\chapter{Shoot, they're just proles.}

\chapterauthor{Roger BORDIER}

In the days and months following the storming of the Bastille, particularly in August, a very lively workers' agitation, more important and resolute than one might perhaps imagine two centuries later, 
shook various corporations and in sometimes confused features, certainly, began to draw the true face of a modern class struggle.
Already in April, a riot directed against the manufacture of the prestigious paper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon had clearly shown that in a certain Parisian population, where destitution faced opulence, tension was running high.
The factory employed four hundred people (a quarter of them children) and it is not clear whether they were among the many rioters.
The essential, paradoxically, is elsewhere, and first of all in the rumor that spread in a short time to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine:
Réveillon would have made remarks that were not very favourable to those who, already so badly paid, were likely to be even less so. True? False?
Misery answered by throwing itself into the street, then it paid the price by seeing the dead of a terrible repression fall while demonstrators were hanged the next day, others violently molested, others imprisoned. 
It was still, as we said, only in April: the wind was blowing against the poor; they had the impression after July 14 that it was finally going to turn in their direction.

For Jaurès, what is remarkable about the storming of the Bastille is that it gave the people a first awareness of its strength.
Indeed, this consciousness developed with a staggering magnitude, an uninterrupted impulse that is proper, not to say the very definition of authentic revolutions,
in many exploited, overexploited, and not only — since they were, it seems, the most prompt — in shoemakers and wig makers for example,
but also among those who were called \enquote{the women of the hall}. That said, the most spectacular action, the most passionately symbolic too, was certainly that of the tailor boys.

What do they want? First a better salary and, in any case, forty cents in any season. Secondly, that second-hand clothes dealers should not be allowed to make new clothes.

We must obviously ask ourselves about this last point: such a requirement is too similar to that of master tailors anxious to eliminate competition so that the relative neutrality of the latter toward their employees does not seem somewhat suspicious.
We guess the blackmail: ah! without the second-hand clothes dealers, we could pay you better. It doesn't matter, though:
that there was in this sense a conjunction of interests does not detract from the quality of the initiative, the concrete form of a wage demand and the will to organize which were indeed on the side of the workers alone.
But what to do? Get together and discuss? They chose lawns facing the Louvre and soon became worried:
how to prevent undesirables from crossing the enclosure? To be sure to find themselves between tradespeople, only, and in the number of three thousand since this figure was actually reached?

There was no question of asking for a membership card that we did not even think of yet in this feverish, primitive, embryonic trade unionism. Then, an idea springs up. It was simple:
the essentially manual work, heavily daily, damaged the skin to such an extent, pricked it so deeply, so durably from needle strokes to needle strokes all year round that it would be enough, to enter, to show his mutilated fingers.

There, no one could be mistaken, no one could cheat: the observers knew too well what to expect. This physical proof was therefore the first card. For the workers bruises testified. Against the workers murders multiplied .

We will not take stock of it, we will not indulge, like others in other places, in a macabre and maniacal accounting.
It would be bad to honor memories that we have learned to respect a lot because they are a part of ourselves, but we will try to make the essentials understood,
at least through painful, unforgettable facts, which constitute the long martyrology of the French working class, all too much designated victim of capitalism.

The owners, as we know, were quick to set up the roadblocks in the form of laws, regulations and controls.
Under the pretext a little too clever, and of course in the name of freedom, to suppress for both employers and employees a corporatism considered in this case reductive, 
the Le Chapelier law of 1791 against coalitions and the right to strike actually hit those who, in order to survive, have little to offer but those miserable hands whose tailors had made an identity document.
The warning having carried, the bourgeoisie, by structuring itself, integrated it. Still, that was not enough. The Le Chapelier law could not offer, despite appearances, a constantly guaranteed protection.
This general measure was aimed at strong, dangerous, but occasional events; it did not provide the certainty of policing described, so to speak, in the schedule of tasks.
This is what the institution of the Worker's Record Book remedied in 1803. On this, it is useless to elaborate at length:
it is easy to imagine what the negative assessments of a boss on a booklet which, moreover, can only be issued by the police, can mean for a worker.
Without the employer's consent, it is impossible to leave one's employment. So, to do without a booklet? In this case, one is called a vagabond. Six months in prison.
Thus, in French society, a single class, a very large social entity that will become more and more so, is placed at all hours under official surveillance. The tone is set, the power says to the workers: I keep an eye on you.

And from the barrel of a gun. It will not stop. Ladies and gentlemen the managing directors of the competent Humanists LLC,
docile old schoolchildren of a system that has passed on to you its pedagogies of selective indignation, you who give lessons because you have learned yours too well,
it is gladly that you repeat, alluding to the old social hope on which these guns always remain pointed and which persists in us, including as a scar: beware, you are heirs! Let's admit. But so are you.

Therefore, since you like accounts, we have the right to ask you. Why, when 1830 was announced, did you find nothing else to send but bullets to those young Masons of Creuse who, in the capital where they were professionally renowned,
cracked at the task for a crump of bread at noon, a broth in the evening and a rotten mattress — when they found one — from cheapstake landlords?
They couldn't take it anymore, the little masons, they left their construction sites. Fire! It's crazy what this brief syllable, image as much as word, contains for you of spontaneous charm;
it is the instinctive poetry that justifies your commandment. Fire in Paris, fire in La Ricamarie, fire in Fourmies, fire in Le Havre, and fire, fire, fire!
And why in 1834, rue Transnonain, did you have your weapons pointed at the basements in order to shoot directly into the cellars through the sigh?
What for? Here we can give you the answer if you do not know it: it is because, in these cellars, most often lived working families.
For a vague uprising and some barricades in the Saint-Merri district, the military authorities had deemed it useful to move without delay to reprisals. Transnonain Street, nearby, offered the amenities we have just mentioned.
Thus died, without much possibility of escape, let alone defense, between the oozing walls of their sad basement, women, children, old men.
Daumier illustrated in a shocking way this beautiful feat of the 35th line regiment under the orders of a general whose name will be trumpeted later in other places: Bugeaud.
The barricades of Saint-Merri, however weak they may have been, caused serious trouble because, at the same time, the intractable canuts of Lyon were once again asserting their rights.
Three years after their insurrection of 1831, this new anger was confusing, especially since, as in Paris, it was not unrelated to the action of the Society of Human Rights, scourge of the government and employers.
This time, the canuts were protesting against an unfair decision depriving them of a relief allowance and their mutuals.

Fire! How many dead? Two hundred, it is thought. There would have been six hundred in 1831, and since then, that year had reconstituted for some in figures of a superstition.
So scary! Masters of the city while the civil and military authorities had withdrawn (prefiguration of the Commune of 1871), installing at the Town Hall a council of sixteen canuts, the insurgents had not, however, initially assigned such goals to their real combativeness. 
Far from it. They only wanted, and indeed obtained, a minimum tariff. The worst part is that, in this conflict, the first orientation was that of a collaboration of classes. Who broke it?
Everyone had signed, including, with the manufacturers and the industrial tribunals, the duly mandated representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and the prefect himself.
And then it was made known, first by means, then openly, that the signatories had had to give in to the unacceptable pressures of an overexcited mass.
Bosses, other bosses, others, the notables reject without precaution the agreement, finally supported by the prefect who goes so far as to make these insane remarks:
It is only a commitment of honour. Indeed. He adds: not mandatory. The execution, he explains, and we know the song (still relevant) is a matter of everyone's good will.

The canuts also had their sense of honor, the real one. While workshop leaders are put out of work, to make an example, they understand very well what they have just been taught:
that a word given to an employee is worthless. It is difficult to push the contempt so far and it was the explosion. The press got involved, deploying an aggressive zeal. Workers' movements are contagious, wrote Le Temps, calling for prompt repression. 
It was heard. The prosecutor of Lyon welcomed with some cynicism, forgetting in passing his dignity as a magistrate, to note that justice now meets the support of the armed force: it can act.
Finally, the President of the Council Casimir-Périer cracked down on the troublemakers: let the workers know well that there are no remedies for them but patience and resignation.

Thoses two words did not fell out of fashion.  In these times of massive unemployment, homelessness, \enquote{suburban sickness}, people on welfare support, regulars of the Restaus du coeur\rfootnote{Food charity founded by a French humorist, several millions lunches distributed each year.},
 young people without a job or prospect, even with diplomas in their pockets, what language do we hold by not holding it, because it is the great mystification in fashion? Patience. Resignation. 
Let us make no mistake about it.  Capitalism of the first half of the nineteenth century speaks bluntly. Capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century practices the unspoken. 
In the meantime, refined intellectuals have enabled this metamorphosis to succeed.

In the meantime we also continued, since the fold was taken, to line up troopers here, policemen there, more and more often the two together. Fire!
Fire on the proletarians of June 1848 who it is better not to remember that they were also insurgents of February, not the least numerous, not the least courageous.
That said, is it necessary to take such a close look? Is it necessary to maintain the national workshops when we can replace them, even superficially, some occupations that we will think of better defining later, if necessary?
But the brave proles are tired of the role of dupes; they reflect, observe, criticize. In short, they are able to analyze situations with more political finesse than previously assumed. They summarize, build synthesis.
What are they actually being offered? Enlistments in the army (to shoot their brothers?) or precarious displacements, destructive of family life. Still these dubious compensations are not really assured: after the dedication in February, the destitution in June awaits most.
How, under such conditions, would the street and the barricades not have appeared once again as the only recourse? Fire!
and one can have the painful impression, certainly, that the revolution is turning against itself. But this is only an aesthetic of the mind carried towards romantic visions:
much more prosaically, it is a question of consolidating the absolute power of the ruling class and better basing profit, on misery if necessary. Especially since it is very difficult to do otherwise in a social and cultural organization that itself has injustice as its foundation.
When Louis Blanc is offered, for some uncertain ministry of progress, an incredibly derisory sum, he calls out: You are asking me to give hungry people a course on hunger. It was useless, indeed. It is more expeditious, more efficient to simply suppress the hungry.
Especially when they have the bad taste to get angry. The real numbers will never be known. Four thousand dead? Five thousand? 
Rioters were pursued in Montmartre to the great quarries where, colliding of course with the protruding verticals that closed the ground, they became a perfect target.
What a beautiful exercise: salvo after salvo, they fell. Not one survived. Think about it, careers! A godsend, this kind of open-air Transnonain street.
However, the cellars have an attraction that stems from their natural mystery and it must be believed that a nostalgia remained: elsewhere, other unfortunate people were locked up in an underground where no one ever knew how long their agony lasted.
These physical details seemed secondary and three years later Badinguet-Bonaparte carried out his coup.

It remained for him to become emperor, which is family trait, and this glorious atavism aknowledged, to arrange to bring up to date some profession of faith: did he not love the people, was he not the friend of the humble, 
did he not have concerns of an altruistic and philanthropic nature, had he not spoken out in favour of the extinction of pauperism, even though there was a lot of laughter when talking about \enquote{the extinction of pauperism after ten o'clock in the evening}?
Unfortunately, it does not appear that his wife shared his views. When the commanding officer of the detachment fired without warning into the crowd at La Ricamarie on June 16, 1869 in order to be able to arrest striking miners,
the emotion was so vivid in front of the thirteen dead and the many wounded that people of Saint-Étienne, near Ricamarie, and also of the surroundings, respectfully addressed Empress Eugenie. They asked her, without judgment, only for help for the victims.
Very Christian, in short. Here is what the very Christian Empress of the French replied:
Rescuing families who were not afraid to offend brave soldiers who only did their duty, would be the most unfortunate example in the eyes of this bad population of Saint-Étienne.

This dispended in advance another bad population, that of Aubin, in the Aveyron, who tried and tested the same things and with one more death a few months later, to present Her Majesty a suffering request in due form.

Such steps are often motivated, at least primarily, by the relentless fate of orphans. Private charity tries to impose itself where the official order cannot act. Or wouldn't want to.
It is that it has many other areas to monitor, other human considerations to put forward and that it is already difficult enough for it to control ages, places, schedules and statistics with regard to child labour.
Successively, from boondoggle to boondoggle, It will be tried to show through the years, or more precisely the decades, a grumpy understanding that the stiffness of the bosses does not grasp well.
However, it is necessary to spare them, those same bosses. Not before eight years, would it suit you? Ten years? Twelve years in the mines, thirteen years for night work for example?
The child labour force, like the underpaid female workforce, contributes very effectively to the growing prosperity of the manufacturing world.
When the first labour inspectors made an initially timid appearance after 1874 and a little more supported in the early 80s, the companies where children were illegally employed had developed a game of hide and seek since it could not be practiced at school.
Be careful, an inspector is there! and the little legs trotted quickly to what was familiar and had been designated in advance, often a carriage with piles of bags that one folded down on oneself.
What would we have said to these illiterate puny people? They were accomplices, so as not to be too hungry, of those who exploited them against those who defended them. At least they ate. 

Kids? You have long made them martyrs. And real ones. In the demanding sense that your distinguished authors give to the word.
During the Bloody Week of May 1871, while the Commune, sublime and disproportionate, bequeathed its message while extinguishing, a real hunt, not only for the too famous \enquote{pétroleuses}\rfootnote{Female Communard supporter and fire-raiser}, but also for children, was carried out in certain neighborhoods.
Given that it was sure that this Gavroche like brood, obviously skilled at sneaking everywhere, had lit a lot of fires. 

Versailles intended of course not to spare anyone.  According to Maurice Dommanget, the reactionary historian Dauban tried in vain, on Rue de la Paix, to rescue a five-year-old girl from death. 
Four children were shot with their mother who had just obtained oil for lighting.  A witness friend of Camille Pelletan later told the latter how other children, obviously very poor, were taken to a barracks to be executed by firing squad. 
He noticed that one of them, who was sobbing, had barefoot in wooden hooves. Then the heavy doors closed as he cried out to the gunmen: \enquote{Killing kids is a shame!}
And that brave people roared around him: \enquote{On the contrary, let us get rid of it, it's Scoundrel seed!}

Scoundrel seed! Did he also belong to this fearsome and so low category the little Émile Cornaille who, on May 1, 1891 in Fourmies, in the North, his meager body riddled with bullets, had like a long spasm in front of the tavernt the Golden Ring where he tried to take refuge?

He was ten years old and carried with him this mysterious weapon that was found in his pocket at the time of burial: a spinning top.

The shooting of Fourmies has taken on an exceptional character in history while others were as much, if not more deadly. Perhaps it was because it intervened at a time and under conditions when such atrocities seemed less easy to conceive.
After all, there had been the influence of the famous \enquote{Republic of the Republicans}, the great laws of the 1880s, the authorization finally granted to the workers to form their own unions and even, as such, to take legal action, etc.
But there had also been, just a year before, the first of May 1st, that of 1890 which, by announcing itself, caused such fear to the bourgeoisie that Paris was literally put under siege.
Several regiments in full reached the capital on a forced march, they brought from Versailles – always Versailles! — imposing artillery batteries and all police stations, from the smallest to the largest, were put on permanent alert.
It was so excessive that even the right-wing press showed some annoyance. Chroniclers wrote that France seemed to mobilize more in 1890 against its workers than in 1870 against the Prussians.

It was therefore that Blanqui had not been wrong to say that the slogan of many bourgeois was: \enquote{Rather the King of Prussia than the Republic}, interesting premonition of the well-known \enquote{Rather Hitler than the Popular Front} of 1936.
Moreover, wealthy families had left Paris in 1890 for the countryside, as more than one did in 36 during the occupations of workshops, warehouses and various engine rooms.
In the end, this first 1 May took place, despite more or less severe clashes, without very serious confrontation on the whole and a delegation to which Jules Guesde belonged was even protocolarily received in the Chamber of Deputies.

So why Fourmies? We're still wondering, in this regard, about an aberrant disproportion. We can leave aside the ridiculous episode of the local commissioner throwing a fuss, revolver in hand, rather a hoot for the strong guys of the factories,
but how not to ask serious questions about the massive presence of all these soldiers, officers and non-commissioned officers,  on the way in which a kind of war organization had been prepared against the possible strikers 
— the mayor Auguste Bernier and the president of the industrial society Charles Belin possibly had something to do with it — on the passion of the sub-prefect, on the rapid arrival of a prosecutor and so on? Fire!
Already, in the morning, a rally having taken place in front of the \enquote{La Sans-Pareille} spinning mill to encourage those who were there to join the movement, the armed group, under the orders of a lieutenant, was undoubtedly more intervening than it should have been.
Several men were arrested and then, in the face of protests from their wives and friends, it was assured that they would be released by noon. This was not the case. Anger began to growl.
Here too, as with the canuts sixty years earlier, a promise given to workers was worthless. Naturally, the afternoon parade could only reflect this exasperation, but finally it was not very dense and threatened little.
There was even some joy. But it can't be accepted either, joy. Fire! A twenty-year-old girl, Maria Blondeau, walked at the head of the procession, a hawthorn branch in her hand. Fire! 
Hit in the face, Maria was literally scalped, her long red hair flew away with the hawthorn in the beautiful sunlight of the North. and — hold on, do you want that clarification? — it was never found, her hair. 
Only parts of brains and bones were found at the corner of the sidewalks.

Enough! Enough, you might say, delicate souls who know how to pray so well for the rises to heaven and the rises in the stock market. Enough. But what do you believe? These details disgust us as much as they do you. To whom do we owe them? 
Nine were killed. Their names are inscribed on a stele at Fourmies: Louise Hublet, twenty years old; Charles Leroy, twenty-one years old; Gustave Pestiaux, sixteen years old; Émile Segaux, thirty years old; Félicie Tonnelier, seventeen years old; Maria Blondeau, twenty years old; Émile Cornaille, ten years old; Maria Diot, seventeen years old; Kléber Giloteaux, nineteen years old. 

Giloteaux, conscript of the year, flew a tricolor flag above his head. Fire! 

Maria Blondeau and her hawthorn have entered the legend. As for Commander Chapus, who had twice given the order to shoot, he was later decorated by General Gallifet, another connoisseur.
For no investigation was opened, no one responsible was sought, no one was finally prosecuted with the exception of Lafargue, who had the good idea to be among the speakers of a meeting in April,
and the Fourmie's trade unionist Culine who, during the parade, wrote an article on a cabaret table. Still, the merit was great: the culprits had been discovered. And not just any of them.
On the one hand the directors of companies in the North hated Culine, on the other hand Paul Lafargue, a great representative of socialism in France, also happened to be one of Karl Marx's sons-in-law. 
Six years in prison for the first, one year in prison for the second. These two leaders had made remarks which, the expectations of the judgment, could only incite a serious subversion.
Basically, the nine Fourmiesans shot had been shot by propaganda, not by bullets. In the House, MP Ernest Roche, who had shown parliamentarians a bloodied shirt, was temporarily excluded.

It was in Fourmies that the Lebel rifles, replacing the heavy Chassepot, were for the first time tested on human targets. 
They were used for others on May 1, then there were other rifles, other men behind the guns, other men still behind the men, some placed at political heights. Brilliant heights, sometimes. 
The radical Clemenceau before the war of 1914-18, the socialist Jules Moch after the war of 1939-45 were repressive. But should we list? There were deaths in Le Havre in the twenties, in Paris on February 9, 1934 among anti-fascist militants, however.
Reminders have something mind-blowing, in the long run. Let's not insist? Maybe. But let us also lose nothing of the tragic thrill that resonates in our memories an echo of ancestral hatred: Shoot, they are only workers.

\rauthor{Roger Bordier}

Roger Bordier is a novelist and essayist. Among his titles: \emph{Les blés}, Prix Renaudot, \emph{Un âge d'or, le Tour de ville, Meeting, La Grande vie, La Belle de mai}. Last publication: \emph{Chronique de la cité joyeuse}, (Albin Michel, 1996).
