“The police,” put in Madame de Bonmont, “ought not to allow things to be shouted.”
“When the Socialists cheered the Republic and the Army we replied, ‘Long live the Army! Death to the Jews!’ The ‘white carnations,’ whom I had hidden in the crowd, rallied to my cry. They charged the ‘red eglantines’ under a hail of iron chairs. They were magnificent. But it was no good, the crowd would not respond. The Parisians had come with their wives and children, with baskets and string bags full of food, and the place swarmed with country cousins come to see the Exhibition. Old farmers with stiff legs who looked on with fishy eyes, peasant women in shawls, looking as scared as owls! How could we stir up a family party of that sort?”
“Doubtless,” said Lacrisse, “the moment was ill-chosen. Besides, to a certain extent, we have to respect the Exhibition truce.”
“All the same,” said Chassons des Aigues, “we hit pretty hard at the Cascades. I gave Citizen Bissolo a crack on the head that sent it down into his hump. I saw him fall to the ground; he looked just like a tortoise. Then, ‘Hurrah for the Army! Death to the Jews!’”
“Doubtless, doubtless,” said Henri Léon gravely. “But ‘Hurrah for the Army!’ and ‘Death to the Jews!’ is a trifle subtle for crowds. It is—if I may say so—too literary, too classical, and it is not sufficiently revolutionary. ‘Hurrah for the Army!’ It is fine, it is noble, it is proper, it is cold—yes, it is cold. Let me tell you, there is only one way to excite a crowd, and that is by panic. Believe me, the only way to get a mob of unarmed people on the run is to put fear into their bellies. You should have run, crying—what shall I say?—‘Save yourselves! Look out! You are betrayed! Frenchmen, you are betrayed!’ If you had shouted that or something like it, in a lugubrious voice, running along the lawn, five hundred thousand people would have run along with you, would have run quicker than you, until they dropped. It would have been terrible and magnificent. You would have been knocked down and trampled to death, mashed to a pulp, but you would have started the revolution.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Jacques de Cadde.
“I am certain of it,” replied Henri Léon. “‘Treachery!’ that is the true cry of riot, the cry that gives wings to the crowd and sets brave men and cowards alike going at the same pace, fills a hundred thousand hearts with one emotion and restores the use of his legs to the paralytic. Ah, my dear Chassons, if you had shouted at Longchamps ‘We are betrayed!’ you would have seen your old screech-owl with her basket of hard-boiled eggs and her umbrella and your old fellow with the stiff legs running like hares.”
“Running where?” asked Lacrisse.
“I don’t know. Who knows where a panic-stricken crowd runs to? They don’t know themselves. But what does that matter? They’ve been set going, and that’s enough. You can’t cause riots with method. To occupy strategical points was well enough in the far-off days of Barbès and Blanqui, but to-day, what with the telegraph, telephone or merely the police and their bicycles, any sort of concerted action is out of the question. Can you see Jacques de Cadde occupying the police-station in the Rue de Grenelle, for instance? No. All that is possible nowadays is a vague, immense, tumultuous demonstration. And fear, unanimous, tragical fear alone is capable of carrying away the enormous human masses that frequent public fêtes or open-air shows. You ask me where the crowd of the 14th of July would have run to, spurred on as by a big black flag at the cries of ‘Treachery! Treachery! The foreigner! Treachery!’ Where would they have run to? Into the lake, I suppose.”
“Into the lake,” repeated Jacques de Cadde. “Well, they would have been drowned, that’s all.”