Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/174

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134
EARLY REMINISCENCES

his troops between the Assembly and the Hôtel de Ville. On the 24th a furious battle was engaged, in which some legions of the National Guard fought the other legions, and the Garde mobile, composed of the sons of the people, did battle against the workmen. The Assembly concentrated all authority in the hands of Cavaignac. On the 25th General Bela was murdered whilst he was addressing the insurgents at the barricades of Fontainebleau. General Daméome was killed in an attack on the Pantheon, General Négrier at the assault on the barricade of the Bastille. Two representatives of the people were also killed. The Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Affre, in the hopes of appeasing the conflict, went to the Bastille to urge peace on the revolutionaries of the faubourg Saint Antoine. He was suffered to pass the barricade, but the conflict continued, and a ball from an upper window struck him, and he fell a martyr to his patriotism and zeal for peace.

Victory was inevitably on the side of the Government troops, who were well disciplined and well equipped, whereas the insurgents were not fully armed, possessing only the guns stolen out of the armour shops, and were short of powder and ball. The Government, determined to crush the rebellion, transported four thousand of the insurgents to Africa. Thirty-two newspapers were suppressed, and their editors imprisoned. Order was restored, but the carnage of the "June days" left a heritage of hatred between the working men and the bourgeoisie.

Mr. Nassau W. Senior, who was in Paris at the time of this Revolution, says, truly enough: "The theory to which we attribute the revolution of 1848 is a disguised Socialism. It is the theory which almost every Frenchman cherishes, as respects himself—that the Government exists for the purpose of making his fortune, and is to be supported only so far as it performs that duty. His great object is to exchange the labours and risks of a business, or of a profession, or even of a trade, for a public salary. The thousands, or rather tens of thousands, of workmen who deserted employment at which they were earning four or five francs a day, to get thirty sous from the ateliers nationaux, were mere examples of the general feeling. To satisfy this universal desire, every government goes on increasing the extent of its duties, the number of its servants, and the amount of its