But suddenly the crowd found the word, a word which indicated the tenor of the Revolution which was to follow: a word which like a ray of light was to conciliate a hundred opinions, to gather into one collective act a hundred individual energies, a simple, powerful, irresistible, sonorous word, the voice of the people pronouncing the people’s sentence upon that imperial régime, which, for close on a score of years, had been preparing the ruin of France; the word was déchéance (dethronement). To the refrain of that word scanned thus—Dé—ché—ance, and sung to the refrain of Les Lampions, the crowd thronged westward on to the Place de la Bastille, to awake that revolutionary quarter, the Faubourg Saint Antoine, asleep for twenty years. Then back again it surged on to the boulevards, there to deliberate and to postpone the attack on the Corps Legislatif until the morrow, Sunday.
In the small hours of that Sabbath morning Juliette from her window watched the boulevards emptying, the people going home, but not to sleep. Lights in the windows announced a vigil—la veillée des larmes.
“Il semble”, writes Mme. Adam, “que sous chaque toit un malade est à toute extrêmité et qu’on passe la nuit à son chevet. Ce malade c’est La France à l’agonie.”[178]
The 4th of September dawned resplendent, an ideal autumn day. “The sun shines to-day,” writes Juliette in her diary.[179] “It is the people’s sun. There is no fear of rain damping our patriotism.”[180]
In this diary, which she kept for her daughter, who was away in Normandy, staying near Granville with her grandparents, Mme. Adam, as they passed, described the events of those memorable hours. By ten o’clock all Paris was in the streets, thronging towards the Place de la Concorde and the bridge leading to the Chambre des Députés, where the members of the Corps Legislatif were to meet at twelve o’clock. Meanwhile, as the surging crowd outside grew larger and larger and more and more clamant, in the smoking-room of the House of Representatives perplexed deputies were vainly seeking some new form of government to replace the Empire. They were hurriedly turning over pages describing those numerous constitutional experiments which France had been trying since the Great Revolution; between the Palais Legislatif and the Palais des Tuileries, where the Empress was on the point of flight, all the time despairing ministers were hurrying to and fro. To Thiers’ house on the Place St. Georges the dying Mérimée was dragging himself to entreat, on behalf of a woman and her son, the intervention of le petit grand homme on whose wisdom every one counted.
Mme. Adam, from her place of vantage in a corner of the bridge close to the balustrade and the great lamps, listened to the talk which surged around her. Some wanted a republic, others feared that a republic would mean a revolution. With the fire of republicanism burning in her own heart like a religion, Juliette felt moved to intervene in what she describes as her first public speech.
“The Republic,” she exclaimed, “is not decreed, it is made, it is born of yourselves. It represents the highest degree of courage, of intelligence, of activity, of expansion to which a nation can attain. If society be a magnified edition of individuals, then the Republic is the result of our noblest actions, a living assemblage of our broadest and most progressive duties, rights and interests. Henceforth no social malady, no monarchical canker shall kill it. Then long live the Republic.”[181]
“My pathos,” writes Mme. Adam, “was not without its success. But my chief delight was to hear repeated around me by thousands of voices: Vive la République.”
From twelve till three, while ministers were deliberating and Eugénie de Montijo was escaping from her Palace, the mob continued to surge round the Chambre des Députés.
At half-past three the deputies heard the crashing noise of doors being broken open: the crowd had invaded the Chamber. But, like Charles I, the Parisians found that the birds had flown; no ministers were present, there were only a few deputies of the left. Among them was Gambetta. He vainly tried to address the mob. But even that resonant voice could not obtain a hearing. Amidst cries of “Where are the ministers?” he was howled down. And it was not until the ministers had reappeared, and the President of the Chamber, M. Schneider, from his official seat, had reminded the people of the danger threatening them, with the enemy barely one hundred miles away, that there was something like order. The ministers, fearing the violence of the mob, stayed but a brief space in the Chamber. After their departure, Gambetta entered the tribune and declared that Louis Napoléon Buonaparte and his dynasty had for ever ceased to reign in France.