Brick Club 4.10.3, 4.10.4, 4.10.5
Lamarque is what Georges Pontmercy could have been but for a bad stroke of luck. “Men felt a sword in his speech.” Lamarque held a very curious and precarious political position, an imperialist then a leftist parliamentarian, then a republican. He very strategically built upon the goodwill his standing in Napoleon’s army earned him, managing to remain involved in the government, and seemingly spent his time balancing his hatred of the Bourbons and his growing distaste for the July Monarchy. It’s a particularly interesting political evolution, going full republican after Napoleon. I don’t necessarily understand the mentality that makes an emperor so much more preferable to a monarchy, constitutional or not. I can mostly understand the anti-Bourbon turned anti-legitimist stance as staunch loyalty to the former emperor, but the progression to republican is interesting. Especially for Lamarque, because he also strongly advocated for the independence movement in Poland and other countries, it wasn’t just about glory for patrie or dedication to French citizens. But he made his bread as an imperialist, gained political power as a leftist during the Restoration, and continued to receive renown under the July Monarchy. A very curious, yet effective progression for Lamarque.
His death prompts the entire city to make its preparations. The “miners” bring out their last barrels of powder from the depths and the monarchy readies its firefighters. And, finally, the red flag goes up. Shots are fired and “wrath sweeps along the émeute as the wind sweeps along a fire.”
“Here the insurrection has the character of a plot; there of an improvisation.” Hugo said the émeute was the fraction against the whole, and I think that’s more right than he knows. We’re shown a series of simultaneous events happening across the city, some violent and some subtle, by workers, students, bourgeoisie, soldiers, all bearing different symbols “like a multitude of flashes in a single peal of thunder.” It isn’t just the minority against the majority here, it’s every flavor of citizen jumping feet first into the action and there’s something to be said for that. There is strategy in the chaos, “the émeute was conducted according to the soundest military tactics,” showing that this fraction could perhaps be a whole. It’s the gathering of so many pieces of society joining into a collective that should rattle the establishment, what has some soldiers nervous. “These old sailors…are completely lost in presence of that immense foam which is called the wrath of the people.” Louis Philippe, however, is “full of serenity.” I don’t know what to think of a ruler who is unfazed at a rebellion, except that he’s a fool. He either doesn’t care about the wrath of the people or is ignorant of it, neither of which is the quality of a great leader or a great man.
The calm familiarity of insurrection is embodied in the flag we saw a glimpse of int he last chapter reading: “Republican revolution, No. 127” which is the kind of bitter humor I expect from Parisians at this point. Speaking of which, Hugo takes a moment to mock the police saying, “that in the night there would be people who would pillage the isolated houses in the deserted quartiers of Paris (in this the imagination of the police was recognised, that Anne Radcliffe mixed with government).”
But this is not the mild, gentle revolution that Hugo admired in 1830. This one is bloody and fearful, a fierce struggle for something more than what the people got last time. There’s anxiety, the palpable fear of loss. Not the glory of right. What it is, is the last option of suffering people, the only thing they believe that will create change, that will finally set things right. That’s what Hugo doesn’t get about violence and revolts (or riots, or insurrections, or revolution, it all comes down to the same thing) especially the string of them in France during this era, the rising desperation that fuels these kind of outbursts. It’s also what has Louis Philippe so serene in his Palace, so unconcerned with more violence. There are people with noble intentions, absolutely, but there are also people—sometimes the same people—who are at the end of their tolerance, who don’t have anything left but anger and determination and a desperate need.
