In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe for commotion. The great city resembles a piece of artillery. When it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the shot is discharged. In June, the spark was the death of General Lamarque. He had had, under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery requisite for the two epochs: the bravery of the battle-field and the bravery of the tribune. A sword was discernible in his speech. He was beloved of the people because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the Emperor well. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the word country. His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what took place.
On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best they might. Joiners carried off door-weights to break down doors. A carpenter went to his timber-yard for his compasses and did not know what for. Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly. One man, asked his object, replied: Insurrection. On the day itself, a day of mingled rain and sun, the funeral procession traversed Paris with official military pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude: the sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities, every possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who were on strike, printers in their paper caps, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column. On the side alleys, in the trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men, women, and children. An armed throng was passing, and a terrified throng looked on. The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with its hand on its sword. Power, being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the suburbs. The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained from time to time. The rain mattered nothing to that throng. At the Bastille, long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the faubourg effected a junction with the procession, and a certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.
The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd, surveyed at that moment with a bird's-eye view, would have presented the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread out over the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high. All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say with a pike surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head. This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. Two prodigious shouts went up: Lamarque to the Pantheon. Lafayette to the Town-hall. Some young men harnessed themselves and began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge, and Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the quay. In the meantime the municipal cavalry came to bar the bridge, and the dragoons deployed along the Quai Morland. The men who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them and shouted: The dragoons. The dragoons advanced at a walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in their scabbards, with an air of gloomy expectation. They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was heard, others that a blow from a dagger was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were suddenly discharged: the first killed the chief of the squadron, the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer. A woman screamed that they were beginning too soon, and all at once a squadron of dragoons which had remained in the barracks was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, sweeping all before them. Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade breaks forth, a barricade is begun, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to all four quarters of Paris, men shout To arms. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.
