The Arcades Project - Operi

a raise of one sou, then the bourgeois becomes terrified and cries out for strong
measures . ... Most of the time, our governments have exploited this sad progress
of fear . ... All I can say here is that . .. our grand Terrorists were by no means
men of the people. They were bourgeois and nobles, men with cultivated, subtle,
bizarre minds-sophists and scholastics." J. Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris, 1846),
pp. 153-154.7 [a8a,2]
Fregier, the author of Les Classes dangereuses, was head clerk at the prefecture of
police. [a8a,3]
On the description of the February Revolution in Flaubert's Education sentimen­
tale-which needs to be reread-one finds (with reference to Stendhal's descrip­
tion of the Battle of Waterloo):' "Nothing of the general movements, nothing of
the great clashes, but rather a succession of details which can never form a whole.
Tills is the model which M. Flaubert has imitated in his depiction of the events of
February and June 1848; it is a model of description from the standpoint of the
idler, and of politics from the standpoint of the nihilist;'].:J. Nescio, La Litterature
JOUS les deux Empires, 1804-1852 (paris, 1874), . [a8a,4]
Scene from the July Revolution. A woman donned men's clothing to fight alongside
the others, and then afterward, as woman again, nursed the wounded who were
lodged in the Stock Exchange. 'Saturday evening, the cannoneers who were transferring
the artillery pieces remaining at the Bourse to the Hotel de Ville enthroned
our young heroine on a cannon crowned with laurels and brought her with them.
This evening, at around ten o'clock, they brought her back in triumph to the
bourse by the light of torches; she was seated on an armchair decorated with
garlands and laurels." C. F. Tricotel, Esquisse de quelques scenes de l'interieur de
la Bourse pendant les jou .... ees des 28, 29, 30 et 31 juillet demier: Au profit des
blesses (Paris, 1830), p. 9. [a9,1]
Lacenaire composed an "Ode it la guillotine;' in which the criminal is celebrated
in the allegorical figure of a woman, of whom it is said: "Tills woman laughed
with horrible glee, / AB a crowd tearing down a throne will laugh;' The ode was
written shortly before Lacenaire's execution-that is, in January 1836. Alfred
Delvau, Les Lions dujour (paris, 1867), p. 8Z [a9,2]
A charity supper at the Hotel de Ville, where unemployed workers-in winter,
above all construction workers-gathered. The hour for the public meal has just
sounded. And now Little Bluecoat hands his ivory-tipped cane to one of his assistants,
takes from his buttonhole a silver place-setting which is attached there, dips
the spoon into one pot after another, tastes, pays the servers, presses the outstretched
hands of the poor, takes up his cane, refastens his spoon, and goes
tranquilly on his way . . . . He is gone. The serving of the food begins." Little
Bluecoat was the nickname of the philanthropist Edme Champion, who had risen
out of very modest circumstances. The passage from Ch.-L.