5.2. 1830: THE PEOPLE FOOLED

MENU: 5.2. 1830: THE PEOPLE FOOLED

AN OFFICIALLY-COMMISSIONED PAINTING...

has all classes surround the new king as he rides past barricades that have not yet been demolished 

That cohesion will soon be as unreal 

as is the white horse in this work of propaganda, 

which the City commissioned

 and musée Carnavalet prominently displays.

*    *    *

Start of a different struggle

• Social classes whose goals diverge

• Faceless poor and bourgeois heroes

• More on bourgeois heroes

• 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"

• An intelligent ogre checks in

• Algeria enters France's conflicts

*      *      *

Next,

5.2.1.

Social classes whose goals diverge

V.2.4. 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 what will become France's great iconic painting and stops exhibiting it six months later, when another insurrection breaks out.

    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 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!"

A July hero

May 1831

# # #

The masterpiece is ambiguous: Liberty with what practical goal? For whom?

Like almost all intellectuals Delacroix approved "the people" 

when their force brought middle class goals and backed 

their massacre when they fought for themselves.

An exception proves the rule.

.*     *     *

Next,

5.2.5.

The Arc de Triomphe's lame homage to the plebes

V.2.5. THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE'S LAME HOMAGE TO THE PLEBES

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

(IN 1836)

To thank the humble for bringing him to power he has soldiers shown 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 mercenaries...

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

At the Saint-Denis gate, 1674 / Carolyn Ristau

A noble fights another noble.

La Paie des soldats from the tapestry "Les Fruits de la guerre," 1546-1548 at the Renaissance Museum / zoom

But commoners were anonymous...

   L'Ange de la mort vainc Sennarcherib, 17th century / zoom

As are the fighters in paintings about the Revolution of 1830.

 

# # #

These soldiers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies on are courageous, determined, individualized, ordinary...

Photos from the diorama at the arch's summit

And need binoculars to decipher.

          Claude Abron

*     *     *

Next,

5.2.6. 

The July Column, as evasive

V.2.6. THE JULY COLUMN, AS EVASIVE

THE OTHER GREAT MONUMENT OF THE TIME: A COLUMN

THAT HONORS 1830'S FALLEN  

(INAUGURATED IN 1840)

Giving their names commemorates them, but omitting their professions erases their mainly humble origins:

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

Names

Perhaps there was no room for professions? But royalists managed to include them, as a way to show the arbitrariness of the Revolution's bloodbath:

Such plaques surround the altar of the Picpus church, near the guillotine's last site.* Its cemetery is reserved to descendants of guillotined nobles.

*At place de la Nation, then called the "place of the Overturned Throne" because the guillotine was transferred there at the end of the Terror (June 13-July 28, 1794). 

 

Monuments present 

their sponsors' point of view.

*      *      *

Next,
 5.2.7.

Victor Hugo's "Time of riots" 

V.2.7. VICTOR HUGO'S "TIME OF RIOTS"

"ENRICH YOURSELVES," A PRIME MINISTER NOTORIOUSLY DECLARES

 

"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:

Le Ventre législatif [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.

     Le Sac de l'Archevêché de Notre-Dame le 14 février 1830, anonymous engraving, 1883 / gone from eBay. 

 Les Assiégés [The Besieged]. Le haut d’une maison du faubourg St. Antoine. Jusqu’au plus modeste réduit la Liberté a trouvé de nobles défenseurs » 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)

For the first time, insurgents wave the red flag and the government uses cannons against its people.

-- Une Histoire de la barricade by Eric Hazan, 2015, is a rare study to give the upheavals their due.

# # #

Working-class organization begins when silk workers of Lyons 

form a union and instead of demanding a lower price for bread, insist on higher wages.

Insurrections follow.

(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 mass communication's first secular image:*

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

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

• Thiers (the next page says more about him), 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, Lénine à Paris, 1968 

*     *     *

Next,

5.2.8.

An intelligent ogre checks in