Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1

by William Walton

Even in the very first days of the new Republic of 1848 the popular discontent broke out afresh. Clubs were formed all over the city; the most violent harangues were made against the bourgeoisie; the words "communism" and "socialism" began to replace "fraternity"; numerous failures occurred in all the business quarters, and all the strangers left the city. Crowds paraded the streets crying, "À bas les aristos!" the last being a new word invented to designate the bourgeoisie, and the latter, strengthened by the workmen in blouses, to the number of a hundred thousand men, made a counter-demonstration, singing the Marseillaise. In 1850, on the eve of the Coup d'État, "a profound discouragement prevailed among the bourgeoisie. The sudden fall in public securities, the rise in the premium on gold, the significant increase in the purchase of foreign bonds, the departure of the numerous strangers who had come to Paris to pass the season, the diminution, more marked even than in the preceding month, in all industrial and commercial transactions,—such were the symptoms of that confidence which was to effect the conciliation of the electors."

The events of the first three or four days of December, 1851, justified only too well these apprehensions, and have been but too frequently related by indignant historians. "It was a sinister and inexpressible moment," says the author of Napoléon le Petit,—"cries, arms lifted toward Heaven, the surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in every direction, a hail of bullets, from the pavements even to the roofs, and in a minute the dead strewing the street, young men falling, their cigars still in their mouths, ladies in velvet dresses killed by the musketry, two booksellers shot on the threshold of their shops without even knowing what was wanted of them, bullets fired into cellar-windows and killing no matter whom, the Bazar de l'Industrie riddled with shell and balls, the Hôtel Sallandrouze bombarded, the Maison-d'Or mitrailleused, Tortoni taken by assault, hundreds of corpses on the Boulevard, a stream of blood in the Rue Richelieu!"

Under the new Empire, Paris saw itself almost transformed by the opening of wide and direct avenues of communication, the suppression of gloomy and insalubrious quarters, the completion of the Louvre, the construction of the Halles, the erection of churches, schools, mairies, and the laying out of public gardens and promenades. Six hundred kilomètres of sewers were provided for the drainage of the capital, and the Bois de Boulogne and de Vincennes greatly embellished. The working-classes were still disturbed by vague discussions over social questions, and by souvenirs of the Republic; but the bourgeoisie, enriched by the public security and liberty of trade, desired only the continuance of order and a somewhat more liberal administration of public affairs. The condition of many parts of the city, as revealed by a number of official investigations after the Revolution of 1848, was indeed deplorable. "A third only of the working-classes live under conditions approaching hygienic ones, the remainder are in a frightful state; forty thousand men and six thousand women are lodged in Paris in furnished houses which are for the greater part nothing but damp hovels, scarcely ventilated, badly kept, containing chambers in which are eight or ten beds pressed one against another, and in which several persons sleep together in the same bed." The immediate effects of the opening of Baron Haussmann's magnificent new boulevards were in many cases disastrous for the workmen and for the poorer classes, who found themselves compelled, by the destruction of their old lodgings, and the increase in rents and daily expenses, to seek shelter in the suburbs, and in the quartiers eccentriques; the Expositions Universelles also served to increase permanently the cost of living, as they have always done since, and in other cities than Paris. On the other hand, the cost of clothing was considerably diminished, and the workingman was never so well arrayed as in the first years of the Second Empire.

The dubious antecedents of the third Napoleon exposed him to even more than the usual hatreds and perils of crowned heads, and the number of plots against his life rivalled even those of the attempted assassinations of Louis-Philippe, one of the most unlucky of sovereigns in this respect. The Emperor has been accused of having been a member of the Italian secret society of the Carbonari in his youth; the Italian war of 1859 has been said to have been rendered imperative by his former oaths, and the frightful affair of the Opera-house on the evening of January 14, 1858, appears to have been the work of this political and revolutionary society. On this gala night, Massol was to bid adieu to the stage, and Madame Ristori was to appear in three acts of Marie Tudor, followed by an act of Guillaume Tell and a scene from the Muette. The house was brilliantly illuminated, both the exterior and the interior, and thronged by an eager audience waiting for the arrival of the Emperor and the Empress; at half-past eight the Imperial cortége appeared, descending the boulevards at a trot and turning into the Rue Le Peletier. In the first two carriages were seated the chamberlains and officers of the crown, and in the third the Imperial couple, escorted by a peloton of lancers of the Guard, the lieutenant commanding which rode close by the right side of the coach, while a maréchal des logis chef rode on the left side. The three vehicles slackened their speed to turn into the vaulted passage, under the marquise, which conducted to the stairway newly constructed for the use of the sovereign, and at this instant a bomb fell in the midst of the cortége and exploded. All the lights were extinguished by the concussion, the glass of the marquise of the theatre and that of the windows of the neighboring houses, from the cellars to the mansards, flew in splinters, the street was covered with the dead and wounded, and the terrified horses of the lancers, bolting in every direction, added to the confusion and terror. A few seconds later, a second bomb fell under the horses of the Imperial carriage, killing them, and a third, directly under the carriage itself.

At the first explosion, the Emperor had attempted to leave his carriage by the door on the right, on the side of the peristyle of the Opéra, but this door, jammed in its frame by the terrible shock, refused to open. While he was hesitating to attempt to descend by the other door, which opened on the street in which the assassins were probably stationed, a haggard and bloody countenance presented itself at the opening. It proved to be that of a brigadier of the secret police, Alessandri, one of the most devoted of the Imperial agents; beside it presently showed themselves the faces of M. Lanet, commissaire of the section of the Opéra, a police officer, Hébert, MM. Royer and Vaëz, directors of the Opéra, and General Roguet. The latter, who had been seated on the box of the Imperial carriage, had received a violent contusion on the neck, from which an enormous quantity of blood escaped. The lieutenant commanding the escort hastily assembled those of his men whom the flying projectiles had spared, and behind this friendly human wall the Emperor and the Empress finally ventured to leave their vehicle, and hastened into the Opera-house. Neither of them were injured, though the former had a hole through his hat, and his forehead was lightly cut by a piece of flying glass. His carriage was riddled by seventy-six projectiles, and he owed his life only to the fact that the panels were all lined with iron.

A hundred and fifty-six persons were killed and wounded by the three bombs; the pavement, the sidewalks, and the front of the Opera-house were pitted with holes and splashed with blood. All the issues of the Rue Le Peletier were closed almost immediately after the explosions, and a prompt descent was made on the restaurant and little garden, immediately opposite the Opera-house, which was kept by an Italian named Broggi. Here those of his companions who were at odds with fortune were in the habit of assembling, and here a waiter named Diot found on a table a pistol and beside it a man who was ostentatiously weeping. When questioned, he gave his name as Swiney, declared he was the servant of an Englishman named Allsop, a brewer, who lived at No. 10, Rue du Mont-Thabor, and that he wept because he feared his master had been killed. The real name of Swiney was Gomez, and that of his master, Allsop, was Orsini; the latter, who had been wounded by his own bomb, was arrested as he was walking peacefully away. He had the assurance to write a long letter to the Emperor from Mazas prison, after his trial, in which, while making no appeal for his own life, he interceded for the independence of Italy, without which, he asserted, "the tranquillity of Europe and that of your Majesty will be but chimeras." He admitted having brought the bombs from England and charged them with fulminating powder, but denied having thrown any of them; he was guillotined on the 13th of March, with his accomplice, Pieri,—Orsini crying with his last breath: "Vive l'Italie! Vive la France!" Gomez was condemned to hard labor for life.

"In 1867," says a historian, "France believed herself invincible. The capital of capitals surpassed the splendors of all other cities, ancient and modern. It was a bedazzlement, a fairy spectacle. But a time was approaching when a bloody and funereal vail was to be suddenly thrown over so many more than Babylonian magnificences, and in which the great city, so proud of her riches and her glory, was to have no other ceremonial than the overthrow of the Vendôme column by French hands in the face of the Prussians."

By the 18th of September, 1870, the siege of Paris by the Germans was formally opened, and yet, on that date, the author of the Journal du Siège declares the capital to be "the most strange and the most marvellous city. On the eve of combat she still preserves her unalterable gaiety, still sings, and strews flowers in front of the soldiers. It is because her resolution is firmly taken, and that she awaits the attack with a firm stand and a valiant heart. To-day, it is a festival Sunday indeed;—on every side is animation, enthusiasm, life. We have made the tour of the boulevards; we have traversed the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de Rivoli, the quais. Everywhere there are tranquil countenances, and everywhere the Sunday crowd, gay, in no way impressed, nowise dejected, as the despatches to foreign journals assert.... The little street industries have not ceased; the tight-rope dancers continue their performances tranquilly in the midst of the military groups.