Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  Despite the growing speed of travel, Paris-based writers who were attracted to the provinces encountered them almost as foreign lands. Naturally, not all parts of France were equally strange. The central part of France around Paris seemed familiar, while the greatest differences were experienced in the west, especially Brittany, and the Midi. Balzac, who was brought up in Tours on the Loire until the age of fifteen in 1814, when his family moved to Paris, saw a clear difference between the Loire valley, where the most perfect French was said to be spoken, and Brittany. In the summer of 1827 he took a coach to Fougères, at the entrance to French-speaking Upper Brittany rather than Breton-speaking Lower Brittany in the west, but foreign enough to serve as the base for his historical novel, The Chouans (1829). He pictured a column of republican soldiers in 1799 isolated in hostile country controlled by chouan rebels who ‘heated the feet’ of informers in front of roaring fires, beheaded traitors and nailed their heads to the door of their cottages, and plundered the bodies of soldiers before sinking them into a lake. The double mission of the republican soldiers, explained the young officer Gérard, was to ‘defend the territory of France’ and to ‘preserve the country’s soul, the generous principles of liberty and independence, the human reason revealed by our Assemblies and which, I hope, will win people over. France is like a traveller carrying a light in one hand and a weapon in the other.’ Yet Balzac hesitated between showing the goatskin-clad, forest-dwelling Bretons, isolated from modern civilization, as benighted assassins or as noble savages. They were ‘as stunted intellectually as the Mohicans and Redskins of North America, but as great, as cunning and as tough as they’.26

  The historian Michelet visited Brittany in the summer of 1831 and reported that the wearing of goatskins began at Laval, even before Brittany was reached, as the forests became denser. He argued that the true, Breton-speaking Brittany was ‘a country quite different from ours, because it has remained faithful to our primitive state; scarcely French, so much it is Gallic’, but that it was controlled by four essentially French towns – Nantes, Rennes, Brest and Saint-Malo – so that Breton ‘resistance’ to things French was gradually being eroded. In terms of difference he was just as much struck by the Midi, which he characterized as ‘a country of ruins’, Roman monuments, Roman law, Roman religion. Avignon in particular was ‘the theatre of this decrepitude’, combining ancient Roman architecture and the Roman Catholic religion. Along with its antiquity went a ‘murderous violence’ exploding in wars of religion against Albigensians and Protestants, and the demagogic rhetoric of the likes of Mirabeau.27

  Michelet’s analysis fed into his History of France in which he exalted ‘that beautiful centralization by which France becomes France’. He imagined centralization not in administrative terms but in intellectual ones, ‘a general, universal spirit’ that was gradually conquering local differences shaped by material considerations such as soil, climate or race. ‘England is an empire, Germany is a country, a race, France is a person.’28 He drove home the same theory in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1838. Paris, he said, was not only the French capital but a European capital, a world capital. ‘Every state today is seeking to imitate France by way of centralization. Local sentiments are gradually dissolving in favour of a unifying spirit which animates all the parts.’29 The work of national unification, begun by the monarchy, was completed by the Revolution and Republic, but on a higher intellectual plane. Into this context Michelet fitted his attack on the Vendée. ‘Just as the world turned towards France and gave itself to her, becoming French at heart, one country made an exception,’ he explained in the third volume of his History of the French Revolution, published in 1850. ‘There was a people that was so strangely blind and so curiously misled that it took arms against the Revolution, its mother, against the public safety, against itself. And by a miracle of the devil that country was in France… that strange people came from the Vendée.’30

  For many writers the south of France was even more barbaric and violent than the west. Prosper Mérimée, who toured France in his capacity as inspector-general of historic monuments, remarked that when he got off the steamboat that had carried him from Lyon to Avignon in September 1834, ‘it seemed to me that I was leaving France… I thought myself in the middle of a Spanish town.’31 Stendhal, who came across Mérimée during his tour of France, was impressed by the speed of the steamboat that took him on the same route from Lyon to Avignon in 1837, a distance of over 60 leagues in ten hours. When he reached Avignon, however, he was keen to confirm it as a violent city, and visited the room in the Hôtel du Palais-Royal where Marshal Brune had been killed in 1815. He reflected that it was incredible that Brune had decided to go to Paris via Avignon; ‘it would have been so simple to go by Gap and Grenoble, where no one ever got murdered.’ For Stendhal, a native of Grenoble, the Dauphiné was a ‘country of fine minds and enlightened patriotism’, quite different from Provence. Three weeks after Waterloo, he boasted, Grenoble was still trying to defend France against invading Piedmontese troops. The ‘civilized part of France’, he argued, was north of a line between Nantes and Dijon; south of that line there was only Bordeaux and Grenoble.32 In his memoirs, The Life of Henri Brulard, he was even more explicit about where civilization stopped, describing ‘the fatal triangle that stretches from Bordeaux, Bayonne and Valence. There they believe in witches, can’t read and don’t speak French.’33

  Not all writers had such a negative view of the Midi. Flaubert, brought up among the green fields of Normandy, and promised a trip to the south with a medical colleague of his father’s if he passed his baccalauréat, which he did in 1840, was fascinated by the classic beauty of the girls of Arles and Marseille, where he felt ‘something Oriental’ in the bright mixture of complexions, costumes and tongues. His fear of violence was projected on to the island of Corsica, where he was told by the prefect that at a formal dinner to which he was invited no member of the conseil général would be without a concealed dagger, while bandits roamed the maquis, women were treated like beasts of burden and murders were routinely committed by vengeance groups of extended families.34 His trip to Brittany seven years later with his friend Maxime du Camp was altogether less challenging. They left Paris by train, going as far as Blois before deciding to continue on foot. The main distinction they drew, however, was between the Breton countryside, whose peasantry, attached to their families and village priests, spent as little time as possible in town on market day, and the towns where no one but maids wore the regional costume, and those working in government offices spoke French and read the newspapers. Gradually, Flaubert remarked, the town-dweller was ‘becoming less Breton and more separate from the peasant, whom he increasingly despises and who distances himself all the more, as they each understand each other less’.35

  CONQUERING PARIS

  The educated, middle-class elite who began to discover France in the 1830s originated from Paris, but that did not mean that they were familiar with Paris life as a whole. The differences between the educated class and ‘the people’ that obtained in the provinces also obtained in Paris, perhaps even more so. However, just as the provinces were being explored by writers, so Paris was being explored first by officials responsible for public order and the public health and secondly, too, by writers. For Paris was a city undergoing rapid transformation in the early nineteenth century. Its population increased from 547,000 in 1801 to 1,539,000 in 1856.36 This expansion was fuelled not by a rising birth rate, for large cities were dens of high mortality, but from provincials coming in search of work and fortune. Often they concentrated at the margins of the city, outside the gates where tolls were imposed on food and drink brought into the city, so that wine was enjoyed tax free, but where also unhealthy industries such as tanneries, glue factories and slaughter-houses were moved, along with the site of public executions under the July Monarchy.37 Others packed into the medieval centre of Paris, finding work on the waterfront, in bars, in street trading or rag-picking. Unfortunately, the a
mount of work available was not enough to sustain the number of hands, thus, at the lower end of society, vegetated a population of casual labourers, tipping into vagrancy, crime and prostitution.

  A sharper awareness of the social problems of the capital came with the publication of two major studies. Prostitution in the City of Paris by Alexander Parent-Duchâtelet, a medically trained vice-president of the Conseil de Salubrité, was published in 1836, after the author had worked himself to death. Dedicated to issues of public hygiene and social justice Parent-Duchâtelet calculated that while there were only 3,558 prostitutes registered with the Paris authorities in 1832, there were 35,000–40,000 more clandestine ones, often minors exploited by old women posing as midwives or tooth-pullers, posted in bars to bring in custom, concentrated in the narrow streets of the Île de la Cité, where there was one prostitute for every fifty-nine inhabitants. Daughters of workers or peasants who had come from north-eastern France to seek a fortune and failed, often the victims of family abuse or brutality, were sent out to labour in workshops or to help street traders but were often unemployed. ‘Only a reproach, a word, an encounter,’ observed Parent-Duchâtelet, ‘was required to plunge a young girl for ever into an abyss of shame and ignominy.’38 The second study, The Dangerous Classes of the Population in the Great Cities, by H.-A. Fréguier, an administrator in the prefecture of the Seine, was published in 1840. Devoted in fact just to Paris, it examined the fluid frontier between the working and criminal population, suggesting that about a third of the working population lost their jobs in time of cyclical depression. At the bottom of the working hierarchy were the rag-pickers, who were generally alcoholics, homeless youths who hung about markets looking for work or pilfering, prostitutes, pimps and madames, ‘rogues, thieves, crooks, fences’ constantly supplied by liberated or escaped convicts, using a common argot and operating in gangs. Less humane and more alarmist than Parent-Duchâtelet, Fréguier’s analysis was also less sociological and more moralizing. ‘As soon as the poor person, abandoned to evil passions, ceases to work,’ he argued, ‘then he becomes the enemy of society.’39

  Path-breaking though these works were, they did not have the same impact on social opinion as a fictionalized account of low life in the capital, The Mysteries of Paris. This rambling work, serialized for the educated public in the Journal des Débats in 1842–3, was the unlikely invention of Eugène Sue, last of a long line of military doctors, who abandoned his career as a naval doctor when his father died in 1830, leaving him a considerable fortune. He became a dandy, haunting the theatre, opera, cafés, salons and the newly founded Jockey Club, until in 1837 he discovered he was ruined. Deciding to write, he was introduced to working-class life in 1841, not in reality but via a play about a poor but honest worker by his friend Félix Pyat.40

  The Mysteries opens with the descent into the rue aux Fèves on the Île de la Cité of Slasher, abandoned by his parents, working in an abattoir from the age of ten or twelve, doing fifteen years’ forced labour for knifing his sergeant in the army, now a docker on the quai Saint-Paul. He forms a brutal relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl known as la Goualeuse or Fleur-de-Marie, also abandoned by her parents, who has been begging from the age of eight for a one-eyed crone called la Chouette. The key figure, who stops Slasher beating up la Goualeuse, is Rodolphe, who poses as the son of rag traders in Les Halles but in fact lives in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the son and heir of the Grand Duc de Gerolstein. Locked in combat with the underworld, including a family of hereditary criminals and fresh-water pirates, the Martial family, he discovers that la Goualeuse is in fact his own daughter by the Countess Sarah McGregor. In the final scene Slasher loses his life defending la Goualeuse from the Martial family, whose mother is being executed. Describing the people converging on the place of execution as ‘a muddy and fetid froth of the population of Paris, this immense crowd of bandits and fallen women who derived their daily bread from crime’, Sue cited Fréguier to the effect that 30,000 people in Paris live by crime alone, but his account of the underworld, strangely penetrated and redeemed by a member of high society like himself, was altogether more influential.41

  The fear that the working population was also the criminal population developed into the fear that the working population was also the insurgent population. In July 1830 and February 1848 popular insurrection which triggered regime change had rapidly been brought under control by the ruling classes, enrolled in the National Guard as the regular military defending the outgoing regimes collapsed. In June 1848, however, the closure of the national workshops that had kept a large proportion of the unemployed in work provoked the June Days revolt. Alexis de Tocqueville, a deputy in the Assembly, argued that the revolt was ‘not to change the form of government but to alter the social order. It was not, in truth, a political struggle… but a class conflict, a servile war.’42 On 23 June drum rolls and bugle blasts summoned the propertied classes to the ranks of the National Guard. One of them was Maxime du Camp, his battalion sent to protect the Foreign Ministry. Wounded in the leg, he denounced the ‘ferocious and stupid beasts’ who threatened ‘French civilization’.43 However, the National Guard held firm, reinforced by volunteers from the provinces, and put paid to the Paris revolt. Tocqueville remembered the arrival of the volunteers from his native Manche, travelling nearly 200 miles across country not yet linked to Paris by rail. ‘They were 1500 in number. Among them I recognized with emotion my friends and neighbours, landowners, lawyers, doctors, farmers. Almost all the old nobility had taken up arms and joined the column.’44

  A Paris redolent of crime and revolt did not befit the capital of a great nation, and when France became an empire once again in 1852, it had to be rebuilt and redefined as an imperial capital. That was the thinking of Georges Haussmann, a career prefect who, as we have seen, ran the Gironde at Bordeaux in 1851 and was offered the prefecture of the Seine in 1853. He lost no time announcing his ambitions at the Hôtel de Ville.

  A great city, a capital above all, has the duty to present itself as equal to the role that it plays in the country. When that country is France, when centralization, which is the basis of its strength, has made the capital both the head and heart of the social body, then that capital would betray its glorious mission if, in spite of everything, it became constantly stuck in the ways of superannuated routine.45

  Building a modern imperial capital meant piercing broad boulevards, cutting long perspectives from one grand monument to the next, including the ‘great cross’ of the rue de Rivoli, boulevard Sébastopol and boulevard Saint-Michel meeting at the place du Châtelet, increasing the number of avenues radiating from the Étoile from five to twelve, each named after a member of the imperial family or one of Napoleon’s victories, and redesigning the Bois de Boulogne to include lakes, gardens, two race-courses and a zoo.46 In the railway age that was now reaching its apogee it meant driving arterial roads to the main termini, from which railways fanned out to every part of France. ‘Everything moves towards Paris: main roads, railways, telegraphs,’ Haussmann announced in 1859, ‘everything moves out from it: laws, decrees, decisions, orders, officials.’47 The east of the capital, the popular quarters which formed the heart of any insurrection, were to be penetrated by strategic roads too wide for barricades. Haussmann was delighted to show the emperor the boulevard Voltaire, which would enable troops to take the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from the rear, and to remove the rue Transnonain, macabre centre of the massacre of innocents in 1834, from the Paris map. Last but not least, the very population associated with crime and disorder would be eliminated from central Paris by what Haussmann called ‘the disembowelling of old Paris’.48 Thus the maze of narrow medieval streets around Notre-Dame, the stage-set of Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, was razed to make way for a few sublime public buildings: the Prefecture of Police, the Palais de Justice, the Tribunal de Commerce, the Hôtel-Dieu, while Les Halles were rebuilt as a modern steel emporium to replace the old den of iniquity.

  Most of the Paris popula
ce was driven into the outskirts of Paris, and the population of central Paris actually fell as public buildings, businesses and sites of pleasure and entertainment multiplied. Suburbs such as Belleville, originally semi-rural villages beyond the old city boundary, with a population of 2,800 in 1801, grew into industrious districts with 60,000 inhabitants by the time they were annexed by the city of Paris in 1859–60.49 However, the shift of popular Paris to the periphery was not uniform. Many workers, needing to stay close to suppliers and clients in the trades they practised, simply crowded more tightly into the lodging houses that remained, or into inner courtyards or attics. Others found temporary accommodation in shanty towns that grew like mushrooms on one development site after another.50 Haussmann had not dealt with the problem of the revolutionary population of Paris, he had simply moved it. ‘Two towns have been created in the capital,’ said one commentator, ‘one rich, one poor. One surrounds the other. The unruly class is like an immense cordon circling the rich class. It would be a lot better if it were not like that.’51