PARIS OF THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS
It was the 25th of June, 1815, when Napoleon left Paris for the last
time. On July 7 the allies entered the city after some unimportant
skirmishing on the outskirts, and on the next day Louis XVIII again took
up his residence in the Tuileries. The Second Restoration of the
Bourbons had come to pass.
Louis found himself received with even less enthusiasm than on his first
appearance, and his people loved him less and less during the nine years
of his reign. He confirmed his earlier charter establishing personal and
religious freedom and equality before the law and the freedom of the
press. He fell more and more, however, under the influence of the
conservative element, with the result that he permitted a savage
persecution of the Bonapartists, let education come under sectarian
control, and imposed on the laboring classes a narrow ecclesiasticism
which aroused their ire. When he was forced by Russia, Austria and
Prussia to fight in support of the tyrannical king of Spain, Ferdinand
VII, against a democratic movement, he placed the Bourbons of the
Restoration on record as sympathetic with autocracy.
Paris was in no peaceful state. There were many of Napoleon’s old
soldiers in town who were constantly quarreling with the monarchists in
restaurants and theaters. An assassin killed the Duke of Berry, the son
of Louis’ brother who succeeded him as Charles X. The execution for
political conspiracy of four young men known as the “four sergeants of
La Rochelle” made a great stir among the lower classes of the city,
always an inflammable element.
The town was forced, also, to pay her share of the war indemnity and of
the support of the garrisons with which the allies saddled the frontier
and the chief cities. One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a day was
the sum which Paris expended in hospitality toward her very unwelcome
guests. Needless to say there was not much ready money for improving the
city.
One reverent monument, the Chapelle Expiatoire, the king did begin to
the memory of his brother. The bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
had been buried in the graveyard behind the Madeleine. Their remains
were removed to Saint Denis in 1815, but the small domed chapel, hemmed
in to-day by busy Paris streets, rises in remembrance of them and
sanctifies the one great grave before it in which lie the bodies of two
thousand unrecorded victims of the Revolution, while the barrier on
right and left is formed by the tombs of the seven hundred Swiss guards
slain in defense of their sovereigns when the mob stormed the Tuileries
on the tenth of August, 1792.
The renewed religious feeling introduced by the royalists expressed
itself in the erection of two churches, Saint Vincent-de-Paul and Our
Lady of Loretto, both in the style of Latin basilicas, though Saint
Vincent’s is made majestic by two square towers not unlike those on
Saint Sulpice. The approach to Saint Vincent’s is by two semicircular
inclined planes, divided by a flight of steps--a handsome entrance.
There are but few at all like it in all Paris. More interesting than the
architecture of these churches is their position, on the north and just
within the “exterior boulevards” which mark Louis XVI’s wall. Population
must have increased heavily in this district to call for two churches of
large size and so near together. Many of the fifty-five new streets laid
out in this reign must have been in this section.
An engraving of 1822 shows that the Champs Élysées had become a field
for the performances of mountebanks, jugglers, rope-walkers,
stilt-walkers, and wandering musicians.
Louis died unlamented. He had been fat when first he entered the
Tuileries; his manner of life was not one calculated to reduce adipose
tissue. His subjects joked about his habits by punning upon his name,
calling Louis _Dixhuit_ (Louis XVIII) _Louis des Huitres_ (Oyster
Louis). He was the last king to die in Paris or even in France, and the
last to be buried with his kind in Saint Denis.
That Charles X, Louis’ brother, was prepared to follow that royal custom
when the time came seems proven by his immediate return to the
traditions of his ancestors. He was consecrated and crowned in the
cathedral at Rheims which had witnessed the coronation of Clovis and
that of every French king since Philip Augustus in the twelfth century.
Like the Grand Monarque he “touched for the king’s evil,” believed in
the divine right of kings, and thought himself allwise in the conduct of
government and his people all-foolish. He recalled the Jesuits whom
Louis XV had banished and mulcted the masses to make restitution to the
royalists whose property had been confiscated when they fled from
Revolutionary France.
Paris forgot that she had loved him in his gay and spendthrift youth,
forgot the passing amusement of his coronation festivities in the Place
du Carrousel, forgot that his armies were winning some successes along
the Mediterranean, forgot everything but hatred when he outraged her
confidence by disbanding the National Guard, on whose loyalty and
prudence the whole city relied.
When he tried to force through the legislature a bill to muzzle the
press, to censor all other publications and to forbid freedom of speech
in the universities, that body flatly refused to follow his
instructions. So determined was Charles to have his own way that this
rebuff and the victories of the liberals in the election of 1830 taught
him no lesson, and on July 26 of that year he issued a proclamation
which brought about a second Revolution. He declared the new liberal
legislature dissolved and summoned another to be chosen by the votes of
property-holders only. He appointed a Council of State from his own
sympathizers, and he abolished the freedom of the press. Thiers’ paper,
the _National_, and the _Courrier_ issued a prompt protest against these
tyrannical Ordinances, and were as promptly suppressed. Crowds gathered
before the newspaper offices where Thiers showed the understanding and
the grasp of the situation which later made him prime minister under
Louis Philippe and first president of the Third Republic.
It was not only the excitable classes--the right bank artisans and the
left bank students--always ready for a fight, who engaged in this
attempt to overthrow the king; the whole city took part, either by
fighting or by taking into their houses fugitives hard pressed by the
royal troops. The city was heavily garrisoned and the citizens naturally
were at a disadvantage against well-trained, well-equipped regulars.
They fought, however, with the ingenuity and the joyousness which always
has marked the Parisian when he seized such opportunities. The narrowest
streets in the old sections--just north of the City Hall around the
church of Saint Merri, near the markets, and on the Cité--were
barricaded and served for three days as a bloody battleground. On the
twenty-eighth the bell on the City Hall rang out its summons and the
republican tricolor side by side with the black flag of death told the
crowd better than words for what they were to contend. Until the
afternoon there was no fiercer struggle than here and on the near-by
bridge to the Cité, where a youth, planting the tricolor on the top of
the middle arch, was shot, crying as he fell, “My name is Arcole! Avenge
my death!” At least his death is remembered, for the bridge still bears
his name, Arcole.
Encouraged by their successes of the day, the people on the next morning
marched to the Louvre where they fought and fell and were buried by
hundreds beneath Perrault’s colonnade. They poured through the Tuileries
as in the days of the Revolution, and they carried the throne from the
Throne Room to the Place de la Bastille where they burned it as a symbol
of tyranny. By way of expressing their feeling for the dignitaries of
the church they sacked the archbishop’s palace beside Notre Dame on
whose towers the tricolor floated. When night fell twenty-four hours
later at least five thousand Parisians had fallen in what they called,
nevertheless, the Three ‘Glorious’ Days of July. Paris and Paris alone
had achieved a revolution for all France.
To commemorate the dead the July Column, Liberty crowned, was raised on
the site of the Bastille, and beneath it in two huge vaults lie scores
upon scores of the victims of the overthrow.
The success of the revolution was a hint which even Charles could
understand. He had been at Saint Cloud during the outbreak. He never
went back to Paris. After his abdication he went to England and died in
Austria six years later.
The political revolution was not the only sudden change of the year
1830. On the 25th of February occurred the “Battle of Hernani” when
Victor Hugo’s famous play in which he embodied the principles of the new
“romantic” school of writing, had its first performance. The classicists
rose with howls and hisses at the very first line, in which was an
infringement of classical rules, and the evening passed tempestuously,
even with an interchange of blows. The piece was allowed other hearings,
however, and at last the novelty became no longer a novelty but the
fashion.
For all her desire for a republican form of government, France, during
the great Revolution, had not been so fortunate in her leaders that she
was prepared now to elevate an ordinary citizen to the headship, the
more as there was no man of especial distinction with the exception of
the too-aged Lafayette. It was he who, in an interview with Louis
Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the royal house, expressed
the popular wish for “a throne surrounded by republican institutions.”
Louis Philippe, who was descended from a younger brother of Louis
XIV,[6] had served in the Revolutionary army, but had become entangled
in a conspiracy which made it prudent for him to join his royalist
friends in England. The Restoration (1814) permitted his return and he
had long lived the life of a quiet _bourgeois_ dwelling in a Paris
suburb, and educating his children in the public schools. He was
generally liked and it needed but small artificial stimulation to start
a boom for his candidacy. On the night of the 30th of July he walked in
from Neuilly and went to the Palais Royal. Three days later Lafayette
presented him to the still armed and still murmuring crowds before the
City Hall, and on the ninth of August the Chamber of Deputies declared
him king not “of France” but “of the French” to emphasize in his title
his summons from the people.
In England during this part of the nineteenth century there was much
popular upheaval over the suffrage and the revolution of industry by the
introduction of machinery. France was equally disturbed, but over
political problems. Louis Philippe apparently had been the choice of the
people, he wore the tricolor and sang the “Marseillaise” beating
time for the crowd to follow, and the provisions of his government
were liberal. Yet he received cordial support only from the
Constitutionalists. He was opposed by the Bonapartists, by the
Legitimists, who wanted a representative of the Bourbons, and by the
Republicans who urged a government like America’s. To the latter
belonged the Paris rabble and they never let pass an opportunity to stir
up trouble for the king. Only a year after his accession when the
Legitimists were holding a service in memory of the Duke of Berry in the
church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois the mob entered the building and
seized the communion plate, the
[Illustration: THE BOURSE.
See page 331.]
[Illustration: CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE.
See page 331.]
crucifix and the priests’ vestments which they threw into the river as
they crossed the bridge to the Cité where they first sacked and then
destroyed the archbishop’s palace.[7] Against this demonstration
good-hearted Louis turned the firemen’s hose instead of the soldier’s
bayonets.
This riot was but one of many which marked the first ten years of Louis
Philippe’s reign. That of the fifth and sixth of June, 1832, is well
known because Victor Hugo described it in “Les Misérables.” The king’s
life was attempted more than once, and it could have been small comfort
to him to feel that his assassination was not undertaken for personal
reasons but because he represented a hated party. It is not to be
wondered at that the “Citizen King” ceased to beat time while the crowd
sang the “Marseillaise,” and that he told an English friend who urged
him to save his voice in the open air, “Don’t be concerned. It’s a long
time since I did more than move my lips.”
Hated by the Republican rabble the king was no less shunned by his own
class, the nobility of the left bank _faubourg_ Saint Germain. They were
so unwilling to frequent a court made up of worthy but uninteresting
_bourgeois_ that Louis is said to have remarked that it was easier for
him to get his English friends from across the Channel to dine with him
at the Tuileries than his French friends from across the Seine.
Added to the other troubles of this time was the cholera which swept
Europe in 1832. Paris looked on it as something of a joke when it first
broke out, several maskers at a ball impersonating Cholera in grisly
ugliness. When some fifty dancers were attacked by the disease during
the evening the seriousness of the situation began to be understood.
Before it left the city twenty thousand people had died.
Such fearful mortality was enough to give matter for thought to any
ruler, and enough was known then about sanitation to cause Louis to set
to work clearing out some of the countless narrow streets with their
unwholesome houses with which the older parts of the city still
abounded, though fifty-five new streets, many of them erasing former
ones, had been opened during the Restoration. The Place du Trône, now
the Place de la Nation was completed. The handsome columns, erected just
before the Revolution, mark the city’s eastern boundary. They are
surmounted by statues of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis.
Before Louis Philippe’s reign ended there were some eleven hundred
streets within the city limits, and the extension and improvement of the
lighting system increased their safety, while they were made beautiful
by many fountains. Of these the best known is that in memory of Molière.
It is erected opposite the house in which the great dramatist died, and
was made possible by one of those public subscriptions by which the
French more than any other people express the gratitude of the masses
for a genius which has given them pleasure.
The water service for domestic use was poor, water-carriers bringing
water in barrels to subscribers and selling it in the street.
The present fountains of the Place de la Concorde are also of this
period, and the obelisk of Luxor which the pacha of Egypt presented to
the king of France, was brought from its place before the great temple
of ancient Thebes where it had stood for three thousand years to make
the central ornament of the same huge square.
The present fortifications of Paris date from this reign. Thiers built
them during his ministry and some thirty-odd years later he had the
satisfaction of knowing that it was through his efforts that the city
was able to hold out for nearly five months against the Prussians.
Of new works for the embellishment of the city Louis Philippe began but
few. The one church of interest was twin-spired Sainte Clotilde, an
accurate reproduction of thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic.
Though initiating little the king finished several important
undertakings of his predecessors. One of these was the Palais des Beaux
Arts where many American students now study art; another was the church
of the Madeleine, and still another the Arc de Triumphe de l’Étoile.
Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle were carefully restored to their
original beauty by the skillful architect and antiquarian,
Viollet-le-Duc, and the Palais de Justice was enlarged. A further
example of the preservation of old buildings for the benefit of the
people was the conversion of the Hôtel Cluny into a museum of medieval
domestic life, and of the adjoining Thermes of the Roman palace into a
repository of Gallo-Roman relics.
With bridges and railroads increasing the public comfort, a vigorous
body of writers adding to the literary reputation of Paris, and the
discovery of Daguerre introducing to the world photography whose
developments have revolutionized many occupations and made possible many
others, the eighteen years of Louis’ reign was a rich period. It was
increasingly turbulent, however, as each riot provoked severe rulings in
an effort to prevent further trouble, and each access of severity
enraged the mob more than ever. The proletariat had no vote, and the
suffrage advances across the Channel served only to irritate and make
the French poor feel poorer than ever both in property and in political
rights.
The crisis came (in 1848) as often happens, over a comparatively small
matter. The king forbade a banquet of his opponents, and the mob seized
upon the refusal as an excuse to fight. The National Guards should have
served as a buffer between the royal garrison and the rabble, but the
rabble stole their guns and the worthy _bourgeois_ of the Guards were of
small service to anybody. There was fighting here and there all over the
city, but chiefly in the neighborhood of the boulevard of the Temple.
There seems to have been no especial reason in these skirmishes; the
coatless fought the wearers of coats without stopping to inquire their
political belief. Huge crowds collected along the rue de Rivoli and
along the quay, hemming into the Place du Carrousel another throng
packed almost to inmovability. His wife and daughters watching him
anxiously from the windows, the king, now a man of seventy-five, came
from the Tuileries, mounted a horse and moved slowly through the press.
Only an occasional voice cried “Long live the king,” and he soon
returned to the palace. In a few minutes word flew from mouth to mouth
that Louis Philippe had abdicated. It was true. An hour and a half later
he left the Tuileries never to return.
With him went his family, leaving behind them all their personal
belongings. At once a horde of roughs took possession of the palace,
slashing pictures, breaking furniture, breakfasting in the royal dining
room, and sending out to buy a better quality than the king’s coffee
which they drank in exquisite Sèvres cups taken out through the broken
glass of a locked cabinet. The royal cellars were emptied promptly. The
princesses’ dresses adorned the sweethearts of the most persistent
fighters. Again, as in 1830, the throne went up in smoke after every
rascal in town had had a chance to test the softness of its cushions.
At the Hôtel de Ville the second Republic was proclaimed, the poet
Lamartine at its head for the money there was in it, it is said. A minor
actor who was in a general’s costume at a dress rehearsal and who put
his head out of a theater window to see the cause of the uproar in the
street, was haled forth, set upon a horse, escorted to the City Hall and
introduced to the nondescript and self-appointed members of the
provisional government there gathered as “governor of the Hôtel de
Ville.” They accepted him without question and Lamartine confirmed him
in his office the next day!
A republican government pure and simple, however, did not satisfy a
large part of the citizens of Paris who were extreme socialists and
demanded that the state provide work for everybody. So insistent were
they that Lamartine established National Workshops and the actual
development of the theory proved more convincing than any possible
argument. Thousands of people were soon enrolled. Many proved idlers,
many were ignorant, much of the output was poor; yet, such as it was, it
seriously disorganized trade and so flooded the market that prices went
down and wages were forced to follow. The men who received $1.00 a day
at first were reduced in a few months to $1.20 a week, while the
government was saddled with a debt of $3,000,000 and with hundreds of
citizens less than ever able to take care of themselves after this
period of what was practically living on charity. The solid citizens
demanded an immediate change, the government insisted that a larger
number of the beneficiaries should either seek other work or go into the
army. Again Paris was a battlefield during three days when many of the
streets were literally ankle-deep in blood. The Parisians could build a
barricade right dexterously by this time and _bourgeois_ and rabble
killed each other heartily in the most pitiable sort of civil war.
Archbishop Affre, who went in person to the faubourg Saint Antoine to
use his influence with the fighters, was mortally wounded. His torn and
blood-stained garments are preserved in the sacristy of Notre Dame.
Early in July an open-air mass in memory of the victims was solemnized
at the foot of the obelisk, but it did not mean that peace was
established, and for a few months more the country quarreled on under
the provisional government until Louis Napoleon was elected president of
the Republic in December, 1848.