The Arcades Project - Operi

mediating power, the good sense of the nation . ... From 1830 to 1839, the bourgeois
Garde Nationale lost 2,000 of their own in confrontation with the barricades,
and it was due more to them than to the army that Louis Philippe was able to
remain on his throne . . . . Whatever the reason-whether simple old age or a
species of lassitude-it was always the bourgeoisie that wearied of this wasteful life
which made it necessary, every six months, for hosiers and cabinetmakers to take
up arms and shoot at each other. The hosiers, peaceful men, grew tired before the
cabinetmakers. This remark would suffice to explain the February Revolution."
Duhech and d'Espezei, Histoire de Paris, pp. 389-391. [VI,S]
June Insurrection. r,It was enough to have the appearance of poverty to be treated
like a criminal. In those days there was something called 'a profile of the insurgent,'
and anyone fitting the description was arrested . ... The Garde N ationale
itself had most certainly determined the outcome of the February Revolution,! but
it never occurred even to them to give the name 'insurgents' to men struggling
against a king. Only those who had risen up against property . .. were known as
insurgents. Because the Garde Nationale . .. 'had saved society,' they cOlIld do at
that time whatever they wanted, and no doctor would have dared refuse them
entry into a hospital. ... Indeed, the blind fury of the Guardsmen went so far that
they would scream 'Silence!' to the fever patients speaking in delirium and would
have murdered these people if the students had not stopped them." EngHinder
vol. 2,
pp. 320, 327-328, 327.
[VI,6]
"It goes without saying that the worker associations lost ground with the coup
d'etat of December 2, 1851. . . . All the associations of workers, those who had
received subsidies from the government as well as the others, began by promptly
removing their signs, on which symbols of equality and the words 'Liberty, Fraternity,
Equality' were inscribed; it was as though they had been shocked by the
blood of the coup. Hence, with the coup d'etat, there were still unquestionably
worker associations in Paris , but the workers no longer risked displaying t.his
name . ... It would be difficult to trace the remaining associations, for it is not only
on the signboards hut also in the city's directory of addresses that the name
'Workers Association' is missing. Worker associations survive, after the coup
{Petat, only in the guise of ordinary commercial concerns. Thus, the former fraternal
association of masons is now going under the trade name 'Bouyer, Cohadon
& Co. ? ' the association of gilders that likewise once existed as such now operates as
the firm of 'Dreville, Thihout & Co.,' and, hy the same token, in every surviving
association of workers it is the managers who give their names to the business . ...
Since the coup d'etat, not one of these associations has admitted a new memher;
any new memher would he regarded with undisguised suspicion. If even the customers
were each t.ime received with distrust, this was because one everywhere
sensed the presence of the police-and was the more justified in doing so as the
police themselves would often show up officially on one pretext or another." Sig-