THE REASON FOR THE COMMUNE.
The Louvre is inseparable from the history of France. In all the upheavals, the tearings down and overturnings, it has been a central figure. It was from the Louvre on that dreadful night in August, 1572, that Charles IX. fired the shot that was the signal for the horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew, which ended in the indiscriminate slaughter of the Huguenots, and from that time on to the present it has been the stage on which tragedies have been enacted. It figured in the terrible days of the Commune, in 1871, and but for an almost Providential interference, would have passed into history as a memory.
The Louvre has always been the especial object of the hatred of the Parisian mob, and no wonder. Every stone laid was so much bread taken from the mouths of French workingmen; every stroke of a chisel, every inch of the wonderful pile, was a robbery of himself of whatever it cost. It was the habitation of a nobility, supported in luxury at the expense of the French people.
It is all well enough to talk of reason, but there is no reason in a revolution. The Parisian whose wife and family were living in garrets and cellars, eating black bread and drinking sour wine, could not be reasoned with when he caught glimpses of the luxurious salons in which the few took their pleasure. He could not be expected to have much reason when he got a smell of the delicacies of the royal table, and thought of the scant fare on which he was compelled to subsist. His garret and thin pallet did not contrast well with the gorgeous apartments and silken couches of his royal masters, nor did the offal with which he was fed compare pleasantly with the wild profusion of dainties which they rioted upon.
It was nightingale tongues versus offal—it was poverty in the extreme versus prodigal waste.
And then the arrogance of these tyrants! They held the commoners as an inferior race, as another creation, much as the Southern planter used to hold his slaves.
One of the ancient nobility replied to a demand from the workingmen for better food: “The animals! Let them eat grass!” It is no wonder, a few months later, when this silken lord was beheaded, that the mob carried his head upon a pike with a tuft of grass in his set jaws.
It is no wonder that when the mob, starved and frozen to a point where death was preferable to life, wrested the power from the nobility and controlled Paris, that it should blindly destroy everything that symbolized royalty, everything that smacked of class rule.
True, the Commune should not have destroyed fountains, and statuary, and paintings, but it must be said that they did not destroy these priceless works for the mere sake of destroying them. The statues symbolized royalty. It was not a Venus that was the object of their hatred—the Venus was their wrong, in stone.