Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot. Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against doors; servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying there is going to be a row. A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place at twenty different spots in Paris at once. Young men emerged from a dram-shop carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape. A well-dressed bourgeois offered cartridges publicly to passers-by. Men with bare arms carried about a black flag on which could be read: Republic or Death. They pillaged a factory of small-arms and three armorers' shops. In a few minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled. They unpaved the streets, unharnessed carriages, uprooted trees, heaped up paving-stones, furniture and planks, and made barricades. They forced the bourgeois to assist them. They entered the dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: The arms have been delivered. All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult, like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter of the Halles alone.
That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied, on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the whole of the Marais, the streets near the Halles; on the left bank, the barracks of the Veterans, the Place Maubert, the powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters. The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points. The combat which had begun with the throwing of stones was continued with gun-shots. About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other. They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which separate the shops. He remained in this delicate situation for nearly half an hour.
Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from their barracks. Drummers were assailed. Officers fell. The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel. There was the hearth. There, evidently, was the question. All the rest was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet. In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the fearful uncertainty of the crisis. Each side was watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated. The night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make itself heard. The Minister of War, who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air. These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having as resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public wrath. The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. Cannons were descending from Vincennes. Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly serene.
