What is this fusillade? Against whom is it directed? Against the
Prussians? No! Against Frenchmen, against passers-by, against those who
cry “_Vive la République et vive l’Ordre_.” Men are falling dead or
wounded, women flying, shops closing, amid the whistling of the
bullets,—all Paris terrified. This is what I have just seen or heard.
We are done for then at last. We shall see the barricades thrown up in
our streets; we shall meet the horrid litters, from which hang hands
black with powder; every woman will weep in the evening when her
husband is late in returning home, and all mothers will be seized with
terror. France, alas! France, herself a weeping mother, will fall by
the hands of her own children.
I had started, in company with a friend, from the Passage Choiseul on
my way to the Tuileries, which has been occupied since yesterday by a
battalion devoted to the Central Committee. On arming at the corner of
the Rue St. Roch and the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs we perceived a
considerable crowd in the direction of the Rue de la Paix. “What is
going on now?” said I to my friend. “I think,” said he, “that it is an
unarmed manifestation going to the Place Vendôme; it passed along the
boulevards a short time since, crying “_Vive l’Ordre_.”
As we talked we were approaching the Rue de la Paix. All at once a
horrible noise was heard. It was the report of musketry. A white smoke
rose along the walls, cries issued from all parts, the crowd fled
terrified, and a hundred yards before us I saw a woman fall. Is she
wounded or dead? What is this massacre? What fearful deeds are passing
in open day, in this glorious sunshine? We had scarcely time to escape
into one of the cross-streets, followed by the frightened crowd, when
the shops were closed, hurriedly, and the horrible news spread to all
parts of terrified Paris.
Reports, varying extremely in form, spread with extraordinary rapidity;
some were grossly exaggerated, others the reverse. “Two hundred victims
have fallen,” said one. “There were no balls in the guns,” said
another. The opinions regarding the cause of the conflict were
strangely various. Perhaps we shall never know, with absolute
certainty, what passed in the Place, Vendôme and the Rue de la Paix.
For myself, I was at once; too far and too near the scene of action;
too near, for I had narrowly missed being killed; too far, for I saw
nothing but the smoke and the flight, of the terrified crowd.
One thing certain is that the Friends of Order who, yesterday,
succeeded in assembling a large number of citizens, had to-day tried to
renew its attempt at pacification by unarmed numbers. Three or four
thousand persons entered the Rue de la Paix towards two o’clock in the
afternoon, crying, “_L’Ordre! L’Ordre! Vive l’Ordre!_” The Central
Committee had doubtless issued severe orders, for the foremost
sentinels of the Place, far from presenting arms to the “Friends of
Order,” as they had done the day before, formally refused to let them
continue their way. And then what happened? Two crowds were face to
face; one unarmed, the other armed, both under strong excitement, one
trying to press forward, the other determined to oppose its passage. A
pistol-shot was heard. This was a signal. Down went the muskets, the
armed crowd fired, and the unarmed dispersed in mad flight, leaving
dead and wounded on their path.
But who fired that first pistol-shot? “One of the citizens of the
demonstration; and moreover, the sentinels had their muskets torn from
them;” affirm the partisans of the Central Committee, and they bring
forward, among other proofs; the evidence of an eye-witness, a foreign
general, who saw it all from a window of the Rue de la Paix. But these
assertions are but little to be relied upon. Can it be seriously
believed that a crowd, to all appearance peaceful, would commit such an
act of aggression? Who would have been insane enough to expose a mass
of unarmed people to such dire revenge, by a challenge as criminal as
it was useless? The account according to which the pistol was fired by
an officer of the Federal guard from the foot of the Place Vendôme,
thus giving the signal to those under his orders to fire upon the
citizens, improbable as appears such an excess of cold-blooded
barbarity, is much the more credible. And now how many women mourn
their husbands and son’s wounded, and perhaps dead? How many victims
have fallen? The number is not yet known. Monsieur Barle, a lieutenant
of the National Guard, was shot in the stomach. Monsieur Gaston
Jollivet, who some time ago committed the offence, grave in our eyes,
of publishing a comic ode in which he allows himself to ridicule our
illustrious and beloved master, Victor Hugo, but was certainly guilty
of none in desiring a return to order, had his arm fractured, it is
said. Monsieur Otto Hottinger, one of the directors of the French Bank,
fell, struck by two balls, while raising a wounded man from the ground.
One of my friends assures me that half-an-hour after the fusillade he
was fired at, as he was coming out from a _porte-cochère_,[18] by
National Guards in ambuscade.
At four o’clock, at the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Neuve
des Petits Champs, an old man, dressed in a blouse, still lay where he
had fallen across the body of a _cantinière_, and beside him a soldier
of the line, the staff of a tricolour flag grasped in his dead hand. Is
this soldier the same of whom my friend Monsieur A—— J—— speaks in his
account of the first demonstration, and who was said to be an employé
at Siraudin’s?
There were many other victims—Monsieur de Péne, the editor of
_Paris-Journal_, dangerously wounded by a ball that penetrated the
thigh; Monsieur Portel, lieutenant in the Eclaireurs Franchetti,
wounded in the neck and right foot; Monsieur Bernard, a merchant,
killed; Monsieur Giraud, a stockbroker, also killed. Fresh names are
added to the funereal list every moment.
Where will this revolution lead us, which was begun by the murder of
two Generals and is being carried on by the assassination of
passers-by?