THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS OF THE LATIN QUARTER
“_When the students sing the_ Carmagnole, _France trembles._”
“_The monarchy of July persecuted the cancan, which historically
seems to have been the anarchy of the period._”—AURÉLIEN SCHOLL.
“_Humble spot, dingy little court, oh, how charming I find you!
Hence will go forth some day the Revolution which shall save us;
the age which by chloroform has already suppressed pain will
suppress hunger also._”
MICHELET on the Collège de France.
“_The great movement of ideas which occurred in France under the
silent reign of Napoleon III., when the tribune was mute, the
press muzzled, and the right of assembly confiscated, had for its
stage the_ brasseries _of the Latin Quarter._”—EDMOND LEPELLETIER.
“The Sorbonne,” says Eugène Pelletan, “shines from the heights through
the early mists like the dawn of intelligence. It is there that the
French Revolution was really born, thence was its point of departure....
“On this sacred mount of the university a philosopher in
monkish garb spoke one day in the open air. What did he say?
It matters little. He said something new, and the multitude
listened because he was the first to defend the claims of the
earth,—the right of reason to reason; and, while he spoke, a
veiled woman, with lips on fire, clung to the grating of a
convent over yonder, and encouraged him with gestures in
default of words.
“The man represents human intellect hampered by the church,
and the woman represents France confined in a cloister; but
Abélard will grow, and will assume day by day, like the Indian
god, a fresh avatar. To-morrow—for what is to-morrow in the
life of a people?—he will bear, according to the ironical or
severe humour of France, the name of Rabelais, the name of
Descartes, the name of Rousseau, the name of Voltaire. And,
side by side with him, the Idea, the insulted, the abused
Idea, will advance with slow and tragic steps between two rows
of fagots, a flame in her forehead and her hands at her sides,
until the day when she shall wrest the torch from the
executioner, and proclaim herself Queen.”
Whoever would unfold the progress of the revolutionary spirit in France
from the earliest times through the centuries must needs write a history
of the Sorbonne and of the seat of the Sorbonne, the _Pays Latin_ (the
Latin Quarter).
In the relatively limited area included between Notre Dame, where the
goddess of Reason was enthroned in the Great Revolution; the Place
Maubert,[62] with its statue of Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth-century
printer, burned for impiety and atheism; the Square Monge, with its
statue of François Villon; the Place Monge, with its statue of Louis
Blanc; the Panthéon, with its memorials to the intellectual liberators,
Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire; the Place de l’Ecole de Médecine,
with its statue of Danton doughtily inscribed, “_Pour vaincre les
ennemis de la justice, il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace et
toujours de l’audace_”; the Place St. Germain des Prés, with its statue
of Diderot; and the Place de l’Institut, with its statue of
Condorcet,—every inch of ground is rich in souvenirs of the
intellectual history of France and of the convulsions by which this
history’s various stages have been marked.
Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abélard, in the twelfth
century, “discoursed to all the earth,—to two popes, twenty cardinals,
and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which
descended from the mountain and inundated Europe”;[63] whither came
Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant;
the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the
sixteenth centuries; where the _trouvère_ Rutebœuf in the thirteenth
century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on the _propagande
par l’exemple_ and even the _propagande par le fait_; where, in the
early part of the fifteenth century, the _Cabocherie_ decreed the reign
of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had
all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, the _Commune
Catholique_ was set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher
of St. Sévérin; where, in the same century, François Rabelais, Clément
Marot, and La Boétie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his
time) prepared themselves, in their very different fashions, to
alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and
René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to found modern philosophy
and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century
Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and
begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of
the Collège de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men
who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second
Empire,—in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and
at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited
to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or
mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.
[Illustration: MÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT]
Revolutionary thinking has not been practised with impunity in the
_Quartier Latin_. From Abélard to Michelet and Renan, religious,
political, and philosophical heresies have called down ecclesiastical,
governmental, and academical wrath with the usual result of helping to
propagate the heresies.
Abélard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to
another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist
of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. “In Ramus,” says Michelet, “they fancied they were killing
a second Abélard. They thought to butcher mind.” Clément Marot was
imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by
Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with
death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was
burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for his _Histoire Naturelle_,
and Montesquieu for his _Esprit des Lois_. Michelet, who “scratched the
heavens with his white hand,”[64] Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were
expelled from the Collège de France.
There have been periods, it is true, when the university faculties have
been servile and cringing,—mere tools of the potentates of church and
state,—and periods when the students have been craven or lethargic; but
these periods are the exceptions. Speaking broadly, the _Quartier_ has
been from first to last a preserve of free living and free thinking, a
stronghold of opposition, a centre of agitation, and a hot-bed of
revolution.
Eugène Pelletan thus describes the students of the university’s
beginnings:—
“A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from nobody
could say where, they live by the grace of God, they eat when
they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets
proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the
future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of
the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl
about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a
bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put
it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the
rector, who invariably exonerates.”
“Scantily clad and almost vagabonds,” says another historian
of this early period, “but not depriving themselves of good
cheer, the future magistrates and theologians, who were to
antagonise in parliament the will of the king, were already
revolutionary.”
In the fourteenth century the faculties, morally, and the students, both
morally and materially, cast in their lots with the revolution of
Etienne Marcel, who is credited with having invented the barricade.
Reign succeeded reign, and still the good habit of thrashing the watch
was kept up. Besides, there were battles-royal galore between the
students and the troops of the king.
The students made themselves jugglers, fakirs, and buffoons on the
Pont-Neuf, then a favourite, shop-lined promenade. They sacked
cook-shops and taverns, and levied tribute from belated pedestrians. The
lawless exploits of François Villon, singer of villanelles to
Guillemette, the _tapissière_, and Jehanneton, the _chaperonnière_, in
the reigns of Charles VII. and Louis XI., have become legendary.
That other great François (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and
turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.
During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and
mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of
the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial
humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into the
_Fronde_,[65] risking their lives on “the Day of the Barricades” and
exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign
minister, Mazarin, in lampoons called _Mazarinades_.
The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared
in the Encyclopedists’ published works, captivated many professors of
the university,[66] and made a direct and profound impression on the
students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the
cafés and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that
fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of
rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had
their rendezvous. At the _Café Procope_,—transformed, alas! into a
vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,—Hébert presided over a club
which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas,
and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d’Eglantine; and the
Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do
full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter
cafés from 1780 to Napoleon’s establishment of himself in power.
Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians,
the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not
the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. “The new
Sorbonne,” says Vacherot, “far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement
which was to culminate in the revolution of July, participated in it
actively, lending it the prestige of its most _spirituel_, its most
serious, and its most eloquent teaching.”
It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the
vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette in _Les Misérables_, who were
responsible for the insurrection of 1830.
It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism
was struggling to supplant Classicism, that the hottest passions were
kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated,
even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of
Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: the _Quartier_ resembled a fancy-dress
ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had
in other times for their political and religious creeds.
The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by
De Banville: “Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction,
coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts of original and fancy
costumes, capped with Basque _bérets_ and felts _à la_ Rubens, they went
up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into space, alone, or in pairs,
or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at
the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,—a custom which, as
you know, dates from the twelfth century.”
Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurélien
Scholl writes: “The young men of the schools thought solely of fêtes and
of fun. The _Quartier_ resembled strangely the _Bohème_ of Mürger,—_la
noce_, nothing but _la noce_. The historiographer of this epoch finds
only farces to narrate, and such farces!”
And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of
1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were
serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a
leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a “reawakening of
the schools,” founded a journal, _La Lanterne du Quartier Latin_, as a
means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an
active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of
the government of Louis Philippe.
They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising
_coup d’état_ of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained
relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready
to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation
sweeps over the length and breadth of the _Quartier_. The students
invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café,
_crèmerie_ after _crèmerie_. They descend without hesitation into the
street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their
heroism with their lives.”
The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the
authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude,
which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was
generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student
type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly
submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta,
Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a
little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic,
were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865
this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by
_Les Propos de Labienus_, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.
It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter
rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as
well as that of 1789, was fermented.
In 1866, at the _Café de la Renaissance Hellénique_, a revolutionary
club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was
barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and
a _rentier_,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against
the production of Augier’s _La Contagion_ at the _Odéon_. Most, if not
all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated
with a club of older men meeting at the _Café Serpente_, saw the inside
of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.
“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in his _Cafés
Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris_, “had a special
physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy,
uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got
together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at
billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and
through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the
voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as
they met on the green cushions. _Etudiantes_ accompanied the
students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and
occupied themselves with politics.”
The imperial police had a special fondness for the Renaissance, and this
café shared with the _Brasserie de St. Sévérin_, after the Commune was
set up, the distinction of being used as a headquarters by the Communard
officials.
The Procope, also affected by police spies, was frequented by Spuller,
Ferry, Floquet, Vermorel, and Gambetta, who preserved their liberty on
more than one occasion by utilising the back door, which had rendered a
similar service to Danton in another century.
The _Café Voltaire_ harboured, among others, Gambetta and Vallès, the
_Café de Buci_ Vallès and Delescluze, and the _Brasserie Audler_ and the
_Restaurant Laveur_ Courbet and his unconventional intimates.
To summarise: from the time of Abélard—the Abélard who was sustained
and inspired by the thought of the flaming lips of Héloïse pressed
against the convent grating—to and through the Commune, the _Pays
Latin_ was characterised by a revolutionary spirit which was composed of
three seemingly independent, if not mutually antagonistic, but, in
reality, complementary and vitally interrelated traits,—love of
laughter, love of liberty, and love of love.
The different persons of this emancipating trinity were equally potent
impellers to Quixotic thought and action; and no one of the three could
have long survived—such is the French temperament in or out of the
_Quartier_—without both of the others. The Gallic imagination and
conscience are dependent on good cheer and affection; they cease to
operate if a fellow may not unbend in buffoonery with the boys and may
not adore a woman. And, without conscience and imagination, is no
revolution.
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME FROM PONT D’AUSTERLITZ]
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_“Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man_
* * * * * * * * *
_Ever the grappled mystery of all Earth’s ages old or new;_
* * * * * * * * *
_Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.”_
WALT WHITMAN.
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