Revolutions - 6.04- Stop The Presses

Episode Date: April 2, 2017

On Monday July 26, 1830 the Four Ordinances were published. On Tuesday July 27 the July Revolution began. 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 6.4. Stop the Presses. Following the elections of June and July 1830, King Charles X was completely over it. Over what? It. All of it, everything. He had just used every dirty trick he could think of to defeat the liberal opposition, and for his effort, the ultra-royalists actually lost seats in the Chamber of Deputies. where once they had battled 221, they were now facing a liberal majority of 270, fearing that the monarchy was about to be railroaded into irrelevance, to a place where the king rules,

but he does not govern. Charles felt extraordinary measures were now justified. And so he sent Prime Minister polling yakoff to draft the four ordinances that we ended last week's show with. The Chamber of Deputies would be dissolved before it had a chance to sit. New elections would be held under laws that restricted the vote to only super wealthy landowners, and to stop the spread of the liberal virus, freedom of the press was revoked. Now, this might seem a bit of an overreaction by Charles, but he did not want to make the same mistakes that his brother, Louis XVI, had made. Charles believed that the French Revolution had succeeded because at every turning point, Louis had vacillated, compromised, acquiesced. To which, Louis had given the third estate an inch,

and they had taken his head. So, based with what he thought was an analogous situation, Charles did what he had advised Louis to do all the way back in 1789, cracked down hard and fast. But learning the lessons of history does not guarantee that following the opposite course of action is automatically correct. For example, Charles the 10th of France is about to provoke a revolution where one does not yet exist, and though he will not lose his head, he will lose everything else. On the night of Sunday, July the 25th, 1830, Prime Minister Polingyak summoned the editor of the official government newspaper, the monitor, to the palace at San Clu, about five miles outside of Paris where the royal family was residing for the summer.

The editor met with Polingak, and the Prime Minister handed over a sheet containing the four ordinances, told the editor to print them in the morning edition, along with a supportive editorial. Now, the editor was a good soldier, and he agreed to do both, but made it plain that he knew. what he was holding in his hand. This was the announcement of the royal coup everyone had been talking about for the better part of a year. With the four ordinances in hand, the editor returned to Paris, ordered his crew to begin setting the type while he drafted an editorial. They all worked through the night, and the explosive edition was ready to go in the morning. Once it rolled off the presses on the morning of Monday, July the 26th, the monitor was distributed across Paris. Individual subscriptions were delivered to homes, and bulk commercial subscriptions were distributed

to street peddlers, cafes, and reading rooms, shops that stocked every kind of publication imaginable, and where the news would often be read aloud to those who could not read, or afford a paper of their own. That morning's edition of the monitor sent a jolt of electricity through everyone who read it. Right there, big as life, were these four ordinances, rewriting the rules of the political game. The supportive editorial argued that the ordinances were necessary to prevent the seditious and libelous press from planting the seeds of revolution. It said, at all times, the periodical press has been, it is in its nature to be, only an instrument of disorder and sedition. The editorial went on to say of the recent political conflicts,

it must be recognized these agitations are almost exclusively produced and excited by the freedom of the press. Then after ticking off a long list of all the mean and nasty things the press had said and done, it had discredited public officials, twisted facts to suit their own ends, encouraged defiance, both among civilians and soldiers, and even revealed military secrets, not meant for the public to see. The editorial then wrapped up by saying that the liberal opposition planned to destroy the charter of government, and so the king was rightly invoking Article 14. Now, on this morning of July the 26th, that liberal opposition was not, in fact, planning to destroy the charter of government. They were instead scattered.

all over the country. Most deputies had gone home for the recent elections and they still lingered in their home constituency. It was a brutally hot last few weeks of July 1830 and Paris was kind of a crummy place to be. Only a dozen or so of the deputies and opposition leaders were actually in Paris when the four ordinances hit the street, though among those still in the city was Adolf Thier, who was among the first to learn of the stunning development. Once the contents of the day's monitor was known, known everywhere by about 10 a.m., copies were handed to messengers and agents who ran it around to the neighboring communities and departments as fast as they could ride. Lafayette got word out at his chateau about 50 miles southeast of Paris. The banker, Jacques Lafitte, was at his estate about 100

miles north, while Francois Guizot was on his way back from Neem and only found out because he happened to run into a messenger going the other way. But everywhere the monitor landed, the jolt of electricity hit, because have you heard the news? The coup is on. As the news spread through Paris and beyond, the streets of Paris began to fill up. For many workers, Monday was already a holiday, and many more had their routines disrupted by the confusing arrival of these surprise ordinances. So mostly confusion reigned, as no one knew what any of this really meant, and so they naturally converged at cafes and reading rooms to hear the latest news, and for both, there was no better venue than the Palais Royale. You guys all remember

the Palais Royale from the French Revolution, of course. It's where Damoulin made his speech on the eve of the fall of the Bastille. It's where Charlotte Corday bought the knife. Owned by the Orlean family in 1789, it was still owned by the Orlean family in 1830. Now, it had been confiscated during the revolution, of course, right after they chopped Philippe Calaté's head off, but no French government had ever sold the property. And so it was one of the few confiscated properties that the bourbons were able to return to their original owners. And so, after the restoration, they gave it back to the Duke to Orleans, and Orleon had restored it to the social and retail hub it had once been. So here in 1830, no less than in 1789, the Palais Royale became a combustible mix of anxiety,

confusion, heat, anger, and defiance. I will also mention at this point that I've done a little something different for this revolution. As I've been writing, I found myself constantly going to a Google map of Paris to pinpoint key streets and addresses, locations of barricades, that sort of thing. So I went ahead and created a shareable Google map with all the key locations of the Revolution of 1830 markdown, and it's available to view at Revolutionspodcast.com. There are layers for each individual day that you can toggle off and on. If you turn them all on, you'll just see a mass of red clashes everywhere. Or you can turn on just a layer for a single day, like today, Monday, July the 26th, 1830, where you'll get the location of the Palaisal, the offices of the National, and where a drunk mob will soon be chucking rocks.

It's kind of an experiment, but I hope it works. Please enjoy. So in Paris, the people most forcibly agitated by the four ordinances were the people directly threatened by its contents. The revocation of freedom of the press was a direct existential threat to. the publishing industry. And I don't mean the journalists, we'll get to them in a second. I mean the people who worked in the industrial business of printing. Paris was a major world capital, with one of the most vibrant publishing cultures in Europe, and all of it was served by printers, typesetters, delivery drivers, paper salesmen, whatever. No less than the glove makers or the cobblers, the printers were an economic class, and at all levels, the press laws

threatened their livelihoods. So at the very top, publishers met with other publishers to discuss the fate of their businesses. Then journalists would gather with journalists to craft literate responses to the crisis. We'll get to that in a second. And then workers would gather with other workers to keep abreast of the latest developments and figure out how they were going to feed themselves. But the printers were not the only ones threatened. And alongside them were as the general bourgeois business interests, the owners of factories and medium-scale ventures, many of them based right there in Paris. For this group, it was the electoral law that was directly threatening, because these bourgeois men of business were the ones who would be cut out of voting if only the top 25% of taxpayers

qualified. I mean, they were prosperous, but not that prosperous. And I should also mention that this was the same group who were organizing and who had been organized by the Help Yourself Clubs. They had just come out in force to support the liberal opposition. and so there was a reason that their class was being targeted for removal from the voter rolls. On July the 26th, most of these guys were actually already congregated in one place, the Hotel de Ville. They were there for an election to a local commerce commission, but the day's agenda was derailed into a discussion about what to do with these ordinances. A few suggested closing their businesses the next date of protest, which would also allow workers to further fill up the streets, but the meeting broke up with no firm resolution.

Above these bourgeois owners were the bankers and financiers of Paris. These guys would qualify for the vote no matter what, and they were not in danger of starving if they missed a few days' work, but they all agreed that falling under the arbitrary whims of the Bourbon dynasty was bad for business. Now, last week I introduced Jacques Lafitte, who was a leader in this clique of bankers, and certainly one of the most popular, but he was not the only leader, and he had a rival in the banker and mine owner, Casimir Perrier, who was himself an opposition deputy, one of the 221, but also a staunch doctrinaire, one of those left-leaning constitutional monarchists

like Francois Guizot. With the more aggressive Lafitte out of the city on Monday of the 26th, Perrier was able to take an early hold of the reins. He called together a small group of about a half dozen deputies to meet at his house in the afternoon. These guys all feared popular revolution, as much as they hated the tyranny of Charles X, and Perrier was clear that this was no time to go off and do something stupid. They would have to gauge events very carefully, because if they got out too far in front of events, they might trigger a revolution, or worse. Meanwhile, getting back to the journalists, who are kind of at the heart of all this, representatives of 12 of the papers most likely to be shut down met with Andre DuPin,

the principal attorney of the doctrinaire liberal paper, the Constitutional. The publisher of the constitutional had asked Dupin to render judgment on the ordinances, and hearing the news, other publishers flocked to his office to hear the verdict. Dupin was himself also one of the opposition deputies, one of the 221, and he now found himself giving public legal advice to a packed office, and he was unequivocal. He said the four ordinances are illegal, and the newspapers have not just a right but a duty to resist. Now, some of the more conservative editors, that's small C conservative, were not thrilled that they were about to have to stick their necks out, but Dupin told them

they were going to have to stick their necks out. Did I mention that Andre Dupin is also a longstanding, intimate associate, and close confidant of Louis Philippe, the Duke de Orleans? Because, well, he's also that. If the editors who met with Dupin tended towards the conservative side of liberalism, it was partly because the more aggressive side were congregating a few blocks away at the offices of Adolf Tier and the National. About 50 men crammed into the office, and they were united in agreement that the king was trying to silence them. And beyond the political battle, they all acutely felt the threat to their livelihoods, because no less than the printers, shutting down the presses meant financial ruin for the journalists.

The National had already run off a hastily drafted response, calling for a tax strike until the ordinances were rescinded. but the men who now gathered out the offices of the National believed the press should issue a single joint statement and they sent Tier and a couple of other guys into the back office to draft a response. He came back out and read it aloud to the assembled group. People have often predicted during the past six months that the laws would be violated, that a coup d'etat would be attempted.

The public, with good sense, refused to believe it. The ministry rejected the prediction as Columny. Nevertheless, the monitor has finally published these memorable ordinances which are the most flagrant violation of the law. The legal regime is now interrupted. That of force has begun. In this situation, obedience ceases to be a duty. The citizens first called upon to obey our journalists.

They ought to give the first example of resistance to the authority which has defy the law. The assembled journalists then elected to sign this declaration of resistance as individuals, rather than official representatives of their papers. but they left with a pledge to jointly publish the response in the morning. And as they dispersed to their respective offices to prepare, Thier noted that it was entirely likely that they would all be in jail this time tomorrow. So with the four ordinances having provoked immediate and widespread resistance, the king was well prepared, right?

Given his determination to stand his ground, to not make the same mistakes as his brother, all the necessary preparations to stand that ground had been carefully laid, right? Ha ha, what kind of podcast do you think you're listening to here? The king took his cues from Prime Minister Polingak, and Polingiac, as usual, was like a lazy cat lying in a sunspot and not particularly interested in your human concerns. So Polingiac did not notify any of the prefects or sub-prefects out in the provinces,

nor did he tell the police forces in Paris, nor did he alert the army or the Navy. Basically, anyone who might be needed to help the king stand his ground found out about the four ordinances in the morning paper along with everyone else. Now, when he signed the ordinances, King Charles had said to his ministers, These are great measures. Much courage and firmness will be required to make them succeed. I count on you. You can count on me. We are united in a common cause. For us, the issue is life or death. But you would not have guessed that it was really life or death, based on the amount of planning done in advance of the four ordinances, which was literally none.

But satisfied that all was well that King Windhoff hunting and the rest of the family played whist. The crowds at the Play Royale only grew as Monday wore on. By the evening of the 26th, the palisades and gardens were packed and humming, and it was there that the first little confrontation of the July Revolution unfolded at just about 8 o'clock. A group of police entered the garden to seize an unapproved press from one of the stalls. Now, this wasn't one of the opposition newspaper operations, but it was a small press operating without a license. For the moment, though, all the police endured was heckling as they removed key pieces of equipment

from the press, and they were able to withdraw without any violence. But news that the police really were out shutting down presses caused even more people to flood into the Palaisal because that was now officially the place to be. With the crowds growing, the police chief decided to shut down the Paleroyal and make everyone go home. So at about 1030, the guards herded people out of the garden and locked up the gates. But the crowd that spilled out onto the street, the Rue Santonoree, was now drunk on irreverent energy, indignant exuberance, and, of course, quite a bit of wine, and they were not ready to go home. This mass of people then split into two smaller groups. One set off towards the Ministry

of Finance Building, which was a symbol of bourbon tyranny and mismanagement. As they marched, they shouted out political slogans like long-lived the 221 and long-lived the charter, down with Polignac, down with the bourbons. As the crowd rolled along, they also introduced one of the hallmarks of the Revolution of 1830, and that's the destruction of the streetlights. Already a staple of central Paris, the streetlights usually hung from poles that straddled the entire length of the street. A few of the more intrepid protesters cut the cables and toppled the poles. So watching from afar, this might have looked like a slow-moving wave of smothering darkness that was also shouting, down with the bourbons. Spooky.

When these guys got to the Ministry of Finance Building, they chucked rocks at it. Which if chucking rocks at the Ministry of Finance Building isn't the most effective form of protest, it certainly has the benefit of being the most viscerally honest. So they kept chucking rocks. The other group had a similar idea, but they headed off towards the Posse von Dome, where the Ministry of Justice Building was because they had heard a rumor that Prime Minister Polingak was there right then. Maybe they could throw some rocks at him. The rumor turned out to be true. Polingak was in fact at the Ministry of Justice Building, but the Prime Minister had gotten

reports of disturbances at the Palais Rao and was anxious to split the scene, but he did not get out fast enough. Accompanied by the Minister of the Navy, the Baron Du C, Polingak's coach was spotted and identified, and the crowd let launch an avalanche. of bricks and rocks, forcing the coach to do a sharp U-turn and run away at full gallop. Poling Yacht's coach managed to get back into the Place Vondome, where they made straight for the office of the local police commander to see what measures were being taken. And both ministers were shocked to see the men on duty just kind of lounging around, as if there weren't destructive mobs rampaging around Paris as we speak, like right over there,

you can hear them. The local commander said, well, I'm trying to get another 150 more guys down here, and Polingak said, well, that is not enough. I'm going to have to put the Royal Guard on alert. And this was like a great record scratch stop moment for the Baron du Sui, who later wrote all of this down in a memoir that's one of the principal sources for the Revolution of 1830. He turned to Prime Minister Polingak and said, the Royal Guard hasn't been put on alert already? And Polingiac turned to him and said, and I quote, you worry too much. And that was when the Baron de Usi started to wonder if perhaps maybe.

He wasn't actually worrying enough. But this night of protest and rock throwing came to a natural end. By midnight, the crowds had lost their coherence and everyone drifted home. And so the chief of the Paris police was able to record at the end of this day that the most perfect tranquility continues to reign in all parts of the city. No event worthy of attention is recorded in the reports that have come through to me. This is what the police chief of Paris is writing down, just about eight hours before the official start of the July Revolution.

Life does come at you fast. So on the morning of Tuesday, July the 27th, 1830, the first editions from the defiant opposition newspapers rolled off the presses. But it was not the unified protest that its organizers had hoped it would be. The riots from the night before had caused a few papers to back out, rather than ag-on violent unrest. And then the more doctrinaire liberal papers like the courier and the constitutional said that they would not print because they were resisting the king's illegal actions and it would be hypocritical for them to break the law. So it was left to just four of the 12 papers to run the joint statement of resistance that had been written by Tierre, the national of course, but also the Times, the Globe, and the Journal of Commerce.

So trying to stop the spread of the prescribed material, the police were out in something. resembling force on the morning of the 27th. They carried now finally a complete list of which publications were approved for sale and distribution, and they went around to the cafes and reading rooms and said, if you don't want to get arrested, you better stock only approved publications. Because remember, Charles doesn't want to ban all of the press. He just wants to ban the unfriendly press. The police also kept a close eye on the city's network of coaches to monitor distribution and make sure nobody was transporting prescribed papers. But though they fanned out and only had four papers to worry about, they still could not stop the spread of the sensational declaration of resistance.

It made its way down to the Palais Royale and other public centers, where its contents were read aloud to gathering crowds of eager listeners. The Declaration of Resistance marks the beginning of the July Revolution, and it is the reason that Tuesday, July the 27th, 1830 is the first of the three glorious days. While the three glorious days were getting started, King Charles was rolling out of bed at San Clue, and he discussed events with Prime Minister Polignac. Having gotten bricks thrown at his head the night before, Polignac was now recommending a more forceful hand in Paris, specifically the army. And the man who would be tasked with leading the military operation was Marshal Auguste Morman. When Marmon was called to meet the king, he had no idea he was about to be tasked with maintaining order in Paris. And like everyone else, he had only heard of the four ordinances in the paper the previous afternoon. A moderate liberal by disposition, Marmonde was personally dumbfounded by the move.

And he said to a friend, well, you see, the lunatics as I foresaw have pushed things to the extreme. I will perhaps be obliged to get myself killed for acts which I abhor and for acts of persons who have long filled me with disgust. At about noon on July the 27th, the King and Polignac sent Marmaw off to Paris to do just that. Now, though Marshal Marmon only got this assignment because it was his turn in the regular assignment rotation, his appointment was filled with pregnant meaning. Marmon features prominently in the stabbed in the back myth that had grown up among Napoleon's veterans after the abdications. Marmont had once been a close intimate of Napoleon Bonaparte, like really super close. They had gone to school together. The Italian campaigns, the trip to Egypt

him back the coup of Brumere, Marmon was Bonaparte's aide-de-camp through all of it. But after a lifetime of devoted service, Marmon found himself in the vicinity of Paris as the allies were closing in on the Capitol in April of 1814, and he opened up negotiations and allowed his army to be surrounded. Marmonde's betrayal left his name as a synonym for treason, just like Benedict Arnold is for Americans. And many of the Napoleonic veterans who considered Marmon the literal definition of treason would soon be manning the other side of the barricades. Before Marmon arrived to take over the operation in Paris, the police forces were still taking the lead in trying to enforce the foreordinances, and with a few defiant newspapers publishing,

they had to make good on the threat to go shut them down. But the police were moving awfully slow. They certainly had not identified papers deemed most likely to resist and posted men at those locations early in the morning, and they didn't exactly spring into action when the first additions hit the street. It was not until about noon that the police finally approached the offices of the Times, and by then its editor, Jean-Jacques-Baud, had locked the door and barricaded himself inside. The police brought in some locksmiths to open the door, but they fled in the face of a hostile mob forming around the offices of the Times. This standoff would last for the better part of the afternoon. Then a few blocks up the road at the offices of the Times. Then a few blocks up the road at the offices

of the national, Thier and his associates also locked the doors, but they were broken easier, and workers were brought in to disable the presses, that is, remove critical pins, that sort of thing. But to everyone's astonishment, there were no arrests. The police had orders to stop the presses, but they did not have arrest warrants for any individual journalist or editor, and there would be no individual arrest warrants for at least another 12 hours. And, FYI, the Bourbon response to events is going to be just about 12 hours behind where they need to be for the whole run of the July Revolution. So instead of arresting anyone, the police simply locked up the doors of the National and departed. They didn't even leave anyone to guard the premises. And so as soon as the

police were gone, the same workers who had been hired to take the presses apart came back, unlocked the doors, and repaired them. Now, I don't know exactly how long the National was out of commission, but it could not have been more than a few hours, maximum. So once a again crammed into the sweltering offices of the national, Thierre and his colleague settled on a plan to emulate the course of the early stages of the French Revolution. And remember, Adolf Thier has written one of the definitive histories of the French Revolution, and he knew exactly what he was doing. If we open our hymnals to episode 3.12, the Great Fear, we will recall that in the aftermath of the fall of the Bastille, the Paris electors, that is, the men who had just elected

the delegates for the third estate to the Estates General, reconvened of their own accord and asserted preeminence in municipal administration. This gave birth to the Paris Commune. Knowing all of this history chapter and verse, Thierre recommended that the electoral colleges, who had, like their brothers of old, just recently taken part in an election, reconvened to assume administrative functions, as the king's illegal conduct had left a power vacuum to be filled. After this meeting broke up, Tierra then led a delegation of like-minded journalists to the

House of Casimir Perrier, who was by then hosting 30-40 opposition deputies in his house, including now Francois Gizot, who had finally returned from Neme. The assembled deputies were agitated by the ordinances, but they were also afraid of going too far too fast. They were worried that a single misstep would cost them their position, and they were worried, frankly, that any kind of resistance was doomed to failure. All they would agree to was to have Gizot draft a response to the four ordinances, saying that it was illegal and they would resist. Then Thierre and his guys showed up and demanded the deputies rally the electors of Paris to create

an active unified resistance. But Perrier was himself resistant to the resistance. Look around, he said, who are we? And he had a point. This was 50 guys in a room. I mean, who knows what, if any wider movement they actually represented. But more importantly, ever the consummate doctrinaire, Perrier said that our cause is a just cause because it is a legal cause. The king won't adhere to the law, so we must, otherwise we lose the moral high ground, not realizing that he was asking everyone to put on a straight jacket that the ultra-royalists had already shunned.

Above all, though, Perrier said we cannot allow things to turn violent, and all the deputies were in agreement on that front. They were the opposition, yes, but that did not mean they wanted to trigger a revolution. Now, as these delegates and journalists met at Perrier's house and compared their mutual aversion to violent revolution, a violent revolution was breaking out in the streets below. And this was literally going on at the same moment, just about three in the afternoon on Tuesday, July the 27th. And as had happened the day before, crowds had been gathering all day at the playwrights.

where, despite official censorship, it was fairly easy to read or hear the opposition's declaration of resistance. And though the journalists who signed that statement knew that they meant resistance to a point, the men and women out in the street just heard, resist. You have a duty to resist. And so, the crowds that gathered made up of people shut out of work, people who were unemployed already, radical students from the local schools, families who had shuttered their retail operations, they all heard resist, literally resist. At about one o'clock in the afternoon, the police tried to get in front of things by once again closing the Garden of the Palais Real. But just like the night before, this just pushed everyone out on the Rue Saint-Annery.

So, as I just said, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, just as the deputies were at Perrier's apartment talking about how they must not let violent revolution break out, the first shots of the July Revolution were fired. A detachment of police. A detachment of police, police cavalry pushed their way into the crowd milling around in front of the Playa Royal to begin the process of forced dispersal. Pushing, shoving, and a few flying objects later, two more cavalry detachments entered the fray. The proximity of loaded guns to a hostile crowd inevitably resulted in some of those guns going off, and the first blood of the revolution was spilled. But that was just a little prelude, because when the crowd refused to disperse, the police reformed on a skirmish line

that covered the breadth of the Rue Santonari, and about 4 p.m., they slowly and methodically marched down the street to force the crowd out of the area. During this push, rocks and projectiles flew out of the crowd, and more shots were fired. This time, bodies hit the ground, and the first dead martyrs offered themselves up to the god of revolution. The skirmish line, though, did successfully clear the street, but those who dispersed now had the bodies of the dead with them, which they paraded up and down the streets of Paris, saying death to the ministry, death to Polignac, death to the Bourbons. Now, just a few hours before these events, Marshal Marmon had arrived at the Twilery Palace to

assess the situation. Now, Polignac had told Marmon that he would have just about 13,000 men at his disposal, which Marmon, being a career army officer, knew was just a number on paper. And it turned out that he only had about 10,000 men on hand. And worse than that was the complete lack of officers. All four of the lieutenant generals were absent from their posts, and fully half the officers were on leave of one kind or another. I mean, when I say preparations for the alleged royalist coup were abysmal, this is what I'm

talking about. So what Marmon really had on hand was about 4,600 of the elite royal guard, including some of those vaunted Swiss regiments, 5,000 regular troops of the line, and about 1,500,000 regular troops of the line, and about 1,500 municipal police and security forces. He was still at the Twilery Palace getting a handle on things when the first shots were fired at the Palais Royale, which was literally just a couple of blocks away. Marmon ordered all of his forces out of their barracks to go occupy key ministry buildings and public squares, and by five o'clock that night, Paris was under something resembling military occupation, a very light, very officerless military occupation. While these forces fanned out, the agitated people of Paris mostly let them go unchallenged,

but many more got to work on their own military response to this crisis. They began constructing barricades. Now, technically, barricades in Paris had first appeared way back in 1588 for the day of the barricades, but that was kind of a one-off event. During the French Revolution proper, barricades had really only shown up once. That was when the army marched into the San Antoine to crush the Sancu lot once and for all. We discussed that in episode 3.41. So it is really here now in 1830 that the barricades become synonymous with urban revolution.

Now we're going to talk more in depth about them next week. So for the moment, just know that in the narrow streets that branched off from the Rue Saint-Honnery, residents began constructing protective barricades. When Marmon found out, he sent out detachments of 13. 30 to 40 guys to tear them down. So the first honest to God fighting of the July Revolution broke out around 6 o'clock that night, when a detachment sent to clear barricades from a street linking the Rue to Rivley with the Rue-Sant-a-ri, the Parisians fought back and had to be driven off by a bayonet charge. An hour later, another detachment came under bombardment from the roofs and windows of a street they were clearing, and the soldiers opened fire. The crackling of gunfire

could now be heard off and on for the next several hours. At about eight that night, with this gunfire crackling, a larger meeting of liberal journalists and deputies and electors gathered at a house just about a quarter of a mile down the street. At this meeting, they all tried to outdo each other in oratory, but once again, few concrete measures were agreed upon. And in fact, one of the participants wrote of this meeting, How many useless words are spoken in this kind of meeting cannot be imagined by a person who has not attended one.

There are the earnest and the impetuous who want to speak to satisfy their temperaments and to soothe themselves by declaiming at random. There are the boobs who want to tell you what they have seen and heard, believing it very important because it is all that they know. Then there are the vein who, preoccupied with themselves, insist upon explaining their conduct. I recall that a large part of the time was spent in listening to a former professor of history, who after having been a liberal, like all his fellows, left us to become an assistant in the faculty of letters. He made both an apology and a mea culpa, explained to us that event had enlightened him and swore to us that he was now really one of us. Meanwhile, all around central Paris, law and order was breaking down. Eminating out from the Palais Royale, there was just now General

rioting and looting and vandalism. The lights came down all over the place, and the whole central core of Paris slowly went dark, block by block, an ominous sight for those watching from the Twilery Palace. Some Parisians sought revenge for the earlier killings, and specifically attacked the guardhouses, looting them for weapons and supplies before burning them to the ground. The vastly outnumbered guards mostly just stood to one side, or tried to get away as fast as they could. At about 10 that night, a large crowd gathered at the Place de la Bastille on the east end of town. Forming where the French Revolution itself had once begun, this growing crowd planned to march on the city center,

but they were blocked by a phalanx of soldiers and police. There were more flying bricks and rocks and more vandalism, but the crowd at the Bastille did not force their way forward. In fact, as had happened the night before the unrest in the streets was cleared out by midnight. It was reported all clear enough to Marmon that he recalled his troops to their barracks. and sent an optimistic report to the king that all was well. Now, King Charles was perfectly willing to believe this optimistic report, as it merely confirmed what he already believed.

When more dire reports had come in earlier in the evening, and an attendant Duke recommended immediately ordering more troops to Paris, the king had replied, You are mad, my dear Duke, I repeat to you for the hundredth time. There is nothing to do or to fear. It is a straw fire that will make only smoke. Charles went to bed that night perfectly convinced that even the smoke would be dissipated by morning. But we wouldn't be here talking about all of this if it was just a straw fire, and though Charles did not know it,

the July revolution was already on. He was going to sleep at the end of day one of the three glorious days. And before we leave today's episode, though, I do want to look back and recognize something really important, that there are actually two revolutions going on simultaneously here. And for the moment, there's very little communication or coordination between them. The first was the bourgeois resistance, the opposition liberal deputies and electors and journalists. These guys are all fairly well to do. They're prosperous and respected. Many were doctrinaire-style liberals who abhorred bourbon tyranny, but who also abhorred popular revolution.

Their revolution was playing out in the homes and salons of prominent politicians, bankers, and businessmen. But down in the streets, there was another revolution, a massively decentralized, spontaneous uprising composed of a motley array from the working classes. These were the old Sanku lot. They were students, shopkeepers, craftsmen, printers, and army veterans who were now literally out fighting in the streets. Next week, the cautious conservatism of the liberal bourgeoisie will be overtaken by the mass uprising of the workers. The July Revolution would not be decided in respectable parlors, or thanks to a finely crafted speech, it would instead be decided in the streets of Paris, a thwart the barricades.