Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848

Let us turn, then, to a sketch of the workshops in their reorganised state. We seek it out with more cheerful hopes; and, in order to change the background of our picture, let us look in the direction of the eastern outskirts of Paris, and investigate the scene presented by the national workshops upon the little plain of St Maur. Before we arrive there, however, we shall fall upon another sketch, which is not without its characteristic traits, as illustrative of the history of revolutionising Paris. Those masses of towers that rise from the midst of walls surrounded by moats, not far from the roadside, and are flanked and backed by the low trees of thick woods at a little distance, belong to the fortress of Vincennes. Within these towers, connected with many a dark page of French history, are confined those frantic and disappointed demagogues, who on the 15th of May endeavoured to overthrow the Assembly, constituted by universal suffrage as the sovereign power of the country, and to substitute their own regime of tyranny and terror in its place. There sit the moody Barbés, whose ideas of republicanism go no further than constant subversion of "what is;" and the cold-blooded and cunning, but ferocious Blanqui, that strange mixture in character, as well as in physiognomy, of the fox and the wolf; there mourns Albert, so lately one of the autocratic rulers of the country – the workman who, not content with his temporary power, helped to plot its return under bloody auspices. There are many others of those furious ultra-republicans, who dreamed of founding a government upon pillage, and supporting it by the guillotine. Those towers, in fact, contain the leaders upon whom a furious party counts, as the master-spirits who are to lead it on to power. Their liberation from confinement is the dream of the party: in every émeute with which the streets of Paris has been almost daily, or rather nightly, animated, the cry has been, "Vive Barbés!" in the fearful insurrection and the civil conflicts of June, the name of Barbés was the rallying cry. Long before that period of terrific memory, the government knew that plots were constantly being laid for the surprise of the fortress, and the liberation of the prisoners. When, led on by the chiefs of the ultra clubs, a band of so-called ouvriers waited upon the minister of the interior, to inform him that an immense monster fraternity banquet was to be held in the forest of Vincennes on a certain day, – they were met by the reply of the minister, that no day could be better chosen, inasmuch as he had appointed that very day for a grand review, on the same spot, of all the troops of Paris, who would thus have an opportunity of fraternising with their "brethren of the workshops." The monster banquet was, consequently, never held, – or rather it was held in the streets of Paris; and the people banquetted upon carnage, and blood, and the still quivering limbs of the unhappy Gardes Mobiles. But that dread hour is not yet come, at the time the sketch is taken. Aware of the designs of the conspirators, the government has sent reinforcements to protect the fortress of Vincennes. The whole forest around is now a camp. In the midst looms the donjon, with its towers and walls, a dark and gloomy prison house: the cannon is on the battlements; the garrison is on duty, as if the fortress were at that moment in a state of siege; and, strikingly contrasting with this stern spectre of stone, is the scene presented by the wooded environs. It partakes of the camp and the fair. The whole place is beleaguered with troops. But if you look among the trees, you will see the tents gleaming forth from among the green. Pickets are scattered here and there; now you see a body of troops of the line drawn up under arms; there again they are reposing upon the grass, or playing among themselves. At intervals comes up the white smoke of a fire, at which the mid-day meal of the soldiers is being cooked, from among the trees; then improviso al fresco kitchens are glimmering, and crackling, and smoking heavily in all directions. The jaunty vivandières, in their short blue petticoats, their tight red jacket boddices, and their little boots, with hats, bearing tricolor-cockades, stuck jauntily on the sides of their heads, are serving out wine to red-epauletted and red-breeched soldiers under the green branches, from their little painted barrels; and booths there are in every direction, with canvass coverings, gleaming out from the low forest, where there are wine and cider venders, and where sausages and other savoury dainties are being fired by little hand-stoves upon the ground. Venders of pamphlets and newspapers, all for one sou, are there also in herds, to tempt the young soldiers to buy their ultra-republican literary wares; and there may be a deeper purpose than mere speculation in the movements of some of the herd. Petty merchants there are also moving about, with every imaginable article of petty merchandise; ragged men with cracked voices, old women, and children of both sexes, are among these speculators upon the scanty purses of the military. The scene is gay and diversified, but it is sadly confused; and above all, when its component parts, and their various details be considered, it tells a sad tale of a city close by, given up to all the miseries of opposition, hatred, suspicion, mistrust, and active conspiracy.

Pass we on, then, to the picture of the reorganised national workshops, – of the reorganisation of which so much boast has been made by members of the government: we come to it at last, having only turned over, on our way, a leaf containing another sketch, which caught our eye in passing.

The scene is devoid of all the picturesque accessories of the park of Monceaux. It represents one of those desert, chalky, open space, that so violently offend the eye in the environs of Paris. In the distance are suburb houses, and scaffoldings of unfinished buildings, and heaps of stone, and mounds of earth, – all is dry, harsh, barren, desolate; it is glaring and painful to the sense in the bright sunlight; it is dreary, muddy, more desolate and offensive still in the time of rain. The sun, however, is bright and hot enough now, when the sketch is taken, about the middle of June. The brains of the thousand and nine workmen, who have been collected in the middle space of the picture, are seething probably beneath that hot sun, and fermenting to desperate schemes. What a pandemonium is represented by this desolate little plain, occupied by the reorganised national workmen. If they have been reorganised, it is only to worse confusion. They are more reckless, more lazy, more noisy, more insubordinate than ever. Those alone are quiet who lie snoring on their bulks in the sunshine; but they will wake ere long, and to active and bloody work, I trow. Yonder is a group employed, as if the welfare of the nation depended upon it, in the interesting and instructive game of bouchon, or of throwing sous at a cork; all their energies and their activity, engaged to earn their pay, are occupied in this work. They are merry and thoughtless, however; but wait! their merriment is but for the moment, and bloody thoughts will be awakened in them before long, under the pernicious influence of those who are allowed to wander among them, and instil poison in their ears. Look! there are jovial fellows reeling about under the influence of strong drink, – they have already thrown away all disguise – they cry "Vive Barbés! Vive la République Démocratique et Sociale! A bas tout le monde!" They at least show that they are ripe for revolt. Some brandish their spades in their hands – for here again is the same pretence of work, and of wheeling earth from one heap to another – and shout the Marseillaise in hideous chorus, or the "Mourir pour la patrie;" and anon they change their song to the Ca Ira of fearful memory; for the other republican ditties are not advanced enough for the bold would-be heroes of the "Red Republic." Here is one squatting under a bare hillock of earth, and piping all alone, in melancholy tone, upon a clarionet; but his musical efforts are as miserably out of time and tune, as are his seeming bucolics under the circumstances. Another has got upon a mound, and is fiddling to a set of fellows who are dancing the horrid Carmagnole, with gestures and faces that need only the pikes, with trunkless heads on them, of the old revolution, to make the scene complete. But the scene will be completed soon; bayonets shall bear heads upon their points, and the Carmagnole shall be danced behind barricades around mutilated bodies. "Vivent les Ateliers Nationaux!" Look at that group who are lowering darkly among themselves, and hold on to each others' blouses in the energy of their suppressed and whispered converse. See! there is another there upon the plain, and there again another such a crowd. They look like conspirators, – and in truth conspirators they are, communicating to each other the plans for the approaching insurrection. And this passes in open day, and we may be there to witness and even to hear; and the whole city shakes its head, and in vague apprehension expects the crisis that is about to come. And yet it will be said by ministers, and ministerial agents, that the national workshops are reorganised, – yes, reorganised to bloodshed and revolt! And no means will be taken by the government to control or suppress – it will not even attempt to stem – the torrent it has wilfully dammed up in these organised clubs of sedition. None now even deign to make a show of working, or, if the overseers come by and shake their heads, they take up their spades, and digging up a little earth, fling it, laughing in confident impunity, upon the back of the superintendent as he turns away. In the hands of such men as these, the pickaxes and spades have the air of the weapons of a murderous crew; and how soon will they not be used to aid them to purposes of murder! And this scene of confusion, and reckless effrontery, is sketched from the life at one of the national workshops in their reorganised state. Bright it is not, but it might shame one of Callot's most wild and turbulent pictures, such as he alone has shown how to etch.

Connected with such scenes as these, in as far as they tended to produce the last stirring sketches with which the Parisian Sketch-book was filled in the month of June, are others, which can only be fleetingly turned over. There is the large dingily lighted club-room, with its dark tribune, its president and secretaries and accolytes, dressed in blue smocks, with blood-red scarfs and cravats – its fiery orators denouncing the bourgeois to the hatred of the working classes, and instilling division, rancour, battle to the death between classes, with violent gesture and frowning brow; and its benches and galleries filled with a fermenting crowd, that yells and clamours, and applauds the sentiment of "hatred and death" to the bourgeois. It is no uninteresting, although a heart-wearying chiaro-oscuro scene, with its strong lights and dark shades – albeit, in its moral as well as its material aspect, the lights are few, the shades many, and dark to utter blackness. Connected with the same suite of subjects, also, is the nature of the small room in the crooked streets of the Cité, or the suburb, with a table spread with papers, around which sit bearded full-faced men, discussing sternly, as may be seen by the scanty lamplight that illumines those haggard physiognomies; it is the room of the conspirators of the "Red Republic," or of the revolutionary agents to be despatched throughout the country, and into other lands, to propagandise the doctrine of destruction to all that is. But this scene must surely be a fancy sketch. Connected, also, is that black sketch of a cellar, in which are concealed arms, guns, pistols, lead, cartridges, barrels of powder, that have evidently fallen into the hands of subversive anarchist conspirators, by means of the connivance, treachery, or at least culpable negligence of those placed in power by the sovereign Assembly, and that have been conveyed thither hidden in wood, in bales, in sacks, amidst provisions. Connected, also, are many other gloomy vignettes. The scribbler in the small room, writing with a sneer of bitterness upon his lip, and the stamp of overflowing bile on his pale face, writing with the red cap of liberty on his head, as if to inspire his brains with visions of all the horrors of a past revolution, glancing now and then, for a hint, at the portraits of Marat and Robespierre, which decorate his room, and grasping, now and then, the pistols on the table by his side, as if to instil the smell of powder and the breath of murder into the very lines he writes; – and again, the printing press worked by the light of the dying candle; – and again, in the hazy morning, the figure of the newspaper vender, swaggering down the boulevard, and skreeching out, with hoarse voice, the "True Republic," or the "People's Friend;" and of the deluded workman, who leans, after his morning dram, against a post, and sucks in the revolutionary poison of those prints, more deadly and damning to his mind, and more fatal to his future existence, than the dram is deleterious to his health, and pernicious to his future life; and prepares his mind for the bayonet and the gun-barrel, by which he means to destroy all those detested, and, his paper tells him, detestable beings, who have toiled to possess any wealth, while he possesses nothing; – and again, by night, the meeting of the man in power and the discontented conspirator, in the well-appointed apartment, where a hideous deed of treachery is to be plotted; or of the wavering workman – who fears he is about to plunge into greater misery, and yet hopes the realisation of the false promises made him – standing, still uncertain, to listen to the voice of the tempting instigator to rebellion under the gas lamp at the obscure street corner, on a drizzling night. All these are sketches connected with the past ones of the national workshops, and with those to come; they lead on to the last in the dark series, irresistibly, inevitably: but as most of them must necessarily be fancy sketches, and not "taken from the life," let them be turned over hurriedly with but a glance.

And those that follow – what a confused mass of startling subjects they offer! See here! the bands of united men assembling by night, and marching silently through the sleeping streets; then shouting and tossing up their arms in open defiance; then the rising barricades, all bristling with bayonets; then the national guards and troops pouring through the streets; the smoke of the firing; the mass of uniforms mounting the barricades; the tottering falling men; the confusion; the bodies strewn hither and thither, of wounded and dead; the struggle, hand to hand upon the barricades, of the blouse with the uniform of the national guard, – fury and hatred between fellow countrymen in each face; the cavalry dashing down the boulevards; the cannon rapidly dragged along; the tottering houses battered down; and then the biers slowly borne upon sad men's shoulders, supporting the dying or the dead; the carts filled with corpses; the wounded, upon straw littered down on the pavement, attended by the doctor in his common black attire, contrasting with the pure white cap and pinners of the sœur de charité; the uniforms, now smeared with blood and blackened by smoke, mingling with the long dark dress and falling white collar of the administering priest. See! now again, in the midst of the carnage and uproar and smoke, the young soldier of the day, the Garde Mobile, borne on the shoulders of his comrades, and waving in his hand the banner which he has wrested with valour from the hands of the insurgents on the barricade; and women, even in the midst of the terror and dismay, fling down flowers from the windows upon the heads of these young defenders of their country – the perfume of the flower mingling with the scent of stifling powder-smoke and the rank taint of blood. See again! there is a cessation of the combat for a time; the weary national guards are returning from the place of action. What a picture does the vista of the boulevards present! Those who have any knowledge of others passing by, stop them to fall upon the neck of a familiar face, and embrace it in grateful thankfulness that even a scarcely known acquaintance is saved from the frightful carnage that has taken place; and men ask for their friends, and heads are shaken; some have fallen, others return not; and in all the windows and the doors are agonised female faces; and women rush out to scream for husbands, fathers, and brothers, and follow those who they think can tell them of their fate in frantic entreaty along the pavement; and others sit more calmly at doorways, and watch, picking lint, in sad apprehension for the future, and silently moistening, with their tears of agonising uncertainty, that work which but too soon may be moistened with blood. How dark, and yet how stirring, how exciting, and yet how heart-rending, are these scenes! Then comes a sketch of a subject that may hereafter be used for many a historical picture. See! that fine old prelate, with his honest and firm face, and his white hair contrasting with his dark brow: he is borne along, first in the arms of confused and mingled men, insurgents and defenders of order mixing in one common cause; then, upon a hastily constructed litter. He lies in his episcopal robes: his face is mild and calm, although he suffers pain; his words are words of Christian forgiveness and heavenly hope, although he has been treacherously assassinated with the words of peace and Christian charity in his venerable mouth; and tears stream from the eyes of armed men, and trickle down their beards; and fellows with fierce faces and gloomy brows kneel to kiss his hand, that now grows colder and colder as he is borne, a victim and a martyr, over the barricades of death, and sobs of remorse and grief are heard among the infernal and battle-stained masses that line his path. Is there then still a feeling of noble generosity among the savages who form the great herd of the city which boasts itself to be the most civilised in the world, – as if civilisation were indeed at so low an ebb of retrograde tide? So there is still a sentiment of religion among the mass of France? Or is this but the theatrical display of men who live only in theatrical emotions, and will act a part before the eyes of their fellow actors, even if it be to the death? It might almost be supposed so – for now the dying prelate is carried by, and gone – the moment for the display of emotions is past: it is gone with that form. See! they are again with the musket on their shoulder – the knife in the hand of women and children! The scene is again, once more, one of smoke and carnage, and yells of execration and blood.

And now again come other scenes of men scouring along the outskirt plains of Paris. The insurgents are vanquished: the people of the Red Republic fly, and leave traces of the colour of their appalling banner in trails of blood; and there are pictures of soldiers and national guards running to the chase, and shooting down the hunted men like rabbits in an affrighted warren. – God have mercy on them all!

We turn over the leaves of the Sketch-book. It is over! The cannon no longer fills the streets with the smoke of the battle-field. Ruined houses compose a scene of hideous desolation in all the further eastern and northern streets of Paris. Affrighted inhabitants begin to crawl out of their houses. Windows are reopened. There is the air of relief from terror upon many a face – and yet how sad an air of grief and consternation pervades every scene in the vast city. The sun is shining brightly and hotly over the capital: there is a flood of light and heavenly love and brightness poured down upon the streets; but it only calls up still more reekingly to heaven the vapour of the blood, that goes up like an accusing spirit. How sadly, too, the bright summer air, and its broad cheering lights upon the white houses and the gilded balconies, contrast with the pale forms of the wearied and wounded men who crawl about, and with the weeping women who sit beneath the porchways, and with the coffins incessantly borne along – not one, or two, or three, but twenty or thirty each hour – and with the crape upon the arms of the men in uniform, or upon the hats, and with the convulsed faces of the wounded and dying, who lie upon their beds of down in the richly furnished apartment, or on the pallets of the hospital, as they shine into the windows of the wounded and dying. Bright as is the day of June, never was sadder scene witnessed in any capital: civil war has never raged more furiously within a city's walls since men conglomerated together in cities for mutual advantage and protection. How many hearts have ached! how many tears have been shed! how many wives are widows! how many children fatherless! how many affianced girls, with fondly beating hearts, will see the face of him they love in life no more! Oh, splendid sun of June! what a mockery thou seemest to be in these pictures of this dark Parisian scrap-book!

But the sun is shining still, and the little birds are twittering merrily upon the house-tops, and the caged canaries chirp at windows, and perchance there is the merry laugh of children. All these things heed not the terror and desolation of the city. It is shining still – into huge churches also, where thick masses of straw are littered down, and the wounded lie in hundreds to overflowing – into courts, where again is scattered straw, and again groan wounded and dying – upon street-side pavements, where again are strewn these sad beds of the victims of civil contention, excited by the most frantic of delusions – and through narrow windows, into prison vaults and palace cellars, where are crowded together masses of prisoners, who, for the most part, regret not the part they have played in the scenes of blood, and sit gloomily upon the damp stone, brooding over schemes of vengeance upon the detested bourgeois, should they escape, and the Red Republic ever be triumphant! It is shining still; and every where it shines, it smiles upon misery: it seems to mock the doomed unhappy city.

But there are still stirring, striking, unaccustomed scenes limned in the Parisian Sketch-book. Paris has been declared in a state of siege by the military autocrat, into whose hands the salvation of the capital and the country from utter anarchy has been given. The scenes of marching men and torrents of bayonets coming down the broad boulevards, and sentinels at street corners, and patrols, and military manœuvres, and galloping dragoons, and of drums beaten from daybreak until late into the night, are nothing new to Paris: such scenes have been traced upon its Sketch-book again and again, for the last four disastrous months. But Paris has gone further now. See! in these sketches it represents one vast camp. All along the broad vast vista of the boulevards are whole regiments bivouacking: the horses of the cavalry are stabled upon straw along the pavements, or around the triumphal arches; arms are piled together at street corners: some sleep upon the straw, while others watch as if in battle array. The shops are still shut, although pale faces look from windows; and the grateful inhabitants shower blessings upon those who have saved the terrified people from the horrors of the Red Republic, the pillage, and the guillotine; and ladies bring out food and wine from the houses; and none think that they can find words enough to express their gratitude, and praise the heroism of their defenders. Alas! those who fought in that evil desperate cause showed equal heroism, equal courage, still more reckless rage! What a strange scene it is, this scene sketched in the streets! The closing scene of a battle-field of unexampled carnage amidst a peaceful population – the soldier and the tenderly nurtured lady placed side by side amidst the wounded and the weary! the mourning of the bereaved family upon the same spot with the first emotion of victory! Since the agitated and disturbed city of Paris has existed, it has witnessed many wild and strange scenes in its bloody and tormented history, but none perhaps so glaring in their strange contrasts as these which have been last painted in its Sketch-book. All over Paris similar pictures may be limned. In the Place de la Concorde is again a camp, again piled arms and cannon, and littered beds of straw, and cooking fires, and groups of men in uniform, in all the various attitudes of the camp and battle-field; and in the glittering Champs Elysées are tents and temporary stabling, and horses, and assembled troops; and beneath the fine trees of the garden of the Tuileries are grouped, in similar fashion, battalions of the national guards of the departments, who have hurried up to the defence of Paris, and who bivouac, night as well as day, beneath the summer sky, in the once royal gardens. All these scenes are strange and most picturesque, and would be even pleasant ones, could the heart forget its terror and its grief – could the sight of the uniforms, the muskets, and the bayonets be severed from the sorrow and the despair, the bloodshed and the crime. In all these scenes Paris has lost its usual aspect, to become a fortress and a camp. The civil dress is rarely visible – the uniform is on almost every back. The carriage and the public vehicle are rare in these sketches; the dashing officer on horseback, the mounted ordnance, the galloping squadrons, take their place. That thin man, with his slim military waist, his long thin bronzed face, his thick mustaches and tufted beard, and his dark, somewhat heavy, eyes gleaming forth from beneath a calm but stern brow, who is riding at the head of a brilliant staff, is General Cavaignac, the military commander of the hour, the autocrat into whose hands the National Assembly of France has confided its destinies. Although, when he removes his plumed hat to salute those who receive him now with enthusiastic acclamations, he exhibits a head partially bald, yet his general air is that of a man in the full vigour of his best years, in the full active use of his lithy form. See! at the head of another mounted group is a still younger man of military command. His face is fuller and handsomer; and his thick mustaches give him a rough bold look, which does not, however, detract from his prepossessing appearance. This is the young General de Lamoricière, also of African fame. He is now minister at war. There are others, also, of the heroes of Algeria, who have not fallen in the street combat, in which so many, who had earned a reputation upon the open battle-field, received death by the hands of their fellow-countrymen. In every sketch are to be seen, as prominent figures, these military rulers of the destinies of France, which a few days have again changed so rapidly. We cannot look upon their striking portraits in these sketches, without asking ourselves how long Cæsar and Anthony may be content to rule the country hand-in-hand, or how soon the jealousy of the young generals may not be turned against each other, and they may not leave the country once more a prey to the dangers of a bloody faction; or which, if not more than one, may not fall a victim to the treachery of a vanquished party's vengeance by assassination? The leaves of the book are blank as regards the future. No one can venture to trace even the slightest outline upon them, with the assurance that it may hereafter be filled up as it has been drawn: and yet that those blank leaves must and will be filled with startling pictures once again, no one can doubt. How far will these young generals supply the most prominent figures in them? together, or sundered in opposition? The hand of fate is ready to trace those sketches; but never was that hand more hidden in the dark cloud of unfathomable mystery. The blank leaves of the album, in which the observing and self-regulating man keeps a daily journal of his doings and his thoughts, are always awful to contemplate: no thinking man can look upon them without asking himself what words, for good or for ill, may be recorded on them. But how far more awful still is the book of fate, upon the leaves of which are to be sketched the stirring scenes of a revolutionary city's history, so intimately connected with a country's destiny! and no one can tell what they may be.