The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-WitnessHugo, Victor
History
The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness
Hugo, Victor
France -- History -- 1789-1900
Two hours afterwards the child was still living, and we were holding a
permanent sitting at No. 15, Rue Richelieu, Jules Favre, Carnot, Michel
de Bourges, and myself, when Dulac entered, and said to us, "I have come
to place myself at your disposal."
[9] "There was also a misunderstanding respecting the appointed time.
Some made a mistake, and thought it was nine o'clock. The first arrivals
impatiently awaited their colleagues. They were, as we have said, some
twelve or fifteen in number at half-past eight. 'Time is being lost,'
exclaimed one of them who had hardly entered; 'let us gird on our sashes;
let us show the Representatives to the People, let us join it in raising
barricades.' We shall perhaps save the country, at all events we shall
save the honor of our party. 'Come, let us to the barricades!' This
advice was immediately and unanimously acclaimed: one alone, Citizen
Baudin, interposed the forcible objection, 'we are not sufficiently
numerous to adopt such a resolution.' But he spiritedly joined in the
general enthusiasm, and with a calm conscience, after having reserved
the principle, he was not the last to gird on his sash."--SCHOELCHER,
_Histoire des Crimes du 2d Decembre_, pp. 130-131.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WORKMEN'S SOCIETIES ASK US FOR THE ORDER TO FIGHT
In presence of the fact of the barricade of the Faubourg St. Antoine so
heroically constructed by the Representatives, so sadly neglected by the
populace, the last illusions, even mine, should have been dispersed.
Baudin killed, the Faubourg cold. Such things spoke aloud. It was a
supreme, manifest, absolute demonstration of that fact, the inaction of
the people, to which I could not resign myself--a deplorable inaction,
if they understood, a self-treason, if they did not understand, a fatal
neutrality in every case, a calamity of which all the responsibility, we
repeat, recoiled not upon the people but upon those who in June, 1848,
after having promised them amnesty, had refused it, and who had unhinged
the great soul of the people of Paris by breaking faith with them. What
the Constituent Assembly had sown the Legislative Assembly harvested.
We, innocent of the fault, had to submit to the consequence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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