“The Eighteenth Arrondissement was the terror of the selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was rumoured, ‘Montmartre is coming down’ (‘Montmartre va descendre’), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was starving to death.”
Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the insurrection, she writes:—
“The four citoyens, Th. Ferré, Avronsart, Burlot, and Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. At the first word of this phrase,—terror of the reaction,—‘Montmartre is coming down,’ I was given into their hands.”
Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from exile:—
“I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is with Montmartre I march to-day.”
It was to the Montmartre of the indigènes, the Montmartre of the workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which was known as le cratère de la révolution, that Louise Michel paid these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of arts and letters, who hold the Vache Enragée above the Golden Calf, far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the Butte, has strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the “selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed,” quake more than ever.
At every cloud on the municipal horizon no bigger than a man’s hand, at every suggestion of disturbance in the political atmosphere, at every slightest rumble presaging the rising of the masses, the classes peer nervously and timorously in the direction of the beetling Montmartre, regretting from the bottom of their hearts that the offer Rothschild is said to have once made, to raze the Butte at his own expense, was not accepted by the government.
The relations between the aboriginal workingmen and the artistic and literary colonists of Montmartre are of the most cordial sort. There is a genuine solidarity between them (wherein is a profound lesson for the social settler), because they have common sufferings, common hatreds, common apprehensions, and common hopes; because they faint from the same hunger, shiver from the same frost, dread the same rent-bills, are liable to the same evictions and the same police rafles, and are under the same temptation, when houseless, to commit a petty misdemeanour in order to get stowed away for the night.
Artists may help the poor working people about them—without that effort of will, that compulsion of duty, which inevitably involves patronage, and which is the bane of all the attempts of the well-to-do to “elevate” the poor—because, poor themselves, they often accept help from them in return and in kind, and because they are neither mysteries nor objects of envy to any.
Nowhere in Paris, certainly, is the identity of interests and sentiments of the simple proletariat and the prolétariat littéraire so graphically presented and the much-prated alliance between brain and brawn, labour and intellect, so completely realised. Nowhere this side of heaven, probably, is social democracy so real and so devoid of pose.