It was like the muffled sound of running water or a distant carriage, though its source was clearly quite nearby. I never did find out the cause, though to be sure I did not search for very long, because I soon went indoors, having asked my companion to accompany me up to my landing. Still keeping an eye on him, I had him open my door, and no sooner had he done so than I took the lamp from his hands and went inside. Not until I was about to vanish from his sight did he deign to remove his hat and salute me. Would he really have killed me had he not seen me on my guard with hands in both pockets, suggesting that I was well armed and that he would be better advised to give up his plan? At the time I thought his threat had not been serious, and I still believe that. In revolutionary times people boast almost as much about the crimes they would like to commit as they do in ordinary times about the good intentions they wish they had. My view is that this miserable fellow would have become dangerous only if the fortunes of war had turned against us. Instead, fortune seemed to smile on us, although at that point the outcome was still uncertain, and that was enough to save me.

At sunrise I heard someone enter my apartment. I awoke instantly, but it turned out to be my servant, who had used his own key to enter. A fine fellow, he had come straight from his bivouac (at his request, I had equipped him with a National Guard uniform and a good rifle) to see if I was at home and in need of his services. He was definitely no socialist by either theory or temperament. Nor was he afflicted in the slightest by the restlessness of spirit that was the common malady of the age. Indeed, it would have been difficult in any age to find a man more content with his position or less troubled by his lot in life. Always very pleased with himself and reasonably pleased with others, he coveted no more than was within his grasp and obtained, or believed he obtained, nearly everything he desired, thereby unwittingly following the precepts that philosophers teach but do not live by: his nature enabled him to enjoy that happy equilibrium between abilities and desires that alone yields the happiness that philosophy promises.

“Well now, Eugène,” I said when he came in that morning, “how are things going?”

“Very well, sir. Quite well indeed!”

“What do you mean, ‘Very well’? I can still hear the sound of cannon.”

“Yes,” he replied, “the fighting continues, but everyone says it will end well.”

With that he removed his uniform, cleaned my boots, brushed my clothing, and put his uniform back on. “If Monsieur has no further need of me and will allow me, I would like to return to the battle now.”

For four days and four nights he pursued this double calling as simply as I have set it down here. Whenever I witnessed this young man’s quiet satisfaction, I felt a sort of calm come over me, quieting the agitation of those days of savage hatred.

Before going to the Assembly, where I did not think any important decisions would be made, I decided to make my way toward places where the fighting continued and I could still hear cannon fire. Not that I wished to “do a little fighting” as Goudchaux did, but I did want to see for myself how things stood. In my utter ignorance of warfare I had difficulty understanding how the battle could continue for such a long time. In any event, indomitable curiosity sometimes got the better of all the other emotions swirling in my head.

I walked a good distance along the boulevards without encountering any signs of battle, but after the porte Saint-Denis there were plenty. The ground was littered with debris left by the retreating insurrectionaries: broken windows, smashed doors, walls pockmarked by bullets or pierced by cannonballs, trees knocked down, and piles of paving stones behind which the ground was strewn with bloodstained straw—such were the depressing vestiges of combat.

I reached the Château-d’Eau, where a large number of troops from a variety of units were assembled. At the base of the fountain a cannon was firing down the rue Samson. At first I thought the insurgents were responding with artillery of their own, but eventually I realized I had been deceived by an echo of the terrible sound of our own gun. I had never heard anything like it. You might easily have thought you were in the midst of a huge battle. In reality, the insurgents answered with nothing more than sporadic though lethal musket fire. It was a strange battle. The rue Samson is of course not a very long street. The canal Saint-Martin lies at the far end, and beyond the canal a large building faced the utterly deserted street. No barricade was in sight, and the cannon seemed to be firing at the building. At long intervals a puff of smoke would emerge from one of the windows facing the street, indicating the presence of an invisible enemy. Our sharpshooters, stationed along the walls, aimed at windows from which shots had been fired. Behind the fountain, Lamoricière, sitting on a large horse exposed to enemy fire, gave orders as bullets whizzed past. I found him more animated and talkative than I imagined a general ought to be in such circumstances. He talked, shouted hoarsely, and gesticulated wildly. The clarity of his thought and words made it clear that he had not lost his composure despite the apparent chaos. But his manner of command might have caused others to lose theirs, and I admit that I would have admired his courage more had he remained calmer.

This battle seemed quite strange to me, because the enemy was invisible and we seemed to be firing at walls. It was nothing like what I had imagined war would be. The boulevard beyond the Château-d’Eau seemed free for the taking, so I couldn’t understand why our troops did not move in that direction or why, if we were intent on first taking the big building facing the street, we did not simply seize it and move on rather than remain exposed to lethal fire from the windows. Yet the answer was simple. The boulevard beyond the Château-d’Eau wasn’t really free for the taking. Just past a bend in the road it bristled with barricades all the way to the Bastille. Before attacking the barricades, we needed to take control of the streets to our rear and above all seize the building facing the rue Samson, which dominated the boulevard and would have greatly impeded our communications. And finally, the reason we did not simply attack the building directly was that the canal, which I could not see from the boulevard, stood between us and it. Our forces therefore hung back and were trying to destroy the house with cannon fire, or at least make it impossible for the enemy to hold. This took a long time, and my earlier surprise that the battle was taking so long gave way to wondering whether at this rate it would ever end. What I saw with my own eyes at Château-d’Eau was at that moment being repeated at a hundred other places around Paris.

Since the insurgents had no artillery, the war in this instance looked less horrifying than it does when the battlefield is plowed up by cannonballs. The men I saw being hit by bullets seemed to have been pierced by invisible arrows. They staggered and fell, but the only visible sign was a small hole in their clothing. In every case I witnessed, what struck me was not so much the physical pain as the moral anguish. It was strange and frightening indeed to see the sudden change in a man’s face when the flame of life in his eyes was suddenly extinguished by the terror of death.

Eventually I saw Lamoricière’s horse collapse after being hit by a bullet. It was the third horse to die under the general in two days. The man himself jumped gently down and carried on screaming orders to his men.

I noticed that on our side the least motivated troops were the regular infantry. Memories of February had left them weak and almost numb, and they seemed to worry that on the day after the battle they might be punished for having done the wrong thing. The most aggressive soldiers were without a doubt the very mobile guards of whom we had been so suspicious—and rightly so, for it would not have taken much to turn them against us. Once engaged, however, they fought prodigiously. All were children of Paris, specimens of the breed that has supplied our armies with its most undisciplined and rashest soldiers, men prepared to rush headlong into danger. They took to war as though it were a lark. It was easy to see, though, that what they loved was battle itself, far more than the cause for which they were fighting. In any case, all the troops were novices and therefore subject to sudden panic. I witnessed this for myself and nearly fell victim to it. At the corner of the rue Samson, on the side of the Château-d’Eau, stood a large, tall building under construction. Insurgents had somehow taken up positions inside, probably entering through the courtyards to the rear. Suddenly they appeared on top of the building and unleashed heavy fire on the troops occupying the boulevard, who did not expect the enemy to attack from so close or so high up. The sound of their rifles echoed from the buildings across the way, giving the impression that we were being attacked from that side as well. Our soldiers were immediately plunged into total confusion. Artillery, infantry, and cavalry suddenly found themselves jostling one another, as soldiers fired in every direction with no idea what they were shooting at. The whole troop pulled back some sixty yards, raising quite a ruckus in the process. The retreat was so sudden and chaotic that I was thrown against the wall of one of the buildings facing the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, knocked down by the cavalry, and hurled about so roughly that I lost my hat and came close to losing my life. Without a doubt this was the most serious danger I faced during the whole period of fighting. It made me realize that not everything is heroic in the heroic game of combat. I have no doubt that accidents like this often befall even the best of troops, but no one boasts of such things, which are never mentioned in dispatches.

What was sublime at this stage of the battle was Lamoricière. Having kept his épée sheathed to that point, he now drew it out and ran to his soldiers, all his features ablaze with the most splendid fury. He halted his men with shouted commands, grabbed them with his hands, even struck them with the pommel of his sword, turned them around, and led them back into the fray, forcing them to race through the fire from the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple to capture the building from which the shots had come. It was all over before a shot could be fired: the enemy had vanished.

The dreary battle then resumed, dragging on until the insurgent fire was finally quieted and the street occupied. There was a moment’s pause before the troops moved on to the next operation. Lamoricière went inside his headquarters—none other than a tavern on the boulevard near the porte Saint-Martin—and I finally had a chance to ask him how things stood.

“How long do you think all this will last?” I asked.

“What do I know?” he replied. “It depends on the enemy, not on us.”

He then showed me a map of all the streets that had been taken and occupied as well as those that remained. “If the insurgents want to defend what they still have as staunchly as they defended the ground we’ve conquered thus far, we may be in for another week, and our losses will be enormous, because we’re losing more men than they are. In this case, the first side whose morale flags will be the one that loses.”

I then laid into him for exposing himself so rashly and, in my view, needlessly.

“What do you want me to do?” he said. “Tell Cavaignac to send me some generals able and willing to back me up, and I’ll stand back. But when the only person you can count on is yourself, you’ve got to take risks with your own life.”

At that moment M. Thiers arrived and flung himself at Lamoricière, whom he called a hero. I could not keep from smiling as I watched this effusive display, because there was no love lost between the two men. But great danger is like wine: it makes men sentimental.

I left Lamoricière in the arms of M. Thiers and returned to the Assembly. It was late, and I can’t think of anything more foolish than getting yourself killed because you can’t control your curiosity about war.

The rest of the day unfolded in the same way as the previous day: the same anxiety in the Assembly, the same feverish inaction, the same firmness.

Volunteers continued to arrive in Paris in large numbers, and frequent announcements of tragic events and illustrious deaths continued. Each new report plunged the Assembly into sadness but also revived its spirit and stiffened its resolve. Any deputy who hesitantly proposed a compromise of any kind with the insurgents was angrily shouted down. As evening approached I decided to go to the Hôtel de Ville to obtain more reliable information about the day’s events. At first it had been the violence of the insurrection that worried me, but now it was the duration. Who could predict the effect of such prolonged uncertain combat, and of the fate of Paris hanging so long in the balance, on other parts of France, especially large working-class cities such as Lyon? As I was crossing the quai de la Ferraille, I ran into national guardsmen from my neighborhood carrying several wounded comrades and two of their officers on stretchers. In chatting with them I noticed how awfully quickly—even in a century as civilized as ours—the most peaceful spirits will jump on the civil-war bandwagon and how rapidly under such unfortunate circumstances the taste for violence and contempt for human life can spread. The men with whom I was conversing were steady, tranquil craftsmen whose gentle habits may even have made them a little soft; in their normal lives they were even farther removed from cruelty than they were from heroism, yet now they dreamt of nothing but destruction and killing. They complained that no use had yet been made of bombs, tunnels, or mines to attack streets held by the insurgents, and they insisted that no quarter be given to any prisoner. I did what I could to calm these enraged lambs, assuring them that stronger measures would be taken the next day. Lamoricière had in fact told me that morning that he had ordered howitzers to be brought up in order to shell beyond the barricades, and I learned that a sapper regiment expected to arrive from Douai would be used to knock down walls and blow up occupied buildings with explosives. I added that no prisoners were to be shot but that any who made a move to defend themselves should be killed at once. By the time I left, the men had calmed down a little, and as I continued on my way I could not help reflecting on the kinds of arguments I had just used and the speed with which I had become familiar over the past two days with inexorable destruction and harshness toward the enemy—ideas so foreign to my nature. As I once again visited the small streets where I had seen such solid and tidy barricades being constructed two days earlier, I saw that the artillery had made short work of those fine ramparts, of which only vestiges remained.

I was received by Marrast, the mayor of Paris. He told me that the Hôtel de Ville was secure but that the insurgents might attempt during the night to recapture streets that had been taken from them. I found him less reassuring than his dispatches. He took me to the room where they had put Bedeau, who had been seriously wounded on the first day of fighting. The Hôtel de Ville had proved to be a lethal post for the generals put in charge there. Bedeau nearly died, and Duvivier and Négrier, who succeeded him, were both killed. Bedeau believed his wounds were minor and was concerned only with the military situation. I took his mental state to be a bad sign, and it worried me.

It was well after nightfall by the time I left the Hôtel de Ville to return to the Assembly. I rejected the proposed escort, thinking I would not need it, but I had more than one occasion to regret my decision. To prevent the insurgent neighborhoods from receiving reinforcements, supplies, or intelligence from other parts of the city, where many people were ready to embrace their cause, a decision had been made that morning, with abundant reason, to suspend traffic in all streets. Anyone who went out without a safe-conduct pass or an escort was to be stopped. I was accordingly halted several times along my route and required to show my badge. Weapons were aimed at me more than ten times by novice sentries who spoke every imaginable dialect, because Paris was full of provincials from all over France, many of whom were seeing the city for the first time.

By the time I arrived, the session had long since been adjourned, but the palace was still in an uproar. A rumor was afoot that the workers of Gros-Caillou were going to use the cover of darkness to seize the building. Having pushed the enemy back into its own territory over the course of three days of fighting, the Assembly was now anxious about the security of its own headquarters. The rumor proved to be totally unfounded, but there can be no better illustration of the nature of this conflict, in which the enemy could always turn out to be your neighbor and you could never be sure that your house wasn’t being sacked while you were defeating the foe at some distant location. To protect the palace from such a coup, barricades were erected at the heads of all the streets leading up to it. When I realized the rumor was false, I went home to sleep.

I will say no more about the June fighting. My memories of the final two days merge with those of the first two and cannot be recovered. As everyone knows, the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the last bastion of the civil war, did not lay down its arms until Monday, that is, on the fourth day after the battle began. It was not until the morning of that same day that the volunteers from La Manche reached Paris. They had come as fast as they could but had to travel more than eighty leagues through parts of the country with no railroads. There were fifteen hundred of them. I was moved to see among them landowners, lawyers, doctors, and farmers—my friends and neighbors. Nearly all the old nobility of the region had taken up arms and joined the troops. The same was true throughout much of France. From the most down-at-the-heels squire to the elegant and idle heirs of the noblest households, all of France’s aristocrats remembered in this moment of danger that they had once belonged to a martial ruling class, and everywhere they set an example of spirit and vigor—for there is plenty of vitality left in these old aristocratic corporations. Though seemingly reduced to dust, a vestige of their former selves remains: more than once they have risen from the shadow of death only to subside once more into eternal rest.

Indeed, it was during the June Days that death claimed the man who had more than any other, perhaps, preserved the spirit of the ancient nobility, M. de Chateaubriand, to whom I was linked by numerous family ties and childhood memories. He had long since subsided into a mute stupor that at times gave the impression that his intelligence had been extinguished. Hearing a rumor of the February revolution, however, he had asked what was going on and been told that the monarchy of Louis-Philippe had been overthrown. “Well done!” he said before lapsing back into silence. Four months later the ruckus of the June Days had reached his ears, and once again he had asked what the noise was all about. He was told that there was fighting in Paris and that what he heard was the sound of cannon fire. He tried in vain to get up, saying, “I want to go there.” Then he fell silent again, this time for good, for he died the next day.

Such were the June Days: necessary and awful. They did not extinguish the revolutionary flame in France, but for a time at least they did put an end to what one might call the essential work of the February revolution. They delivered the nation from the oppression of the Paris workers and placed its fate back in its own hands.

Socialist theories compounded of envious and greedy passions continued to spread among the people and sow the seeds of future revolutions, but the socialist party itself remained defeated and impotent. The Montagnards, who did not belong to that party, soon realized that they had been damaged beyond repair by the same blow that had done in the socialists. It did not take long for the moderate republicans to begin worrying that the victory that had saved them might ultimately undermine the Republic; they immediately tried to pull back, but to no avail. I, who detested the Montagnards and had little attachment to the Republic but adored liberty, began in the aftermath of these events to worry seriously on liberty’s behalf. I saw immediately that the June battle, though it marked a necessary crisis, would in some respects alter the nation’s temperament. The love of independence was about to give way to fear of and perhaps distaste for free institutions. Liberty having been abused, a swing of the pendulum in the other direction was inevitable. Indeed, the reaction began on June 27. At first it was very slow, almost invisible to the naked eye, but soon it picked up speed and force and eventually became irresistible. Where will it end? I do not know. I think it will be very difficult for us not to regress well beyond the point we had achieved prior to February, and I predict that all parties—socialists, Montagnards, republicans, and liberals—will remain discredited until memories of the revolution of 1848 have faded and the general spirit of the age regains its sway.

CHAPTER 11

Constitutional commission

(Sorrento, March 1851)

I will now change subject, gladly turning from scenes of civil war to recollections of parliamentary life. I want to discuss what was happening in the constitutional commission, of which I was a member. We need to go back a little in time, because the commission was appointed and began its work before the June Days. I did not discuss it earlier so as not to interrupt my account of the events that quickly and directly led to the insurrection.

The task of appointing members of the commission began on May 17. It was a lengthy process because it had been decided that commissioners would be chosen by a majority vote of the full Assembly. I was elected on the first round along with Cormenin, Marrast, Lamennais, Vivien, and Dufaure. I don’t know how many additional rounds were needed to fill out the list of eighteen members.

Although the commission was appointed before the June victory, nearly all of its members belonged to one or another of the various moderate parties in the Assembly. Only two Montagnards were represented—Lamennais and Considerant—and those two were little more than chimerical dreamers, especially Considerant, who, had he been sincere, would have deserved to be placed in an asylum. But I fear he deserved more than that.

If one looks at the committee as a whole, it is easy to see that nothing very remarkable should have been expected of it.

Some of its members had spent their lives running or overseeing the administration under the previous government. They had never seen, studied, or understood any form of government other than monarchy. Furthermore, most of them had applied the principles of monarchy rather than studied them and had devoted little thought to anything above the level of routine affairs. Now that they were responsible for implementing theories that they had always ignored or combated, and that had conquered without convincing them, they had considerable difficulty bringing any ideas other than monarchical ones to their task. When they did entertain republican ideas, they did so at times timidly, at times fiercely, but always somewhat at random, like novices.

Meanwhile, the authentic republicans on the commission had few ideas of any kind other than those they had read in the newspapers or conceived while writing for them, for several of them were journalists. Marrast had of course run Le National for ten years, and Dornès was then its editor in chief. Vaulabelle, a serious thinker but coarse and even cynical, wrote regularly for the paper. One month later he was quite rightly astonished to find himself minister of education and religion.

All of this bore little resemblance to the men who, with Washington in the chair, drafted the American constitution sixty years ago—men sure of their goal and thoroughly familiar with the means of achieving it.

Even if the commission had been capable of doing a good job, moreover, lack of time and preoccupation with what was happening in the streets would have prevented it.

No nation is less attached to its government than the French, and no nation is less capable of doing without a government. The moment the country is obliged to go it alone, it succumbs to vertigo and teeters as if on the edge of an abyss. When the commission convened, the country was desperate for the constitution to be finished and a government to be established on a firm foundation, or at any rate a durable and lawful one. What France wanted was not so much a good constitution as any constitution at all. The Assembly shared this desire and tried repeatedly to speed our work along, though we had little need of encouragement, since memories of May 15, fearful anticipation of the June Days, and the sight of the divided, weak, and incompetent government in charge of the country sufficed to hasten our work. But to be candid, the main constraint on our thinking was fear of what was happening outside and of the train of events already in motion. It is impossible to overstate the pressure that revolutionary ideas exerted even on those least disposed to accept them, pushing them almost unwittingly farther than they wanted to go and even diverting them altogether from the path they would have preferred to follow. There is no doubt that if the commission had convened on June 27 rather than May 16, it would have taken an entirely different course.

Debate began on May 22. The first issue was to decide where to begin our immense task. Lamennais proposed that we begin by settling the status of local government. This was how he himself had begun a proposed constitution that he had published shortly before our meeting in order to claim credit for his innovations. He then moved from the question of priority to the heart of the matter: administrative centralization. His thinking was more or less seamless: a single system entirely preoccupied him, and all the ideas it contained were so closely related that whenever any one of them emerged, the others were sure to follow. He forcefully demonstrated that a republic whose citizens lacked the intelligence to govern themselves and did not practice governing themselves every day would be a monster, unfit to live.

With that proposal on the table, the commission warmed to its task. Barrot, who had always entertained a fairly ardent though confused notion of the advantages of local liberties, enthusiastically supported Lamennais, as did I. Marrast and Vivien were opposed. True to form, Vivien defended centralization, for he was a professional administrator and also inclined that way by nature. He had everything it takes to be a skillful lawyer and excellent commentator but none of the requisite qualities of the legislator or statesman. In this instance the threat to his cherished institutions was so clear that he became impassioned, arguing that the Republic ought to increase centralization rather than limit it. That aspect of the February revolution seemed to please him.

Marrast, for his part, was a garden-variety French revolutionary of the sort for whom freedom of the people has always meant despotism exercised in the people’s name. Hence the fact that Vivien and Marrast suddenly agreed did not surprise me at all. I was used to this sort of thing, and I had long since observed that the only way to achieve harmony between a conservative and a radical was to attack not the application but the principle of centralized governmental power. That way you were sure to drive them into each other’s arms.

So when people claim that nothing is safe from revolution, I say they are wrong: centralization is safe. In France, the one thing we cannot create is a free government, and the one institution we cannot destroy is centralization. How could centralization possibly perish? The enemies of government love it, and governments themselves cherish it. To be sure, the latter occasionally notice that centralization leaves them vulnerable to sudden and irremediable disaster, but this does not discourage them. The pleasure of meddling in everything and controlling everyone enables them to put up with its dangers. They prefer a pleasant life to a longer, more secure existence; like the rakes of the Regency, they would rather have it “good and short.”

The question could not be settled that day, but we anticipated the outcome by deciding we would not deal with local government first.

Lamennais resigned the next day. Under the circumstances, this was bound to be a problem. Word of the resignation was sure to spread and reinforce preexisting prejudices against us. We therefore humbly entreated Lamennais to reconsider. Since I had agreed with him, I was dispatched to pay him a visit and urge him to return. I did so, but in vain. Although he had lost only on a procedural point, he had concluded that he would never gain the upper hand, and if he could not be everything, he preferred to be nothing. He would not budge, despite all my arguments on behalf of the ideas we shared.

If you want to form an accurate idea of the indestructible and, as it were, infinite power the clerical spirit and habits exert on anyone who has ever acquired them, you would do well to consider the example of the defrocked priest. Although Lamennais wore white stockings, a yellow waistcoat, a colorful tie, and a green frock coat, he nevertheless retained his priestly character and even appearance. He took short, quick steps, never turned his head or looked directly at anyone, and slipped through crowds with an awkward, modest air, as if he had just emerged from a sacristy, yet he was a proud enough man to walk on the heads of kings and argue with God himself.

Unable to overcome Lamennais’s obstinacy, we pressed on without him. To avoid further premature debates, we charged a subcommittee with the task of setting the agenda. Unfortunately, the subcommittee was selected in such a way that Cormenin, who was our chair, controlled it and in fact decided in its place. All subsequent initiatives came from him, and as chair he controlled the course of our debates. He thus exerted a most unfortunate influence on the whole subsequent process and must therefore, perhaps, shoulder much of the blame for the flaws in our work.

Like Lamennais, Cormenin had drafted and published a constitution of his own, which he too thought we ought to adopt, but he had no idea how to get us to do so. Extreme vanity usually makes a person either a very bold or a very timid speaker. Cormenin’s vanity scarcely allowed him to open his mouth at all the moment he was contradicted by anyone or gathered an audience of three or more listeners. He reminded me of one of my neighbors in Normandy, who loved to polemicize but to whom the good Lord had denied the gift of oral argument. Any time I challenged this man’s opinions, he would hurry back to his home and write me a letter containing all the things he should have said to me in person. Cormenin therefore despaired of persuading us but liked to think he could take us by surprise. He hoped we would gradually come to accept his system—almost unwittingly, as it were—if he presented yet another small piece of it every day. He managed this so well that a general discussion of the entire constitution never took place, and it was nearly impossible to identify the main idea of each subsection. Every day he brought us five or six fully drafted articles, and if anyone tried to move the discussion beyond the terrain thus marked out, he patiently and painstakingly coaxed them back. Occasionally someone protested, but he wore us down, and in the end we gave in to his gentle but constant pressure. A chairman’s influence on the work of a commission is immense. Anyone who has seen such a body at work will understand what I mean. It is true, however, that if several of us had been determined to resist the chairman’s tyranny, we could have achieved our ends by joining forces. But there was no time for major discussions, and no taste either. The immensity and complexity of the task daunted and frightened us before we even began. Most of the members had not even tried to study how a constitution is made, or had only the vaguest idea of how to go about it, and those who had clearer thoughts felt uneasy about expressing them. We were afraid, moreover, of stumbling into violent and interminable battles if we delved too deeply, so we preferred to maintain the appearance of harmony by remaining on the surface. We worked our way through to the end by implicitly adopting important principles disguised as minor details, assembling the entire machinery of government piece by piece without having a clear sense of the relative importance of each cog or how one part meshed with another. When we took breaks from this noble work, Marrast, who was a republican in the style of Barras and who had always preferred luxury, fine food, and women to raggedy democracy, recounted his amorous adventures, while Vaulabelle told off-color jokes. For the sake of the commission, I hope the minutes prepared—quite incompetently—by our secretary are never published. The sterility of the debate about such exuberantly fertile material would surely come as a surprise to anyone who read them. Of all the commissions I ever served on, I never saw one worse than this.

There was one important debate, however. It concerned the issue of a single chamber. In fact, this was the only issue on which the two parties between which the commission was covertly divided truly clashed. The real issue was not so much the two chambers as the general character the new government was to have. Did we want to promote the carefully designed but somewhat complicated system of checks and balances and place over the Republic limited, moderate powers that would consequently be used with prudence and deliberation? Or would we instead opt for a simpler theory, bestowing undivided power on a homogeneous authority, which, facing no barriers to its action, could act forcefully and irresistibly? This was the crux of the debate. The general question might have been raised in connection with any number of other articles, but it emerged most clearly with respect to the specific issue of two chambers.

The battle was lengthy: it continued through two sessions. The outcome was never in doubt for a moment, however, because public opinion, not only in Paris but in all the départements, heavily favored a single chamber. Barrot was the first to speak in favor of two chambers. He took up my thesis and developed it with much talent but little moderation because he had lost his mental equilibrium in the February revolution and never regained his poise. I backed Barrot and at several points revived the attack. I was a little surprised to hear Dufaure speak out against us, and rather vigorously at that. Some lawyers are in the habit of arguing for causes in which they do not believe, while others easily persuade themselves that the cause they are pleading for is indeed the right one; it is difficult for any lawyer to escape one or the other of these two positions. Dufaure was a lawyer of the second kind. Neither public opinion nor his own passions and interests could ever have driven him to embrace a cause he believed to be bad, but they might well incline him to find the cause good, and often that was enough. His mind, by nature hesitant, ingenious, and subtle, would little by little open up to the possibility, and in certain cases he came not just to believe in the cause but to support it enthusiastically. I was often surprised to find him vigorously defending causes that I knew he had been quite hesitant to take up.

This time, his main reason for supporting a unicameral legislature (and I believe the best reason there is) was that in France executive power exercised by a single individual elected by the people would surely become dominant if checked solely by a legislative power weakened by its division into two chambers.

I recall my answer, which was that his objection might turn out to be true, but what was already certain was that two great powers naturally jealous of each other and placed in “eternal tête-à-tête” (that was the phrase I used) without provision for arbitration by a third power would immediately find themselves on bad terms, if not at war, and would remain so until one destroyed the other. I added that while a president elected by the people and equipped with the immense prerogatives that the person in charge of the governmental apparatus wields in France might in some cases be able to pressure a divided legislature, a president aware of possessing such legitimacy and such powers would always refuse to serve as the mere agent of a unicameral legislature, subject to the capricious and tyrannical will of such a body.

Both sides were right. Stated this way, the problem was insoluble, as I will show later, but that was the way the nation stated it.

Dupin completed our rout. He defended the single chamber with surprising verve. One might have thought he had never held another opinion. I expected this. I knew him to be a selfish coward at heart, despite occasional flashes of courage and honesty. For ten years I had watched him hover about the various parties without joining any of them, while vehemently attacking the losers. Part ape, part jackal, he was forever snapping his jaws, making faces, and leaping about, always ready to pounce on the wounded. In the constitutional commission he was true to form, or rather he outdid himself. This time I saw no flashes of courage or honesty: he was uniformly shallow from beginning to end. He usually remained silent until a majority had emerged, but once the majority came out in favor of the democratic view, he hastened to place himself at its head and often raced far out in front of it. One time he realized in midcourse that he had made a mistake: the majority was not headed in the direction he had anticipated. His quick, nimble wit stopped him in his tracks, and he turned right around and was soon running toward the position he had been fleeing a moment earlier.

Nearly all the former parliamentarians were against two chambers. Most sought more or less plausible pretexts for their votes. Some saw the Council of State as the check they acknowledged to be necessary, while others promised to impose formal procedures on the single chamber that would slow it down enough to guard against both its own enthusiasms and external surprises. In the end, however, the real reason for the vote came out. We had in the commission a minister of the Gospel, a M. Coquerel, who had seen his fellow Catholic priests sitting in the Assembly and wished to join them, which proved to be a mistake on his part: he had been a highly admired preacher but was immediately transformed into a ludicrous political speaker. He could barely open his mouth without uttering some pompous foolishness. This time, he was naive enough to tell us that although he still favored two chambers, he would vote for one because public opinion favored it and he did not wish to “fight the current,” to use his own words. Such ingenuous candor dismayed the others who were voting as he did for the same reason, but Barrot and I were delighted. This was our only satisfaction, however, for our side mustered only three votes.

This abject failure discouraged me somewhat, but it knocked Barrot out completely. His attendance at meetings became increasingly sporadic, and he showed up henceforth only to mark his impatience or disdain, not to give advice.

We moved on to the executive branch. Despite all I’ve said about the circumstances and the nature of the commission, it is still hard to believe that such an immense, difficult, and novel subject occasioned no general debate or even extended discussion.

We were unanimous in wanting to entrust executive power to a single individual. But how was this man to be elected, what prerogatives should he have, who should assist him, and what responsibilities would he bear? Clearly, none of these questions could be treated in the abstract, and each of them was inevitably related to all the others. Above all, no decision could be made about any of these points without consulting the specific state of the country’s mores and habits. These were of course old problems made new by the novel circumstances.

Cormenin, as was his wont, opened the discussion by proposing an article he had already crafted, which stipulated that the head of the executive branch, or president (as he would be known from that time on), would be elected directly by a relative majority of the people, with a required minimum of at least 2 million votes. I think that no one but Marrast opposed this article. He proposed that the head of the executive branch should be elected by the Assembly. Good fortune having gone to his head, he had deluded himself at that point into thinking that the Assembly’s choice would fall on him—as strange as that might seem today. Cormenin’s article nevertheless passed easily, to the best of my recollection. It was by no means self-evident, however, that having the people elect the president was the proper thing to do: the direct-election clause was as novel as it was dangerous. In a country without monarchical traditions, where the executive power has always been weak and remains limited, nothing could be wiser than to make the nation responsible for choosing the president. A president lacking the strength deriving from direct election would become the plaything of the legislature. Our situation was very different, however. We were emerging from monarchy, and even the republicans retained the habits they had acquired under the monarchical regime. Furthermore, centralization made our situation unlike that of any other country. According to centralist doctrine, sole responsibility for administering the country in matters great as well as small would belong to the president. The thousands of functionaries who hold the entire country in their hands would report to him alone. These practices were sanctioned not only by law but also by the prevailing ideas of the time, which February 24 had left intact, for we had preserved the spirit of monarchy even as we were losing the taste for it. Under such conditions, what would a president elected by the people be, if not a pretender to the throne? The institution could please only those who hoped to use it to help turn presidential power into monarchy. It seemed clear to me then and is obvious to me now that if we wanted the president to be elected without endangering the Republic, we should have imposed strict limits on his power. I am not sure, however, that even this would have been enough, for even if executive power had been limited by law, the president would have retained powers implicit in the memory and past practice of the executive branch. Since, on the contrary, we allowed the president to retain his full powers, we should not have opted for election by the people. Although Cormenin’s article was initially adopted, it was later attacked quite harshly, but for reasons other than those I have just set forth. In the aftermath of June 4, Prince Louis-Napoléon, to whom no one had given any thought a few days earlier, was elected to the Assembly by Paris and three départements. It was therefore reasonable to fear that if the people were allowed to choose, he might be elected head of the Republic. The various other pretenders and their allies protested. The question was again put to the commission, but the majority voted as before.

Throughout the time the commission dwelt on this issue, I tried to anticipate which way the balance of power would normally tilt in a republic of the kind we were about to create. Sometimes I thought it would tip in favor of the unicameral legislature; other times, in favor of the elected president. My uncertainty troubled me greatly. The truth is that it was impossible to say in advance. Which of these two great rivals would win would depend on the circumstances and dispositions of the moment. The only sure thing was that they would be at war with each other, and the ruin of the Republic would follow.

None of the ideas I have just set forth was seriously explored by the commission. Indeed, it is fair to say that none was even discussed. Barrot touched on them one day in passing but did not dwell on them. He dimly grasped the issues, as one glimpses images between wakefulness and sleep, after which he gave them no further thought. (His mind was more somnolent than feeble; in fact he was capable of seeing quite some distance ahead when he applied himself.)

I myself was hesitant, and reluctant to point out the issues. My failure on the matter of the two chambers left me little heart for a fight. I confess, moreover, that I was more preoccupied by the desire to place a powerful leader at the head of the Republic than by a desire to put together a perfect republican constitution. Bear in mind that we were being led at the time by the divided and uncertain executive commission, socialism was at the gates, and the June Days were approaching. Later, in the Assembly after the June Days, I strongly supported the election of the president by the people and did my part to win its passage. My main reason for doing so was that after announcing to the nation that we would grant it this right, which it had always ardently desired, it could not be denied. Although this was true, I still regret having spoken on that occasion.

To return to the commission, unable and unwilling to oppose adoption of the principle, I at least tried to make its application less dangerous. First, I proposed to limit the scope of executive power in several respects, but it was clear to me that nothing serious could be accomplished in that regard. I therefore turned to the mode of election itself and revived debate on the portion of Cormenin’s article bearing on that question. As I mentioned earlier, that article proposed that the president should be elected directly by a relative majority, with a minimum of 2 million votes. There were several very serious drawbacks to this mode of election.

If the citizens choose the president directly, one has to be deeply wary of popular enthusiasm and infatuation, and the president elected this way enjoys far greater prestige and moral authority. If only a relative majority is needed to validate an election, the president may represent the will of only a minority of the nation. I asked that the president not be elected directly by the citizens, suggesting that his election be entrusted instead to delegates elected by the people.

Second, I proposed replacing the relative majority with an absolute majority. If no absolute majority was achieved in the first round, the Assembly would then choose the president. These ideas were good, I think, but not new. I borrowed them from the American constitution. I don’t believe anyone would have suspected this had I not mentioned it—that is how unprepared the commission was to play its important role.

The first part of my amendment was rejected, as I had expected. The judgment of our great men was that the system was not simple enough and that it bore a slight taint of aristocracy. The second part was accepted; it is part of the present constitution.

Beaumont proposed that the president should not be eligible for reelection. I strongly supported this, and the proposal passed. On this occasion we both committed a serious error, which I fear will have very unfortunate consequences. We had always been keenly aware of the danger to liberty and public morality that would exist if the president were eligible to be reelected, for he would then devote to ensuring his reelection all the vast resources of coercion and corruption that our laws and mores grant the chief executive. Our thinking was not quick or supple enough to recognize that once it was decided that the citizens themselves would directly elect the president, the damage was already done, and we would only make matters worse by rashly seeking to impede the people’s choice.

This vote and the great influence I had on it are my most painful memories of that time. We repeatedly came up against the obstacle of centralization, and instead of eliminating it, we tripped over it. In a republic, it is essential that the chief executive be responsible, but for what, and to what extent? Could he be made responsible for the thousand administrative details with which our administrative law burdened him, which would be impossible and indeed dangerous for him to attend to by himself? Such an arrangement would have been unjust and ridiculous. And if he were not responsible for the administration in the strict sense, who would be? It was decided that the president’s responsibility should be shared with the ministers, whose countersignature would be required, as in the time of the monarchy. Thus the president was responsible, yet he was not entirely free in his actions and could not protect his subordinates.

We then moved on to discuss the constitution of the Council of State. Cormenin and Vivien took charge of this, and they went about their work like men building their own homes. They did their best to make the Council of State a third branch of government, but to no avail. It became something more than a board of directors but far less than a legislative assembly.

The only part of our work that was dispatched with superior skill and, I think, settled wisely was the part having to do with justice. On this terrain the commission felt confident, since most of its members had been or still were lawyers. Thanks to them, we were able to save the principle that judges cannot be removed from office. As in 1830, this principle held firm against the current that swept everything else away. Yet old-time republicans attacked it, very stupidly in my opinion, because it does far more to preserve the independence of citizens than to enhance the power of those who govern. The Court of Appeals and above all the tribunal charged with judging political crimes were immediately conceived as they exist today (1851). Beaumont drafted most of the articles pertaining to these two important courts. What we did in this area was far better than everything that had been tried over the previous sixty years. This is probably the only part of the constitution of 1848 that will survive.

At Vivien’s behest, we decided that the constitution could be amended only by a new Constituent Assembly, which was fair enough, but we added that amendments could be made only if the National Assembly granted its explicit approval in three successive four-fifths votes, which made any regular amendment procedure all but impossible. I did not take part in that vote. I had long thought that rather than seek to make our governments eternal, it would be better to allow for easy, lawful change. All things considered, I thought the possibility of change preferable to the opposite, and I thought it best to treat the French people as one would treat a madman, who is best left unshackled lest the constraint drive him wild.

During the deliberations, I noted several strikingly unusual opinions. Martin, who, not content to have been a precocious republican, once made a fool of himself by announcing from the podium that he had been “born a republican,” nevertheless proposed that the president be given the power to dissolve the Assembly, overlooking the fact that granting the president such power naturally would give him mastery over the Republic. Marrast wanted the Council of State to include a section responsible for developing “new ideas,” to be called the Section of Progress. Barrot proposed that all civil trials should be heard by a jury, as if such a judicial revolution could be improvised overnight. Finally, Dufaure proposed to prohibit the hiring of substitutes for military service, so that every conscripted individual would have to serve in person, a measure that would have destroyed any form of liberal education unless the required duration of service were drastically reduced, which would have wreaked havoc on the organization of the army.

Although we were constantly pressed for time and ill prepared to deal with such important matters, we nevertheless progressed toward the completion of our assigned task. We kept saying that we would adopt the proposed articles for the time being and later return for a second look. With the preliminary sketch in hand, we would be in a better position to perfect the features of the final portrait and make sure that the various parts fit together. But we never took that second look, and the sketch became the finished portrait.

We made Marrast our secretary. His performance in this important mission exposed the laziness, carelessness, and impudence that were so central to his character. He spent the first few days doing nothing, even though the Assembly repeatedly asked to be informed of the results of our deliberations and all France eagerly awaited the news. Then he dispatched his work in one night, the night before he was to announce it to the Assembly. That morning, he showed his report to one or two colleagues he happened to meet before rashly going to the podium and announcing on behalf of the commission a report that virtually none of its members had seen. This reading took place on June 19. The proposed constitution contained 139 articles and had been drafted in less than one month. We could not have worked more quickly, but we could have done better. We had adopted many of the minor articles that Cormenin had introduced, but we had rejected even more, which had irritated their author all the more because his annoyance remained stuck in his craw, unverbalized. He sought consolation from the public. He either wrote or had someone else write (I no longer remember which) an article that appeared in all the newspapers in which he recounted what had taken place inside the commission, attributing all the good it had done to himself and all the bad to his adversaries. The publication of this article displeased us no end, as one might imagine. We decided to let Cormenin know our feelings in the matter, but no one wished to speak for the group. We had among us a worker (because workers were being placed everywhere at the time) named Corbon, a sincere fellow of firm character. He readily accepted the task. The next day, just after the opening of the commission’s session, he therefore asked for the floor and with rather brusque simplicity and precious few words he let Cormenin know what we thought. Cormenin’s face fell, and he glanced around the table in search of allies. No one moved. In a hesitant voice he then asked: “Am I to conclude from what has just been said that the commission wishes me to resign?” We said nothing. He took his hat and left. No one stopped him. Never was so great an insult so effortlessly absorbed, without so much as a frown of displeasure. Although he was a remarkably vain man, he was, I think, not particularly sensitive to private insults, and as long as his amour propre was flattered in public, he would not make much of a fuss about being cudgeled in private.

Many people believe that Cormenin, a viscount turned radical while remaining a devout Catholic, had always been playacting and had hidden his true beliefs. I would not go so far as to assert this as fact, although I often noticed strange inconsistencies between what he said in conversation and what he wrote; in fact, he always seemed to me more sincere in his fear of the revolutionaries than in his support for the opinions he borrowed from them. What always impressed me most about him was the deviousness of his mind. No writer in public life has ever so fully exemplified the habits and failings of the writer’s trade. Once he had put the various provisions of a law into suitable form and prepared a striking and ingenious draft, he believed his work was done. Form, sequence, and symmetry absorbed him fully. But what he required above all was novelty. Institutions that had been previously tried in other times and places were as detestable to him as clichés, and in his eyes the primary merit of a law was to bear no resemblance to anything that had gone before. The law governing the appointment of the Constituent Assembly was of course his doing. I ran into him at the time of the general election, and his tone suggested how pleased he was with his handiwork: “Has the world ever seen anything like what is happening today? Has any country gone so far as to allow servants, paupers, and soldiers to vote? Admit that no one until now ever even imagined such a thing.” Rubbing his hands together, he added: “It will be very curious to see what comes of all this.” He spoke as if it were a chemistry experiment.

11. “You have your reasons for judging as you do.” Act I, scene 2, verse 169.

12. The Institut de France, comprising five academies: Française, Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Sciences, Beaux-Arts, and Sciences Morales et Politiques.

13. Guizot supported the Sonderbund, a separatist movement of seven Catholic (ultramontane) cantons in Switzerland formed in 1845 but dissolved after defeat in a brief civil war in 1847.

14. It was actually the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

15. The radical and moderate parties of the revolutionary assembly.

16. Tocqueville quotes here from a text published in the Journal de Valognes on March 26, which we partly reproduce below, on 227, and not from the March 19 meeting he alludes to.

17. Partly reproduced below, on 225.

18. The governmental body administering a département.

19. “Why not love me, impudent lady?” L’École des femmes, act 5, scene 4, verse 52.

20. Louis XVI had been beheaded on January 21, 1793.

21. Abbé Grégoire, elected to the Chamber in 1819, was barred from serving after being wrongly exposed as a regicide.

22. The primary administrative divisions in France, first created in 1790.

23. Poland was then under the control of Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

24. Officers responsible for keeping order in the Assembly.

25. In addition to the National Guard, the provisional government created a Mobile Guard in February 1848, which many unemployed workers joined.

26. The Phrygian cap.

27. Said Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, when leading Protestant troops in the religious wars of the 1560s.