The Arcades Project - Operi

mund Englander, Geschichte der Jranzosischen Arbeiter-Associationen (Hamburg,
1864), vol. 4, 1'1'. 195, 197-198,200.
[Vla,l]
In regard to Cahet. After the February Revolution, someone had discovered . .. ,
in the files of Toulouse's chief of police, a letter from Gouhenant, delegate or
president of the first vanguard, who in 1843, during the trial in Toulouse,2 had
offered his services as police agent to the government of Louis Philippe. It was
known that this poison of espionage in France had penetrated even into all the
pores of family life; but that a police agent, this most disgusting excrescence of the
old society, could have found his way to the leader of the vanguard of Icarians in
order t.o cause his ruin, and at the risk of going under himself, aroused considerahle
surprise. Hadn't police spies been seen in Paris fighting and dying on the
barricades, doing hattle with t.he government in whose pay they stood!" Sigmund
Englander, Geschichte der JranzosischenArbeiter-Associationen, vol. 2, pp. 159-
160. 0 Utopians 0 [Vla,2]
"With t.he development of proletarian conspiracies, the need arose for a division of
labor. The members were divided into occasional conspirators, conspirateurs
d 'occasion-that is, workers who engaged in conspiracy alongside their other employment,
merely attending meetings and holding themselves in readiness to appeal'
at the pla(e of assemhly at the leaders' eommand-and professional
conspirat.ors, who devoted all their energy to the conspiracy and made their living
from it . ... The social situation of this class determines its entire character from
the outset. Proletarian conspiracy naturally affords them only very limited and
uncertain means of subsistence. They are therefore constantly obliged to dip into
the cash boxes of the conspiracy. A number of them also come into direct conflict
with civil society as such, and appear before the police courts with a greater or
lesser degree of dignity. Their precarious livelihood, dependent in individual cases
more on chance than on their activity, their irregulm' lives whose only fixed portsof-eall
are the taverns of the marchands de vin (the conspirators' places of rendezvous),
their inevitable acquaintanee with all kinds of dubious people, place them
in that social category which in Paris is known as the boheme. These democratic
hohemians of proletarian origin are therefore either workers who have given up
their work and have as a eonsequence become dissolute, or charaeters who have
emerged from the lumpenproletariat. and bring all the dissolute habits of that dass
with them into their new way of life . ... The whole way of life of these professional
eonspirators has a most deeidedly hohemian character. Reeruiting sergeants for
the conspil'aey, t.hey go from marchand de vin to marchand de ·vin, feeling t.he
pulse of the workers, seeking out their men, cajoling them into the conspiracy and
getting either the society's treasury or their new friends to foot the bill for the liters
inevitably eonsumed in the process. Indeed, it is really the nwrchand de vin who
provides a roof over their heads. It is with him that. the eonspirator spends most of
his t.ime; it. is here he has his rendezvous with his eolleagues, with the members of
his section and with prospective reeruits; it is here, finally, that the secret meetings
of sections (groups) and seetion leaders t.ake plaee. The conspirator, highly san-