@ -1427,5 +1427,113 @@ The insurrection of Lyon will always be one of the most original episodes of our
He was wrong. It wasn't over. June 1849 would bring him other satisfactions…
\section[Order finally reigns in Lyon]{1849-1851 — Order finally reigns in Lyon}
A good bloodletting but also a trial-spectacle of the Chamber of Peers sitting in the High Court, this is the remedy administered to the population of the city of Lyon and the kingdom.
Despite the protest of the Lyonnais expressed by Eugène Baune, a republican professor at the business school, the case of the 60 Lyonnais was disjointed from the 163 indicted at the national level.
On August 13, 1835, the verdict divided the sentences as follows: Deported for life outside the national territory: 7;
Detention in a fortress (Doullens) for 20 years: 2; for 15 years: 3; for 10 years: 9; for 7 years: 4; five years in prison: 19; three years in prison: 4; one year in prison: 2;
acquitted: 9; one accused had died during the trial. That's 312 years in prison or detention (more than 9 years on average) not counting the duration of the deportation.
However, three years later, an amnesty was proclaimed on the occasion of the marriage of the Duke of Orleans: Louis-Philippe was attempting a rallying operation to the regime.
This time it was a workers' and republican insurrection, even more obvious than that of 1834, and in the hope of dividing this common front,
the members of the Society for Human Rights were hit harder than those of the workers' organizations of the Silk Factory.
Once again, miscalculation: Eugène Baune was not wrong who had told his judges on July 10, 1835: "Do you believe that the fight that was fought is the last? Our presence before you only attests to a vanguard defeat."
In fact the regime had gained 14 years of relative tranquility that could give Guizot the illusion of the durability of the censitary suffrage, he who opposed any reform calling for the lowering of the income threshold necessary to access the "democratic" ballot box,
the magic slogan of the time: "Get rich!"
In 1848, the conjunction of an economic crisis at the same time agricultural, banking and industrial, with scandals that reached the high spheres of society and with a reformist agitation that, politically reaching the country, led to an explosive situation.
It is then the weight of the working class that is decisive on the event level.
In Paris the proletarian irruption turns into a revolution what was only "reasonable" manifestations easily contained.
In Lyon, on February 25, the emergence around and in the town hall of the secret societies of the Croix-Rousse in the middle of the courteous negotiations between republicans "of the day before" and republicans "of the next day" put an end to the delaying speeches.
As the neo-babouvist weaver Joseph Benoit reports: "a strong column that descended from the Croix-Rousse thwarted all their plans and convinced them of the uselessness of their resistance.
In the evening the people commanded masterly at the Town Hall and organized a revolutionary committee."\footnote{Confessions of a Proletarian, op. cit. Cit.}.
Without delay, the secret society of the Voraces (which hid in the form of a company of Free Drinkers) planned to undertake the destruction of the forts built since 1831 on the plateau at the sites visited by Souk,
shortly after the reconquest of the city and whose arrowslits were oriented towards the rebel suburb. The Commissioner of the Republic, Emmanuel Arago, who arrived in Lyon on 28 February, was coldly welcomed when he suggested the cessation of their business:
in the afternoon of 5 March, he had to accept the idea of the destruction of "these fortified walls built by the monarchy between Lyon and Croix-Rousse at the time when the monarchy premeditated to annihilate the republican workers"\footnote{Journal d'un bourgeois de Lyon en 1848, Présentation Justin Godart, PUF, 1924, p. 4l.}.
In a city that the historian G. Perreux does not hesitate to describe at that time as "the first republican city of France"\footnote{Republican propaganda at the beginning of the July Monarchy, 1930, p.99.}, the return of the Republic found in the vanguard the neo-Babouvist militants of Lyon who,
with their clandestine "Flower Society" linked with the former Parisian Society of Families became "Society of Equals"\footnote{With Barbes, Martin Bernard and Blanqui.} dreamed of establishing "the community of goods at the same time as the Republic".
The Lyon events of the spring of 1848 offer a particular tone.
The multiple tree plantations of Liberty adopt an original ceremonial. After the ceremony, a procession drove the young girls crowned with flowers who opened the march to their homes.
At their side a "man of the people" wearing a red cap, carrying a ammunition rifle, installed on a stretcher supported by 4 men is seen as "deification of the Revolt", as Monfalcon notes, acerbic.
On April 9, an expiatory funeral ceremony is held in honor of the victims of the anti-republican repression.
It takes place in the center of the city, arena of the intense fighting of 1834. Five thousand people participated and Monfalcon saw there "the awful reminiscence of 93".
On the 16th, another demonstration is organized. No longer by the authorities but by the "mountain" clubs. It aimed to install in Perrache, Place de la Liberté, a statue of the Sovereign People due to J. P. Lepind.
It depicted a worker, chest uncovered, standing on a barricade, rifle in hand. Immediately it was baptized by the popular voice The Man of the People.
Followed by the long procession of a crowd, it was walked all around the peninsula, the place of residence of the local bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
A subscription was launched to offer a bronze replica of the monument to the "Brothers of Paris as a pledge of admiration and unity".
In June 1848, however, Lyon did not move. The government has thought of parrying the blow. It placed a massive order for silk flags that occupied the looms and while he crushed the revolt of the workers of the Parisian national shipyards,
he deployed in Lyon a spectacular security device, which delighted and reassured the "men of the golden chest".
Here, Martin Bernard noted on the eve of the Parisian tragedy, "the bourgeois element and the popular element are continually in the presence (…)
with the only difference that the devoted instincts of the people always bring them back to the principles of the Revolution, while the narrow, selfish calculations of the bourgeoisie always keep them away from them."\footnote{Lyon's history review, XII, 1913, p. 179.}
The defeat of the Parisians did not, however, affect the determination of the Lyon workers, on the contrary!
In the elections of May 1849, for the Legislative, after the disarmament of the Croix-Rousse, then of the entire National Guard of the city, the irreducibility of the workers is confirmed spectacularly:
the eleven candidates on the "red list" were elected with votes between 72,569 and 69,323, ahead of the moderate candidates (50,343 votes).
The reshuffled government after June 1848 had sent as commander of the military place, Marshal Bugeaud who had earned in Algeria – already! — its reputation as an expert in "pacification". In plain language of military rudeness he expressed in a letter to Thiers his fury:
"What raw and ferocious beasts! How can God allow mothers to make this kind ! Ah! these are the real enemies and not the Russians and Austrians."\footnote{Maréchal Bugeaud, unpublished letters, Lyon, 1849.}
Without letting himself be stopped by his theological questions, he hastened to prepare a good and decisive bringing this rebellious people to heel. The plan outlined was not carried out by him.
Through cholera, "God" recalled Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Marquis de la Piconnerie and Duke of Isly (Algeria) on June 10, 1849.
Faced with the provocative behavior of the civil and military authority, on June 4, 1849, The Republican threatened. The solution, it wrote:
"It is the dictatorship of the proletariat destroying the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie drove out the aristocracy, as royalty buried feudalism."
… Which goes to show, the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was initiated neither by Marx nor by Lenin, but by the military terrorism of the bourgeoisie refusing social democracy!
From 15 to 16 June 1849, Bugeaud's mortal blow was dealt by General Gémeau. On the 14th, a false news of a victorious Parisian insurrection circulated in the city, when in reality the demonstration organized by the deputies of the Mountain came to a sudden end.
As Karl Marx explained: "It was only in Lyon that a stubborn, bloody conflict was reached. In this city where the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat are directly face to face,
where the workers' movement is not as in Paris enveloped and determined by the general movement."\footnote{K . Marx, The Class Struggle in France, 1850. We can consult on this whole episode in The nineteenth century and the French Revolution (Société d'histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle, Créaphis, 1992), the contribution M. Moissonnier: Les images de la République dans le monde et le mouvement ouvrier lyonnais (Republic's pictures in the world and the Lyon's worker's movement), pp. 173-189.}
Things unfolded as in the exercise against the canuts of the Croix-Rousse quickly isolated from the rest of the city held under surveillance.
In forty-eight hours, with the use of cannon, the last insurrection of the silk plateau was suppressed. The barricades of the slopes were swept away, then those of the Grande Rue and the rue du Mail.
150 corpses of insurgents were officially recorded, cabarets were closed, opposition newspapers were suppressed, peddling of printed matter was banned, 1,500 arrests resulted in 1,200 cases dealt with by the councils of war.
The state of siege preluded the maneuvers that led to the opening of the way for the imperial dictatorship.
Let us refer to the confession of the good J. B. Monfalcon, editor of the official historical directories of the city.
Commenting in the one written for the year 1852 (before the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, the text was already ready), he writes about 1849\footnote{pp. 87-88, Dépôt Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.}:
"There is no doubt that if the riot had held it would have received powerful reinforcements from socialists in the vicinity, the obstacles of all kinds encountered by the troops marching on Lyon are proof of the spirit of the neighboring populations.
Lyon was obviously chosen for the center of a socialist peasant revolt and how to calculate the chances if the National Guard had existed? It would have provided at least 10,000 men to the insurgency. "
It is obvious that this is an echo of the panic campaign in preparation for the coup d'état and aimed at presenting the year 1852, that of the legislative elections, as a scarecrow concealing the threat directed against the right to property.
Then take the yearbook of 1853, when the bourgeoisie agreed to "lose its crown to save its purse" (Marx). Monfalcon "blesses a revolution coming this time from above and no longer from the fange of the cobblestones like all the others"
because without the coup d'état, "the division was settled in advance, to each his abilities, to each capacity according to his works, to this one such ministry, to this other such fund, to the valets the habit of their master,
to the maneuver the house he has built, to the peasant the farm he exploits, to the vicious the honest woman (…) to the ignorant the public education, to the atheist the cults, to the murderer justice"\footnote{idem, pp. 93-94}.
And no doubt in Monfalcon the palm of the apocalyptic description! Which is not certain, because the propaganda writings of the time surpass themselves.
And the Second Empire, as we know, was the signal of the "festival of profits", opening to the joyful leap of French capitalism.
What remains in the city that the tourist travels, of these tragedies of the first hundred years of the birth of French capitalism?
He will gladly be shown, at the fabric museum, the admirable fabrics produced by an elite workforce: the "façonné" that required science and know-how.
The only place where one seeks to show the men who made the wealth of the Factory, Cooptiss, the House of Canuts, rue d'Ivry, has not until now obtained the public aid that it would be normal for it to benefit.
Of the canuts, the advertisement presents a falsified image produced by a distorting folklore, from which the struggles for a long time were banned.
It's all about jumping songs, good words and gastronomic recipes from poor people washed down with Beaujolais! It was not until the early 1950s that an artery of the Croix-Rousse, responding to the Lyon name "express way",
takes the name of boulevard des canuts, and the arrival in the prefectural administration of the historian Fernand Rude to be affixed, on the borough town hall, a plaque evoking the battles of 1831 and 1834.
Apart from that, the streets of the city are silent on this past and that of the Revolution of 1789, whenever it comes to workers' militants or revolutionaries: neither Denis Monnet, nor Bertrand, the Jacobin mayor, nor Joseph Châlier.
On the other hand, the open opponents of the canuts are honored: Prunelle deputy mayor (1831-1835), proclaiming the responsibility of the Saint-Simonians in the revolt of 1831,
the deputy Fulchiron "Fichu-rond" for the canuts he accused of opulence, the unnoticed Christophe Martin, 1835-1840, and Terme, 1840-1847, continuing the same discourse, Bugeaud, the inevitable, and Gasparin whose street leads in the center to Place Bellecour…
which was, quite naturally, the place of arms. On the other hand, Bouvier du Molard is unknown for reasons of abusive tolerance, but compensated by Vaïsse, prefect with a grip of the Empire and Haussmann, Lyonnais, friend of the bankers.
All associated with 81 street names bearing the names of saints. The street signs celebrate order, finally restored by iron and blood in the city of wonderful silks.
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