Napoleon the Little
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Victor Hugo >> Napoleon the Little
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To abridge: Louis Bonaparte confesses, in this state paper, _one
hundred and ninety-one_ murders.
This document being cited for what it is worth, the question is, what
is the true total? What is the exact figure of his victims? How many
corpses bestrew the _coup d'etat_ of December? Who can tell? Who
knows? Who will ever know? As we have already seen, one witness
deposed: "I counted in that place thirty-three bodies;" another, at a
different part of the boulevard, said: "We counted eighteen bodies
within a space of twenty or twenty-five yards." A third person,
speaking of another spot, said: "There were upwards of sixty bodies
within a distance of sixty yards." The writer so long threatened with
death told ourselves: "I saw with my eyes upwards of eight hundred dead
bodies lying along the boulevard."
Now think, compute how many it requires of battered brains, of breasts
shattered by grape-shot, to cover with blood, "literally," half a mile
of boulevards. Go you, as did the wives, the sisters, the daughters,
the wailing mothers, take a torch, plunge into the dark night, feel on
the ground, feel along the pavement and the walls, pick up the corpses,
interrogate the phantoms, and reckon if you can.
The number of his victims! One is reduced to conjecture. This question
must be solved by history. As for us, it is a question which we pledge
ourselves to examine and explore hereafter.
On the first day, Louis Bonaparte made a display of his slaughter. We
have told the reason why. It suited his purpose. After that, having
derived from the deed all the required advantage, he concealed it.
Orders were given to the Elysean journals to be silent, to Magnan to
omit, to the historiographers to know nothing. They buried the slain
after midnight, without lights, without processions, without prayers,
without priests, by stealth. Families were enjoined not to weep too
loud.
The massacre along the boulevards was only a part; it was followed by
the summary fusillades, the secret executions.
One of the witnesses whom we have questioned asked a major in the
gendarmerie mobile, who had distinguished himself in these butcheries:
"Come, tell us the figure? Was it four hundred?" The man shrugged his
shoulders. "Was it six hundred?" The man shook his head. "Eight
hundred?"--"Say twelve hundred," said the officer, "and you will fall
short."
At this present hour nobody knows exactly what the 2nd of December was,
what it did, what it dared, whom it killed, whom it buried. The very
morning of the crime, the newspaper offices were placed under seal,
free speech was suppressed, by Louis Bonaparte, that man of silence and
darkness. On the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th, and ever since, Truth
has been taken by the throat and strangled just as she was about to
speak. She could not even utter a cry. He has deepened the gloom about
his ambuscade and he has succeeded in part. Let history strive as she
may, the 2nd of December will, perhaps, continue involved, for a long
time to come, in a sort of ghastly twilight. It is a crime made up of
audacity and darkness; here it shows itself impudently in broad
daylight; there it skulks away into the mist. Hideous and double-faced
effrontery, which conceals no one knows what monstrosities beneath its
cloak.
But these glimpses are sufficient. There is a certain side of the 2nd
of December where all is dark; but, within that darkness, graves are
visible.
Beneath this great enormity a host of crimes may be vaguely
distinguished. Such is the behest of Providence; there are compulsions
linked to treason. You are a perjurer! You violate your oaths! You
trample upon law and justice! Well! take a rope, for you will be
compelled to strangle; take a dagger, for you will be compelled to
stab; take a club, for you will be compelled to strike; take shadow and
darkness, for you will be compelled to hide yourself. One crime brings
on another; there is a logical consistency in horror. There is no
halting, no middle course. Go on! do this first; good! Now do that,
then this again; and so for ever! The law is like the veil of the
Temple: once rent, it is rent from top to bottom.
Yes, we say it again, in what has been called "the act of the 2nd of
December," one meets with crime at every depth. Perjury floats on the
surface, murder lies at the bottom. Partial homicides, wholesale
butcheries, shooting in open day, fusillades by night; a steam of blood
rises from every part of the _coup d'etat_.
Search in the common grave of the churchyards, search beneath the
street pavement, beneath the sloping banks of the Champ-de-Mars,
beneath the trees of the public gardens, in the bed of the Seine!
But few revelations. That is easily understood. Bonaparte has the
satanic art of binding to himself a crowd of miserable officials by I
know not what terrible universal complicity. The stamped papers of the
magistrates, the desks of the registrars, the cartridge-boxes of the
soldiers, the prayers of the priests, are his accomplices. He has cast
his crime about him like a network, and prefects, mayors, judges,
officers, and soldiers are caught therein. Complicity descends from
the general to the corporal, and ascends from the corporal to the
president. The _sergent-de-ville_ and the minister feel that they are
equally implicated. The gendarme whose pistol has pressed against the
ear of some unfortunate, and whose uniform has been splashed with human
brains, feels as guilty as his colonel. Above, cruel men gave orders
which savage men executed below. Savagery keeps the secret of cruelty.
Hence this hideous silence.
There is even emulation and rivalry between this savagery and this
atrocity; what escaped the one was seized upon by the other. The future
will refuse to credit these prodigious excesses. A workman was crossing
the Pont au Change, some gendarmes mobiles stopped him; they smelt his
hands. "He smells of powder," said a gendarme. They shot the workman;
his body was pierced by four balls. "Throw him into the stream," cries
the sergeant. The gendarmes take him by the neck and heels and hurl him
over the bridge. Shot, and then drowned, the man floats down the river.
However, he was not dead; the icy river revived him; but he was unable
to move, his blood flowed into the water from four holes; but being
held up by his blouse, he struck against an arch of one of the bridges.
There some lightermen discovered him, picked him up, and carried him to
the hospital; he recovered; he left the place. The next day he was
arrested, and brought before a court-martial. Rejected by death, he was
reclaimed by Louis Bonaparte. This man is now at Lambessa.
What the Champ-de-Mars secretly witnessed,--the terrible night
tragedies which dismayed and dishonoured it,--history cannot yet
reveal. Thanks to Louis Bonaparte, this revered field of the Federation
may in future be called Aceldama. One of the unhappy soldiers whom the
man of the 2nd of December transformed into executioners, relates with
horror, and beneath his breath, that in a single night the number of
people shot was not less than eight hundred.
Louis Bonaparte hastened to dig a grave and threw in his crime. A few
shovelfuls of earth, a sprinkling of holy water by a priest, and all
was said. And now, the imperial carnival dances above that grave.
Is this all? Can it be that this is the end? Does God allow and
acquiesce in such burials? Believe it not. Some day, beneath the feet
of Bonaparte, between the marble pavements of the Elysee or the
Tuileries, this grave will suddenly re-open, and those bodies will come
forth, one after another, each with its wound, the young man stricken
to the heart, the old man shaking his aged head pierced by a ball, the
mother put to the sword, with her infant killed in her arms,--all of
them upstanding, pallid, terrible to see, and with bleeding eyes fixed
on their assassin.
Awaiting that day, and even now, history has begun to try you, Louis
Bonaparte. History rejects your official list of the dead, and your
_pieces justificatives_.
History asserts that they lie, and that you lie.
You have tied a bandage over the eyes of France and put a gag in her
mouth. Wherefore?
Was it to do righteous deeds? No, but crimes. The evil-doer is afraid
of the light.
You shot people by night, on the Champ-de-Mars, at the Prefecture, at
the Palais de Justice, on the squares, on the quays, everywhere.
You say you did not.
I say you did.
In dealing with you we have a right to surmise, to suspect, and to
accuse.
What you deny, we have a right to believe; your denial is equivalent to
affirmation.
Your 2nd of December is pointed at by the public conscience. Nobody
thinks of it without inwardly shuddering. What did you do in those dark
hours?
Your days are ghastly, your nights are suspicious. Ah! man of darkness
that you are!
* * * *
Let us return to the butchery on the boulevard, to the words, "Let my
orders be executed!" and to the day of the 4th.
Louis Bonaparte, during the evening of that day, must have compared
himself to Charles X, who refused to burn Paris, and to Louis Philippe,
who would not shed the people's blood, and he must have done himself
the justice to admit that he is a great politician. A few days later,
General T----, formerly in the service of one of the sons of King Louis
Philippe, came to the Elysee. As soon as Louis Bonaparte caught sight
of him, the comparison we have just pointed out suggesting itself to
him, he cried out to the general, exultingly: "Well?"
Louis Bonaparte is in very truth the man who said to one of his former
ministers, who was our own informant: "_Had I been Charles X, and had
I, during the days of July, caught Laffitte, Benjamin Constant, and
Lafayette, I would have had them shot like dogs._"
On the 4th of December, Louis Bonaparte would have been dragged that
very night from the Elysee, and the law would have prevailed, had he
been one of those men who recoil before a massacre. Fortunately for
him, he had no such scruples. What signified a few dead bodies, more or
less? Nonsense! kill! kill at random! cut them down! shoot, cannonade,
crush, smash! Strike terror for me into this hateful city of Paris! The
_coup d'etat_ was in a bad way; this great homicide restored its
spirit. Louis Bonaparte had nearly ruined himself by his felony; he
saved himself by his ferocity. Had he been only a Faliero, it was all
over with him; fortunately he was a Caesar Borgia. He plunged with his
crime into a river of gore; one less culpable would have sunk, he swam
across. Such was his success as it is called. He is now on the other
bank, striving to wipe himself dry, dripping with the blood which he
mistakes for the purple, and demanding the Empire.
II
SEQUEL OF CRIMES
Such a man is this malefactor!
And shall we not applaud thee, O Truth! when, in the eyes of Europe and
of the world, before the people, in the face of God, while he appealed
to honour, the sanctity of an oath, faith, religion, the sacredness of
human life, the law, the generosity of all hearts, wives, sisters,
mothers, civilization, liberty, the republic, France; before his
valets, his Senate and his Council of State; before his generals, his
priests, and his police agents,--thou who representest the people (for
the people is truth); thou who representest intelligence (for
intelligence is enlightenment); thou who representest humanity (for
humanity is reason); in the name of the enthralled people, in the name
of exiled intelligence, in the name of outraged humanity, before this
mass of slaves who cannot, or dare not, speak, thou dost scourge this
brigand of order.
Let some one else choose milder words. I am outspoken and harsh; I have
no pity for this pitiless man, and I glory in it.
Let us proceed.
To what we have just related add all the other crimes, to which we
shall have occasion to return more than once, and the history of which,
God granting us life, we shall relate in detail. Add the numberless
incarcerations attended with circumstances of ferocity, the overgorged
prisons,[1] the sequestration of property[2] of the proscribed in ten
departments, notably in La Nievre, in L'Allier, and in Les
Basses-Alpes; add the confiscation of the Orleans property, with the
slice allotted to the clergy. Schinderhannes never forgot to share with
the cure. Add the mixed commissions, and the commission of clemency, so
called;[3] the councils of war combined with the examining magistrates,
and, multiplying the instances of abomination, the batches of exiles,
the expulsion of a part of France out of France (the department of the
Herault, alone, furnishing 3,200 persons, either banished or
transported); add the appalling proscription,--comparable to the most
tragic devastations in history,--which for an impulse, for an opinion,
for an honest dissent from the government, for the mere word of a
freeman, even when uttered before the 2nd of December, takes, seizes,
apprehends, tears away the labourer from the field, the working-man
from his trade, the house-holder from his house, the physician from his
patients, the notary from his office, the counsellor from his clients,
the judge from his court, the husband from his wife, the brother from
his brother, the father from his children, the child from his parents,
and marks its ill-omened cross on every head, from the highest to the
lowest. Nobody escapes. A man in tatters, wearing a long beard, came
into my room one morning at Brussels. "I have just arrived," said he;
"I have travelled on foot, and have had nothing to eat for two days."
Some bread was given him. He ate. "Where do you come from?"--"From
Limoges."--"Why are you here?"--"I don't know; they drove me away from
my home."--"What are you?"--"A maker of wooden shoes."
[1] The _Bulletin des Lois_ publishes the following decree,
dated the 27th of March:--
"Considering the law of May 10, 1838, which classes the
ordinary expenses of the provincial prisons with those to be
included in the departmental budgets:
"Whereas this is not the nature of the expenses occasioned by
the arrests resulting from the events of December;
"Whereas the facts which have caused these arrests to
multiply are connected with _a plot against the safety of
the state_, the suppression of which concerned society at
large, and therefore it is just to discharge out of the
public funds the excess of expenditure resulting from the
_extraordinary increase_ in the number of prisoners;
"It is decreed that:--
"An extraordinary credit of 250,000f. be opened, at the
Ministry of the Interior, on the revenue of 1851, to be
applied to the liquidation of the expenses resulting from the
arrests consequent on the events of December."
[2] "Digne, January 5, 1852.
"The Colonel commanding the state of siege in the department
of the Basses-Alpes
"Decrees:--
"Within the course of ten days the property of the fugitives
from the law _will be sequestrated_, and administered by
the director of public lands in the Basses-Alpes, according
to civil and military laws, etc. FRIRION."
Ten similar decrees, emanating from the commanders of states of
siege, might be quoted. The first of the malefactors who
committed this crime of confiscating property, and who set the
example of arrests of this sort, is named Eynard. He is a
general. On December 18, he placed under sequestration the
property of a number of citizens of Moulins, "because," as he
cynically observed, "_the beginning of the insurrection leaves
no doubt_ as to the part they took _in the insurrection_, and in
the pillaging in the department of the Allier."
[3] The number of _convictions_ actually upheld (in most cases
the sentences were of transportation) was declared to be as
follows, at the date of the reports:--
By M. Canrobert 3,876
By M. Espinasse 3,625
By M. Quentin-Bauchard 1,634
-----
9,135
Add Africa; add Guiana; add the atrocities of Bertrand, of Canrobert,
of Espinasse, of Martimprey; the ship-loads of women sent off by
General Guyon; Representative Miot dragged from casemate to casemate;
hovels in which there are a hundred and fifty prisoners, beneath a
tropical sun, with promiscuity of sex, filth, vermin, and where all
these innocent patriots, all these honest people are perishing, far
from their dear ones, in fever, in misery, in horror, in despair,
wringing their hands. Add all these poor wretches handed over to
gendarmes, bound two by two, packed in the lower decks of the
_Magellan_, the _Canada_, the _Duguesclin_; cast among the convicts
of Lambessa and Cayenne, not knowing what there is against them, and
unable to guess what they have done. One of them, Alphonse Lambert, of
the Indre, torn from his death-bed; another, Patureau Francoeur, a
vine-dresser, transported, because in his village they wanted to make
him president of the republic; a third, Valette, a carpenter at
Chateauroux, transported for having, six months previous to the 2nd of
December, on the day of an execution, refused to erect the guillotine.
Add to these the man-hunting in the villages, the _battue_ of
Viroy in the mountains of Lure, Pellion's _battue_ in the woods of
Clamecy, with fifteen hundred men; order restored at Crest--out of two
thousand insurgents, three hundred slain; mobile columns everywhere.
Whoever stands up for the law, sabred and shot: at Marseilles, Charles
Sauvan exclaims, "Long live the Republic!" a grenadier of the 54th
fires at him; the ball enters his side, and comes out of his belly;
another, Vincent, of Bourges, is deputy-mayor of his commune: as a
magistrate he protests against the _coup d'etat_; they track him
through the village, he flies, he is pursued, a cavalryman cuts off two
of his fingers with his sword, another cleaves his head, he falls; they
remove him to the fort at Ivry before dressing his wounds; he is an old
man of seventy-six.
Add facts like these: in the Cher, Representative Vignier is arrested.
Arrested for what? Because he is a representative, because he is
inviolable, because he is consecrated by the votes of the people.
Vignier is cast into prison. One day he is allowed to go out _for one
hour_ to attend to certain matters which imperatively demand his
presence. Before he went out two gendarmes, Pierre Gueret and one
Dubernelle, a brigadier, seized Vignier; the brigadier held his hands
against each other so that the palms touched, and bound his wrists
tightly with a chain; as the end of the chain hung down, the brigadier
forced it between Vignier's hands, over and over, at the risk of
fracturing his wrists by the pressure. The prisoner's hands turned blue
and swelled.--"You are putting me to the question," said Vignier
coolly.--"Hide your hands," sneered the gendarme, "if you're
ashamed."--"You hound," retorted Vignier, "you are the one of us two
that this chain dishonors."--In this wise Vignier passed through the
streets of Bourges where he had lived thirty years--between two
gendarmes, with his hands raised, exhibiting his chains. Representative
Vignier is seventy years old.
Add the summary fusillades in twenty departments; "All who resist,"
writes Saint-Arnaud, Minister of War, "are to be shot, in the name of
society defending itself."[4] "Six days have sufficed to _crush_ the
insurrection," states General Levaillant, who commanded the state of
siege in the Var. "I have made some good captures," writes Commandant
Viroy from Saint-Etienne; "I have shot, without stirring, eight
persons, and am now in pursuit of the leaders in the woods." At
Bordeaux, General Bourjoly enjoins the leaders of the mobile columns to
"have shot forthwith every person caught with arms in his hands." At
Forcalquier, it was better still; the proclamation declaring the state
of siege reads:--"The town of Forcalquier is in a state of siege. Those
citizens who _took no part_ in the day's events, and those who have
arms in their possession, are summoned to give them up on pain of being
shot." The mobile column of Pezenas arrives at Servian: a man tries to
escape from a house surrounded by soldiers; he is shot at and killed.
At Entrains, eighty prisoners are taken; one of them escapes by the
river, he is fired at, struck by a ball, and disappears under the
water; the rest are shot. To these execrable deeds, add these infamous
ones: at Brioude, in Haute-Loire, a man and woman thrown into prison
for having ploughed the field of one of the proscribed; at Loriol, in
the Drome, Astier, a forest-keeper, condemned to twenty years' hard
labour, for having sheltered fugitives. Add too, and my pen shakes as I
write it, the punishment of death revived; the political guillotine
re-erected; shocking sentences; citizens condemned to death on the
scaffold by the judicial janissaries of the courts-martial: at Clamecy,
Milletot, Jouannin, Guillemot, Sabatier, and Four; at Lyon, Courty,
Romegal, Bressieux, Fauritz, Julien, Roustain, and Garan, deputy-mayor
of Cliouscat; at Montpellier, seventeen for the affair of Bedarieux,
Mercadier, Delpech, Denis, Andre, Barthez, Triadou, Pierre Carriere,
Galzy, Galas (called Le Vacher), Gardy, Jacques Pages, Michel Hercule,
Mar, Vene, Frie, Malaterre, Beaumont, Pradal, the six last luckily
being out of the jurisdiction; and at Montpellier four more, Choumac,
Vidal, Cadelard and Pages. What was the crime of these men? Their crime
is yours, if you are a good subject; it is mine, who writes these
lines; it is obedience to Article 110 of the Constitution; it is armed
resistance to Louis Bonaparte's crime; and the court "orders that the
execution shall take place in the usual way on one of the public
squares of Beziers," with respect to the last four, and, in the case of
the other seventeen, on one of the squares at Bedarieux. The _Moniteur_
announces it; it is true that the _Moniteur_ announces, at the same
time, that the service of the last ball at the Tuileries was performed
by three hundred maitres d'hotel, habited in the liveries rigorously
prescribed by the ceremonial of the old imperial palace.
[4] Read the odious despatch, copied verbatim from the
_Moniteur_:
"The armed insurrection has been totally suppressed in Paris
by vigorous measures. The same energy will produce the same
effect everywhere else.
"Bands of people who spread pillage, rapine, and fire, place
themselves outside of the law. With them one does not argue
or warn; one attacks and disperses them.
"All who resist must be SHOT, in the name of society
defending itself."
Unless a universal cry of horror should stop this man in time, all
these heads will fall.
Whilst we are writing, this is what has just occurred at Belley:--
A native of Bugez, near Belley, a working-man, named Charlet, had
warmly advocated, on the 10th of December, 1848, the election of Louis
Bonaparte. He had distributed circulars, supported, propagated, and
hawked them; the election was in his eyes a triumph; he hoped in
Louis-Napoleon; he took seriously the socialist writings of the
prisoner of Ham, and his "philanthropical" and "republican" programmes:
on the 10th of December there were many such honest dupes; they are now
the most indignant. When Louis Bonaparte was in power, when they saw
the man at work, these illusions vanished. Charlet, a man of
intelligence, was one of those whose republican probity was outraged,
and gradually, as Louis Bonaparte plunged deeper and deeper into
reactionary measures, Charlet shook himself free; thus did he pass from
the most confiding partisanship to the most open and zealous
opposition. Such is the history of many other noble hearts.
On the 2nd of December, Charlet did not hesitate. In the face of the
many crimes combined in the infamous deed of Louis Bonaparte, Charlet
felt the law stirring within him; he reflected that he ought to be the
more severe, because he was one of those whose trust had been most
betrayed. He clearly understood that there remained but one duty for
the citizen, a bounden duty, inseparable from the law,--to defend the
Republic and the Constitution, and to resist by every means the man
whom the Left, but still more his own crime, had outlawed. The refugees
from Switzerland passed the frontier in arms, crossed the Rhone, near
Anglefort, and entered the department of the Ain. Charlet joined their
ranks.
At Seyssel, the little troop fell in with the custom-house officers.
The latter, voluntary or misled accomplices of the _coup d'etat_,
chose to resist their passage. A conflict ensued, one of the officers
was killed, and Charlet was made prisoner.
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