THE OTHER CRIMES
I
SINISTER QUESTIONS
What was the number of the dead?
Louis Bonaparte, conscious of the advent of history, and imagining that
a Charles IX can extenuate a Saint Bartholomew, has published as a
_pièce justificative_, a so-called "official list of the deceased
persons." In this "Alphabetical List,"[1] you will meet with such items
as these: "Adde, bookseller, 17 Boulevard Poissonnière, killed in his
house; Boursier, a child seven years and a-half old, killed on Rue
Tiquetonne; Belval, cabinetmaker, 10 Rue de la Lune, killed in his
house; Coquard, house-holder at Vire (Calvados), killed on Boulevard
Montmartre; Debaecque, tradesman, 45 Rue de Sentier, killed in his
house; De Couvercelle, florist, 257 Rue Saint-Denis, killed in his
house; Labilte, jeweller, 63 Boulevard Saint-Martin, killed in his
house; Monpelas, perfumer, 181 Rue Saint-Martin, killed in his house;
Demoiselle Grellier, housekeeper, 209 Faubourg Saint-Martin, killed on
Boulevard Montmartre; Femme Guillard, cashier, 77 Faubourg Saint-Denis,
killed on Boulevard Saint-Denis; Femme Garnier, confidential servant, 6
Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, killed on Boulevard Saint-Denis; Femme
Ledaust, housekeeper, 76 Passage du Caire, at the Morgue; Françoise
Noël, waistcoat-maker, 20 Rue des Fossés-Montmartre, died at La
Charité; Count Poninski, annuitant, 32 Rue de la Paix, killed on
Boulevard Montmartre; Femme Raboisson, dressmaker, died at the National
Hospital; Femme Vidal, 97 Rue de Temple, died at the Hôtel-Dieu; Femme
Séguin, embroideress, 240 Rue Saint-Martin, died at the hospital
Beaujon; Demoiselle Seniac, shop-woman, 196 Rue du Temple, died at the
hospital Beaujon; Thirion de Montauban, house-holder, 10 Rue de Lancry,
killed at his own door," etc., etc.
[1] The functionary who drew up this list, is, we know, a learned
and accurate statistician; he prepared this statement honestly,
we have no doubt. He has stated what was shown to him, and what
he was permitted to see, but what was concealed from him was
beyond his reach. The field for conjecture is left open.
To abridge: Louis Bonaparte confesses, in this state paper, _one
hundred and ninety-one_ murders.
This document being cited for what it is worth, the question is, what
is the true total? What is the exact figure of his victims? How many
corpses bestrew the _coup d'état_ of December? Who can tell? Who
knows? Who will ever know? As we have already seen, one witness
deposed: "I counted in that place thirty-three bodies;" another, at a
different part of the boulevard, said: "We counted eighteen bodies
within a space of twenty or twenty-five yards." A third person,
speaking of another spot, said: "There were upwards of sixty bodies
within a distance of sixty yards." The writer so long threatened with
death told ourselves: "I saw with my eyes upwards of eight hundred dead
bodies lying along the boulevard."
Now think, compute how many it requires of battered brains, of breasts
shattered by grape-shot, to cover with blood, "literally," half a mile
of boulevards. Go you, as did the wives, the sisters, the daughters,
the wailing mothers, take a torch, plunge into the dark night, feel on
the ground, feel along the pavement and the walls, pick up the corpses,
interrogate the phantoms, and reckon if you can.
The number of his victims! One is reduced to conjecture. This question
must be solved by history. As for us, it is a question which we pledge
ourselves to examine and explore hereafter.
On the first day, Louis Bonaparte made a display of his slaughter. We
have told the reason why. It suited his purpose. After that, having
derived from the deed all the required advantage, he concealed it.
Orders were given to the Élyséan journals to be silent, to Magnan to
omit, to the historiographers to know nothing. They buried the slain
after midnight, without lights, without processions, without prayers,
without priests, by stealth. Families were enjoined not to weep too
loud.
The massacre along the boulevards was only a part; it was followed by
the summary fusillades, the secret executions.
One of the witnesses whom we have questioned asked a major in the
gendarmerie mobile, who had distinguished himself in these butcheries:
"Come, tell us the figure? Was it four hundred?" The man shrugged his
shoulders. "Was it six hundred?" The man shook his head. "Eight
hundred?"--"Say twelve hundred," said the officer, "and you will fall
short."
At this present hour nobody knows exactly what the 2nd of December was,
what it did, what it dared, whom it killed, whom it buried. The very
morning of the crime, the newspaper offices were placed under seal,
free speech was suppressed, by Louis Bonaparte, that man of silence and
darkness. On the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th, and ever since, Truth
has been taken by the throat and strangled just as she was about to
speak. She could not even utter a cry. He has deepened the gloom about
his ambuscade and he has succeeded in part. Let history strive as she
may, the 2nd of December will, perhaps, continue involved, for a long
time to come, in a sort of ghastly twilight. It is a crime made up of
audacity and darkness; here it shows itself impudently in broad
daylight; there it skulks away into the mist. Hideous and double-faced
effrontery, which conceals no one knows what monstrosities beneath its
cloak.
But these glimpses are sufficient. There is a certain side of the 2nd
of December where all is dark; but, within that darkness, graves are
visible.
Beneath this great enormity a host of crimes may be vaguely
distinguished. Such is the behest of Providence; there are compulsions
linked to treason. You are a perjurer! You violate your oaths! You
trample upon law and justice! Well! take a rope, for you will be
compelled to strangle; take a dagger, for you will be compelled to
stab; take a club, for you will be compelled to strike; take shadow and
darkness, for you will be compelled to hide yourself. One crime brings
on another; there is a logical consistency in horror. There is no
halting, no middle course. Go on! do this first; good! Now do that,
then this again; and so for ever! The law is like the veil of the
Temple: once rent, it is rent from top to bottom.
Yes, we say it again, in what has been called "the act of the 2nd of
December," one meets with crime at every depth. Perjury floats on the
surface, murder lies at the bottom. Partial homicides, wholesale
butcheries, shooting in open day, fusillades by night; a steam of blood
rises from every part of the _coup d'état_.
Search in the common grave of the churchyards, search beneath the
street pavement, beneath the sloping banks of the Champ-de-Mars,
beneath the trees of the public gardens, in the bed of the Seine!
But few revelations. That is easily understood. Bonaparte has the
satanic art of binding to himself a crowd of miserable officials by I
know not what terrible universal complicity. The stamped papers of the
magistrates, the desks of the registrars, the cartridge-boxes of the
soldiers, the prayers of the priests, are his accomplices. He has cast
his crime about him like a network, and prefects, mayors, judges,
officers, and soldiers are caught therein. Complicity descends from
the general to the corporal, and ascends from the corporal to the
president. The _sergent-de-ville_ and the minister feel that they are
equally implicated. The gendarme whose pistol has pressed against the
ear of some unfortunate, and whose uniform has been splashed with human
brains, feels as guilty as his colonel. Above, cruel men gave orders
which savage men executed below. Savagery keeps the secret of cruelty.
Hence this hideous silence.
There is even emulation and rivalry between this savagery and this
atrocity; what escaped the one was seized upon by the other. The future
will refuse to credit these prodigious excesses. A workman was crossing
the Pont au Change, some gendarmes mobiles stopped him; they smelt his
hands. "He smells of powder," said a gendarme. They shot the workman;
his body was pierced by four balls. "Throw him into the stream," cries
the sergeant. The gendarmes take him by the neck and heels and hurl him
over the bridge. Shot, and then drowned, the man floats down the river.
However, he was not dead; the icy river revived him; but he was unable
to move, his blood flowed into the water from four holes; but being
held up by his blouse, he struck against an arch of one of the bridges.
There some lightermen discovered him, picked him up, and carried him to
the hospital; he recovered; he left the place. The next day he was
arrested, and brought before a court-martial. Rejected by death, he was
reclaimed by Louis Bonaparte. This man is now at Lambessa.
What the Champ-de-Mars secretly witnessed,--the terrible night
tragedies which dismayed and dishonoured it,--history cannot yet
reveal. Thanks to Louis Bonaparte, this revered field of the Federation
may in future be called Aceldama. One of the unhappy soldiers whom the
man of the 2nd of December transformed into executioners, relates with
horror, and beneath his breath, that in a single night the number of
people shot was not less than eight hundred.
Louis Bonaparte hastened to dig a grave and threw in his crime. A few
shovelfuls of earth, a sprinkling of holy water by a priest, and all
was said. And now, the imperial carnival dances above that grave.
Is this all? Can it be that this is the end? Does God allow and
acquiesce in such burials? Believe it not. Some day, beneath the feet
of Bonaparte, between the marble pavements of the Élysée or the
Tuileries, this grave will suddenly re-open, and those bodies will come
forth, one after another, each with its wound, the young man stricken
to the heart, the old man shaking his aged head pierced by a ball, the
mother put to the sword, with her infant killed in her arms,--all of
them upstanding, pallid, terrible to see, and with bleeding eyes fixed
on their assassin.
Awaiting that day, and even now, history has begun to try you, Louis
Bonaparte. History rejects your official list of the dead, and your
_pièces justificatives_.
History asserts that they lie, and that you lie.
You have tied a bandage over the eyes of France and put a gag in her
mouth. Wherefore?
Was it to do righteous deeds? No, but crimes. The evil-doer is afraid
of the light.
You shot people by night, on the Champ-de-Mars, at the Prefecture, at
the Palais de Justice, on the squares, on the quays, everywhere.
You say you did not.
I say you did.
In dealing with you we have a right to surmise, to suspect, and to
accuse.
What you deny, we have a right to believe; your denial is equivalent to
affirmation.
Your 2nd of December is pointed at by the public conscience. Nobody
thinks of it without inwardly shuddering. What did you do in those dark
hours?
Your days are ghastly, your nights are suspicious. Ah! man of darkness
that you are!
* * * *
Let us return to the butchery on the boulevard, to the words, "Let my
orders be executed!" and to the day of the 4th.
Louis Bonaparte, during the evening of that day, must have compared
himself to Charles X, who refused to burn Paris, and to Louis Philippe,
who would not shed the people's blood, and he must have done himself
the justice to admit that he is a great politician. A few days later,
General T----, formerly in the service of one of the sons of King Louis
Philippe, came to the Élysée. As soon as Louis Bonaparte caught sight
of him, the comparison we have just pointed out suggesting itself to
him, he cried out to the general, exultingly: "Well?"
Louis Bonaparte is in very truth the man who said to one of his former
ministers, who was our own informant: "_Had I been Charles X, and had
I, during the days of July, caught Laffitte, Benjamin Constant, and
Lafayette, I would have had them shot like dogs._"
On the 4th of December, Louis Bonaparte would have been dragged that
very night from the Élysée, and the law would have prevailed, had he
been one of those men who recoil before a massacre. Fortunately for
him, he had no such scruples. What signified a few dead bodies, more or
less? Nonsense! kill! kill at random! cut them down! shoot, cannonade,
crush, smash! Strike terror for me into this hateful city of Paris! The
_coup d'état_ was in a bad way; this great homicide restored its
spirit. Louis Bonaparte had nearly ruined himself by his felony; he
saved himself by his ferocity. Had he been only a Faliero, it was all
over with him; fortunately he was a Cæsar Borgia. He plunged with his
crime into a river of gore; one less culpable would have sunk, he swam
across. Such was his success as it is called. He is now on the other
bank, striving to wipe himself dry, dripping with the blood which he
mistakes for the purple, and demanding the Empire.
II
SEQUEL OF CRIMES
Such a man is this malefactor!
And shall we not applaud thee, O Truth! when, in the eyes of Europe and
of the world, before the people, in the face of God, while he appealed
to honour, the sanctity of an oath, faith, religion, the sacredness of
human life, the law, the generosity of all hearts, wives, sisters,
mothers, civilization, liberty, the republic, France; before his
valets, his Senate and his Council of State; before his generals, his
priests, and his police agents,--thou who representest the people (for
the people is truth); thou who representest intelligence (for
intelligence is enlightenment); thou who representest humanity (for
humanity is reason); in the name of the enthralled people, in the name
of exiled intelligence, in the name of outraged humanity, before this
mass of slaves who cannot, or dare not, speak, thou dost scourge this
brigand of order.
Let some one else choose milder words. I am outspoken and harsh; I have
no pity for this pitiless man, and I glory in it.
Let us proceed.
To what we have just related add all the other crimes, to which we
shall have occasion to return more than once, and the history of which,
God granting us life, we shall relate in detail. Add the numberless
incarcerations attended with circumstances of ferocity, the overgorged
prisons,[1] the sequestration of property[2] of the proscribed in ten
departments, notably in La Nièvre, in L'Allier, and in Les
Basses-Alpes; add the confiscation of the Orleans property, with the
slice allotted to the clergy. Schinderhannes never forgot to share with
the curé. Add the mixed commissions, and the commission of clemency, so
called;[3] the councils of war combined with the examining magistrates,
and, multiplying the instances of abomination, the batches of exiles,
the expulsion of a part of France out of France (the department of the
Herault, alone, furnishing 3,200 persons, either banished or
transported); add the appalling proscription,--comparable to the most
tragic devastations in history,--which for an impulse, for an opinion,
for an honest dissent from the government, for the mere word of a
freeman, even when uttered before the 2nd of December, takes, seizes,
apprehends, tears away the labourer from the field, the working-man
from his trade, the house-holder from his house, the physician from his
patients, the notary from his office, the counsellor from his clients,
the judge from his court, the husband from his wife, the brother from
his brother, the father from his children, the child from his parents,
and marks its ill-omened cross on every head, from the highest to the
lowest. Nobody escapes. A man in tatters, wearing a long beard, came
into my room one morning at Brussels. "I have just arrived," said he;
"I have travelled on foot, and have had nothing to eat for two days."
Some bread was given him. He ate. "Where do you come from?"--"From
Limoges."--"Why are you here?"--"I don't know; they drove me away from
my home."--"What are you?"--"A maker of wooden shoes."
[1] The _Bulletin des Lois_ publishes the following decree,
dated the 27th of March:--
"Considering the law of May 10, 1838, which classes the
ordinary expenses of the provincial prisons with those to be
included in the departmental budgets:
"Whereas this is not the nature of the expenses occasioned by
the arrests resulting from the events of December;
"Whereas the facts which have caused these arrests to
multiply are connected with _a plot against the safety of
the state_, the suppression of which concerned society at
large, and therefore it is just to discharge out of the
public funds the excess of expenditure resulting from the
_extraordinary increase_ in the number of prisoners;
"It is decreed that:--
"An extraordinary credit of 250,000f. be opened, at the
Ministry of the Interior, on the revenue of 1851, to be
applied to the liquidation of the expenses resulting from the
arrests consequent on the events of December."
[2] "Digne, January 5, 1852.
"The Colonel commanding the state of siege in the department
of the Basses-Alpes
"Decrees:--
"Within the course of ten days the property of the fugitives
from the law _will be sequestrated_, and administered by
the director of public lands in the Basses-Alpes, according
to civil and military laws, etc. FRIRION."
Ten similar decrees, emanating from the commanders of states of
siege, might be quoted. The first of the malefactors who
committed this crime of confiscating property, and who set the
example of arrests of this sort, is named Eynard. He is a
general. On December 18, he placed under sequestration the
property of a number of citizens of Moulins, "because," as he
cynically observed, "_the beginning of the insurrection leaves
no doubt_ as to the part they took _in the insurrection_, and in
the pillaging in the department of the Allier."
[3] The number of _convictions_ actually upheld (in most cases
the sentences were of transportation) was declared to be as
follows, at the date of the reports:--
By M. Canrobert 3,876
By M. Espinasse 3,625
By M. Quentin-Bauchard 1,634
-----
9,135
Add Africa; add Guiana; add the atrocities of Bertrand, of Canrobert,
of Espinasse, of Martimprey; the ship-loads of women sent off by
General Guyon; Representative Miot dragged from casemate to casemate;
hovels in which there are a hundred and fifty prisoners, beneath a
tropical sun, with promiscuity of sex, filth, vermin, and where all
these innocent patriots, all these honest people are perishing, far
from their dear ones, in fever, in misery, in horror, in despair,
wringing their hands. Add all these poor wretches handed over to
gendarmes, bound two by two, packed in the lower decks of the
_Magellan_, the _Canada_, the _Duguesclin_; cast among the convicts
of Lambessa and Cayenne, not knowing what there is against them, and
unable to guess what they have done. One of them, Alphonse Lambert, of
the Indre, torn from his death-bed; another, Patureau Francoeur, a
vine-dresser, transported, because in his village they wanted to make
him president of the republic; a third, Valette, a carpenter at
Châteauroux, transported for having, six months previous to the 2nd of
December, on the day of an execution, refused to erect the guillotine.
Add to these the man-hunting in the villages, the _battue_ of
Viroy in the mountains of Lure, Pellion's _battue_ in the woods of
Clamecy, with fifteen hundred men; order restored at Crest--out of two
thousand insurgents, three hundred slain; mobile columns everywhere.
Whoever stands up for the law, sabred and shot: at Marseilles, Charles
Sauvan exclaims, "Long live the Republic!" a grenadier of the 54th
fires at him; the ball enters his side, and comes out of his belly;
another, Vincent, of Bourges, is deputy-mayor of his commune: as a
magistrate he protests against the _coup d'état_; they track him
through the village, he flies, he is pursued, a cavalryman cuts off two
of his fingers with his sword, another cleaves his head, he falls; they
remove him to the fort at Ivry before dressing his wounds; he is an old
man of seventy-six.
Add facts like these: in the Cher, Representative Vignier is arrested.
Arrested for what? Because he is a representative, because he is
inviolable, because he is consecrated by the votes of the people.
Vignier is cast into prison. One day he is allowed to go out _for one
hour_ to attend to certain matters which imperatively demand his
presence. Before he went out two gendarmes, Pierre Guéret and one
Dubernelle, a brigadier, seized Vignier; the brigadier held his hands
against each other so that the palms touched, and bound his wrists
tightly with a chain; as the end of the chain hung down, the brigadier
forced it between Vignier's hands, over and over, at the risk of
fracturing his wrists by the pressure. The prisoner's hands turned blue
and swelled.--"You are putting me to the question," said Vignier
coolly.--"Hide your hands," sneered the gendarme, "if you're
ashamed."--"You hound," retorted Vignier, "you are the one of us two
that this chain dishonors."--In this wise Vignier passed through the
streets of Bourges where he had lived thirty years--between two
gendarmes, with his hands raised, exhibiting his chains. Representative
Vignier is seventy years old.
Add the summary fusillades in twenty departments; "All who resist,"
writes Saint-Arnaud, Minister of War, "are to be shot, in the name of
society defending itself."[4] "Six days have sufficed to _crush_ the
insurrection," states General Levaillant, who commanded the state of
siege in the Var. "I have made some good captures," writes Commandant
Viroy from Saint-Étienne; "I have shot, without stirring, eight
persons, and am now in pursuit of the leaders in the woods." At
Bordeaux, General Bourjoly enjoins the leaders of the mobile columns to
"have shot forthwith every person caught with arms in his hands." At
Forcalquier, it was better still; the proclamation declaring the state
of siege reads:--"The town of Forcalquier is in a state of siege. Those
citizens who _took no part_ in the day's events, and those who have
arms in their possession, are summoned to give them up on pain of being
shot." The mobile column of Pézenas arrives at Servian: a man tries to
escape from a house surrounded by soldiers; he is shot at and killed.
At Entrains, eighty prisoners are taken; one of them escapes by the
river, he is fired at, struck by a ball, and disappears under the
water; the rest are shot. To these execrable deeds, add these infamous
ones: at Brioude, in Haute-Loire, a man and woman thrown into prison
for having ploughed the field of one of the proscribed; at Loriol, in
the Drôme, Astier, a forest-keeper, condemned to twenty years' hard
labour, for having sheltered fugitives. Add too, and my pen shakes as I
write it, the punishment of death revived; the political guillotine
re-erected; shocking sentences; citizens condemned to death on the
scaffold by the judicial janissaries of the courts-martial: at Clamecy,
Milletot, Jouannin, Guillemot, Sabatier, and Four; at Lyon, Courty,
Romegal, Bressieux, Fauritz, Julien, Roustain, and Garan, deputy-mayor
of Cliouscat; at Montpellier, seventeen for the affair of Bédarieux,
Mercadier, Delpech, Denis, André, Barthez, Triadou, Pierre Carrière,
Galzy, Galas (called Le Vacher), Gardy, Jacques Pagès, Michel Hercule,
Mar, Vène, Frié, Malaterre, Beaumont, Pradal, the six last luckily
being out of the jurisdiction; and at Montpellier four more, Choumac,
Vidal, Cadelard and Pagès. What was the crime of these men? Their crime
is yours, if you are a good subject; it is mine, who writes these
lines; it is obedience to Article 110 of the Constitution; it is armed
resistance to Louis Bonaparte's crime; and the court "orders that the
execution shall take place in the usual way on one of the public
squares of Béziers," with respect to the last four, and, in the case of
the other seventeen, on one of the squares at Bédarieux. The _Moniteur_
announces it; it is true that the _Moniteur_ announces, at the same
time, that the service of the last ball at the Tuileries was performed
by three hundred maîtres d'hôtel, habited in the liveries rigorously
prescribed by the ceremonial of the old imperial palace.
[4] Read the odious despatch, copied verbatim from the
_Moniteur_:
"The armed insurrection has been totally suppressed in Paris
by vigorous measures. The same energy will produce the same
effect everywhere else.
"Bands of people who spread pillage, rapine, and fire, place
themselves outside of the law. With them one does not argue
or warn; one attacks and disperses them.
"All who resist must be SHOT, in the name of society
defending itself."
Unless a universal cry of horror should stop this man in time, all
these heads will fall.
Whilst we are writing, this is what has just occurred at Belley:--
A native of Bugez, near Belley, a working-man, named Charlet, had
warmly advocated, on the 10th of December, 1848, the election of Louis
Bonaparte. He had distributed circulars, supported, propagated, and
hawked them; the election was in his eyes a triumph; he hoped in
Louis-Napoleon; he took seriously the socialist writings of the
prisoner of Ham, and his "philanthropical" and "republican" programmes:
on the 10th of December there were many such honest dupes; they are now
the most indignant. When Louis Bonaparte was in power, when they saw
the man at work, these illusions vanished. Charlet, a man of
intelligence, was one of those whose republican probity was outraged,
and gradually, as Louis Bonaparte plunged deeper and deeper into
reactionary measures, Charlet shook himself free; thus did he pass from
the most confiding partisanship to the most open and zealous
opposition. Such is the history of many other noble hearts.
On the 2nd of December, Charlet did not hesitate. In the face of the
many crimes combined in the infamous deed of Louis Bonaparte, Charlet
felt the law stirring within him; he reflected that he ought to be the
more severe, because he was one of those whose trust had been most
betrayed. He clearly understood that there remained but one duty for
the citizen, a bounden duty, inseparable from the law,--to defend the
Republic and the Constitution, and to resist by every means the man
whom the Left, but still more his own crime, had outlawed. The refugees
from Switzerland passed the frontier in arms, crossed the Rhône, near
Anglefort, and entered the department of the Ain. Charlet joined their
ranks.
At Seyssel, the little troop fell in with the custom-house officers.
The latter, voluntary or misled accomplices of the _coup d'état_,
chose to resist their passage. A conflict ensued, one of the officers
was killed, and Charlet was made prisoner.
The _coup d'état_ brought Charlet before a court-martial. He was
charged with the death of the custom-house officer, which, after all,
was but an incident of war. At all events, Charlet was innocent of that
death; the officer was killed by a bullet, and Charlet had no weapon
but a sharpened file.
Charlet would not recognize as a lawful court the body of men who
pretended to sit in judgment on him. He said to them: "You are no
judges; where is the law? The law is on my side." He refused to answer
them.
Questioned on the subject of the officer's death, he could have cleared
up the whole matter by a single word; but to descend to an explanation
would, to a certain extent, have been a recognition of the tribunal. He
did not choose to recognize it, so he held his peace.
These men condemned him to die, "according to the usual mode of
criminal executions."
The sentence pronounced, he seemed to have been forgotten; days, weeks,
months elapsed. Everybody about the prison said to Charlet, "You are
safe."
On the 29th of June, at break of day, the town of Belley saw a mournful
sight. The scaffold had risen from the earth during the night, and
stood in the middle of the public square.
The people accosted one another, pale as death, and asked: "Have you
seen what there is in the square?"--"Yes."--"Whom is it for?"
It was for Charlet.
The sentence of death had been referred to M. Bonaparte, it had
slumbered a long time at the Élysée; there was other business to attend
to; but one fine morning, after a lapse of seven months, all the world
having forgotten the conflict at Seyssel, the slain custom-house
officer, and Charlet himself, M. Bonaparte, wanting most likely to
insert some event between the festival of the 10th of May and the
festival of the 15th of August, signed the warrant for the execution.
On the 29th of June, therefore, only a few days ago, Charlet was
removed from his prison. They told him he was about to die. He
continued calm. A man who has justice on his side does not fear death,
for he feels that there are two things within him: one, his body, which
may be put to death, the other, justice, whose hands are not bound, nor
does its head fall beneath the knife.
They wanted to make Charlet ride in a cart. "No," said he to the
gendarmes, "I will go on foot, I can walk, I am not afraid."
There was a great crowd along his route. Every one in the town knew him
and loved him; his friends sought his eye. Charlet, his arms fastened
behind his back, bowed his head right and left. "Adieu, Jacques! adieu,
Pierre!" said he, smiling. "Adieu, Charlet!" they answered, and all of
them wept. The gendarmerie and the infantry surrounded the scaffold. He
ascended it with slow and steady steps. When they saw him standing on
the scaffold, a shudder ran through the crowd; the women cried aloud,
the men clenched their fists.
While they were strapping him to the plank, he looked up at the knife,
saying: "When I reflect that I was once a Bonapartist!" Then, raising
his eyes to Heaven, he exclaimed, "Vive la République!"
The next moment his head fell.
It was a day of mourning at Belley and through all the villages of the
Ain. "How did he die?" people would ask.--"Bravely."--"God be praised!"
In this wise a man has been killed.
The mind succumbs and is lost in horror in presence of a deed so
damnable.
This crime being added to the rest complements and sets a sinister sort
of seal upon them.
It is more than the complement, it is the crowning act.
One feels that M. Bonaparte ought to be satisfied! To have shot down at
night, in the dark, in solitude, on the Champ-de-Mars, under the arches
of the bridges, behind a lonely wall, at random, haphazard, no matter
whom, unknown persons, shadows, the very number of whom none can tell;
to cause nameless persons to be slain by nameless persons; and to have
all this vanish in obscurity, in oblivion, is, in very truth, far from
gratifying to one's self-esteem; it looks like hiding one's self, and
in truth that is what it is; it is commonplace. Scrupulous men have the
right to say to you: "You know you are afraid; you would not dare to do
these things publicly; you shrink from your own acts." And, to a
certain extent, they seem to be right. To shoot down people by night is
a violation of every law, human and divine, but it lacks audacity. One
does not feel triumphant afterwards. Something better is possible.
Broad daylight, the public square, the judicial scaffold, the regular
apparatus of social vengeance--to hand the innocent over to these, to
put them to death in this manner, ah! that is different. I can
understand that. To commit a murder at high noon, in the heart of the
town, by means of one machine called court, or court-martial, and of
another machine slowly erected by a carpenter, adjusted, put together,
screwed and greased at pleasure; to say it shall be at such an hour;
then to display two baskets, and say: "This one is for the body, that
other for the head;" at the appointed time to bring the victim bound
with ropes, attended by a priest; to proceed calmly to the murder, to
order a clerk to prepare a report of it, to surround the murder victim
with gendarmes and naked swords, so that the people there may shudder,
and no longer know what they see, and wonder whether those men in
uniform are a brigade of gendarmerie or a band of robbers, and ask one
another, looking at the man who lets the knife fall, whether he is the
executioner or whether he is not rather an assassin! This is bold and
resolute, this is a parody of legal procedure, most audacious and
alluring, and worth being carried out. This is a noble and
far-spreading blow on the cheek of justice. Commend us to this!
To do this seven months after the struggle, in cold blood, to no
purpose, as an omission that one repairs, as a duty that one fulfills,
is awe-inspiring, it is complete; one has the appearance of acting
within one's rights, which perplexes the conscience and makes honest
men shudder.
A terrible juxtaposition, which comprehends the whole case. Here are
two men, a working-man and a prince. The prince commits a crime, he
enters the Tuileries; the working-man does his duty, he ascends the
scaffold. Who set up the working-man's scaffold? The prince!
Yes, this man who, had he been beaten in December, could have escaped
the death penalty only by the omnipotence of progress, and by an
enlargement, too liberal certainly, of the principle that human life is
sacred; this man, this Louis Bonaparte, this prince who carries the
practices of Poulmann and Soufflard into politics, he it is who
rebuilds the scaffold! Nor does he tremble! Nor does he turn pale! Nor
does he feel that it is a fatal ladder, that he is at liberty to
refrain from erecting it, but that, when once it is erected, he is not
at liberty to take it down, and that he who sets it up for another,
afterwards finds it for himself. It knows him again, and says to him,
"Thou didst place me here, and I have awaited thee."
No, this man does not reflect, he has longings, he has whims, and they
must be satisfied. They are the longings of a dictator. Unlimited power
would be tasteless without this seasoning. Go to,--cut off Charlet's
head, and the others. M. Bonaparte is Prince-President of the French
Republic; M. Bonaparte has sixteen millions a year, forty-four thousand
francs a day, twenty-four cooks in his household, and as many
aides-de-camp; he has the right of fishing in the ponds of Saclay and
Saint-Quentin; of hunting in the forests of Laigne, Ourscamp,
Carlemont, Champagne and Barbeau; he has the Tuileries, the Louvre, the
Élysée, Rambouillet, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Compiègne; he has his
imperial box at every theatre, feasting and music every day, M.
Sibour's smile, and the arm of the Marchioness of Douglas on which to
enter the ballroom; but all this is not enough; he must have the
guillotine to boot; he must have some of those red baskets among his
baskets of champagne.
Oh! hide we our faces with both our hands! This man, this hideous
butcher of the law and of justice, still had his apron round his waist
and his hands in the smoking bowels of the Constitution, and his feet
in the blood of all the slaughtered laws, when you, judges, when you,
magistrates, men of the law, men of the right...! But I pause; I shall
meet you hereafter with your black robes and your red robes, your robes
of the colour of ink, and your robes of the colour of blood; and I
shall find them, too, and having chastised them once, will chastise
them again--those lieutenants of yours, those judicial supporters of
the ambuscade, those soilers of the ermine,--Baroche, Suin, Royer,
Mongis, Rouher, and Troplong, deserters from the law,--all those names
which signify nothing more than the utmost contempt which man can feel.
If he did not crush his victims between two boards, like Christiern II;
if he did not bury people alive, like Ludovic the Moor; if he did not
build his palace walls with living men and stones, like Timour-Beg, who
was born, says the legend, with his hands closed and full of blood; if
he did not rip open pregnant women, like Cæsar Borgia, Duke of
Valentinois; if he did not scourge women on the breasts, _testibusque
viros_, like Ferdinand of Toledo; if he did not break on the wheel
alive, burn alive, boil alive, flay alive, crucify, impale, and
quarter, blame him not, the fault was not his; the age obstinately
refuses to allow it. He has done all that was humanly or inhumanly
possible. Given the nineteenth century, a century of gentleness,--of
decadence, say the papists and friends of arbitrary power,--Louis
Bonaparte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau,
Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of Naples: he has
even surpassed them. A rare merit, with which we must credit him as
another impediment: the scene was laid in France. Let us do him this
justice: in the times in which we live, Ludovic Sforza, the
Valentinois, the Duke of Alva, Timour, and Christiern II, would have
done no more than Louis Bonaparte; in their time, he would have done
all that they did; in our time, just as they were about to erect their
gibbets, their wheels, their wooden horses, their cranes, their living
towers, their crosses, and their stakes, they would have desisted like
him, in spite of themselves, and unconsciously, before the secret and
invincible resistance of the moral environment, of that formidable and
mysterious interdiction of an entire epoch, which rises in the north,
the south, the east, and the west, to confront tyrants, and says no to
them.
III
WHAT 1852 WOULD HAVE BEEN
But, had it not been for this abominable 2nd of December, which its
accomplices, and after them its dupes, call "necessary," what would
have occurred in France? Mon Dieu! this:--
Let us go back a little, and review, in a summary way, the situation as
it was before the _coup d'état_.
The party of the past, under the name of order, opposed the republic,
or in other words, opposed the future.
Whether opposed or not, whether assented to or not, the republic, all
illusions apart, is the future, proximate or remote, but inevitable, of
the nations.
How is the republic to be established? There are two ways of
establishing it: by strife and by progress. The democrats would arrive
at it by progress; their adversaries, the men of the past, appear to
desire to arrive at it by strife.
As we have just observed, the men of the past are for resisting; they
persist; they apply the axe to the tree, expecting to stop the mounting
sap. They lavish their strength, their puerility, and their anger.
Let us not utter a single bitter word against our old adversaries,
fallen with ourselves on the same day, and several among them with
honour on their side; let us confine ourselves to noting that it was
into this struggle that the majority of the Legislative Assembly of
France entered at the very beginning of its career, in the month of
May, 1849.
This policy of resistance is a deplorable policy. This struggle between
man and his Maker is inevitably vain; but, though void of result, it is
fruitful in catastrophes. That which ought to be will be; that which
ought to flow will flow; that which ought to fall will fall; that which
ought to spring up will spring up; that which ought to grow will grow;
but, obstruct these natural laws, confusion follows, disorder begins.
It is a melancholy fact that it was this disorder which was called
order.
Tie up a vein, and sickness ensues; clog up a stream, and the water
overflows; obstruct the future, and revolutions break out.
Persist in preserving among you, as if it were alive, the past, which
is dead, and you produce an indescribable moral cholera; corruption
spreads abroad, it is in the air, we breathe it; entire classes of
society, the public officials, for instance, fall into decay. Keep dead
bodies in your houses, the plague will break out.
This policy inevitably makes blind those who adopt it. Those men who
dub themselves statesmen do not understand that they themselves have
made, with their own hands and with untold labour, and with the sweat
of their brows, the terrible events they deplore, and that the very
catastrophes which fall upon them were by them constructed. What would
be said of a peasant who should build a dam from one side of a river to
the other, in front of his cottage, and who, when he saw the river
turned into a torrent, overflow, sweep away his wall, and carry off his
roof, should exclaim: "Wicked river!"? The statesmen of the past, those
great builders of dams across streams, spend their time in exclaiming:
"Wicked people!"
Take away Polignac and the July ordinances, that is to say, the dam,
and Charles X would have died at the Tuileries. Reform in 1847 the
electoral laws, that is to say once more, take away the dam, and Louis
Philippe would have died on the throne. Do I mean thereby that the
Republic would not have come? Not so. The Republic, we repeat, is the
future; it would have come, but step by step, successive progress by
progress, conquest by conquest, like a river that flows, and not like a
deluge that overflows; it would have come at its own hour, when all was
ready for it; it would have come, certainly not more enduring, for it
is already indestructible, but more tranquil, free from all possibility
of reaction, with no princes keeping watch, with no _coup d'état_
behind.
The policy which obstructs the progress of mankind--let us insist on
this point--excels in producing artificial floods. Thus it had managed
to render the year 1852 a sort of formidable eventuality, and this
again by the same contrivance, by means of a dam. Here is a railway; a
train will pass in an hour; throw a beam across the rails, and when the
train comes to that point it will be wrecked, as it was at Fampoux;
remove the beam before the train arrives, and it will pass without even
suspecting the catastrophe recently lurking there. This beam is the law
of the 31st of May.
The leaders of the majority of the Legislative Assembly had thrown it
across 1852, and they cried: "This is where society will be crushed!"
The Left replied: "Take away your beam, and let universal suffrage pass
unobstructed." This is the whole history of the law of the 31st of May.
These are things for children to understand, but which "statesmen" do
not understand.
Now let us answer the question we just now proposed: Without the 2nd of
December, what would have occurred in 1852?
Revoke the law of the 31st of May, take away the dam from before the
people, deprive Bonaparte of his lever, his weapon, his pretext, let
universal suffrage alone, take the beam off the rails, and do you know
what you would have had in 1852?
Nothing.
Elections.
A sort of peaceful Sundays, when the people would have come forward to
vote, labourers yesterday, today electors, to-morrow labourers, and
always sovereign.
Somebody rejoins: "Oh, yes, elections! You talk very glibly about them.
But what about the 'red chamber' which would have sprung from these
elections."
Did they not announce that the Constitution of 1848 would prove a "red
chamber?" Red chambers, red hobgoblins, all such predictions are of
equal value. Those who wave such phantasmagorias on the end of a stick
before the terrified populace know well what they are doing, and laugh
behind the ghastly rag they wave. Beneath the long scarlet robe of the
phantom, to which had been given the name of 1852, we see the stout
boots of the _coup d'état_.
IV
THE JACQUERIE
Meanwhile, after the 2nd of December, the crime being committed, it was
imperative to mislead public opinion. The _coup d'état_ began to
shriek about the Jacquerie, like the assassin who cried: "Stop thief!"
We may add, that a _Jacquerie_ had been promised, and that M. Bonaparte
could not break all his promises at once without some inconvenience.
What but the Jacquerie was the red spectre? Some reality must be
imparted to that spectre: one cannot suddenly burst out laughing in the
face of a whole people and say: "It was nothing! I only kept you in
fear of yourselves."
Consequently there was a _Jacquerie_. The promises of the play-bill
were observed.
The imaginations of his entourage gave themselves a free rein; that old
bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the
newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the
disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being
suppressed, it was quite easy; it is easy to lie when the tongue of
contradiction has been torn out beforehand.
They exclaimed: "Citizens, be on your guard! without us you were lost.
We shot you, but that was for your good. Behold, the Lollards were at
your gates, the Anabaptists were scaling your walls, the Hussites were
knocking at your window-blinds, the lean and hungry were climbing your
staircases, the empty-bellied coveted your dinner. Be on your guard!
Have not some of your good women been outraged?"
They gave the floor to one of the principal writers in _La Patrie_, one
Froissard.
"I dare not write or describe the horrible and improper things they did
to the ladies. But among other disorderly and villainous injuries, they
killed a chevalier and put a spit through him, and turned him before
the fire, and roasted him before the wife and her children. After ten
or twelve had violated the woman, they tried to make her and the
children eat some of the body; then killed them, put them to an evil
death.
"These wicked people pillaged and burned everything; they killed, and
forced, and violated all the women and maidens, without pity or mercy,
as if they were mad dogs.
"Quite in the same manner did lawless people conduct themselves between
Paris and Noyon, between Paris and Soissons and Ham in Vermandois, all
through the land of Coucy. There were the great violators and
malefactors; and, in the county of Valois, in the bishopric of Laon, of
Soissons, and of Noyon, they destroyed upwards of a hundred châteaux
and goodly houses of knights and squires, and killed and robbed all
they met. But _God_, by his grace, found a fit remedy, for which all
praise be given to him."
People simply substituted for God, Monseigneur le Prince-President.
They could do no less.
Now that eight months have elapsed, we know what to think of this
"Jacquerie;" the facts have at length been brought to light. Where?
How? Why, before the very tribunals of M. Bonaparte. The sub-prefects
whose wives had been violated were single men; the curés who had been
roasted alive, and whose hearts Jacques had eaten, have written to say
that they are quite well; the gendarmes, round whose bodies others had
danced have been heard as witnesses before the courts-martial; the
public coffers, said to have been rifled, have been found intact in the
hands of M. Bonaparte, who "saved" them; the famous deficit of five
thousand francs, at Clamecy, has dwindled down to two hundred expended
in orders for bread. An official publication had said, on the 8th of
December: "The curé, the mayor, and the sub-prefect of Joigny, besides
several gendarmes, have been basely massacred." Somebody replied to
this in a letter, which was made public; "Not a drop of blood was shed
at Joigny; nobody's life was threatened." Now, by whom was this letter
written? This same mayor of Joigny who had been _basely massacred_, M.
Henri de Lacretelle, from whom an armed band had extorted two thousand
francs, at his château of Cormatin, is amazed, to this day, not at the
extortion, but at the fable. M. de Lamartine, whom another band had
intended to plunder, and probably to hang on the lamp-post, and whose
château of Saint-Point was burned, and who "had written to demand
government assistance," knew nothing of the matter until he saw it in
the papers!
The following document was produced before the court-martial in the
Nièvre, presided over by ex-Colonel Martinprey:--
"ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE
"_Honesty is a virtue of republicans._
"_Every thief and plunderer will be shot._
"_Every detainer of arms who, in the course of twelve hours, shall
not have deposited them at the mayor's office, or given them up,
shall be arrested and confined until further orders._
"_Every drunken citizen shall be disarmed and sent to prison._
"_Clamecy, December 7, 1851._
"_Vive la république sociale!_
"THE SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE."
This that you have just read is the proclamation of "Jacques." "Death
to the pillagers! death to the thieves!" Such is the cry of these
thieves and pillagers.
One of these "Jacques," named Gustave Verdun-Lagarde, a native of
Lot-Garonne, died in exile at Brussels, on the 1st of May, 1852,
bequeathing one hundred thousand francs to his native town, to found a
school of agriculture. This partitioner did indeed make partition.
There was not, then, and the honest co-authors of the _coup d'état_
admit it now to their intimates, with playful delight, there was not
any "Jacquerie," it is true; but the trick has told.
There was in the departments, as there was in Paris, a lawful
resistance, the resistance prescribed to the citizens by Article 110 of
the Constitution, and superior to the Constitution by natural right;
there was the legitimate defence--this time the word is properly
applied--against the "preservers;" the armed struggle of right and law
against the infamous insurrection of the ruling powers. The Republic,
surprised by an ambuscade, wrestled with the _coup d'état_. That
is all.
Twenty-seven departments rose in arms: the Ain, the Aude, the Cher, the
Bouches du Rhône, the Côte d'Or, the Haute-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne, the
Loiret, the Marne, the Meurthe, the Nord, the Bas-Rhin, the Rhône,
Seine-et-Marne, did their duty worthily; the Allier, the Basses-Alpes,
the Aveyron, the Drome, the Gard, the Gers, the Hérault, the Jura, the
Nièvre, the Puy-de-Dôme, Saône-et-Loire, the Var and Vaucluse, did
theirs fearlessly. They succumbed, as did Paris.
The _coup d'état_ was as ferocious there as at Paris. We have cast
a summary glance at its crimes.
So, then, it was this lawful, constitutional, virtuous resistance, this
resistance in which heroism was on the side of the citizens, and
atrocity on the side of the powers; it was this which the _coup
d'état_ called "Jacquerie." We repeat, a touch of red spectre was
useful.
This Jacquerie had two aims; it served the policy of the Elysée in two
ways; it offered a double advantage: first, to win votes for the
"plebiscite;" to win these votes by the sword and in face of the
spectre, to repress the intelligent, to alarm the credulous, compelling
some by terror, others by fear, as we shall shortly explain; therein
lies all the success and mystery of the vote of the 20th of December;
secondly, it afforded a pretext for proscriptions.
The year 1852 in itself contained no actual danger. The law of the 31st
of May, morally extinct, was dead before the 2nd of December. A new
Assembly, a new President, the Constitution simply put in operation,
elections,--and nothing more.
But it was necessary that M. Bonaparte should go. There was the
obstacle; thence the catastrophe.
Thus, then, did this man one fine morning seize by the throat the
Constitution, the Republic, the Law, and France; he stabbed the future
in the back; under his feet he trampled law, common sense, justice,
reason, and liberty; he arrested men who were inviolable, he
sequestered innocent men; in the persons of their representatives he
seized the people in his grip; he raked the Paris boulevards with his
shot; he made his cavalry wallow in the blood of old men and of women;
he shot without warning and without trial; he filled Mazas, the
Conciergerie, Saint-Pélagie, Vincennes, his fortresses, his cells, his
casemates, his dungeons, with prisoners, and his cemeteries with
corpses; he incarcerated, at Saint-Lazare, a wife who was carrying
bread to her husband in hiding; he sent to the galleys for twenty
years, a man who had harboured one of the proscribed; he tore up every
code of laws, broke every enactment; he caused the deported to rot by
thousands in the horrible holds of the hulks; he sent to Lambessa and
Cayenne one hundred and fifty children between twelve and fifteen; he
who was more absurd than Falstaff, has become more terrible than
Richard III; and why has all this been done? Because there was, he
said, "a plot against his power;" because the year which was closing
had a treasonable understanding with the year which was beginning to
overthrow him; because Article 45 perfidiously concerted with the
calendar to turn him out; because the second Sunday in May intended to
"depose" him; because his oath had the audacity to plot his fall;
because his plighted word conspired against him.
The day after his triumph, he was heard to say: "The second Sunday in
May is dead." No! it is probity that is dead! it is honour that is
dead! it is the name of Emperor that is dead!
How the man sleeping in the chapel of St. Jerome must shudder, how he
must despair! Behold the gradual rise of unpopularity about his great
figure; and it is this ill-omened nephew who has placed the ladder. The
great recollections are beginning to fade, the bad ones are returning.
People dare no longer speak of Jena, Marengo, and Wagram. Of what do
they speak? Of the Duc d'Enghien, of Jaffa, of the 18th Brumaire. They
forget the hero, and see only the despot. Caricature is beginning to
sport with Cæsar's profile. And what a creature beside him! Some there
are who confound the nephew with the uncle, to the delight of the
Élysée, but to the shame of France! The parodist assumes the airs of a
stage manager. Alas! a splendour so infinite could not be tarnished
save by this boundless debasement! Yes! worse than Hudson Lowe! Hudson
Lowe was only a jailor, Hudson Lowe was only an executioner. The man
who has really assassinated Napoleon is Louis Bonaparte; Hudson Lowe
killed only his life, Louis Bonaparte is killing his glory.
Ah! the villain! he takes everything, he abuses everything, he sullies
everything, he dishonours everything. He selects, for his ambuscade the
month, the day, of Austerlitz. He returns from Satory as one would
return from Aboukir. He conjures out of the 2nd of December I know not
what bird of night, and perches it on the standard of France, and
exclaims: "Soldiers, behold the eagle." He borrows the hat from
Napoleon, and the plume from Murat. He has his imperial etiquette, his
chamberlains, his aides-de-camp, his courtiers. Under the Emperor, they
were kings, under him they are lackeys. He has his own policy, his own
13th Vendémiaire, his own 18th Brumaire. Yes, he risks comparison! At
the Élysée, Napoleon the Great has disappeared: they say, "_Uncle
Napoleon_." The man of destiny has outdone Géronte. The perfect man
is not the first, but this one. It is evident that the first came only
to make the second's bed. Louis Bonaparte, in the midst of his valets
and concubines, to satisfy the necessities of the table and the
chamber, mingles the coronation, the oath, the Legion of Honour, the
camp of Boulogne, the Column Vendôme, Lodi, Arcola, Saint-Jean-d'Acre,
Eylau, Friedland, Champaubert--Ah! Frenchmen! look upon this hog
covered with slime strutting about in that lion's skin!