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