1848 (9 page)

 

The violence erupted when stones were hurled by the crowd at the Municipals, who reacted by forcing their way through the tumult, sabres drawn, and knocking people over. One of the victims was an old woman, who died when her head hit the paving stones; elsewhere a worker was hacked down by a sabre. The first blood had been spilled and now fighting broke out across the city: outside Guizot's home in the Foreign Ministry on the rue des Capucines, on the Champs-Elysées, on the Place de la Bastille and at the stock exchange. The insurgents had armed themselves first with iron railings torn down from fences, then with arms pillaged from gun shops.
¹⁴
The forces of order managed to protect the public buildings, but the crowds simply retreated into the labyrinthine streets of the artisanal districts.

While Paris rioted, Guizot faced Barrot's demand for impeachment for corruption and for betraying the constitution. Yet, with the spectre of revolution now hovering over them, even most opposition deputies were in no mood to weaken authority and the motion attracted only fifty-three signatures. Guizot allowed himself to listen to the charges with a contemptuous smile.
¹⁵
Moreover, since the rioting was spontaneous and unexpected, the republicans themselves were uncertain what to do. That night the journalists of
La Réforme
discreetly met among the shadowy colonnades of the Palais-Royal, but they could not agree on the best course of action. Some republicans chose to wait on events, but others returned to their districts to mobilise the rank and file of the revolutionary secret societies and to harness the insurrection.

Overnight, barricades arose in the narrow streets of central and eastern Paris. With their sheer weight of numbers, the forces of order ought to have remained masters of the city: there were some 31,000 regular troops, 3,900 Municipals and 85,000 National Guards from Paris and the suburbs. Yet the regulars could act only on the express order of the Prefect of Police - and the Royal Council that night, fearful of provoking a popular backlash, wisely advised prudence.
¹⁶
As for the National Guard, it was a citizens' militia composed of taxpayers - a bourgeois force upon which Louis-Philippe thought he could rely. But even those who came from the more conservative western districts baulked at defending an unpopular ministry and helping in the unsavoury task of putting down the insurgents. Some of those who responded to the call-out were badgered and then talked around by crowds of workers. Others, particularly those of the radical Twelfth Legion, which had meant to attend the original banquet at the Panthéon, reacted to the call to arms with defiant cries of ‘
Vive la réforme!
' The National Guards therefore mustered only in tiny numbers, leaving the hated Municipals almost alone in the struggle to keep control of the streets. The insurgents cut off, attacked and disarmed their more isolated guard posts, while their comrades joined the regulars in spending a miserable night huddled around camp fires and bivouacking in the rain.
¹⁷

Through the following day the National Guard played a pivotal role in mediating between the insurgents and the Municipals. For example, a detachment of the latter was defending the Lepage Brothers' firearms shop, at a crossroads on the rue Bourg l'Abbé, which became a hornets' nest of musketry: by the afternoon of 23 February one of the street corners had been so riddled with bullets that it collapsed in a heap of rubble. The fighting ended only when a detachment of National Guards marched in and divided the two sides, allowing Étienne Arago, one of the founders of
La Réforme
, to negotiate the Municipals' surrender.
¹⁸

His military position weaker than he had expected it to be, Louis-Philippe, who up to now had been stubbornly resistant to concessions, reluctantly decided that the time had come to sacrifice his hated first minister. In the early afternoon of the 23rd Guizot was summoned to the Tuileries Palace, where the King expressed his bitter regret at having to end their long-standing collaboration. Guizot returned to parliament, where, according to d'Agoult, his breathing seemed to be ‘stifled by an internal weight',
¹⁹
but he threw his head back as if, Tocqueville thought, he was afraid of bowing. The opposition received his announcement of his dismissal with thunderous applause, drowning out his voice, while he was mobbed - like a pack of dogs tearing at their quarry, Tocqueville acerbically remarked - by pro-government deputies, for whom Guizot's fall meant the loss of patronage, position and power.
²⁰
The leaders of the dynastic opposition, Barrot and Adolphe Thiers, congratulated themselves on forcing a change of ministry without - as they thought - toppling the monarchy.

For a few hours this illusion did not appear to be unfounded. When National Guards and breathless deputies ran from barricade to barricade spreading the news of Guizot's dismissal, the firing gradually died down and the menacing crowds began to celebrate. Yet the fate of the regime was still finely balanced. The King had sacrificed his minister to the crowd, but the underlying political and social pressures remained. Moreover, the republicans began to sense that they might secure more than just the fall of a ministry. They continued to harangue the artisans and National Guards, who were uncertain as to whether the time had come to dismantle the barricades. As so often happens in these precarious moments in history, an accident tipped the scales against the regime. On the evening of 23 February coloured lights garlanded the boulevards, where
tricolore
-waving Parisians gathered to celebrate Guizot's demise. At 9.30 p.m., into this festive crowd marched an orderly phalanx of six or seven hundred workers from the radical eastern districts. The revellers joined this march, singing patriotic songs. According to Jean-François Pannier-Lafontaine, a former army paymaster who was marching in the front rank, the people were yelling ‘
Vive la Réforme! A bas Guizot!
' but raising no hue and cry against the King. Outside the offices of
Le National
, they stopped to listen to Marrast, who urged the people to demand reform and the impeachment of other government ministers, but there was still no talk of deposing the monarchy. Yet the collision was not far away, for further down the boulevard some two hundred men of the 14th Line, the regiment protecting Guizot's lodgings in the Foreign Ministry, heard the singing and, through a light haze of smoke, could see the glow of torches as the swollen crowd approached the rue des Capucines. As a precaution their commander ordered his men to block the boulevard. When the marchers came to a halt, they pressed against the soldiers, and the officer, apparently hoping to nudge them back a little, ordered his men to ‘Present bayonets!' As the troops performed the manoeuvre, a mysterious shot burst into the night air. In a knee-jerk response the nervous soldiers let off a volley, the bullets killing or wounding fifty people. Pannier-Lafontaine was knocked over and trapped beneath one of the falling bodies, while one of his companions was wounded. There was panic, as people fled in all directions, trying to find cover from a second volley which never came.
²¹

News of the slaughter pulsated around the city: for Parisians, the massacre seemed to signal the onset of a government effort to reassert its authority by crushing force. After midnight people huddling fearfully behind closed shutters were drawn out by a spectacle worthy, d'Agoult wrote, of Dante's Inferno: a horse and wagon, drawn by a muscular, bare-armed worker, bore five lifeless bodies, including ‘the corpse of a young woman whose neck and chest were stained with a long stream of blood'. The tableau was lit by the flickering, reddish reflections of a torch held aloft by ‘a child of the people, with a pallid complexion, eyes burning and staring . . . as one would depict the spirit of vengeance'. Behind the cart another worker shook his sparkling torch, ‘passing his fierce gaze over the crowd: “Vengeance! Vengeance! They are slaughtering the people!”' The insurgents, fired up again, prepared to fight once more and they raced back to the barricades. ‘At that moment,' noted d'Agoult, ‘the corpse of a woman had more power than the bravest army in the world.'
²²

When Louis-Philippe heard of the massacre, he yielded more of his crumbling ground by appointing Thiers and Barrot to form a government, all too aware that it would be a mere cooling drop in a boiling ocean. He also put on his mailed fist, by appointing Marshal Thomas Bugeaud to command all forces in Paris. Bugeaud was a veteran of the recent colonial wars in Algeria, and he had a hardline reputation as the ‘butcher' of the rue Transnonain. Thiers and Barrot proclaimed their new ministry, hoping that the change of government would be enough to persuade the Parisians to cease fire. Barrot courageously rode from one fortification to the next, calling on the insurgents to stand down, but he was stunned by mocking cries of ‘We don't want cowards! No more Thiers! No more Barrot! The people are the masters!' The Parisians had paid too dearly for there to be a repeat of 1830, and now the journalists of
La Réforme
stole from barricade to barricade, uttering the electrifying word ‘
République
'.

In the early hours of 24 February, Bugeaud unleashed his forces, sending four strong columns of troops through the city in an attempt to clear away the barricades. Yet the King, understanding that more bloodshed would make the situation utterly irretrievable, had ordered that the officers in charge should negotiate before firing on the insurgents. Consequently, there were stand-offs across the city, which led nowhere. The lack of determination at the very top showed that the regime's self-confidence had faltered. By mid-morning, even Bugeaud was beginning to doubt the wisdom of his strategy. His officers understood that there was little chance of prevailing over the barricades without immense carnage; the National Guards had either joined the insurgents or were reluctant to fight against them; many barracks in the city were under siege; and the revolutionaries had managed to capture a convoy of munitions from the arsenal at Vincennes. The marshal ordered all his troops to fall back on the Tuileries, to consolidate the defence of the royal palace. Tocqueville witnessed the humiliating retreat of the column commanded by General Alphonse Bedeau: it ‘looked like a rout. The ranks were broken, the soldiers marched in disorder, heads down, exuding both shame and fear; as soon as one of them briefly fell out with the mass, he was quickly surrounded, seized, embraced, disarmed and sent on his way; all that was done within the blink of an eye.'
²³
To the east the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the city government, was taken by National Guards who had joined the revolutionaries. To the west Tocqueville, caught on the Place de la Concorde by a crowd of insurgents, escaped being beaten up or worse by a timely shout of ‘
Vive la Réforme!
You know that Guizot has fallen?' ‘Yes, monsieur', came a mocking reply from a short, stocky worker, who pointed at the Tuileries, ‘but we want more than that.'
²⁴
Both the massacre on the rue des Capucines and the retreat of Bedeau's column symbolised successively the July Monarchy's loss of legitimacy and of power.
²⁵

With the revolutionaries closing in on the palace, Thiers urged the King to withdraw from the city, bring up regular troops and smash the revolution with overwhelming force from outside. It was a strategy Thiers would adopt much later against the Paris Commune in 1871. In 1848, however, he was rebuffed by his horrified colleagues, including Barrot, and Thiers, in power for less than a day, resigned and stole out of the palace. He was later spotted by a threatening crowd and he escaped by jumping into a cabriolet, which drove him to safety; throughout the journey, he was ‘gesticulating, sobbing and pronouncing incoherent words'.
²⁶
Outside the palace, the royalist scholar and diplomat Adolphe de Circourt was on the Place du Carrousel, drawn up with his National Guard battalion - one of the few units (all from the wealthier, conservative western districts) still defending the regime. Louis-Philippe rode out in front of these loyal troops, but to Circourt he seemed ‘pale and virtually set in stone'. The street-fighting raged just a few hundred yards away, producing ‘a storm of noise which combined a roaring with a tempest . . . One felt vaguely that, behind the first detachments which gave combat, rolled an immeasurable crowd which no moral or intellectual power could any longer stop or turn back.'
²⁷

The last stand took place at the Château d'Eau, which guarded one of the main access routes to the Tuileries. The Château d'Eau was a two-storey guard post with barred windows, centred on the fountain from which it drew its name. It was defended by some hundred men of the now despised 14th Line and ten Municipal Guards. In bitter fighting vividly described by Gustave Flaubert, the air buzzed with bullets, was torn by the cries of the wounded and rattled to the beating of drums.
²⁸
In the carnage the masonry of the fountain itself was torn apart by the musketry, and the water spilled out over the square, mingling with the blood of the slain and wounded. The insurgents took the awful decision to end the murderous fighting by crashing carriages, laden with burning straw and spirits, into the guard post. As the fire caught, an officer, choking on the smoke, opened the door to escape, only to be shot down. His men piled out behind, throwing their weapons on the ground in a frantic gesture of surrender. The victorious assailants surged forward and then struggled to put out the fire, tripping over blackened corpses and charred debris.
²⁹
Among the wounded on the revolutionary side was the tailor Buacher, who was hit by several musket balls. His shattered arm was later amputated and his signature at the bottom of his testimony in the archives has all the unsteadiness of someone writing with the wrong hand.
³⁰