This Place, with which Louis XIV. adorned Paris, was first called the Place des Conquêtes, to recall the brilliant victories which had secured to France the fine provinces which we have just lost a large part of, after most lamentable reverses. The sumptuous edifices, built according to Mansard’s plans, which form the contour, render it in an architectural point of view the finest Place in Europe. Destined by Louis XIV. to bring together the royal library and imprimerie, the academies, the
mint, and the hôtel of foreign ambassadors; now inhabited by wealthy families, rich travellers, and some of the government officials; situated between the garden of the Tuileries and the Boulevards des Capucines and des Italiens; entered at its two extremities by the Rues de Castiglione and de la Paix, through which pour wealthy merchants and elegant promenaders, it became on the twenty-second of March the theatre of uproar and civil war: it was covered with blood, and occupied by an armed crowd, in which prevailed the most sinister faces from the worst quarters of Paris.
The national guards of Bercy that I had seen the night before were models of civilization and distinction compared with these. Some were rather boys than men. They appeared to be only sixteen or seventeen years of age. As proud as they were surprised to carry a gun, they only sought for an opportunity or a pretext to use it. Those who have witnessed the revolutions of Paris know that armed children are capable of atrocious misdeeds. Sprung from the lowest grades of society, destitute of all moral sense, they care but little what cause they have to defend or what enemy to attack: their highest ambition is to display their audacity and to fire off their guns. As I am only relating the things I witnessed myself, I shall not speak of the fiendish part taken, according to some spectators, by a boy in the fusillade which had just shot down too great a number of pacific and honorable citizens. Many of the insurgents were in a state of overexcitement, proceeding less from their political and social opinions than from a too copious absorption of wine and other liquors: this is on days of revolutionary storms another category of insurgents capable of
everything because they have lost all moral sense. There was but little care and uniformity about their accoutrements. Some had on only a part of the uniform of the national guards: others wore a képi and a blouse. A great number of the képis were not numbered. Here and there were to be seen some red sashes.
In this nameless multitude might also be remarked men of fifty or sixty years, whose ferocious and degraded faces excited the worst suspicions respecting their moral instincts and their previous relations with the legal authorities. I at once saw that many of them were foreigners, particularly Italians and Poles. What a contrast between such insurgents, hardly to be found in June, 1848, in the lowest parts of Paris, and the imposing architectural splendor of one of the finest squares in the world! I could not express the effect of this mingling of poetic beauty and foul deformity upon me.
Another contrast no less sad rent my heart. The side of the Place Vendôme toward the Rue de la Paix was sprinkled with blood; now and then the wounded and dead were carried by; and over these spots of human blood, by the side of these unfortunate victims of civil war, a great number of insurgents, perhaps the very ones who without any motive or provocation had shot them down, were laughing, eating, drinking, and amusing themselves, as if they were celebrating the happiest event of their lives.
In going to the Ministère de la Justice, I had to pass through several groups of varied physiognomy. They were generally astonished to see the ecclesiastical garb among them. I acknowledge that, if I had not had a mission of sacerdotal obligation to accomplish, I should hardly have procured them this surprise,
notwithstanding my natural love of observation. Some—a small number, however—received me with coarse insults and horrid laughter. A few steps from the Ministère de la Justice, a national guardsman, who was talking and gesticulating with uncommon vivacity, stopped to address me, while shaking his fist at me, this singular apostrophe: “When shall we be delivered from those wretches?” I will not relate other pleasantries of this nature of which I was the butt: this one is only too much. Their authors had doubtless learned to know and judge the clergy by the violent diatribes of citizens Blanqui and Félix Pyat.
Others, on the contrary, saluted me with a respect and cordiality which I was careful to return politely. They were honest workmen who had doubtless had intercourse with their parish priests, or whose children attended the catechism classes or the schools of the religious congregations, and received a benefit which they understood how to appreciate. There were strange contrasts in this mixture. Not to forget a single characteristic detail, I caught some observations that denoted on the part of their authors serious regrets for the dreadful catastrophe which terrified the whole city.
If, among the insurgent battalions chosen to fire on the inoffensive inhabitants of Paris, there were some to deplore the horrors of civil war, how many might not have been found in the other battalions! If the ringleaders could be separated from those whom they lead, and the deceivers from the deceived, the number of the latter would be considerable, and the former somewhat modified. One of the most serious faults of the workman of Paris is the incredible facility with which he enters into all the hollow schemes of