Henri Bergson - "Dreams"

Aristotle - "Ethics"

Editor In Chief Rossiter Johnson - "The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12"

AEschylus - "The House of Atreus"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Napoleon the Little

V >> Victor Hugo >> Napoleon the Little




"All this occurred between noon and one o'clock. On this side of the
barricades an immense number of people covered the pavement on both
sides of the boulevard; in some places, silent; in others, crying:
'Down with Soulouque! Down with the traitor!'

"From time to time, mournful processions traversed the multitude; they
consisted of files of closed litters borne by hospital attendants and
soldiers. At their head marched men holding long poles, from which hung
blue placards, on which was inscribed, in huge letters: _Service of
the Military Hospitals_. On the curtains of the litters: _Wounded,
Ambulance_. The weather was dull and rainy.

"At this time there was a great crowd at the Bourse. On all the walls
bill-stickers were posting despatches announcing the adhesion of the
departments to the _coup d'etat_. Even the stockbrokers, while
trying to bull the market, laughed and shrugged their shoulders at
these placards. Suddenly, a well-known speculator, who had for two days
been a great admirer of the _coup d'etat_, made his appearance,
pale and breathless, like a fugitive, and exclaimed: 'They are firing
on the boulevards!'

"This is what had happened:




III


"A little after one o'clock, a quarter of an hour after the last order
given by Louis Bonaparte to General Roguet, the boulevards throughout
their whole length, from the Madeleine, were suddenly covered with
cavalry and infantry. Almost the whole of Carrelet's division, composed
of the five brigades of Cotte, Bourgon, Canrobert, Dulac, and Reibell,
making a total of sixteen thousand four hundred and ten men, had taken
up their position, and extended in echelon from Rue de la Paix to
Faubourg Poissonniere. Each brigade had its battery with it. Eleven
pieces were counted on Boulevard Poisonniere alone. Two of the guns,
with their muzzles turned different ways, were levelled at the entrance
to Rue Montmartre and Faubourg Montmartre respectively; no one knew
why, as neither the street nor the faubourg presented even the
appearance of a barricade. The spectators, who crowded the sidewalks
and the windows, gazed in dismay at all these guns, sabres, and
bayonets.

"'The troops were laughing and chatting,' says one witness. Another
witness says: 'The soldiers acted strangely. Most of them were leaning
on their muskets, with the butt-end on the ground, and seemed nearly
falling from fatigue, or something else.' One of those old officers who
are accustomed to read a soldier's thoughts in his eyes, General L----,
said, as he passed Cafe Frascati: 'They are drunk.'

"There were now some indications of what was about to happen.

"At one moment, when the crowd was crying to the troops, '_Vive la
Republique!_' 'Down with Louis Bonaparte!' one of the officers was
heard to say, in a low voice: 'There's going to be some pigsticking!'

"A battalion of infantry debouches from Rue Richelieu. Before the Cafe
Cardinal it is greeted by a unanimous cry of '_Vive la Republique!_'
A writer, the editor of a Conservative paper, who happens to be on the
spot, adds: '_Down with Soulouque!_' The staff officer in command of
the detachment aims a blow at him with his sabre, which, being dodged
by the journalist, cuts in two one of the small trees on the boulevard.

"As the 1st Regiment of Lancers, commanded by Colonel Rochefort,
reached a point abreast of Rue Taitbout, a numerous crowd covered
the pavement of the boulevard. They were residents of the quarter,
tradesmen, artists, journalists, and among them several young mothers
leading their children by the hand. As the regiment was passing, men
and women--every one--cried: '_Vive la Constitution!_' _'Vive la
Loi!_' '_Vive la Republique!_' Colonel Rochefort,--the same who
had presided at the banquet given on the 31st of October, 1851, at the
Ecole Militaire, by the 1st Regiment of Lancers to the 7th Regiment of
Lancers, and who, at this banquet, had proposed as a toast, 'Prince
Louis-Napoleon, the head of the State, the personification of that
order of which we are the defenders!'--this colonel, when the crowd
uttered the above perfectly lawful cry, spurred his horse into the
midst of them through the chairs on the sidewalk, while the Lancers
precipitated themselves after him, and men, women, and children were
indiscriminately cut down. 'A great number remained dead on the spot,'
says a defender of the _coup d'etat_; and adds, 'It was done in a
moment.'[1]

[1] Captain Mauduit, _Revolution Militaire du 2 Decembre_,
p. 217.

"About two o'clock, two howitzers were pointed at the extremity of
Boulevard Poissonniere, a hundred and fifty paces from the little
advanced barricade at the Bonne Nouvelle guard-house. While placing the
guns in position, two of the artillerymen, who are not often guilty of
a false manoevre, broke the pole of a caisson. '_Don't you see they
are drunk!_' exclaimed a man of the lower classes.

"At half past two, for it is necessary to follow the progress of this
hideous drama minute by minute, and step by step, fire was opened
before the barricade languidly, and almost as if done for amusement.
The officers appeared to be thinking of anything but a fight. We shall
soon see, however, of what they were thinking.

"The first cannon-ball, badly aimed, passed above all the barricades
and killed a little boy at the Chateau d'Eau as he was drawing water
from the fountain.

"The shops were shut, as were also almost all the windows. There was,
however, one window left open in an upper story of the house at the
corner of Rue du Sentier. The curious spectators continued to assemble
mainly on the southern side of the street. It was an ordinary crowd and
nothing more,--men, women, children, and old people who looked upon the
languid attack and defence of the barricade as a sort of sham fight.

"This barricade served as a spectacle pending the moment when it should
become a pretext.




IV


"The soldiers had been firing, and the defenders of the barricade
returning their fire, for about a quarter of an hour, without any one
being wounded on either side, when suddenly, as if by an electric
shock, an extraordinary and threatening movement took place, first in
the infantry, then in the cavalry. The troops suddenly faced about.

"The historiographers of the _coup d'etat_ have asserted that a
shot, directed against the soldiers, was fired from the window which
had remained open at the corner of Rue du Sentier. Others say that
it was fired from the roof of the house at the corner of Rue
Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance and Rue Poissonniere. According to others, it
was a pistol shot and was fired from the roof of the tall house at the
corner of Rue Mazagran. The shot is contested, but what cannot be
contested is that, for having fired this problematical shot, which was
perhaps nothing more than the slamming of a door, a dentist, who lived
in the next house, was shot. The question resolves itself into this:
Did any one hear a pistol or musket shot fired from one of the houses
on the boulevard? Is this the fact, or is it not? a host of witnesses
deny it.

"If the shot was really fired, there still remains a question: Was it a
cause, or was it a signal?

"However this may be, all of a sudden, as we have said before, cavalry,
infantry, and artillery faced towards the dense crowd upon the
sidewalks, and, no one being able to guess why, unexpectedly, without
motive, 'without parley,' as the infamous proclamations of the morning
had announced, the butchery began, from the Gymnase Theatre to the
Bains Chinois, that is to say, along the whole length of the richest,
the most frequented, and the most joyous boulevard of Paris.

"The army began shooting down the people at close range.

"It was a horrible and indescribable moment: the cries, the arms raised
towards heaven, the surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in all
directions, a shower of balls falling on the pavement and bounding to
the roofs of the houses, corpses strewn along the street in a moment,
young men falling with their cigars still in their mouths, women in
velvet gowns shot down by the long rifles, two booksellers killed on
their own thresholds without knowing what offence they had committed,
shots fired down the cellar-holes and killing any one, no matter who,
the Bazaar riddled with shells and bullets, the Hotel Sallandrouze
bombarded, the Maison d'Or raked with grape-shot, Tortoni's carried by
assault, hundreds of corpses stretched upon the boulevard, and a
torrent of blood on Rue de Richelieu.

"The narrator must here again crave permission to suspend his
narrative.

"In the presence of these nameless deeds, I who write these lines
declare that I am the recording officer. I record the crime, I appeal
the cause. My functions extend no further. I cite Louis Bonaparte, I
cite Saint-Arnaud, Maupas, Moray, Magnan, Carrelet, Canrobert, and
Reybell, his accomplices; I cite the executioners, the murderers, the
witnesses, the victims, the red-hot cannon, the smoking sabres, the
drunken soldiers, the mourning families, the dying, the dead, the
horror, the blood, and the tears,--I cite them all to appear at the bar
of the civilized world.

"The mere narrator, whoever he might be, would never be believed. Let
the living facts, the bleeding facts, therefore, speak for themselves.
Let us hear the witnesses.




V


"We shall not print the names of the witnesses, we have said why, but
the reader will easily recognize the sincere and poignant accent of
reality.

"One witness says:--

"'I had not taken three steps on the sidewalk, when the troops, who
were marching past, suddenly halted, faced about towards the south,
levelled their muskets, and, by an instantaneous movement, fired upon
the affrighted crowd.

"'The firing continued uninterruptedly for twenty minutes, drowned from
time to time by a cannon-shot.

"'At the first volley, I threw myself on the ground and crept along on
the pavement like a snake to the first door I found open.

"'It was a wine-shop, No. 180, next door to the Bazaar de l'Industrie.
I was the last person who went in. The firing still continued.

"'In this shop there were about fifty persons, and among them five or
six women and two or three children. Three poor wretches were wounded
when they came in; two of them died, after a quarter of an hour of
horrible agony: the third was still alive when I left the shop at four
o'clock; however, as I afterwards learned, he did not survive his
wound.

"'In order to give an idea of the crowd on whom the troops fired, I
cannot do better than mention some of the persons assembled in the
shop.

"'There were several women, two of whom had come into the quarter to
buy provisions for their dinners; a little lawyer's clerk, who had been
sent on an errand by his master; two or three frequenters of the
Bourse; two or three house-holders; several workmen, in wretched
blouses, or in nothing. One of the unhappy beings who had taken refuge
in the shop produced a deep impression on me. He was a man of about
thirty, with light hair, wearing a gray paletot. He was going with his
wife to dine with his family in Faubourg Montmartre, when he was
stopped on the boulevard by the passage of the column of troops. At the
very beginning, at the first discharge, both he and his wife fell down;
he rose and was dragged into the wine-shop, but he no longer had his
wife on his arm, and his despair cannot be described. In spite of all
we could say, he insisted that the door should be opened so that he
might run and look for his wife amid the grape-shot that was sweeping
the street. It was all we could do to keep him with us for an hour. The
next day, I learned that his wife had been killed, and her body found
in the Cite Bergere. A fortnight afterwards I was informed that the
poor wretch, having threatened to apply the _lex talionis_ to M.
Bonaparte, had been arrested and sent to Brest, on his way to Cayenne.
Almost all the persons assembled in the wine-shop held monarchical
opinions, and I saw only two, a compositor named Meunier, who had
formerly worked on the _Reforme_, and a friend of his, who declared
themselves to be Republicans. About four o'clock, I left the shop.'

"Another witness, one of those who fancied he heard the pistol-shot on
Rue de Mazagran, adds:--

"'This shot was a signal to the soldiers for a fusillade on all the
houses and their windows, the roar of which lasted at least thirty
minutes. The discharge was simultaneous from Porte Saint-Denis as far
as the Cafe du Grand Balcon. The artillery soon took part with the
musketry.'

"Another witness says:--

"'At quarter past three, a singular movement took place. The soldiers
who were facing Porte Saint-Denis, suddenly faced about, resting on the
houses from the Gymnase, the Maison du Pont-de-Fer, and the Hotel
Saint-Phar, and immediately, a running fire was directed on the people
on the opposite side of the way, from Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Richelieu.
A few minutes were sufficient to cover the pavement with dead bodies;
the houses were riddled with balls, and this paroxysm of fury on the
part of the troops continued for three quarters of an hour.'

"Another witness says:--

"'The first cannon-shots aimed at the barricade Bonne-Nouvelle served
as a signal to the rest of the troops, who fired almost simultaneously
at every one within range of their muskets.'

"Another witness says:--

"'No words are powerful enough to describe such an act of barbarity.
One must himself have seen in order to be bold enough to speak of it,
and to attest the truth of so unspeakable a deed.'

"'The soldiers fired thousands and thousands of shots--the number is
inappreciable[1]--on the unoffending crowd, and that without any sort
of necessity. There was a desire to produce a deep impression. That was
all.'

[1] The witness means _incalculable_, but we have preferred
to change nothing in the original depositions.

"Another witness says:--

"'The troops of the line, followed by the cavalry and the artillery,
arrived on the boulevard at a time when the general excitement was very
great. A musket-shot was fired from the midst of the troops, and it was
easy to see that it had been fired in the air, from the smoke which
rose perpendicularly. This was the signal for firing on the people and
charging them with the bayonet without warning. This is a significant
fact, and proves that the military wanted the pretence of a motive for
beginning the massacre which followed.'

"Another witness tells the following tale:--

"'The cannon, loaded with grape-shot, cut up all the shop-fronts from
the shop _Le Prophete_ to Rue Montmartre. From Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle
they must have fired also on the Maison Billecoq, for it was struck at
the corner of the wall on the Aubusson side, and the ball, having
traversed the wall, penetrated the interior of the house.'

"Another witness, one of those who deny the shot, says:--

"'People have endeavoured to excuse this fusillade and these murders,
by pretending that the troops had been fired on from the windows of
some of the houses. Not only does General Magnan's official report seem
to deny this rumour, but I assert that the discharge was instantaneous
from Porte Saint-Denis to Porte Montmartre, and that there was not,
previously to the general discharge, a single shot fired separately,
either from the windows or by the soldiers, from Faubourg Saint-Denis
to Boulevard des Italiens.'

"Another witness, who is also one of those who did not hear the shot,
says:--

"'The troops were marching past the veranda of the Cafe Tortoni, where
I had been about twenty minutes, when, before any report of fire-arms
had reached us, they quickened their pace; the cavalry went off at a
gallop, the infantry at double-quick. All of a sudden we saw, coming
from the direction of Boulevard Poissonniere, a sheet of fire, which
spread and came on rapidly. I can vouch for the fact that, before the
fusillade began, there had been no report of fire-arms, and that not a
single shot had been fired from any of the houses between the Cafe
Frascati and the spot where I stood. At last we saw the soldiers before
us level their muskets and threaten us. We took refuge on Rue Taitbout,
under a porte-cochere. At the same moment the balls flew over our
heads, and all around us. A woman was killed ten paces from me just as
I ran under the porte-cochere. I can swear that, up to that time, there
was neither barricade nor insurgents; there were _hunters, and there
was game_ flying from them,--that is all.'

"This image 'hunters and game' is the one which immediately suggests
itself to the mind of all those who beheld this horrible proceeding. We
meet with the same simile in the testimony of another witness:--

"'At the end of my street, and I know that the same thing was observed
in the neighbouring ones as well, we saw the gendarmes mobiles with
their muskets, and themselves in the position of _hunters waiting for
the game to rise_, that is to say, with their muskets at their
shoulders, in order that they might take aim and fire more quickly.

"'In order that those persons who had fallen wounded near the doors on
Rue Montmartre might receive the first necessary attentions, we could
see the doors open from time to time and an arm stretched out, which
hastily drew in the corpse, or dying man, whom the balls were striving
to claim as their own.'

"Another witness hits upon the same image:--

"'The soldiers stationed at the corners of the streets awaited the
people as they passed, _like hunters lying in wait for their game_, and
as soon as they saw them in the street they fired at them _as at a
target_. A great many persons were killed in this manner on Rue du
Sentier, Rue Rougemont, and on Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere.'

* * * *

"'"Go on," said the officers to the unoffending citizens who demanded
their protection. At these words they went their way quickly and with
confidence; but it was merely a watchword which meant _death_; for
they had gone only a few steps before they fell.'

"'At the moment the firing began on the boulevards,' says another
witness, 'a bookseller near the carpet warehouse was hastily closing
his shop, when a number of fugitives who were striving to obtain
admittance were suspected by the troops of the line, or the gendarmerie
mobile, I do not know which, of having fired upon them. The soldiers
broke into the bookseller's house. The bookseller endeavoured to
explain matters; he was taken out, alone, before his own door, and his
wife and daughters had only time to throw themselves between him and
the soldiers when he fell dead. His wife had her thigh traversed by a
ball, while his daughter was saved by the steel of her stays. I have
been informed that his wife has since gone mad.'

"Another witness says:--

"'The soldiers entered the two booksellers' shops between _Le
Prophete_ and M. Sallandrouze's. The murders committed there have
been proved. The two booksellers were massacred on the pavement. The
other prisoners were put to death in the shops.'

"Let us conclude with three extracts which it is impossible to
transcribe without a shudder:--

"'For the first quarter of an hour of this scene of horror,' says a
witness, 'the firing, which for a moment became less sharp, caused some
persons who were only wounded to suppose that they might get up. Of
those who were lying before _Le Prophete_ two rose. One of them fled by
Rue du Sentier, from which he was only a few yards away. He reached it
amid a shower of balls which carried away his cap. The other could only
succeed in raising himself on his knees, in which position, with his
hands clasped, he besought the soldiers to spare his life; but he fell
at once, shot dead. The next day one could see in the side of the
veranda of _Le Prophete_ a spot only a few feet in extent, which more
than a hundred balls had struck.'

"'At the end of Rue Montmartre as far as the fountain, a distance of
about sixty paces, there were sixty bodies of men and women, mothers,
children, and young girls. All these unfortunate creatures had fallen
victims of the first volley fired by the troops and the gendarmerie,
who were stationed on the opposite side of the boulevard. They all fled
at the first discharge, took a few steps, then fell to rise no more.
One young man had taken refuge in a gateway, and tried to shelter
himself behind the projection of the wall towards the boulevards. After
ten minutes of badly aimed shots, he was hit, in spite of all his
efforts to render himself as small as possible by drawing himself up to
his full height, and he too was seen to fall, to rise no more.'

"Another:--

"'The plate glass and the windows in the Maison du Pont-de-Fer were all
shattered. One man, who was in the courtyard, went mad with fright. The
cellars were filled with women who had sought refuge there, but in
vain. The soldiers fired into the shops and the cellar windows. From
Tortoni's to the Gymnase Theatre similar things took place. This lasted
more than an hour.'




VI


"Let us confine ourselves to these extracts. Let us close this mournful
inquest. We have proofs enough.

"The general execration of the deed is visible. A hundred other
depositions which we have before us repeat the same facts in almost the
same words. It is at present certain, it is proved, it is beyond the
possibility of doubt, it cannot be denied, it is evident as the
sunlight, that on Thursday, the 4th of December, 1851, the unoffending
citizens of Paris, the citizens who were not in any way mixed up with
the fighting, were shot down without warning, and massacred merely for
the sake of intimidation, and that it is not possible to attach any
other meaning to Monsieur Bonaparte's mysterious command.

"This execution lasted until nightfall. For more than an hour, there
was, as it were, a debauch of musketry and artillery. The cannonade and
the platoon-firing crossed each other indiscriminately; at one time the
soldiers were killing one another. The battery of the 6th Regiment of
Artillery, which belonged to Canrobert's brigade, was dismounted; the
horses, rearing in the midst of the balls, broke the axles, the wheels
and the poles, and of the whole battery, in less than a minute there
remained only one gun in commission. A whole squadron of the 1st
Lancers was obliged to seek refuge in a shed on Rue Saint-Fiacre.
Seventy bullet-holes were counted the next day in the pennons of the
lances. A sort of frenzy had seized the soldiers. At the corner of Rue
Rougemont, and in the midst of the smoke, one general was waving his
arms as if to restrain them; a medical officer of the 27th was nearly
killed by the soldiers whom he endeavoured to check. A sergeant said to
an officer who took hold of his arm: 'Lieutenant, you are betraying
us.' The soldiers had no consciousness of themselves; they had gone mad
with the crime they were ordered to commit. There comes a moment when
the very outrageousness of what you are doing makes you redouble your
blows. Blood is a kind of horrible wine; men get drunk with carnage.

"It seemed as if some invisible hand were launching death from the
midst of a cloud. The soldiers were no longer aught but projectiles.

"Two guns in the roadway of the boulevard were pointed at the front of
a single house, that of M. Sallandrouze, and fired volley after volley
at it, at close range. This house, which is an old mansion of hewn
stone, remarkable for its almost monumental flight of steps, being
split by bullets as if by iron wedges, opened, gaped, and cracked from
top to bottom. The soldiers fired faster and faster. At every
discharge, the walls cracked again. Suddenly an officer of artillery
galloped up, and cried, 'Hold! hold!' The house was leaning forward;
another ball, and it would have fallen on the guns and the gunners.

"The artillerymen were so drunk that many of them, not knowing what
they were doing, allowed themselves to be killed by the rebound of
their guns. The balls came simultaneously from Porte Saint-Denis,
Boulevard Poissonniere and Boulevard Montmartre; the drivers, hearing
them whizzing past their ears in every direction, lay down upon their
horses, while the gunners hid underneath the caissons and behind the
wagons; soldiers were seen to drop their caps and fly in dismay into
Rue Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance; troopers, losing their heads, fired
their carbines in the air, while others dismounted and made a
breastwork of their horses. Two or three of the latter, without riders,
ran here and there, mad with terror.

"The most horrible amusements were blended with the massacre. The
tirailleurs from Vincennes had established themselves at one of the
barricades on the boulevard which they had carried by assault, and from
thence they practised shooting at persons passing at a distance. From
the neighbouring houses, such shocking dialogues as this were heard:
'I'll bet I bring that fellow down.'--'I'll bet you don't.'--'I'll bet
I do.' And the shot followed. When the man fell, one could guess by the
roar of laughter. Whenever a woman passed, the officers cried: 'Fire at
that woman; fire at the women!'

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