My father soon became greatly excited. “They are lying to us, they are deceiving us, they are trying to put us to sleep,” he said, much grieved, feeling his Christian-heathen-socialist-scientific Republic escaping him.
My grandmother felt more and more secure. “Order is maintained, and therefore the form of government matters little, after all,” she said. Grandfather, when my father and I became more hopeless, said:
“Come, come, things are going very well for the Empire.”
But I made my grandparents very unhappy with my sorrow, my recriminations, my imprecations. Life became insupportable, intolerable, to all of us. It must have been the same, at that time, in every family where there were idealists and sincere Republicans, those who believed they could bring down the moon for the people, worthy, as they thought them, of all miraculous gifts.
The national workshops, which had interested me so much, now made me despair. Alas! they were going wrong. What! that admirable conception—the State creating workshops to give employment to those who needed it, to feed those who were dying of hunger; that benevolent, protecting institution, a social safeguard against poverty, an admirable example held up to all nations—was it to be dissolved?
Émile Thomas, who was at the head of these workshops, did not follow Louis Blanc’s ideas, although he often said to the contrary. They were beginning to suspect him of being the agent of “the man of the Strasbourg and Boulogne riots.” Instead of organising the national workshops, he disorganised them.
“The reactionists,” said my father to me, “endeavour to make it believed that Émile Thomas is acting according to Louis Blanc’s ideas, when, on the contrary, he is the worst enemy of those ideas. They wish to render pure socialism guilty of the crimes they are committing in its name. Trélat, the Minister of Public Instruction, cannot suffer the national workshops; the Executive Committee abhors them, the middle class has a horror of them, because it is afraid of them. What will happen if, as the National Assembly, composed of reactionists, desires, they abolish the workshops? A hundred thousand men thrown suddenly out of work, on the streets of Paris, will cause terrible riots; there will be a bloody revolution, in which reforms will be drowned, and that is their aim.”
Ah! those hundred thousand men threatened with being turned into the streets! I saw them unhappy, wandering about, without work, despairing, while their wives and children were dying of hunger at home. I wept over them. My heart was full of an immense pity for them, and, day by day, I felt obliged to be kept informed of all that was taking place. My grandmother, who had recently subscribed to the National, wished to prevent my reading it, but I insisted on seeing it, and, while I was revolted at the hatred of the “yellow gloves” for my national workshops, I kept myself informed about events until my father’s visits.
When I learned that Monsieur de Falloux was commissioned by the National Assembly to furnish a plan of dissolution of the national workshops, I knew that everything was falling to pieces.
My father said to me: “They are organising butchery; they wish to dissolve the national workshops from one day to another. Trélat himself sees the danger. He proposes to replace the workmen successively, little by little. He has destituted Émile Thomas, seeing at last the disorganising work he was accomplishing; he has given his son-in-law, Lalanne, the place, and Lalanne is reorganising the workmen, but it is too late, for the wolves of the National Assembly wish carnage.”