Napoleon the Little

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"This was one of the watchwords; on Boulevard Montmartre, where the
bayonet was greatly in requisition, a young staff-captain cried: 'Prick
the women!'

"One woman, with a loaf under her arm, thought she might cross Rue
Saint-Fiacre. A tirailleur shot her down.

"On Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau they did not go so far. A woman cried,
'Vive la Republique!' she was merely whipped by the soldiers. But let
us return to the boulevard.

"One of the passers-by, a bailiff, was struck by a ball aimed at his
head; he fell on his hands and knees, imploring mercy! He received
thirteen more balls in his body. He survived: by a miraculous chance,
not one of his wounds was mortal. The ball which struck his head tore
the skin, and made the circuit of his skull without fracturing it.

"An old man of eighty, being found concealed somewhere or other, was
brought before the steps of _Le Prophete_, and shot: he fell. 'He will
have no bump on his head,' said a soldier; the old man had fallen upon
a heap of dead bodies. Two young men from Issy, who had been married
only a month, to two sisters, were crossing the boulevard on their way
from business. They saw the muskets levelled at them, and threw
themselves on their knees, crying, 'We married the two sisters!' They
were killed. A dealer in cocoa, named Robert, living on Faubourg
Poissonniere, No. 97, fled, with his can on his back, down Rue
Montmartre; he was killed.[1] A boy of thirteen, a saddler's apprentice,
was passing along the boulevard opposite the Cafe Vachette. The soldiers
took aim at him. He uttered the most heart-rending cries, and, holding
up a bridle that he had in his hand, waved it in the air, exclaiming,
'I am sent on an errand!' He was killed. Three balls perforated his
breast. All along the boulevards were heard the shrieks and heavy falls
of the wounded, whom the soldiers pierced with their bayonets, and then
left, without taking the trouble to despatch them.

[1] "We may name the witness who saw this. He is one of the
proscribed; it is M. Versigny, a representative of the people.
He says:--

"'I can still see, opposite Rue du Croissant, an unfortunate
itinerant vender of cocoa, with his tin can on his back, stagger,
then gradually sink in a heap, and fall dead before a shop. Armed
only with his bell, he had received all by himself the honour of
being fired at by a whole platoon.'

"The same witness adds:--'The soldiers swept the streets with
their guns, even where there was not a paving-stone moved from
its place, not a single combatant.'"

"Some villains seized the opportunity to steal. The treasurer of a
company, whose offices are on Rue de la Banque, left at two o'clock to
collect a note on Rue Bergere, returned with the money, and was killed
on the boulevard. When his body was removed, he had neither ring, nor
watch, nor the money he was taking to his office.

"On the pretence that shots had been fired at the troops, the latter
entered ten or twelve houses, at random, and despatched with their
bayonets every one they found. In all the houses on the boulevard,
there are metal pipes by which the dirty water runs out into the
gutter. The soldiers, with no idea why it was so, conceived a feeling
of mistrust or hatred for such and such a house, closed from top to
bottom, mute and gloomy, and like all the houses on the boulevard,
seeming uninhabited, so silent was it. They knocked at the door; the
door opened, and they entered. An instant after there was seen to flow
from the mouth of the metal pipes a red, smoking stream. It was blood.

"A captain, with his eyes starting from their sockets, cried to the
soldiers: 'No quarter!' A major vociferated: 'Enter the houses and kill
every one!'

"Sergeants were heard to say: '_Pitch into the Bedouins; hit them
hard!_' 'In the uncle's time,' says a witness, 'the soldiers used to
call the civilians _pekins_. At present, we are Bedouins; the soldiers
massacred the people to the cry of "_Give it to the Bedouins_."'

"At the Frascati Club, where many of the regular frequenters of the
place were assembled, among them an old general, they heard the thunder
of musketry and artillery, and could not believe that the troops were
firing ball. They laughed, and said to one another: 'It's blank
cartridges. What a _mise-en-scene_! What an actor this Bonaparte is!'
They thought they were at the Circus. Suddenly the soldiers entered,
mad with rage, and were about to shoot every one. They had no idea of
the danger they were running. They continued to laugh. One of the
eye-witnesses said to us: '_We thought that this was part of the
buffoonery._' However, seeing that the soldiers continued to threaten
them, they at last understood.--'_Kill them all!_' cried the soldiers.
A lieutenant, who recognized the old general, prevented them from
carrying out their threat. In spite of this, a sergeant said: 'Hold
your d----d tongue, lieutenant; this isn't your affair, it's ours.'

"The troops killed for the mere sake of killing. A witness says: 'In
the courtyards of the houses, they shot even the horses and dogs.'

"In the house next Frascati's, at the corner of Rue Richelieu, the
soldiers were coolly going to shoot even the women and children, who
were already drawn up in a mass before a platoon for that purpose when
a colonel arrived. He stopped the massacre, boxed up these poor
trembling creatures in the Passages des Panoramas, where he locked them
in, and saved them. A celebrated writer, Monsieur Lireux, after having
escaped the first balls, was led about, during an hour, from one
guard-house to another, preparatory to being shot. It required a
miracle to save him. The celebrated artist, Sax, who happened to be in
the musical establishment of M. Brandus, was about to be shot, when a
general recognized him. Everywhere else the people were killed
indiscriminately.

"The first person killed in this butchery--history has in like manner
preserved the name of the first person killed at the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew--was one Theodore Debaecque, who lived in the house at the
corner of Rue du Sentier, where the carnage began.

VII

"When the slaughter came to an end,--that is to say when it was black
night, and it had begun in broad day,--the dead bodies were not
removed; they were so numerous that thirty-three of them were counted
before a single shop, that of M. Barbedienne. Every square of ground
left open in the asphalt at the foot of the trees on the boulevards was
a reservoir of blood. 'The dead bodies,' says a witness, 'were piled up
in heaps, one upon another, old men, children, blouses and paletots,
assembled pell-mell, in an indescribable mass of heads, arms, and
legs.'

"Another witness describes thus a group of three individuals: 'Two had
fallen on their backs; and the third, having tripped over their legs,
had fallen upon them.' The single corpses were rare and attracted more
notice than the others. One young man, well dressed, was seated against
a wall, with his legs apart, his arms half folded, one of Verdier's
canes in his hand, and seemed to be looking at what was going on around
him; he was dead. A little farther on, the bullets had nailed against a
shop a youth in velveteen trousers who had some proof-sheets in his
hand. The wind fluttered these bloody proofs, on which the fingers of
the corpse were still closed. A poor old man, with white hair, was
lying in the middle of the road, with his umbrella at his side. His
elbow almost touched a young man in patent leather boots and yellow
gloves, who had his eye-glass still in his eye. A few steps away, with
her head on the sidewalk, and her feet in the road, lay a woman of the
people, who had attempted to escape, with her child in her arms. Both
were dead; but the mother still tightly grasped her child.'

"Ah! you will tell me, M. Bonaparte, that you are very sorry, but that
it was an unfortunate affair; that in presence of Paris, ready to rise,
it was necessary to adopt a decided course, and that you were forced to
this extremity; that, as regards the _coup d'etat_, you were in debt;
that your ministers were in debt; that your aides-de-camp were in debt;
that your footmen were in debt; that you were answerable for them all;
and that, deuce take it! a man cannot be a prince without spending,
from time to time, a few millions too much; that one must amuse one's
self and enjoy life a bit; that the Assembly was to blame for not
having understood this, and for seeking to restrict you to two paltry
millions a year, and, what is more, to force you to resign your
authority at the expiration of your four years, and to execute the
Constitution; that, after all, you could not leave the Elysee to enter
the debtors' prison at Clichy; that you had in vain had recourse to
those little expedients which are provided for by Article 405; that
exposure was at hand, that the demagogical press was chattering, that
the matter of the gold ingots threatened to become known, that you were
bound to respect the name of Napoleon, and that, on my word! having no
other alternative, rather than become one of the vulgar swindlers named
in the code, you preferred to be one of the great assassins of history!

"So then, instead of polluting, this blood has purified you! Very good.

"I resume.

VIII

"When all was finished, Paris came to see the sight. The people flocked
in crowds to those terrible places; no one interfered with them. This
was what the butcher wanted. Louis Bonaparte had not done all this to
hide it afterwards.

"The southern side of the boulevard was covered with torn cartridge
wads; the sidewalk on the northern side disappeared beneath the mortar
torn from the fronts of the houses by the bullets, and was as white as
if snow had fallen on it; while pools of blood left large dark patches
on that snow of ruins. The foot of the passer-by avoided a corpse only
to tread upon fragments of broken glass, plaster, or stone; some houses
were so riddled by the grape and cannon-balls, that they seemed on the
point of tumbling down; this was the case with M. Sallandrouze's, which
we have already mentioned, and the mourning warehouse at the corner of
Faubourg Montmartre. 'The Billecoq house,' says a witness, 'is, at the
present moment, still propped up by wooden beams, and the front will
have to be partly rebuilt. The balls have made holes in the carpet
warehouse in several places.' Another witness says: 'All the houses
from the Cercle des Etrangers to Rue Poissonniere were literally
riddled with balls, especially on the right-hand side of the boulevard.
One of the large panes of plate glass in the warehouses of _La Petite
Jeannette_ received certainly more than two hundred for its share.
There was not a window that had not its ball. One breathed an
atmosphere of saltpetre. Thirty-seven corpses were heaped up in the
Cite Bergere; the passers-by could count them through the iron
railings. A woman was standing at the corner of Rue Richelieu. She was
looking on. Suddenly she felt that her feet were wet. 'Why, has it been
raining?' she said, 'my feet are in the water.'--'No, madame,' replied
a person who was passing, 'it is not water.'--Her feet were in a pool
of blood.

"On Rue Grange-Bateliere three corpses were seen in a corner, quite
naked.

"During the butchery, the barricades on the boulevards had been carried
by Bourgon's brigade. The corpses of those who had defended the
barricade at Porte Saint-Denis, of which we have already spoken at the
beginning of our narrative, were piled up before the door of the Maison
Jouvin. 'But,' says a witness, 'they were nothing compared to the heaps
which covered the boulevard.'

"About two paces from the Theatre des Varietes, the crowd stopped to
look at a cap full of brains and blood, hung upon a tree.

"A witness says: 'A little beyond the Varietes, I came to a corpse
lying on the ground with its face downwards; I tried to raise it, aided
by others, but we were repelled by the soldiers. A little farther on,
there were two bodies, a man and a woman; then one alone, a workman'
(we abridge the account). 'From Rue Montmartre to Rue du Sentier _one
literally walked in blood_; at certain spots, it covered the sidewalk
some inches deep, and, without exaggeration, one was obliged to use the
greatest caution not to step into it. I counted there thirty-three
corpses. The sight was too much for me: I felt great tears rolling down
my cheeks. I asked leave to cross the road, in order to enter my own
house, and my request was _granted as a favour_!'

"Another witness says: 'The boulevard presented a horrible sight. _We
literally walked in blood._ We counted eighteen corpses in about five
and twenty paces.'

"Another witness, the keeper of a wine-shop on Rue du Sentier, says: 'I
went along Boulevard du Temple to my house. When I got home, I had an
inch of blood around the bottom of my trousers.'

"Representative Versigny has this to say: 'We could see, in the
distance, almost as far as Porte Saint-Denis, the immense bivouac-fires
of the infantry. The light from them, with the exception of that from a
few rare lamps, was all we had to guide us amid that horrible carnage.
The fighting in the daytime was nothing compared to those corpses and
that silence. R. and I were half-dead with horror. A man was passing
us; hearing one of my exclamations, he came up to me, took my hand, and
said: "You are a republican; and I was what is called a friend of
order, a reactionary, but one must be forsaken of God, not to execrate
this horrible orgy. France is dishonoured." And he left us, sobbing.'

"Another witness, who allows us to give his name, a Legitimist, the
honourable Monsieur de Cherville, deposes as follows: 'In the evening,
I determined on continuing my sad inspection. On Rue Le Peletier I met
Messieurs Bouillon and Gervais (of Caen). We walked a few steps
together, when my foot slipped. I clung to M. Bouillon. I looked at my
feet. I had walked into a large pool of blood. M. Bouillon then
informed me, that, being at his window, in the morning, he saw a
druggist, whose shop he pointed out to me, shutting his door. A woman
fell; the druggist rushed forward to raise her; at the same moment, a
soldier, ten paces off, aimed at him and lodged a bullet in his head.
Overcome with wrath, and forgetting his own danger, M. Bouillon
exclaimed to the passers-by: "You will all bear witness to what has
taken place."'

"About eleven o'clock at night, when the fires of the bivouacs were
everywhere lighted, M. Bonaparte allowed the troops to amuse
themselves. It was like a _fete-de-nuit_ on the boulevards. The
soldiers laughed and sang, as they threw into the fire the debris of
the barricades. After this, as at Strasbourg and Boulogne, money was
distributed among them. Let us hear what a witness says: 'I saw, at
Porte Saint-Denis, a staff-officer give two hundred francs to the chief
of a detachment of twenty men, with these words: "The prince ordered me
to give you this money, to be distributed among your brave soldiers!
the marks of his satisfaction will not be confined to this."--Each
soldier received ten francs.'

"On the evening of the battle of Austerlitz, the Emperor said:
'Soldiers, I am content with you.'

"Another person adds: 'The soldiers, with cigars in their mouths,
twitted the passers-by and jingled the money in their pockets.' Another
says: 'The officers broke the rolls of louis d'or _like sticks of
chocolate_.'

"The sentinels allowed only women to pass; whenever a man made his
appearance, they cried: 'Be off!' Tables were spread in the bivouacs,
and officers and soldiers drank around them. The flame of the braziers
was reflected on all those merry faces. The corks and capsules of the
champagne bottles floated on the red torrents of blood. From bivouac to
bivouac the soldiers exchanged loud cries and obscene jokes. They
saluted one another with: 'Long live the grenadiers!' 'Long live the
lancers!' and all joined in, 'Long live Louis-Napoleon!' One heard the
clinking of glasses, and the crash of broken bottles. Here and there,
in the shadow, women, with a taper of yellow wax or a lantern in their
hands, prowled among the dead bodies, gazing at those pale faces, one
after another, and seeking a son, a father, or a husband.

IX

"Let us hasten to have done with these ghastly details.

"The next day, the fifth, something terrible was seen in the cemetery
of Montmartre.

"An immense space, the exact location of which is unknown to this day,
was 'utilized' for the temporary interment of some of those who had
been massacred. They were buried with their heads above ground, in
order that their relations might recognize them. Most of them had also
their feet above ground, with a little earth upon their breasts. The
crowd flocked to the spot, the sightseers pushed one here and there,
they wandered about among the graves, and, at times, one felt the earth
giving way beneath one's feet: one was walking on the stomach of a
corpse. One turned and beheld a pair of boots, of sabots, or of women's
shoes; while on the other side was the head, which the pressure on the
body caused to move.

"An illustrious witness, the great sculptor David, who is now
proscribed and wandering far from France, says:--

"'In the cemetery of Montmartre, I saw about forty bodies with their
clothes still on them; they had been placed side by side and a few
shovelfuls of earth hid all except their heads, which had been left
uncovered in order that they might be recognized by their relations.
There was so little earth that their feet were still visible; the
crowd, horrible to say, was walking on their bodies. Among them were
young men with noble features, bearing the stamp of courage; in the
midst was a poor woman, a baker's servant, who had been killed while
she was carrying bread to her master's customers, and near her a young
girl who sold flowers on the boulevards. Those persons who were looking
for friends who had disappeared, were obliged to trample the bodies
under foot, in order to obtain a near view of their faces. I heard a
man of the lower classes say, with an expression of horror: "It is like
walking upon a spring-board."'

"The crowd continued to flock to the various spots where the victims
had been carried, especially to the Cite Bergere, so that, on this day,
the fifth, as the numbers increased to such an extent as to become
troublesome, and as it was necessary to get rid of them, these words,
written in capital letters on a large placard, were to be seen at the
entrance of the Cite Bergere: 'There are no more dead bodies here.'

"The three naked corpses on Rue Grange-Bateliere were not removed until
the evening of the fifth.

"It is evident, and we insist upon it, that at first, and for the
advantage which it wished to derive from it, the _coup d'etat_ did
not make the least endeavour to conceal its crime; shame did not come
until later; the first day, on the contrary, it flaunted it. It was not
content with atrocity, it must needs add cynicism. Massacre was but a
means; the end was intimidation.

X

"Was this end attained?

"Yes.

"Immediately afterwards, as early as the evening of December 4, the
public excitement subsided. Paris was frozen with stupor. The
indignation that raised its voice before the _coup d'etat_, held
its peace before the carnage. The affair had ceased to resemble
anything in history. One felt that one had to deal with a man of a
hitherto unknown type.

"Crassus crushed the gladiators; Herod slaughtered the infants; Charles
IX exterminated the Huguenots; Peter of Russia, the Strelitz; Mehemet
Ali, the Mamelukes; Mahmoud, the Janissaries; while Danton massacred
the prisoners. Louis Bonaparte had just discovered a new sort of
massacre--the massacre of the passers-by.

"This massacre ended the struggle. There are times when what should
exasperate a people, strikes them with terror. The population of Paris
felt that a ruffian had his foot upon his throat. It no longer offered
any resistance. That same evening Mathieu (of the Drome) entered the
place where the Committee of Resistance was sitting and said to us: 'We
are no longer in Paris, we are no longer under the Republic; we are at
Naples under the sway of King Bomba.'

"From that moment, in spite of all the efforts of the committee, of the
representatives, and of their courageous allies, there was, save at
certain points only,--such as the barricade of the Petit-Carreau, for
instance, where Denis Dussoubs, the brother of the representative, fell
so heroically,--naught but a resistance which resembled the last
convulsions of despair rather than a combat. All was finished.

"The next day, the 5th, the victorious troops paraded on the
boulevards. A general was seen to show his naked sword to the people,
and to exclaim: 'The Republic--here it is!'

"Thus an infamous butchery, the massacre of the passers-by, was
included, as a supreme necessity, in the 'measure' of the 2nd of
December. To undertake it, a man must be a traitor; to make it
successful, he must be an assassin.

"It was by this proceeding that the _coup d'etat_ conquered France
and overcame Paris. Yes, Paris! It is necessary for one to repeat it
again and again to himself,--it was at Paris that all this happened!

"Great God! The Russians entered Paris brandishing their lances and
singing their wild songs, but Moscow had been burnt; the Prussians
entered Paris, but Berlin had been taken; the Austrians entered Paris,
but Vienna had been bombarded; the English entered Paris, but the camp
at Boulogne had menaced London; they came to our barriers, these men of
all nations, with drums beating, trumpets resounding, colours flying,
swords drawn, cannon rumbling, matches lighted, drunk with excitement,
enemies, conquerors, instruments of vengeance, shrieking with rage
before the domes of Paris the names of their capitals,--London, Berlin,
Vienna, Moscow! The moment, however, that they crossed the threshold of
the city, the moment that the hoofs of their horses rang upon the
pavement of our streets, Englishmen, Austrians, Prussians, Russians, on
entering Paris, beheld in its walls, its buildings, its people,
something predestined, something venerable and august; they all felt a
holy sentiment of respect for the sacred city; they all felt that they
had before them, not the city of one people, but the city of the whole
human race; they all lowered the swords they had raised! Yes, to
massacre the Parisians, to treat Paris like a place taken by assault,
to deliver up to pillage one quarter of the town, to outrage the second
Eternal City, to assassinate civilization in her very sanctuary, to
shoot down old men, children, and women, in this illustrious spot, this
home of the world; that which Wellington forbade his half-naked
Highlanders, and Schwartzenberg his Croats to do; that which Blucher
did not suffer his Landwehr to do, and which Platow dared not allow his
Cossacks to undertake,--all these things hast thou, base wretch, caused
to be done by French soldiers!"

BOOK IV

THE OTHER CRIMES

I

SINISTER QUESTIONS

What was the number of the dead?

Louis Bonaparte, conscious of the advent of history, and imagining that
a Charles IX can extenuate a Saint Bartholomew, has published as a
_piece justificative_, a so-called "official list of the deceased
persons." In this "Alphabetical List,"[1] you will meet with such items
as these: "Adde, bookseller, 17 Boulevard Poissonniere, killed in his
house; Boursier, a child seven years and a-half old, killed on Rue
Tiquetonne; Belval, cabinetmaker, 10 Rue de la Lune, killed in his
house; Coquard, house-holder at Vire (Calvados), killed on Boulevard
Montmartre; Debaecque, tradesman, 45 Rue de Sentier, killed in his
house; De Couvercelle, florist, 257 Rue Saint-Denis, killed in his
house; Labilte, jeweller, 63 Boulevard Saint-Martin, killed in his
house; Monpelas, perfumer, 181 Rue Saint-Martin, killed in his house;
Demoiselle Grellier, housekeeper, 209 Faubourg Saint-Martin, killed on
Boulevard Montmartre; Femme Guillard, cashier, 77 Faubourg Saint-Denis,
killed on Boulevard Saint-Denis; Femme Garnier, confidential servant, 6
Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, killed on Boulevard Saint-Denis; Femme
Ledaust, housekeeper, 76 Passage du Caire, at the Morgue; Francoise
Noel, waistcoat-maker, 20 Rue des Fosses-Montmartre, died at La
Charite; Count Poninski, annuitant, 32 Rue de la Paix, killed on
Boulevard Montmartre; Femme Raboisson, dressmaker, died at the National
Hospital; Femme Vidal, 97 Rue de Temple, died at the Hotel-Dieu; Femme
Seguin, embroideress, 240 Rue Saint-Martin, died at the hospital
Beaujon; Demoiselle Seniac, shop-woman, 196 Rue du Temple, died at the
hospital Beaujon; Thirion de Montauban, house-holder, 10 Rue de Lancry,
killed at his own door," etc., etc.

[1] The functionary who drew up this list, is, we know, a learned
and accurate statistician; he prepared this statement honestly,
we have no doubt. He has stated what was shown to him, and what
he was permitted to see, but what was concealed from him was
beyond his reach. The field for conjecture is left open.

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