CHAPTER IX

THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS OF THE LATIN QUARTER

“_When the students sing the_ Carmagnole, _France trembles._”

“_The monarchy of July persecuted the cancan, which historically seems to have been the anarchy of the period._”—AURÉLIEN SCHOLL.

“_Humble spot, dingy little court, oh, how charming I find you! Hence will go forth some day the Revolution which shall save us; the age which by chloroform has already suppressed pain will suppress hunger also._”

MICHELET on the Collège de France.

“_The great movement of ideas which occurred in France under the silent reign of Napoleon III., when the tribune was mute, the press muzzled, and the right of assembly confiscated, had for its stage the_ brasseries _of the Latin Quarter._”—EDMOND LEPELLETIER.

“The Sorbonne,” says Eugène Pelletan, “shines from the heights through the early mists like the dawn of intelligence. It is there that the French Revolution was really born, thence was its point of departure....

“On this sacred mount of the university a philosopher in monkish garb spoke one day in the open air. What did he say? It matters little. He said something new, and the multitude listened because he was the first to defend the claims of the earth,—the right of reason to reason; and, while he spoke, a veiled woman, with lips on fire, clung to the grating of a convent over yonder, and encouraged him with gestures in default of words.

“The man represents human intellect hampered by the church, and the woman represents France confined in a cloister; but Abélard will grow, and will assume day by day, like the Indian god, a fresh avatar. To-morrow—for what is to-morrow in the life of a people?—he will bear, according to the ironical or severe humour of France, the name of Rabelais, the name of Descartes, the name of Rousseau, the name of Voltaire. And, side by side with him, the Idea, the insulted, the abused Idea, will advance with slow and tragic steps between two rows of fagots, a flame in her forehead and her hands at her sides, until the day when she shall wrest the torch from the executioner, and proclaim herself Queen.”

Whoever would unfold the progress of the revolutionary spirit in France from the earliest times through the centuries must needs write a history of the Sorbonne and of the seat of the Sorbonne, the _Pays Latin_ (the Latin Quarter).

In the relatively limited area included between Notre Dame, where the goddess of Reason was enthroned in the Great Revolution; the Place Maubert,[62] with its statue of Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth-century printer, burned for impiety and atheism; the Square Monge, with its statue of François Villon; the Place Monge, with its statue of Louis Blanc; the Panthéon, with its memorials to the intellectual liberators, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire; the Place de l’Ecole de Médecine, with its statue of Danton doughtily inscribed, “_Pour vaincre les ennemis de la justice, il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace_”; the Place St. Germain des Prés, with its statue of Diderot; and the Place de l’Institut, with its statue of Condorcet,—every inch of ground is rich in souvenirs of the intellectual history of France and of the convulsions by which this history’s various stages have been marked.

Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abélard, in the twelfth century, “discoursed to all the earth,—to two popes, twenty cardinals, and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which descended from the mountain and inundated Europe”;[63] whither came Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant; the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the sixteenth centuries; where the _trouvère_ Rutebœuf in the thirteenth century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on the _propagande par l’exemple_ and even the _propagande par le fait_; where, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the _Cabocherie_ decreed the reign of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, the _Commune Catholique_ was set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher of St. Sévérin; where, in the same century, François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and La Boétie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his time) prepared themselves, in their very different fashions, to alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to found modern philosophy and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of the Collège de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second Empire,—in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.

Revolutionary thinking has not been practised with impunity in the _Quartier Latin_. From Abélard to Michelet and Renan, religious, political, and philosophical heresies have called down ecclesiastical, governmental, and academical wrath with the usual result of helping to propagate the heresies.

Abélard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. “In Ramus,” says Michelet, “they fancied they were killing a second Abélard. They thought to butcher mind.” Clément Marot was imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for his _Histoire Naturelle_, and Montesquieu for his _Esprit des Lois_. Michelet, who “scratched the heavens with his white hand,”[64] Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were expelled from the Collège de France.

There have been periods, it is true, when the university faculties have been servile and cringing,—mere tools of the potentates of church and state,—and periods when the students have been craven or lethargic; but these periods are the exceptions. Speaking broadly, the _Quartier_ has been from first to last a preserve of free living and free thinking, a stronghold of opposition, a centre of agitation, and a hot-bed of revolution.

Eugène Pelletan thus describes the students of the university’s beginnings:—

“A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from nobody could say where, they live by the grace of God, they eat when they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the rector, who invariably exonerates.”

“Scantily clad and almost vagabonds,” says another historian of this early period, “but not depriving themselves of good cheer, the future magistrates and theologians, who were to antagonise in parliament the will of the king, were already revolutionary.”

In the fourteenth century the faculties, morally, and the students, both morally and materially, cast in their lots with the revolution of Etienne Marcel, who is credited with having invented the barricade.

Reign succeeded reign, and still the good habit of thrashing the watch was kept up. Besides, there were battles-royal galore between the students and the troops of the king.

The students made themselves jugglers, fakirs, and buffoons on the Pont-Neuf, then a favourite, shop-lined promenade. They sacked cook-shops and taverns, and levied tribute from belated pedestrians. The lawless exploits of François Villon, singer of villanelles to Guillemette, the _tapissière_, and Jehanneton, the _chaperonnière_, in the reigns of Charles VII. and Louis XI., have become legendary.

That other great François (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.

During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into the _Fronde_,[65] risking their lives on “the Day of the Barricades” and exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign minister, Mazarin, in lampoons called _Mazarinades_.

The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared in the Encyclopedists’ published works, captivated many professors of the university,[66] and made a direct and profound impression on the students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the cafés and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had their rendezvous. At the _Café Procope_,—transformed, alas! into a vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,—Hébert presided over a club which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas, and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d’Eglantine; and the Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter cafés from 1780 to Napoleon’s establishment of himself in power.

Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians, the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. “The new Sorbonne,” says Vacherot, “far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement which was to culminate in the revolution of July, participated in it actively, lending it the prestige of its most _spirituel_, its most serious, and its most eloquent teaching.”

It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette in _Les Misérables_, who were responsible for the insurrection of 1830.

It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism was struggling to supplant Classicism, that the hottest passions were kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated, even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: the _Quartier_ resembled a fancy-dress ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had in other times for their political and religious creeds.

The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by De Banville: “Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction, coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts of original and fancy costumes, capped with Basque _bérets_ and felts _à la_ Rubens, they went up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into space, alone, or in pairs, or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,—a custom which, as you know, dates from the twelfth century.”

Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurélien Scholl writes: “The young men of the schools thought solely of fêtes and of fun. The _Quartier_ resembled strangely the _Bohème_ of Mürger,—_la noce_, nothing but _la noce_. The historiographer of this epoch finds only farces to narrate, and such farces!”

And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of 1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a “reawakening of the schools,” founded a journal, _La Lanterne du Quartier Latin_, as a means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of the government of Louis Philippe.

They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising _coup d’état_ of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of the _Quartier_. The students invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café, _crèmerie_ after _crèmerie_. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives.”

The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by _Les Propos de Labienus_, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.

It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.

In 1866, at the _Café de la Renaissance Hellénique_, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and a _rentier_,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier’s _La Contagion_ at the _Odéon_. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at the _Café Serpente_, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.

“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in his _Cafés Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris_, “had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as they met on the green cushions. _Etudiantes_ accompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics.”

The imperial police had a special fondness for the Renaissance, and this café shared with the _Brasserie de St. Sévérin_, after the Commune was set up, the distinction of being used as a headquarters by the Communard officials.

The Procope, also affected by police spies, was frequented by Spuller, Ferry, Floquet, Vermorel, and Gambetta, who preserved their liberty on more than one occasion by utilising the back door, which had rendered a similar service to Danton in another century.

The _Café Voltaire_ harboured, among others, Gambetta and Vallès, the _Café de Buci_ Vallès and Delescluze, and the _Brasserie Audler_ and the _Restaurant Laveur_ Courbet and his unconventional intimates.

To summarise: from the time of Abélard—the Abélard who was sustained and inspired by the thought of the flaming lips of Héloïse pressed against the convent grating—to and through the Commune, the _Pays Latin_ was characterised by a revolutionary spirit which was composed of three seemingly independent, if not mutually antagonistic, but, in reality, complementary and vitally interrelated traits,—love of laughter, love of liberty, and love of love.

The different persons of this emancipating trinity were equally potent impellers to Quixotic thought and action; and no one of the three could have long survived—such is the French temperament in or out of the _Quartier_—without both of the others. The Gallic imagination and conscience are dependent on good cheer and affection; they cease to operate if a fellow may not unbend in buffoonery with the boys and may not adore a woman. And, without conscience and imagination, is no revolution.

* * * * *

_“Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man_

* * * * * * * * *

_Ever the grappled mystery of all Earth’s ages old or new;_

* * * * * * * * *

_Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last; Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.”_

WALT WHITMAN.

* * * * *