The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work is laid. They sprang from the earth at the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets that history has ever beheld. It sometimes happens that, even contrary to liberty and to the government by all for all, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against the people. Beggars attack the common right. These are melancholy days. Those words which are intended to be insults exhibit rather the fault of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer, rather the fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited. Athens was an ochlocracy. The beggars were the making of Holland. The populace saved Rome more than once. The rabble followed Jesus Christ. The dregs of the city, the law of the earth. The man of probity sacrifices himself, and out of his very love for this crowd he combats it. June, 1848, was an exceptional fact. It was necessary to combat it, and this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848, at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself. Two absolutely unique barricades characterized that insurrection. One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine. The other defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple. Those before whom these two fearful masterpieces reared themselves beneath the brilliant blue sky of June will never forget them.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous. It was three stories high and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg, three streets from angle to angle, and nineteen barricades were ranged behind it. Of what was it made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It was the improvisation of the ebullition. An immense dray was spread out crossways, its axle pointing heavenward. An omnibus hoisted to the very summit presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air. It was the acropolis of the barefooted. The Faubourg Saint Antoine had thrust its misery there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the broom. Blocks resembling headsman's blocks and pieces of woodwork like gibbets amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old tortures. It converted everything into a weapon. It was not combat, it was a paroxysm. A vast red flag flapped in the wind. It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai. It attacked in the name of the revolution the revolution. The Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise. Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness. The bombs plunged into it. What was the use of cannonading chaos? The regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its bristling and a mountain by its size.
A quarter of a league away, if one thrust one's head beyond a shop on the boulevard, one perceived in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville a strange wall reaching to the second story, a sort of hyphen between the houses, built of paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, but the architecture was rigid. Almost invisible loopholes resembled black threads. The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. A sepulchre. The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light. It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple. One felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre. One looked at it and spoke low. From time to time, if some soldier chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded. The men had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe. There was no waste of useless powder. Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate. Defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, the barricade held out for three days. On the fourth they pierced the houses and came over the roofs. Not one of the eighty thought of flight. All were killed there except the leader. The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders. The barricade of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw. The other a mask. One the dragon, the other the sphinx. Cournet built the first: lofty stature, a red face, a crushing fist, a loyal soul. War was the very air he breathed. He carried the hurricane on into battle. Barthelemy built the second: thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, a tragic street urchin who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came out and made this barricade. Later, in London, Barthelemy slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards he was hanged. He began in France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows. Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.
