Victor Hugo Fullscreen Les Miserables 2 (1862)

Then the bourgeois shouts:

“Long live the people!”

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify, so far as history is concerned?

Is it a revolt?

Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect.

For them, it is like a relic of 1830.

Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a day.

A revolution cannot be cut off short.

It must needs undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a mountain sinking into the plain.

There are no Alps without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of Parisians calls “the epoch of the riots,” is certainly a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century.

A last word, before we enter on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time and space.

There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor.

Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history.

The epoch, surnamed “of the riots,” abounds in details of this nature.

Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.

We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: “We have seen this.”

We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine.

In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.

CHAPTER III—A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe for commotion.

As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the shot is discharged.

In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action.

He had had in succession, under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the bravery of the tribune.

He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech.

Like Foy, his predecessor, after upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of Napoleon’s marshals in petto.

The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence.

He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to intervening events.

In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days.

Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the word country.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and by the government as an occasion.

This death was an affliction.

Like everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt.

This is what took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day appointed for Lamarque’s burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect.

This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors.

They armed themselves as best they might.

Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment “to break down doors.”

One of them had made himself a dagger of a stocking-weaver’s hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the stump.

Another, who was in a fever “to attack,” slept wholly dressed for three days.

A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:

“Whither are you going?” “Eh! well, I have no weapons.”

“What then?”

“I’m going to my timber-yard to get my compasses.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” said Lombier.