Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I—THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
2819 words | Chapter 378
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work
is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two
different aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at
the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of
the streets that history has ever beheld.
It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary
to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal
vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths
of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its
fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its
darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against,
and that the populace wages battle against, the people.
Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.
These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of
night even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those
words which are intended to be insults—beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
populace—exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.
For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries.
Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the
populace saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus
Christ.
There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.
It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable
people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
mysterious saying: _“Fex urbis, lex orbis,”_—the dregs of the city, the
law of the earth.
The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular _coups
d’état_ and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
when, while doing that which it is one’s duty to do, one feels
something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from
proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience,
though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated
with a pain at the heart.
June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes a
question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.
Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
then, be permitted to arrest the reader’s attention for a moment on the
two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
characterized this insurrection.
One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom
these two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath
the brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the
faubourg, that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined,
jagged, cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed
with piles that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and
there, powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades
were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets behind
this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the
agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that
point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what
was that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses
demolished expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said
others. It wore the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred,
ruin. It might be asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who
destroyed this? It was the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take
this door! this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this
broken brazier! this cracked pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this
roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! It was the
collaboration of the pavement, the block of stone, the beam, the bar of
iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane, the unseated chair, the
cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the malediction. It was grand
and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied on the public place by
hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the
broken bowl,—threatening fraternization of every sort of rubbish.
Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his potsherd. Terrible, in
short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts broke
the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out there
crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that
tumultuous façade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very
summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery
had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror,
presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses
of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to
the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; ’93 on ’89, the 9th of
Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of
January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved
the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot
whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is
thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this
shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub
petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though
there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent
progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress?
Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There
was something of the cesspool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the
cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of
the broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling
headsman’s blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets
having the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the
rubbish, amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of
the old tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine
converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could
throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it
was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which
there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones,
coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles
on account of the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the
clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the
army, it was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of
flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of
guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast
red flag flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the
roll of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the
starving were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the
back of an electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of
lightning. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit
where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of
God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish.
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the
revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade, chance, hazard,
disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—had facing it the
Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal
suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding
defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the
faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the
strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its
excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and
grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the
bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its
enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which
debouches on the boulevard near the Château-d’Eau, if one thrust one’s
head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne
shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street
which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the
rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts,
a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the
left, as though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall
in order to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of
paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled
with the square, laid out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of
course, but, as in the case of certain Roman walls, without interfering
with its rigid architecture. The entablature was mathematically
parallel with the base. From distance to distance, one could
distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which
resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated from each other
by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.
All windows and doors were closed. In the background rose this barrier,
which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and
tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not
a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.
The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.
It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was
impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this
mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,
rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One
felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.
From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the
people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp
whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he
escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaïen was seen to ensconce itself in
some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or
in the plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made
themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe,
plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of
useless powder. Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and
there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly
which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes-cochères were
encumbered with wounded.
One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one
understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.
Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms
at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the
attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal
redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some
crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the
bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.
The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
shudder.—“How that is built!” he said to a Representative. “Not one
paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain.”—At
that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.
“The cowards!” people said. “Let them show themselves. Let us see them!
They dare not! They are hiding!”
The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they
did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they
came over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty
cowards thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of
the leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall speak presently.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed
a maw; the other a mask.
Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was
composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first
barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.
These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,
Cournet, the other, Barthélemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
barricade; Barthélemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image
of the man who had built it.
Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible
eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men,
the most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very
air he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in
the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he
sprang from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried
the hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there
was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the
divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.
Barthélemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street
urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for
him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came
out and made this barricade.
Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthélemy
slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in
the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion
plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating
circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthélemy
was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being who
possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began in
France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.
Barthélemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.
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