IV.1.1. 1830: THE PEOPLE FOOLED

MENU: 4.1.2. 1830: The people fooled

THIS OFFICIALLY-COMMISSIONED PAINTING HAS ALL CLASSES SURROUND THE NEW KING AS HE RIDES PAST 1830'S BARRICADES 

The Duke of Orleans on the way to City Hall, crosses place du Châtelet, July 31 1830 by Prosper Lafaye, 1830 / zoom

But the social cohesion will soon be as imaginary as is the white horse in this work of propaganda, which the City Museum prominently exhibits.

In brief

• Freedom's great painting, fervent and ambiguous

• The Arc de Triomphe's lame homage to the plebes 

• The July Column, as evasive

• Victor Hugo's "time of riots" 

• Algeria enters France's conflicts

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Next,

Freedom's great painting, fervent and ambiguous

FREEDOM'S GREAT PAINTING, FERVENT AND AMBIGUOUS

THE PLEBIAN GODDESS AND THE HUMBLE FIGHTER SHOWN

FULL FACE MAKE THE WORK EXPLOSIVE

Louis-Philippe hesitates to buy the work that will become France's iconic painting and when another insurrection breaks out six months later, stops exhibiting it.

    By Eugène Delacroix, 1831, zoom

Cut to emphasize those figures  

The capitalism that 1830 unleashed worsened the lives of the humble:* "A free people whose happiness begins" is this work's ironic title.

 * The population that is too poor to tax goes from 68% in 1833 to 72,2% in 1846. (Haussmann by Michel Carmona, 2000, p. 177)

          

 Engraving by Travies, 1831 / zoom

"10,000 in civil list, a budget of a billion, higher taxes, laws of privilege, arrests and illegal visits, arrests without motive, crowded prisons, stock market coups, produce at onerous cost, commerce wiped out, national colors forbidden, patriots assassinated, aggressors publicly paid, treasure wasted, sinecures, traitors to the nation and the population miserable.

Freed people, whose happiness begins, 

relax after your immense achievement!

People! Rest!"

Internet, no further information

A July hero

May 1831

# # #

For all its passion the masterpiece is ambiguous: Liberty with what practical goal? For whom?

Like almost all intellectuals

Delacroix approved "the people" 

when their force imposed middle class goals,

and backed their massacre

when they fought for themselves.

More later.

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Next,

The Arc de Triomphe's lame homage to the plebes

THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE'S LAME HOMAGE TO THE PLEBES

TO UNITE THE FRENCH AROUND HIM, LOUIS-PHILIPPE COMPLETES THE MONUMENT THAT NAPOLEON BEGAN

(IN 1836)

He thanks the humble for bringing him to power by showing soldiers as men of the people for the first time:

Claude Abron

Till then, warriors were shown as Romans, whether they were kings, nobles — adversaries included  — or leaders of mercenaries:

Louis XIII at place des Vosges,  Louis XIV at the Musée Carnavalet

At the Saint-Denis gate, 1674 / Carolyn Ristau

Nobles fight other nobles, not commoners 

Soldiers' Pay, scene from the tapestry The Fruits of War., 1546-1548 at the Renaissance Museum / zoom

...but commoners were anonymous, like the fighters in paintings about 1830

 

             The Angel of Death Defeats Sennarcherib, 17th century / zoom

# # #

But on the frieze at the top of the Arc soldiers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies are courageous, determined, individualized, ordinary...

Photos from the diorama at the arch's summit

 ...and need binoculars to decipher 

          Claude Abron

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Next,

The July Column, as evasive

THE JULY COLUMN, AS EVASIVE

THE OTHER GREAT MONUMENT OF THE TIME: A COLUMN

THAT HONORS THE FALLEN OF 1830

(INAUGURATED IN 1840)

Giving their names acknowledges them, while omitting their professions erases their humble origins.

The July Column, on the ultra-symbolic place de la Bastille

Names

 Perhaps there was no room for professions? 

But royalists managed to do so,

as a way to show the arbitrariness

of the Revolution's bloodbath:

 

Plaques like this one surround the altar of the Picpus church, which is a few steps from the guillotine's last site.* Its cemetery is reserved to descendants of guillotined nobles.

*At place de la Nation in the east, which then was outside town and called the "place of the Overturned Throne" because the guillotine was transferred there in the last weeks of the Terror (June 13-July 28, 1794). For some of its drama, please click here and here (please scroll down).

 

Monuments present their sponsors' point of view.

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Next,
"The time of riots" 

"THE TIME OF RIOTS" (Victor Hugo)

"ENRICH YOURSELVES"A PRIME MINISTER* NOTORIOUSLY DECLARES

 

* François Guizot: 

"Monsieur Guizot is personally incorruptible and he rules by corruption. 

He makes me think of an honest woman who runs a brothel." 

-- Victor Hugo

Corruption, the rule of money and more intense exploitation

come with businessmen in command after 1830:

The legislative belly by Honoré Daumier, 1834 / zoom

"-- The bank bores you and you would rather have a private office in the Ministry of the Interior?"  
-- Yes, father. 
-- There is one great difficulty: will you be rascal enough for that post?" 

-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1834, start of  Part II

"Workers must know that there is no remedy for them except patience and resignation." 

-- Another Prime Minister, the banker Casimir-Périer

• Far from resigning themselves, the poor revolt so often that uprisings are ignored. Riots begin in February 1831 with the pillaging of the Notre-Dame bishopric and are endemic until the killings of 1834, mentioned below.

         The Pillage of the Archbishopric of Notre-Dame, February 14, 1831, anonymous engraving, 1883/ zoom

The Besieged, a House on rue Saint-Antoine by André Joseph Bodem, zoom (please scroll down)  

"Gunning down happens at a crossroad, in an alley, at a dead end; barricades are taken, lost and retaken; blood flows, grapeshot riddles houses' facades, bullets kill people making love, corpses block the streets. A few streets away one hears the shock of billiard balls in cafés."

-- Les Misérables

• The revolt in Les Misérables is real (June 5-6, 1832)

Insurgents wave the red flag and the government uses cannons against its people for the first time.

-- A History of the Barricade by Eric Hazan, 2015,

whose studies give the upheavals their due. 

# # #

Working-class organization begins when silk workers of Lyons 

form a union and rather than demanding a lower price for bread, insist on higher wages.

Workers' insurrections begin.

(In 1831 and 1834) 

Popular print / zoom

# # # 

The 1834 uprising spreads to Paris.

• When a bullet shot from a window kills an officer, soldiers enter the house and shoot all the residents, floor by floor:

Zoom (no information on the work)

 

• The lithograph Transnonain Street brings outrage. It is the first secular image of mass communication:*

* Freedom of the press and outstanding caricaturists let lithography take off.

Transnonain street, April 15 1834 by Honoré Daumier / zoom

       The house is n° 62 rue Beaubourg, next to the museum (there is no plaque).

A dead baby lies under the corpse. The white sheets and shirt bring out the menace of the shadows.

• Thiers (then Minister of the Interior) rejoices so much in repression that he accompanies its ultra-conservative commander (the marquis Robert Bugeaud)

Bugeaud and Thiers are elsewhere at the time of the massacre, but are held responsible. "Unfair!" writes Bugeaud's biographer. But they show no regret and the killers go unpunished. 

The repressions of Lyons and the "Massacre of rue Transnonain" with its 14 dead announce the future.

# # #

"While Guizot incited businessmen to enrich themselves

and built new neighborhoods for the wealthy,

a mass reduced to unemployment, hunger, sickness [...]  

learned solidarity and class struggle through disaster."

  -- Jean Fréville, Lenin in Paris, 1968 (in French)

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Next,
Algeria enters France's conflicts

ALGERIA ENTERS FRANCE'S CONFLICTS

CONQUEST OF ALGERIA / REPRESSION IN FRANCE: TWO SIDES OF ONE STORY 

The king seizes Algiers, hoping that victory will crush domestic opposition: "The white banners were the monarchy, sailing from the port as did Saint Louis..."

-- René Chateaubriand

            The Landing at Sidi-Ferruch, July 14 1830 by Pierre-Julien Gimbert / zoom

The monarchy falls nevertheless, and the new regime inherits 

a war that goes badly and serves mainly to let officers advance in rank: 

           The Fight at Habrah (in 1837), 1840, detail, by Horace Vernet / zoom

On the white horse, a son of Louis-Philippe. "Don't send any more princes!" the commander begs.

An attack is so poorly prepared that starving French soldiers fall back, abandoning civilians, sick and wounded (in 1835). They are decapitated.

-- Morny, the Vice-Emperor by Michel Carmona, 2005 (in French) 

The insurrection of 1848 makes Algeria suddenly useful, as a place to deport rebels and that the turbulent can colonize:

Internet, no source named

"Pushing back an attack of pillaging Arabs" 

"We'll be farmers and fighters," says Martial, a repented offspring of criminals, to a former criminal. The latter is killed, but Martial and his mistress, the ferocious Louve ("she wolf") start a new life in Algeria.

-- The Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue, 1843

The population drops by at least 20% between 1830 and 1875.

-- The Twilight of Revolutions, 1848-1871 ("Le Crépuscule des revolutions") by Quentin Deluermoz, 2012 
Other estimates are 30%.

"I will burn your villages and your harvests," says the notorious General Bugeaud, who led the Parisian repression of 1834 and is the bogey-man "Bujo" a century later:

-- Struggles and Dreams ("Les Luttes et les rêves") by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 2016 

 Thomas-Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie, Duke of  Isly (1784-1849), Marshal of France

by Charles-Philippe Larivière, between 1843 and 1845 / zoom

Other version with smoke from burning village in background; in 2023, gone from the web. "The goal... is to keep Arabs from sowing, harvesting, pasturing... burn their harvests every year... or exterminate every last one of them."

-- General Bugeaud, February 22, 1841, Wikipédia (in French)

The army learns savagery: 

• "He remembered his two years in Africa, and how he had ransomed Arabs in the little outposts of the South..." 

"and a gay and cruel smile passed over his lips at the recollection of an escapade that had cost the lives of three men from the Ouled-Alane tribe and given them, his companions and himself, twenty chickens, two sheep, gold, and a subject to laugh about for six months."

-- Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, 1885,
who in 1881 had been a journalist in Algeria.

• "It was not rare to see soldiers throw children to their comrades, who received them at the tip of their bayonets... .

They tore off the earrings of women, the ears too, and cut off their fingers for the rings." 

-- Victor Hugo citing a general who visits him in 1871, Things seen (his diary), 1871

• "To be rid of ideas that sometimes assail me I cut heads, not heads of artichokes but heads of men."

-- Colonel Lucien de Montagnac, Letters of a soldier, toward 1848 (in French)

Zoom

The colonists' version, like Hollywood's of "the conquest of the West:" 

             By the Sword and the Plow, Algeria in the time of General Bugeaud, 1994

# # #

The war was terrible for French soldiers as well, who were often peasants enrolled by force.  

Badly fed, clothed and equipped, obliged to commit atrocities and living in fear of unpredictable Arab reprisals, they suffered from wind and heat during the day and cold at night, and from malaria, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, cholera and depression.

One-third of the army was hospitalized (in 1846). Two-thirds of the sick had no beds, three-fourths no mattress, some lay outside, and there was not enough water, food, or medicine. 

There were seven times more deaths in the army than among civilians, whose life expectancy was already short.

-- Struggles and Dreams

The interminable Algerian war affected the army

• The racism and cruelty learned there intensified the savagery of repressions at home.

•  The Arabs fought in traditional ways and victories over them give a sense of omnipotence, with no experience of modern warfare.

To be continued.

End of this section

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Next,

4.1.3.

February 1848: the people fooled again