It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette in Les Misérables, who were responsible for the insurrection of 1830.
It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism was struggling to supplant Classicism, that the hottest passions were kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated, even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: the Quartier resembled a fancy-dress ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had in other times for their political and religious creeds.
The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by De Banville: “Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction, coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts of original and fancy costumes, capped with Basque bérets and felts à la Rubens, they went up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into space, alone, or in pairs, or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,—a custom which, as you know, dates from the twelfth century.”
Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurélien Scholl writes: “The young men of the schools thought solely of fêtes and of fun. The Quartier resembled strangely the Bohème of Mürger,—la noce, nothing but la noce. The historiographer of this epoch finds only farces to narrate, and such farces!”
And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of 1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a “reawakening of the schools,” founded a journal, La Lanterne du Quartier Latin, as a means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of the government of Louis Philippe.
They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising coup d’état of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of the Quartier. The students invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café, crèmerie after crèmerie. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives.”
The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by Les Propos de Labienus, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.
It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.
In 1866, at the Café de la Renaissance Hellénique, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and a rentier,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier’s La Contagion at the Odéon. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at the Café Serpente, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.
“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in his Cafés Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris, “had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as they met on the green cushions. Etudiantes accompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics.”