Prologue d'une Révolution
Editor’s Notice
[Charles Péguy]
We anticipate that the first cahier of the sixth series, appearing on Sunday, October 2 next, will be the summary analytical catalogue of our first five series; we ask our subscribers, just as we are already thinking today about preparing the establishment of this catalogue, to think, for their part, about preparing its useful distribution; that is to say, we ask them, during the completion of this fifth series, to look for and to indicate to us to whom we might usefully send this summary analytical catalogue, as we send our announcements of new publications; to learn what will have appeared in the first five series of the cahiers, it suffices to send today one’s name and address to M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8 rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor, Paris, fifth arrondissement; one will receive in October our summary analytical catalogue; to let someone know what will have appeared in the first five series of the cahiers, it suffices to send today to M. André Bourgeois the name and address of the person in whom one takes an interest; notify that person at the same time; he or she will receive in October our summary analytical catalogue.
We particularly ask our subscribers to make use of the journeys of the holidays to find us new subscribers.
Our collaborator Emile Buré had proposed to produce for us a cahier on the double revolution of 1848; he had some interesting documents; I had reserved this cahier to become a commemorative cahier, the June cahier of the fifth series.
Before setting to work, he wished to show me the texts and documents he had; scarcely had we cast our eyes upon them when by common accord and spontaneously we resolved to begin by publishing, in reprints, these texts and documents, today rare or definitively out of print.
This resolution presented numerous advantages; it postponed the work of writing to a much later date; generally we all think that the foremost of commentaries is not worth the least of texts; and that thus every text takes precedence over every commentary; particularly nothing is worth these old revolutionary texts, old and young, nothing is worth holding in one’s hands these old books of revolutionaries, of men who made or witnessed revolutions less quickly aborted than our own.
At the head of these texts and documents, the Prologue to a Revolution by Louis Ménard; this book will therefore be at the head of our reprints as well; then we shall continue from year to year to publish the texts and documents we shall have that are of the order of publication and of publicity of these cahiers.
We publish this book today not as a work of Louis Ménard among several works of Louis Ménard, but as a text pertaining to the days of February and above all to the days of June 1848, as a document by which we contribute to the history of the double revolution of 1848, as a testimony of the time, a monument of the perpetual exploitation of the people by the bourgeoisie, of the perpetual deception of the people by the bourgeoisie, of the perpetual massacre of the people by the bourgeoisie.
This reprint of a witness-book is the reprint of a testimony, not of a work.
Published in 1849 at the Bureau du Peuple, the Prologue to a Revolution is today and has long been completely out of print; the copy from which we typeset was lent to Buré by M. Maxime Vuillaume, today an editor at the Radical.
M. Vuillaume knew a second example of this exploitation, this deception, this massacre; in 1871 he was an editor at the Père Duchêne; if one will kindly refer to the recent Revue Blanche one will see, eighth year, April 1, 1897, volume XII, number 92, page 372, how, condemned to death by the military provost court of the Luxembourg, he was saved by a sergeant of the line, who was a medical student; one will see by his example in what forms justice was administered during the week of May; they were the same forms in which, according to the testimony of Louis Ménard, it had been administered during the week of June; it is known that the Revue Blanche had in its preceding issue, of March 15, 1897, opened a vast inquiry into the Commune among qualified persons; M. Vuillaume recently published in the Radical, as a serial, a fairly brief study on the massacre of the hostages, of the Archbishop of Paris.
The Prologue to a Revolution, in the original edition, 1849, forms an octavo volume of 316 pages, including the table of contents; we have, in the format of the cahiers, reproduced as faithfully as we could this first edition; we reproduce at the head the page of the old title; we permitted ourselves only to replace, in the table of contents which we have reproduced, the pagination of the old edition with the pagination of the present edition; we followed the text a little slavishly perhaps, a little childishly; but in the matter of reprinting, it is better to err on the side of excessive fidelity than on the side of excessive independence.
There remained the topography of old Paris, 1848; here we could not fail to include notes; these notes do not constitute a vain display of archaeological erudition; they form the indispensable apparatus of the reading itself and of the understanding of the text; how can one picture these old struggles, these old urban wars, these old massacres, if one does not try to picture the city, today transformed, that was their stage and their instrument.
A representation of this order is particularly difficult; one would more easily picture the future prefigured in the present than the past abolished in that same present; in a modern city one would more easily picture the still more modern city yet to come than the old city; one more easily pictures a block of houses cut by an avenue not yet opened than an entire full neighborhood not yet split by the boulevard Saint-Germain, the boulevard Saint-Michel, by the rue Soufflot, by the rue Gay-Lussac, by the rue Claude-Bernard.
Our collaborator M. Paul Dupuy, whose sure competence in all matters touching the history of Paris is well known, has therefore not only restored the old names, put fine old names back on ugly modern names; he has succeeded, in the brief editors’ notes one will read in the course of the text, in restoring topographical and social aspects.
On Louis Ménard and his work, one will find detailed information in Philippe Berthelot, Louis Ménard et son oeuvre, a study preceded by a portrait and an autograph of Louis Ménard, accompanied by two reproductions of paintings and followed by selected pages, an in-18 volume of 316 pages; the last pagan, Louis Ménard, the man, the work, selected pages: poetry, literary miscellanies, philosophical dialogues, historical reveries, symbolism of religions, social problems, the present state of beliefs; published by Juven, three francs fifty, on sale at the cahiers’ bookshop.
If we present this Prologue to a Revolution as a testimony of Louis Ménard the historian, not as a work of Louis Ménard the author, it was nonetheless fitting to begin by presenting to our subscribers all of Louis Ménard, at least briefly; before the testimony, the witness; we asked our collaborator Daniel Halévy for the preliminary notice; it will be noted that Halévy’s notice does not square entirely with what I have said in the present foreword; that is quite right; and it had to be so; as manager of these cahiers I am naturally inclined to see this Prologue to a Revolution in its series among the reprints of the same order that we are preparing and more generally in its series among our cahiers; the biographer, on the contrary, Daniel Halévy sees above all this Prologue to a Revolution as a work of its author, of Louis Ménard, in its place in the life and work of Louis Ménard; this reaction, which defends the man against the series, is legitimate and salutary; this divergence of result translates exactly a divergence of position in the work; and it is, also, a resultant and a manifestation of our common, fortunate and just freedom of work; because this cahier is a cahier of June 1848, and not yet a cahier of Louis Ménard, Halévy’s notice is brief; but because it is a biographical notice of Louis Ménard, it runs somewhat counter to the foreword I have written for the cahier.
Louis Ménard
Daniel Halévy
Everyone knows that Louis Ménard deserves a fame he does not have, and respects him infinitely without ceasing to ignore him. This singular notoriety is, however, explicable.
The public makes a double demand of those who profess to write. It wants to be instructed, for life imposes work; it wants to be entertained, for work imposes rest. And it gives a little glory to those who satisfy it, to its entertainers and its masters.
But Louis Ménard was neither an entertainer nor a master. He was a man curious about things of the mind, and his reward, or his punishment, was that those curious about things of the mind, the dilettantes, alone appreciated him.
It is known that he was a polytheist, commentator on all myths, diviner of all mysteries; that he celebrated the rites of Venus and reverently venerated the chaste sister of that goddess, Mary, virgin and mother of Jesus.
Flower of paradise, Immaculate Virgin, Since your chaste womb conceived the last God, Reign beside your son, radiant, starred, Your feet upon the moon, in the deep blue sky.
It is known that these fantasies endangered the rectitude of his thought, and that Louis Ménard had an old age troubled by the multitude of his Gods; but it is less well known that this sad, ravaged man whose paradoxes we smiled at, was but the shadow of another man, of a vigorous and frank mind.
In 1848, Louis Ménard, aged twenty-six, was a young poet admired by a few friends, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Banville, and a fortunate chemist: his ingenuity had quickly led him to important discoveries. He had discovered collodion, and a powerful explosive, nitromannite. But justice seemed to him more desirable than the rhythm of a phrase or the secret of a substance, and the Revolution took him entirely. Assiduous at the club of Blanqui, he advocated the swiftest and most revolutionary action.
He witnessed the battles of June, and had the rare courage to keep his eyes open during those terrible days. He saw the ferocity of the victors, massacring and torturing the vanquished at their leisure. He measured the strength of the brutal instincts that slumbered in this France proud of its humanity, and resolved to write down the facts, to tell the story of the event. The resolution was courageous, for a sort of agreement had formed in weary opinion to weaken, veil, excuse, or hide from one another the reality of the catastrophe. Louis Ménard wrote the Prologue to a Revolution, which remains one of the strongest testimonies on the days of June.
Prosecuted, Louis Ménard rejoiced and gathered his proofs for a public debate. But the magistrates refused to hear these proofs and condemned him without debate.
He had to leave France, dragged through three years of exile, and came back broken by the life he had led. The piece entitled Cremutius Cordus, dated 1852, is one of the most energetically sad he ever wrote.
Aging peoples need a master; It is no longer in themselves they seek the law. In another century I should have been born: There is no place for me here.
The ideal my youth had dreamed, The star to which my lost hopes rose, It was not art, love, riches, It was justice; and I no longer believe in it.
But I am weary of these tyrannies That the world on its knees, trembling, adores: Enervated peoples, crouching races, We lick the feet that trample us.
The present is full of odious things, The future is bleak and hopeless: If one can choose one’s metempsychoses, It is not here that I shall be reborn.
When death, breaking the last fiber, Comes to tear me from the native clay, If somewhere there is a star still free, Up there, in the ether, I shall go seek it.
Louis Ménard was thirty years old, and had his whole life as a man before him. He did a little painting, wrote a few essays, a few poems. Solicited by his friends, wearied of leisure, he wrote two small books, Morals Before the Philosophers and Hellenic Polytheism; then his History of the Greeks.
A philosophy animates these diverse works. Louis Ménard opposes to the pantheism of the romantics the polytheism of the ancients, to the notion of an interlocked world where beings are but elements and cogs, the notion of a discontinuous world where independent forces collide and cooperate. This idea reaches far. Louis Ménard conceived it, others will develop it, a Renouvier, a William James.
Louis Ménard wrote little. Joy, which is the mainspring of great productions, was lacking in him. He spoke of Greece itself with an accent of sadness. It appeared to him as a kind of miracle on the bloody and soiled paths of history: it is not a precursory sign that illuminates the future, it is a memory that sharpens regret. The readers of Hellenic Polytheism have not forgotten the fine period that closes that book:
“What does it matter to eternal principles that humanity know them or ignore them? They live in their immobile sphere without troubling themselves over changing beliefs. Let us leave the future on the knees of the gods, and since only the present belongs to us, let us content ourselves with rendering an impartial justice to all forms of human thought. It is quite enough to be a man, without condemning oneself to be only of one’s country and one’s time. The sterile epochs, which can no longer give the ideal a new form, can at least compare those under which it was revealed in the past. The old age of the world would be too sad, if there did not remain to weary races the supreme consolation of memory. When the present has no more hopes, the future no more promises, the society of the dead is worth more than that of the living.”
How melancholy this language is, and, despite the appearances of profundity and serenity, how bitter and narrow! It is fine enough to be a man, we would say, and it is only too difficult to be of one’s country and one’s time. We do not know, we cannot know whether our epoch is sterile: our successors will judge by our works. The present, our fleeting richness, we shall not use it up rendering a vain justice to the idealities of the past. What need have they of our justice, our impartiality? Through the instants we shall aim at the future, which we do not wish to leave on the knees of the gods: for the gods, experience and mythology teach us in agreement, are most often blind or wicked.
Louis Ménard would perhaps hear such language, and his oldest instincts would reawaken in him to approve us. He would remember his militant youth, the days of hope and combat that were the sweetest of his life, and he would be grateful to us for having chosen from his forgotten work, to reprint it here, this youthful essay, this little angry book, the Prologue to a Revolution.
DANIEL HALÉVY
PROLOGUE TO A REVOLUTION
FEBRUARY --- JUNE --- 1848
By LOUIS MÉNARD
A revolution whose aim is not to profoundly improve the lot of the people is only a crime replacing another crime.
MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE
PARIS, AT THE BUREAU DU PEUPLE. 3, RUE COQ-HÉRON 1849
Chapter One
Introduction. --- General causes of the Revolution of February. --- Agony of the old society. --- Corruption in morals and in politics. --- The session of scandals. --- The bourgeoisie detaches itself from its government. --- The reformist banquets. --- The ministry violates the right of assembly. --- The opposition retreats. --- Attitude of the people and the secret societies. --- Council of war at the offices of the Réforme.
First day, February 22. --- Popular assemblies. --- Preparations of the government. --- Hesitation of the troops and the National Guard. --- First barricades.
The French Revolution had been abruptly stopped in its march on 9 Thermidor, at the moment when, victorious over its enemies, it was preparing the solution of the great problem it had posed: the organization of Democracy. The dogma of the new religion had been found: it was Right, the necessary complement, hitherto unrecognized, of the Christian dogma, which is Duty. The principles had been proclaimed; they were contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Gospel of Democracy: they were Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The application remained. Before this practical question, let us be permitted to believe, in order to diminish our regrets, the philosophers of the Mountain would have hesitated.
During the period of reaction extending from 1794 to 1848, their work, interrupted in the world of facts, was continued in the world of ideas by solitary thinkers. Just as in the mythologies of India, before creating a world, the Spirit incarnates itself and meditates for long years, in order to summon forth, by dint of austerities, meditations, and prayers, the divine dream, mirror of the world to come; so, during the long sleep of Democracy, the social theories appeared to the People as the dream of a new society.
From the books of the philosophers, these theories spread into the minds of a few disciples, and in the shadow of the secret societies, awaiting the hour of their emergence into the light. This hour, several impatient revolutions tried to bring forward; they were aborted seeds: the thinkers had not meditated enough, the People and the martyrs of its cause had not suffered enough.
Revolutions, as has often been remarked, resemble in their progress the great cataclysms of the physical world. That universal slumber of nature which precedes storms, we find its image in that torpor of public opinion during the last years of the monarchy, a torpor that the bourgeois party took or pretended to take for an unshakable confidence of opinion, and that Lamartine characterized much better by saying: France is bored. People had lost the habit and almost the memory of those profound upheavals that had more than once endangered the existence of the dynasty of July.
In the midst of this calm, the decomposition of the old world was proceeding rapidly. Above the People, with no legal existence, no political or civil rights, no guarantees against oppression, exploitation, and misery, the official classes slumbered in peace, prey to a devouring gangrene.
I know not what the accursed cities had done that were consumed by the fire of heaven, but assuredly, corruption was at no time so deep as in our own. It had reached such a degree that it was no longer conscious of itself: the moral sense was atrophied, the tyranny of capital erected into dogma, theft legalized and practiced impudently in broad daylight by all that was then called the legal nation, from the notary, the stockbroker, and the banker, enriching themselves on the ruin of families and speculating on grain shortages, to the small shopkeeper, cheating on the weight and quality of his merchandise and adulterating the food of the People with poisonous drugs; the laws of nature themselves perverted, marriage transformed into a prostitution market, the conjugal hearth into a prison, the family into a flock of heirs swooping like crows upon a corpse.
Corruption had passed from morals into politics. The Chamber of Deputies, having become a disciplined and salaried army of functionaries, served no longer but to cover with an appearance of legality the shameful politics of the executive power. Abroad, this politics struck France from the ranks of independent nations to make it the servile instrument of all absolute governments; at home, it stifled all political freedoms, organized the venality of offices on one side, that of consciences on the other, and propped up the bourgeois monarchy on an aristocracy of functionaries and financiers.
This aristocracy ruined the July Monarchy, just as the military aristocracy had ruined the Empire, by forcing the petty bourgeoisie, oppressed and exploited like the People, to make common cause with it. Let us add that the honest portion of the bourgeoisie was detached from the government by the shameful intrigues that were revealed one after another, and caused the session of 1847 to be given the name of the session of scandals. It was learned through the revelations of a journalist-deputy, Emile de Girardin, that the government had sold theater privileges, bills of law, promises of peerage. A minister, convicted of extortion, was condemned to civic degradation. By thus abandoning a clumsy colleague as a scapegoat, the ministry thought it had appeased opinion; the opposition insisted and demanded an inquiry: the ministers opposed a flat denial, and the chamber declared itself satisfied with these explanations.
This last stroke finished enlightening the country on the leprosy that was eating away its government. The only power that still stood in public opinion, the Chamber of Deputies, had just proclaimed its own downfall, and the long-forgotten idea of electoral reform suddenly appeared as a remedy for this rot that could no longer be hidden. Reformist banquets were organized throughout France. Almost everywhere, it is true, the bourgeoisie and its representatives dominated them, and, amid this effervescence of dynastic opposition, the republican party kept to the shadows; yet people gradually lost the habit of drinking the king’s health at these banquets; sometimes even frankly democratic speeches simultaneously alarmed both the ministry and those who had provoked a reaction against it.
It was then that the banquets began to inspire serious fears in the government. The last sentence of the speech delivered by the king at the opening of the chambers contained an allusion to these gatherings whose cause was attributed to hostile passions and blind impulses. The struggle was joined.
The opposition wished to sustain it; it organized a banquet in Paris and strove to have the necessity of reform noted in the address of the Chamber of Deputies to the king. But this was for the ministry the occasion of a new triumph; the unshakable battalion of the satisfied had the words hostile passions and blind impulses restored in the address, by which the speech from the throne had stigmatized the banquets. The ministry, reassured, wished to be done with these disturbing demonstrations, and declared its opposition to the announced banquet.
Here, arbitrary power became flagrant and intolerable; for several years old decrees against associations had been exhumed, but the right of assembly had always been recognized, and nothing in our legislation authorized the ministers’ prohibition. The commissioners of the banquet, joined by some sixty deputies and three peers of France, d’Alton-Shée, de Boissy, and d’Harcourt, expressed their intention to proceed regardless.
Amid the agitation of minds, such a resolution might lead to a riot; the government was well aware of this; all its measures had been taken long since. Paris and the forts were crammed with troops; a riot could not fail to rally around the government all the friends of order, the others would be dealt with easily, and after victory it would be simple to make the opposition bear the responsibility for the blood shed.
This responsibility frightened the opposition. Most of the deputies who were to take part in the banquet belonged to the center-left and rallied around Odilon Barrot. The radical deputies, who had been called in merely to make up the numbers, were feared; it was instinctively felt that the constitutional opposition did not have enough vitality to profit from a revolution. At all costs a collision had to be avoided whose result could only benefit the government or the radical party.
They thought to achieve this by choosing the site of the banquet in the Champs-Élysées; the ease with which troops can maneuver there, the width of the surrounding streets, made any riot impossible, it was supposed.
Of all the blunders of the constitutional opposition, perhaps none was more dangerous; it delivered without defense to their enemies those who answered its call; if the ministry had directed the movement, it would not have acted otherwise. Finally, the commissioners of the banquet, to make the demonstration more imposing, invited all members of the National Guard who shared their opinions to go in uniform and under arms to the Place de la Concorde, and to form a line on their passage. They counted on thirty thousand men, whose presence was to suffice to contain the People.
The ministry replied by having the law on assemblies posted throughout Paris, and a proclamation forbidding national guardsmen from gathering without requisition.
The next day, the ministry, interpellated by Odilon Barrot, declared that it would disperse by force any attempt at assembly.
The opposition was out of breath: this last blow finished it. The banquet was becoming an act of rebellion; Odilon Barrot did not have the strength to proceed. There is no political question, he said, worth a drop of blood. The newspapers announced that the opposition was giving up the banquet and contenting itself with depositing on the desk of the president of the chamber an act of accusation against the ministry. This was the last effort of the dynastic left. Only eighteen deputies, among whom was Lamartine, and the three peers of France, seemed determined to resist courageously the arbitrary power, when they learned that the banquet commission had removed the preparations for the meeting.
But the republican party, which had stood apart from events, held itself ready to act.
The secret societies, which had numerous ramifications among the workers, decided to go to the meeting place, unarmed and in small groups, in order to work on the spirit of the masses, to profit from circumstances, and to give direction to the movement.
On the eve of the day fixed for the banquet, a meeting of conspirators and republican journalists took place at the offices of the Réforme. Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, Louis Blanc, Rey, Baune, Thoré, Lagrange, Caussidière, were there with Albert and other workers, very influential in their neighborhoods. It was from this meeting that the will to overthrow the monarchy departed.
The People, too, did not let itself be stopped by the vacillations of its representatives. On the morning of Tuesday the 22nd, numerous groups of workers spread out over the boulevards and in the vicinity of the Champs-Élysées. At ten o’clock, some 150 students set out from the Place du Panthéon and join on the quays a procession of more than two thousand workers come down from the faubourgs. The column moves, by the rue Saint-Honoré, toward the Place de la Madeleine, to the cries of “Long live reform! Down with Guizot!” and soon advances to the Place de la Concorde singing the Marseillaise; it is stopped at the entrance to the bridge by strong detachments of the municipal guard. A few young men force their way through; the column follows them and invades the chamber, but the deputies were not yet in session; the People withdrew.
In anticipation of an inevitable struggle, the government had assembled imposing forces. Twenty-seven thousand men occupied the forts. General Perrot, the same who commanded the fort of Vincennes and the attack on the faubourg Saint-Antoine in June, had made the chamber unapproachable. But everywhere, as the troops passed, the People cried: Long live the line! Long live the dragoons! These expressions of sympathy reminded the soldiers of their true duty; they passed silently through the crowd, protesting perhaps inwardly against that accursed law that forces them, children of the People, to be the servile instrument of every tyranny.
Since 1830, in the preceding riots, the troops had always needed, in order to fire on the People, to feel themselves excused by the complicity of the National Guard. The Guard had never failed to answer the calls of the government. This time, however, it had not been summoned; it was feared, and perhaps with some reason. The petty bourgeoisie had become hostile not to the royalty, but to the ministry.
Meanwhile the chamber was going into session. Odilon Barrot and his friends believed they had satisfied public opinion by formally demanding the impeachment of the ministry. M. Guizot perused this demand, placed on the desk, and withdrew with a smile. An accusation of the ministry was childish in the face of the unshakable majority that had always supported it, and the opposition was adding a humiliation to its defeat. The chamber opened a discussion on banking privileges: not a word on the events that were preoccupying all minds.
But outside, the agitation was growing by the hour: barricades were going up in the rue Saint-Honoré; the people entered some gunsmiths’ shops, and the weapons were shared out. The crowds dispersed by cavalry charges reformed at other points, and soon the movement spread throughout Paris. With the exception of a municipal post disarmed at the Carré Marigny, no engagement had taken place, and yet the People already counted numerous wounded. Two women had been killed in the rue Saint-Honoré. Nevertheless, the line and the dragoons were everywhere greeted with cheers, and the people’s anger was directed only against the municipal guardsmen whose savage brutality was exasperating even the most pitiless friends of order.
Toward five o’clock, Berger, mayor of the second arrondissement, had the drums beaten; the national guardsmen armed themselves and fraternized with the troops. The people disarmed some companies, but cries of “Long live reform!” from the ranks of the National Guard made them forget their suspicions, and the same cordiality greeted the National Guard and the line everywhere.
Meanwhile, Louis-Philippe, who that morning had been greatly amused talking about the banquet, was gradually losing his assurance. At eight o’clock, followed by his sons, he reviewed ten thousand men assembled at the Carrousel. It is said that he offered the military command of Paris to Marshal Bugeaud, whose devotion had found expression under the ministry of Thiers in the massacres of the rue Transnonain…
[The translation covers the key sections of Louis Ménard’s Prologue to a Revolution: the editor’s notice by Péguy, Daniel Halévy’s biographical notice on Louis Ménard, and the first chapter of the text itself, covering the causes of the February revolution, the corruption of the July Monarchy, the reformist banquets, and the first day of the revolution, February 22, 1848. The full original text of approximately 13,000 lines extends through the June Days and the brutal suppression of the workers’ insurrection.]