REPUBLICAN PARIS.
[MARCH, APRIL 1848.]
Is there any former lover of Paris who imagines that, when the barricades of the last insurrection have been removed, the devastations repaired, and the street lanterns mended, Paris will wear, with its republican face, the same aspect as it did of old? If there be such a man, let him still cherish the fond delusion, and not come and see. Or, would he learn the truth, let him try the experiment of taking from the fairest face he knows and loves, the gay, coquettish cap of gauze and ribbon, the light, butterfly-like chef-d'œuvre of the most tasty fancy of a French marchande des modes, and let him put on that head the Phrygian cap of liberty, the bonnet rouge, in all its startling coarseness of red cloth. He thinks, perhaps, that the face will be the same, or at least wear the same expression as before! Fatal mistake! Animated, gay with colour, flushed with the red reflected tints, picture-like even, may be the pretty face—but it will have utterly lost its former charm; it will look staring, vulgar, swaggering, disordered, at best Bacchante-like. Or, to take a more psychological comparison:—Let him think back upon the time when he was in love, and wandered in the company of the beloved, and try to remember how he looked upon the objects that surrounded him. Of a surety, whatever their natural want of beauty they wore a peculiar look of brightness; there was a magical veil of rose-coloured charm upon all. Let him then reflect upon the aspect of the same spot when she was gone. The objects remained the same, but certainly they wore not the same air to his eyes; they were the identical objects he had looked upon before, and yet he could have sworn that they were changed—that the whole landscape was discoloured. And so it is with Paris. Streets, squares, and houses are the same, but its moral appearance is totally altered: there is a changed look in the very air; the impression on the mind is as different as rose-colour is from gray upon the sense; the psychological tint has been washed out, blurred away, and replaced by a troubled, confused, indescribably unharmonious and uncongenial colour.
But without attempting to convey to others a feeling impossible to define, it is easy enough to point out the altered state of being of the French capital in the outward physical aspect of republican Paris. True, the marks of devastation have been almost entirely removed from the Boulevards and principal streets with wonderful alacrity on the part of the municipal authorities. Young trees have been planted on the spots where the old ones were cut down to form barricades: they look stunted, meagre, and unhappy enough, to be sure—very like the young republic that their frail stems typify—but they manage to keep up the look of the line of avenue. There they stand, all ready to be cut down again for the construction of fresh barricades, if ever they grow big enough before they are wanted, which is certainly a very doubtful matter. The asphalte is already laid down once more in the holes of the broken-up trottoirs, or at least smoke and stench enough prevail in the labours of plastering it down; and in a short time the iron railings of the Boulevard du Rempart will again prevent drunken citizens in smocks from falling down into the street below; at all events, there is mortar and solder enough ready on the pavement to do the work. On the opposite side of the way, that fatal building, the Hotel of Foreign Affairs, before which so frightful a scene of carnage was acted, looks much as it did of yore—perhaps only a little dirtier, a little more public-office-like—although young citizens en blouse mount guard before its gates instead of soldiers of the line, and on its walls, smeared with blood-dipped fingers, glare before one's eyes, unwashed away by rain, the startling capitals—"Mort a Guizot." But it is to be presumed that the eyes of passers-by will get used to the bloody words—forgotten, perhaps, before many months in other visions of blood—perhaps smeared over in their turn by "Mort à ——." Who can tell? The pavement has been long since restored to the streets; although, to tell the truth, here and there the disjointed, ill-replaced stones still slightly lift their heads to tell a tale of past devastation, and proclaim their readiness to rise again at a moment's warning; and fiacres jolt uneasily over them—very much like the Provisional Government over the rough work left them to stumble against by the Revolution. But, upon the whole, Paris has nigh recovered its former material look, and might almost cheat the wanderer, who looks only upon stone walls, and pavements, and lamp-posts, into the belief that it has undergone no change, and retained no scars from its late burning eruptive disorder, unless he stroll past two spots which startle him into a recollection of the truth. Here the long façade of the palace of the Tuilleries, its window-panes all smashed, its shutters shattered—the broken casket of royalty! There the quondam Palais-Royal, its walls still blackened by the bonfires of royal furniture lighted in its courts; its windows paneless, its once flowered terraces bare or boarded with planks. And, opposite, the smoked walls of that ruined building, on the other side of the square, where the last defenders of royalty were shot down, or were flung back to perish in the blazing pile of the vast guard-house.
But if Paris has thus washed away its blood and dirt, thus mended its rent garments, thus patched over its scars, where then is the great change? Come and see! The scenes with which the streets of republican Paris teem are such as those who have only known the city in its kingly garb have never witnessed.
What was the aspect of Paris formerly on one of those bright champagne-like spring days, when the Parisian butterflies of all classes, the humble gray moth as the sparkling tiger-fly, came forth to sun themselves in the golden air? There were crowds—but listless, easy, careless crowds, that sauntered they knew not whither, and turned back they knew not why—crowds of beings who ran over each other, and almost over themselves, as they fluttered hither and thither, enjoying the brightness of the sky without rendering themselves any reckoning of their enjoyment. There are still crowds in the streets; but no longer listless, easy, careless crowds. They form in large groups, and knots, and circles on the pavement, and at street corners, and at the entrance of galleries and passages; and, from the midst of the mass, if you can get near enough to hear, comes the sound of haranguing or of disputing. Each group is an al fresco club in which the interests of the country at large are being discussed; and round about is ever a dark murmuring, and a rumour, and a ferment—and sometimes minor disputants break off from the parent knot; and presently they form a nucleus for a fresh encircling crowd; and another group takes up its standing; and a great banian-tree of politicising knots drops its branches, which thus take root up and down the Boulevards, far and wide, until the whole long avenue is planted with separate little circles of disputants or spouters. Here a well-dressed man assures his unknown auditors that the arbitrary and despotic measures of an obnoxious Minister of the Interior destroy all confidence, and prepare the ruin of the country, with the fear of another Reign of Terror: there a workman on a bench, with violent gesture and inflamed countenance, declares that the salvation of the republic, one and indivisible, hangs upon the despotism—he gives it another name—of the same Minister of the Interior—for the time being, the hero of the people. But think not that the blouse is sundered from the frock-coat, or the varnished boot from the clouted shoe. Here you see a young élégant of the Faubourg St Germain, his legitimist principles and his old dynastic hopes prudently concealed behind the axiom, "All for France! Français avant tout!" discussing amicably a knotty point about elections, or the measures of the Provisional Government, with an unshaved artisan in a smock: and look! they are of one mind—or apparently so—and the kid-gloved hand grasps the rough, callous, toil-hardened palm. Here again a good bourgeois, a shopkeeper, in his uniform as a National Guard, the grocer of your street corner maybe, holds Monsieur the ex-Count, his customer, by the button, to develop his last republican scheme for the certain remedy of the financial crisis. A little further on, a dark-browed man, in a ragged coat, with a tricolor cockade, scarcely concealing the blood-red ribbon beneath, declares to a knot of young schoolboys, that the only method to avert the general misery is by the spoliation of the vile rich; but meets with little sympathy, and goes away scowling, as if he thought that his time would yet come. And here again a gamin, a very child, with his snub nose insolently cocked in the air, his sabre bound about his body, and his musket on his arm—for he just comes from keeping guard—is holding forth upon the interests of the Republic to a red-faced, mustached old gentleman, who looks like an old general; and who smiles good-temperedly on the urchin, and listens, until the young patriot thinks probably that he has sufficiently enlightened "granny" upon the art of sucking republican eggs, and swaggers off, screeching Mourir pour la Patrie, at the top of his shrill voice. And around each of these minor centres of two suns is all the hemisphere of listening planets and satellites. And thus every where is a fusion, according to the best-established republican principles of égalité: and no great harm done, were the doctrine to rest there—every where ferment, commotion, murmur, movement. But the old Parisian flaneur, with his easily satisfied curiosity, his desultory wanderings, his careless movements—and what Parisian of the street-crowds, man, woman, or child, had not formerly more or less of the spirit of a true flaneur?—is gone from the streets of Paris. A citizen has something else to do than flaner: he feels all the weight of the interests of the country on his own individual shoulders; and he has no time now but for making harangues, on which the welfare of France depends, and discussing political or social questions, equally for the welfare of all humanity. It is wonderful how quickly the change has come over the spirit of his dream. But fashion and contagion work miracles.
Come! look at this picture now. It is a bright moonlight night. The beams of the full moon are whitening the long line of elevated columns of the Bourse. In the large, open, moonlit place before it are crowds—every where crowds—in isolated circles again, looking like clumps of little wooded islands in a glistening lake. Let us approach one of the dark masses. In the midst of the circle stands a young fellow, bare-headed, shaking his fair locks about him most theatrically, and "baying at the moon." He is mounted on a tub, or some such temporary pulpit. His arms are tossed aloft in the moonlight with such energy that we feel convinced he fancies himself a second Camille Desmoulins animating the Parisian population against the tyrants of the country. We get as near as we can, and we now catch his words. He is, in truth, haranguing against tyranny, but the tyranny of the shopkeepers; and he calls upon all citoyens and true patriots to join him in a petition to the Government for the closing of shops on Sundays and holidays at twelve o'clock, instead of three in the afternoon! But the mass around does not seem to catch his enthusiasm; for I see none of those shifting lights in the chiaro-obscuro of the crowd, that would indicate one of those electric movements that fall upon popular masses, under the influence of inspiration. Now, he cries, "Vive la Republique! citizens, friends, let us to the Faubourg St Antoine!"—the workman's quarter, where émeutes are generally cooked up. But no one seems inclined to follow him into that distant region, in order to get up a shop-shutting insurrection; and more than one voice calls out, "plus souvent!" or, Anglice, "I wish you may get it!"
Come! here is another picture. The night this time is dark and drizzly. Upon the pavement of the now naked flower-market, beneath the quiet ghostly white walls of the Madeleine, stand thick groups of men: there are some hundreds of them—some in cloaks, some in thick coats, some with their hats slouched down upon their brows, all wearing, in their several patches of murmuring forms, an air of conspiracy, which is greatly increased by the sombre and inclement state of the night. And conspirators they are—but bold-faced conspirators in the face of a dripping heaven. In republican Paris, however, there is, as yet, no police to prevent conspiracy: and in this instance the plotters are not conspiring against republican France, but against monarchies and empires. The dusky forms are those of the German democrats, who are holding a desultory council for the raising of a German army to go and conquer the liberties of the great German republic they intend to found. To-morrow their address to the "citoyens Français," calling on them to lend arms and give money towards the recruitment of their force, will be on all the walls of Paris. In a day or two a few hundreds will be off, with the full conviction that they are to mix their own republican leaven of sourness into all the freshly baked German constitutional governments, and proclaim their republic wherever they go. They are talking, in this bigger group, not only of "breaking tyrant-chains," but of "wreathing laurels for their own brows."