4.10: The 5th of June 1832 (locations part 2)
There are going to be way more parts for this than I anticipated…
The Funeral Procession of General Lamarque
[A bigger version with the notes] & [A clean and unedited version]
Okay so there’s a ton of information here. First the boring part:
The places where Hugo mentions the government forces being situated at the start of the day. Note that
a) this probably isn’t all the government forces, obviously. Just the main placements. Hugo also mentions the soldiers and guards outside of the city that would be later be called for backup. Also there were a bunch of guys in the barracks. I marked some of the barracks that I happened to find on the map with blue dots but that’s not all of them by any means. There were barracks all over the city and that’s not even counting the guardhouses which I left out because it’d be too much work to mark them all. If you want me to do that I can, but some time later.
b) also a bunch of them were obviously following the funeral cortège.
c) some of the government forces joined the rebellion, particularly the guys at the Place de la Bastille I think? As well as many of the ones in the procession (including Charles Jeanne who was a national guard). Many of them actually weren’t fully armed, including Charles Jeanne and Alexandre Dumas (who was an artilleryman and participated in the cortège too) for example. Most national guards only had their sabres with them. Jeanne had to go back home to get his rifle later on.
Place Louis XV (= Place Louis XVI = Place de la Concorde): four squadrons of carabineers
“Latin country” (99% sure this just means the Latin Quarter) and Jardin des Plantes: Municipal Guard
Halle-aux-Vins: a squadon of dragoons
Place de la Grève: half of the 12th Light Infantry
Place de la Bastille: the other half of the 12th Light Infantry
The Célestins: the 6th Dragoons
The courtyard of the Louvre: artillery
I can’t be bothered to cross check these with the other sources. You can check Blanc yourselves if you want to know. Gisquet basically just talks about the police and the municipal guards because they were under his command. The only relevant thing you get from Gisquet’s account is that the police knew that the revolutionaries were planning to divert the procession to the Panthéon and that’s why the area between the Bridge of Austerlitz and the Panthéon was so heavily guarded (and probably why the hearse was successfully recaptured by the municipal guards but I’m getting ahead of the story here).
[x] Place Louis XVI (formerly Place Louis XV) in canon era (1829). Louis-Philippe renamed it Place de la Concorde. Here viewed from Pont de la Concorde (in 1829 Pont Louis XVI)
([Here’s another 1829 picture of the Place] but from a completely different angle, facing Palais Boubon. I won’t show it here because I’m trying to use pictures sparingly in this post. Instead have this next one:)
[x] Same place, unclear time. The picture is from 1848 but it’s labeled Place Louis XVI which could imply that it’s supposed to depict it in the Restauration era. Anyway I wanted to have this one because it’s the only one I found that shows the start of Rue Royale properly without also showing either the Obelisk (which didn’t come until later) or the statue of Louis XV (which had already been removed) Anyway this is where the carabineers were stationed and also where there was a ton of people waiting for the procession to start. The procession itself doesn’t seem to have passed through here: instead it started in the middle of Rue Royale (the street that starts between the buildings in the center right of the picture) but a lot of the people joined in from here. Possibly also Les Amis.
I have pictures of the other locations of the troops but none of them are really that relevant to Les Mis characters in this chapter so I’m leaving them out for now. I only wanted to have Place de la Concorde because it’s relevant to the beginning of the procession.
The actual funeral procession/cortège. I’m not going to get too deep into the details of what happened because there are perfectly good sources describing it that have even been translated into English. So if you want to read more about the cortège (and while you’re at it, the insurrection too) @tenlittlebullets made a great post about them [here]. (I think the only major one that I know is missing is [Gisquet’s memoirs] and they’re only in French anyway.)
For this part of the events, I recommend [Alexandre Dumas’s memoirs]. For one thing, he was actually there. For another, it’s by far the most fun to read! :D Seriously, check it out if you haven’t. He starts talking about Lamarque at page 260 of the sixth volume and the actual funeral day account starts on page 266. (This post deals with the events up to when he gets bored of the speeches and goes grab lunch.)
So the processions’s intended route (stress on “intended”) was to leave the general’s home in Faubourg Saint-Honoré by Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, follow the Grand Boulevards* past the Place de la Bastille and then to the Place Mazas (Place d’Austerlitz) by the Seine, at the entrance to the Pont d'Austerlitz, where it would stop for speeches and all that, and then finally it was supposed to leave Paris** to Mont-de-Marsan in Landes, where the General was originally from, for the interment.
* (these are the old boulevards of Paris that form a sort of a half circle around the Right Bank and btw if you hear someone, at least in this era, talk about “the boulevards” without specifying which boulevards they mean, it’s probably these boulevards.)
** (probably by the way of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital on the left bank? I couldn’t confirm this but I got the impression from Gisquet)
According to Dumas, the public was actually allowed to visit the General’s home to see his body early in the morning. Maybe some of Les Amis did this too?
I couldn’t find the General’s home address so the start of the procession is a bit vague there, hence the dotted line on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. But in any case it didn’t start properly until it got to Rue Royale and took its proper form and picked up most of the people. The time of departure from Rue Royale was around 11:30 am. It went past the Madeleine Church to Boulevard de la Madeleine and then Boulevard des Capucines.
[x] This is obviously not canon era (as you can brilliantly deduce from the fact that it’s a photograph) but I like this picture as an illustration of the location: the beginning of the boulevards. The Madeleine church is of course on the left. The procession approached it directly but then turned right here to continue on the boulevards. The first section is the Boulevard de la Madeleine followed by Boulevard des Capucines (and B. des Italiens in the distance).
At the level of Rue de la Paix (the first yellow dot on the map), around 12:15 am, some enthusiasts decided to divert the head of the cortège (mostly just the hearse, I think, and maybe some of the people coming right behind it) to Place Vendôme to make a little lap around the column. They had some friction with the guards stationed there but soon returned the hearse to the planned route without provoking anything more dramatic.
[x] Place Vendôme and the column. Not canon era but it’s a good picture, I think.
The next incident happened on the Boulevard des Italiens at the level of Rue de Choiseul (Blanc claims it was Rue Grammont but just ignore him and believe Dumas. I checked this!) In the corner house, Hôtel Boufflers (12 Rue de Choiseul), on the second floor (or third floor depending on how you count floors) there was a club called Cercle des Arts and some people were at the balcony, among them Duc de Fitz-James who kept his hat on when everybody else was baring their heads in honour of the dead. He got stones thrown at him for this and retreated inside.
The procession continued to the Boulevard Montmartre.
[x] Boulevard Montmartre in 1830. It’s possible that the trees, or at least some of them, had been cut down in the revolution later in 1830 so in 1832 they might be replaced by younger replanted trees. Maybe. (All I found was that “about half” of the trees on the grand boulevards were cut down.) This picture is facing west so the cortège would arrive here from the direction we’re looking at.
