A History of the Barricade by Eric Hazan

Author:Eric Hazan [Hazan, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-02-16T04:30:00+00:00

Just as the coffin reached the place de la Bastille, some sixty students from the Polytechnique came running. They had ignored the order not to leave the school and were ready to join the insurrection. (We may remember the opening words of Stendhal’s second novel: ‘Lucien Leuwen had been expelled from the Polytechnique for having gone for an inappropriate walk, one day when he and all his fellow students were detained: this was the time of one of the famous journées of June, April or February 1832 or 1834.’) The procession followed the boulevard Bourdon, between the Arsenal basin and the grain warehouses, crossed the little bridge at the end of the canal and stopped on the esplanade just before the Pont d’Austerlitz.

A podium had been erected here for valdedictory speeches by Lafayette, Marshal Clausel, and foreign generals. The tail end of the great crowd was still at the Bastille; there was growing restlessness. Suddenly a strange horseman appeared, dressed in black; he passed slowly along the ranks, holding a red flag topped by a Phrygian cap, on which the words could be read: ‘Liberty or death’. This image of 1793 electrified the crowd, but terrified those officiating on the podium: Lafayette hastened off in a fiacre, and General Exelmans, who attempted to object, narrowly escaped being thrown into the canal.

At this point a small detachment of dragoons from the Célestins barracks arrived on the quai Morland.4 The crowd booed them and pelted them with stones, a shot was fired, and the battle began. This time a whole squadron emerged from the barracks, surging through the rue de la Cerisaie and charging the crowd. From the granaries and the Arsenal, the insurgents fired on the dragoons. The colonel’s horse was killed under him. A barricade, the first of the day, was hastily erected on the boulevard Bourdon, and the dragoons had to withdraw into their barracks.

Meanwhile some young people had crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz with the coffin, and reached the Jardin des Plantes. Here a carriage was waiting to take the general to his last resting-place in the Landes, but the insurgents shouted out: ‘To the Panthéon!’ The carabineers who tried to block their path were met by rifle fire. The rioters took possession of the veterans’ barracks, stormed the guard post on the place Maubert, and occupied the entire line of the barriers on the Left Bank.5 On the opposite bank, their advance was equally rapid: the guard posts of the Marais, the mairie of the eighth arrondissement, the post of the Château-d’Eau and the Les Halles quarter were in their hands.6

Paris was already enflamed. The republicans had spread themselves in every direction, running up barricades in the different streets, disarming the military posts, summoning the troops whom they came across to join them, attacking them if they refused, menacing the powder magazines and arsenals, arresting the drummers whom they found beating the roll-call, knocking in the drumheads; a party everywhere small in number, but constantly gaining adherents by their audacious bravery, and everywhere acting in concert.

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