THE INSURGENT
(L’INSURGÉ)
By Ludovic Halévy
Done into English by the Editor
“Prisoner,” said the president of the court-martial, “have you anything to add in your defense?”
“Yes, my colonel,” responded the accused; “you have given me a little advocate who has defended me according to his idea. I want to defend myself according to my own.
“My name is Martin—Louis Joseph; I am fifty-five years old. My father was a locksmith. He had a little shop in the upper part of the Faubourg Saint-Martin and did a small business. We just about lived. I learned to read inLe National, which was, I believe, the paper of Monsieur Thiers.
“The 27th of July, 1830, my father went out early in the morning. That evening at ten o’clock they brought him back to us dying on a litter. He had received a bullet in the chest. By his side upon the litter was his musket.
“‘Take it,’ he said to me; ‘I give it to you, and every time there is to be an insurrection, beagainst the government—always! always! always!’
“An hour afterward he was dead. I went out in the night. At the first barricade I stopped and offered myself. A man examined me by the light of a lantern. ‘A child!’ he cried. I was not yet fifteen. I was very small, quite undersized. I answered: ‘A child, that’s possible; but my father was killed about two hours ago. He gave me his musket. Teach me how to use it.’
“Starting with that moment, I became what I have been always, for forty years: an insurgent! If I fought during the Commune, it was neither from compulsion nor for the thirtysous, it was from taste, from pleasure, from habit, from routine.
“In 1830, I bore myself rather bravely at the attack on the Louvre. That gamin who—the first—climbed the iron fence under the bullets of the Swiss—that was I. I received the medal of July; but thebourgeoisiegave us a king. Everything had to be done over again. I joined a secret society, I learned to mould bullets, to make powder. In short, I completed my education—and I waited.
“I had to wait nearly two years. The 5th of June, 1832, at midday, before the Madeleine, I began by unhitching one of the horses from thehearse of General Lamarque. I passed the day shouting, ‘Vive Lafayette!’ and the night in making barricades. The next morning we were attacked by the soldiers. That afternoon towards four o’clock we were pocketed, cannonaded, fired upon with grape-shot, crushed, in the Church of St. Méry. I had a bullet and three bayonet thrusts in my body when I was picked up by the soldiers on the flag-stones of a little chapel on the right—the chapel of St. John. I used often to return to that little chapel—not to pray, I was not brought up in those ideas—but to see the trace of my blood which is still marked upon the stones.
“Because of my youth, I got only ten years in prison. I was sent to Mont-Saint-Michel. That was why I didn’t take any part in the uprisings of 1834. If I had been free, I should have been fighting in the Rue Transnonian as I had fought in the Rue St. Méry. Against the government—always!—always!—always! That was the last word of my father, that was my gospel, my religion! I called that my catechism in six words. I got out of prison in 1842 and again I began to wait.
“The revolution of ’48 made itself—without help. Thebourgeoisiewere stupid and cowardly. They were neither for us nor against us. TheCity Guards alone defended themselves. We had a little trouble in capturing the post of the Château-d’Eau. The evening of the 24th of February I stayed three or four hours on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. The members of the Provisional Government one after another made speeches to us, said to us that we were ‘heroes,’ ‘noble citizens,’ ‘the first people of the world;’ that we had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. After having regaled us with these fine words, they gave us a republic which wasn’t any better than the monarchy which we had tumbled to the ground.
“In June I took up my musket again—but that time things were not successful. I was arrested, condemned, sent to Cayenne. It seems that out there I behaved myself well. One day I saved a captain of marines who was drowning. They thought that very fine. Notice that I would very cheerfully have shot at that captain—if he had been on one side of a barricade and I on the other; but a man who is drowning, who is dying——. In short, I received my pardon. I got back to France in 1852, after theCoup d’État. I had missed the insurrection of 1851.
“At Cayenne I had made a friend, a tailor named Bernard. Six months after my departure for France, Bernard died. I went to see hiswidow. She was in destitution. I married her. We had a son in 1854. You will understand all in good time why I speak of my wife and of my son. Only, you ought already to suspect that an insurgent who marries the widow of an insurgent does not have royalist children.
“Under the Empire, nothing was going on. The police held a firm grip. We were dispersed, disarmed. I worked, I brought up my son in the ideas that my father had given me. The wait was long—Rochefort, Gambetta, public reunions; all those things put us in motion again.
“On the first serious occasion I showed myself. I was of that little band that assaulted the barracks of the firemen of Villette. Only, there a stupid thing was done. They killed a fireman unnecessarily. I was taken, thrown into prison; but the government of the Fourth of September set us free—from which I concluded that we had done quite right in attacking that barracks and in killing that fireman, even unnecessarily.
“The siege commenced. At once I was against the government, and for the Commune. I marched against the Hôtel-de-Ville on the 31st of October and the 22d of January. I loved revolt for the sake of revolt. An insurgent, I told you at the start, I am an insurgent. I cannot see a club without joining it, an insurrection withoutrunning after it, a barricade without bringing my paving-stone to it. That goes with my blood.
“And then, besides, I wasn’t altogether ignorant, and I said to myself: ‘We only need to succeed some day, clear to the foundations, and then in our turn we shall be the government and things will go a little better than with all these lawyers who get behind us during the battle, and who pass ahead of us after the victory.’
“The 18th of March came, and naturally I was in it. I cried ‘Hurrah for the military!’ I fraternized with the soldiers. I went to the Hôtel-de-Ville. I found there a government at work—absolutely as on the 24th of February.
“Now you tell me that that insurrection was not legitimate. That’s possible, but I don’t quite see why. I begin to be muddled, I do, between these insurrections which are a duty and those insurrections which are a crime! I do not clearly see the difference.
“I fired on the Versailles troops in 1871, as I fired on the Royal Guards in 1830, and on the City Guards in 1848. After 1830 I received the medal of July. After 1848, the compliments of Monsieur Lamartine. This time, I’m going to have transportation or death.
“There are some insurrections that please you. You raise columns to them, you give their namesto streets, you distribute among yourselves the offices, the promotions, the big salaries; and we others, who made the revolution, you call us—noble citizens, heroes, a nation of brave men, etc., etc. It is with such money that we are paid.
“And then, there are some other insurrections that displease you. As a result of those, you distribute to us exile, transportation, death. Well, see here: if you hadn’t paid us so many compliments after the first, perhaps we would not have done the last. If you had not raised the Column of July at the entrance to our quarter, perhaps we should not have gone to demolish the Vendôme Column in your quarter. Those two penny-trumpets were not in harmony. The one had to discord with the other, and that is what came about.
“Now, I am going to tell you why I threw away my captain’s uniform at the street corner on the 26th of May, why I was in a blouse when I was arrested. When I learned that these gentlemen of the Commune, instead of coming to fire with us upon the barricades, were distributing thousand-franc notes to themselves at the Hôtel-de-Ville, shaving their beards, dyeing their hair, and going to hide themselves in caves, I didn’t wish to keep the shoulder-straps they had given me.
“Besides, they embarrassed me, those shoulderstraps. ‘Captain Martin,’ that was silly. ‘Insurgent Martin,’ quite as it should be. I wanted to end as I had begun, to die as my father had died, an insurrectionist in an insurrection, a barricader in a barricade.
“I couldn’t get myself killed. I got taken. I belong to you. Only, I wish you would do me one favor. I have a son, a child of seventeen, he is at Cherbourg, on the hulks. He has fought, it is true, and he will not deny it; but it was I who put the musket in his hand, it was I who told him that his duty was there. He listened to me. He obeyed me. That alone is his crime. Do not condemn him too harshly.
“As for me, you have hold of me—do not let me go; that’s the advice I give you. I’m too old to mend, and, besides, what would you have? Nothing can change what is: I was born on the wrong side of the barricade.”