June 24

No. 28, June 28, 1848
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

The whole night Paris was militarily occupied. Strong pickets of troops stood in the squares and on the boulevards.

At four o’clock in the morning the general march was beaten. An officer and several men of the National Guard went into every house and fetched the men of their company who had not voluntarily reported for duty.

At the same time the roar of cannon resounds again, most violently near the Saint Michel bridge, the junction point of the insurgents of the left bank and the Cité. General Cavaignac, invested with the dictatorship this morning, burns with eagerness to exercise it against the émeute. The previous day artillery was used only exceptionally, and mostly only grapeshot was fired; but today at every point artillery is brought to bear not only against the barricades, but also against the houses; not only grapeshot is fired, but cannonballs, shells, and Congreve rockets.

In the upper part of the Faubourg Saint Denis a fierce struggle began in the morning. The insurgents had occupied a house under construction near the Nord railway and several barricades. The first legion of the National Guard attacked, without however gaining any advantage. They shot off their ammunition and had about fifty dead and wounded. They barely held their position until the artillery arrived (at about 10 o’clock), which shot the house and the barricades to the ground. The troops reoccupied the Nord railway. The struggle in this whole area (called Clos Saint Lazare, which the Kölnische Zeitung transforms into the “courtyard of Saint Lazare”) nevertheless continued for a long time and was conducted with great bitterness. “It is a veritable butchery,” writes the correspondent of a Belgian paper. At the barriers Rochechouart and Poissonnière strong barricades had been raised; the entrenchment at Allée Lafayette was likewise thrown up again and gave way only in the afternoon to the cannonballs.

In the streets Saint Martin, Rambuteau and du Grand Chantier the barricades could likewise only be taken with the aid of cannon.

The Café Cuisinier, opposite the Saint Michel bridge, has been shot to pieces by cannonballs.

The main struggle, however, took place in the afternoon towards three o’clock on the Quai aux Fleurs, where the famous clothes shop, “La Belle Jardinière”, was occupied by 600 insurgents and turned into a fortress. Artillery and line infantry attack. One corner of the wall is battered down. Cavaignac, who commands the fire here in person, calls upon the insurgents to surrender, otherwise he would have them all put to the sword. The insurgents refused this. The cannonade begins anew, and finally incendiary rockets and shells are thrown in. The house is completely shot to pieces; eighty insurgents lie buried under the rubble.

In the Faubourg Saint Jacques, in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon, the workers had likewise entrenched themselves on all sides. Every house had to be besieged as in Saragossa. The efforts of the dictator Cavaignac to storm these houses were so fruitless that the brutal Algerian soldier declared that he would have them set on fire if the garrison did not surrender.

In the Cité girls fired from the windows at the soldiers and the civic guard. Here too, howitzers had to be brought into play in order to achieve any success.

The eleventh battalion of the Mobile Guard, which wanted to fight on the side of the insurgents, was cut down by the troops and the National Guard. At least so it is said.

Towards midday the insurrection was decidedly gaining ground. All the faubourgs, the outlying sections of Les Batignolles, Montmartre, La Chapelle and La Villette, in short the whole outer rim of Paris, from Les Batignolles to the Seine, and the greater half of the left bank of the Seine, were in their hands. Here they had captured 13 cannon, which they did not use. In the centre, in the Cité and in the lower part of the Rue Saint Martin, they were pressing towards the Hôtel de Ville, which was covered by masses of troops. But nevertheless, Bastide declared in the Chamber, it might perhaps be taken by the insurgents within an hour, and in the stupor which this news provoked, dictatorship and a state of siege were decreed. Hardly invested with these powers, Cavaignac resorted to the most extreme, the most brutal means, such as have never been used in any civilised city, such as even Radetzky hesitated to employ in Milan. The people were again too magnanimous. Had they answered the incendiary rockets and howitzers with burning, they would have been the victors by evening. But they never thought of using the same weapons as their adversaries.

The ammunition of the insurgents consisted mostly of gun-cotton, which had been manufactured in large quantities in the Faubourg Saint Jacques and in the Marais. On the Place Maubert a bullet foundry had been established.

The government continually received reinforcements. Throughout the night troops arrived in Paris; the National Guard from Pontoise, Rouen, Meulan, Mantes, Amiens, Le Havre arrived; troops from Orléans, artillery and pioneers came from Arras and Douai, a regiment came from Orléans. On the morning of the 24th, 500,000 cartridges and twelve pieces of artillery from Vincennes entered the city; the railway workers on the Nord railway, incidentally, had torn up the rails between Paris and Saint Denis, so that no further reinforcements could arrive.

These combined forces and this unheard-of brutality succeeded on the afternoon of the 24th in driving back the insurgents.

The fury with which the National Guard fought, and how well they knew that this struggle was a matter of their existence, is shown by the fact that not only Cavaignac but the National Guard itself wanted to set the entire district of the Panthéon on fire!

Three points were designated as headquarters of the attacking troops: the Porte Saint Denis, where General Lamoricière commanded; the Hôtel de Ville, where General Duvivier stood with 14 battalions; and the Place de la Sorbonne, from where General Damesme fought the Faubourg Saint Jacques.

Around midday the approaches to the Place Maubert were taken and the square itself was surrounded. At one o’clock the square fell. Fifty men of the Mobile Guard fell in the process! At the same time, after a violent and sustained cannonade, the Panthéon was taken or rather surrendered. The fifteen hundred insurgents who were entrenched here capitulated – probably as a result of the threat of M. Cavaignac and the furious bourgeois to deliver the whole district to the flames.

At the same time the “defenders of order” pushed further and further forward on the boulevards and took the barricades in the surrounding streets. In the Rue du Temple the workers had been driven back as far as the corner of Rue de la Corderie; in the Rue Boucherat fighting was still going on, likewise beyond the boulevard, in the Faubourg du Temple. In the Rue Saint Martin occasional musket shots were still being fired; at the Pointe Saint Eustache one barricade still held out.

In the evening, towards seven o’clock, two battalions of the National Guard from Amiens were brought to General Lamoricière, which he immediately used to encircle the barricades behind the Château d’Eau. The Faubourg Saint Denis was quiet and free at this time, and likewise almost the whole of the left bank of the Seine. The insurgents were encircled in a part of the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine. These two districts, however, are separated by the Boulevard Beaumarchais and the Canal Saint Martin lying behind it, and the latter was free for the military.

General Damesme, the commander of the Mobile Guard, was hit by a bullet in the thigh at the barricade in the Rue de l’Estrapade. The wound is not dangerous. The representatives Bixio and Dornès were also not as dangerously wounded as was at first believed. General Bedeau’s wound is likewise slight.

By nine o’clock the Faubourg Saint Jacques and the Faubourg Saint Marceau were as good as taken. The fighting had been extremely violent. General Bréa now commanded here.

General Duvivier at the Hôtel de Ville had had less success. Nevertheless the insurgents had also been driven back here.

General Lamoricière had, after fierce resistance, cleared the Faubourgs Poissonnière, Saint Denis and Saint Martin as far as the barriers. Only in the Clos Saint Lazare did the workers still hold out; they had entrenched themselves in the Hôpital Louis Philippe.

The President of the National Assembly reported this news at half-past nine in the evening. He had to correct himself several times, however. He admitted that there was still heavy shooting in the Faubourg Saint Martin.

The state of affairs on the evening of the 24th was thus:
The insurgents still held about half the terrain they had occupied on the morning of the 23rd. This terrain constituted the easternmost part of Paris: the Faubourgs St. Antoine, du Temple, St. Martin and the Marais. The Clos St. Lazare and a few barricades at the Jardin des Plantes formed their advanced posts.
The whole remaining part of Paris was in the hands of the government.

What is most striking about this desperate struggle is the fury with which the “defenders of order” fought. They, who formerly had such delicate nerves for every drop of “bourgeois blood”, who even had sentimental fits over the death of the municipal guards on February 24th, these bourgeois now shoot down the workers like wild beasts. In the ranks of the National Guard, in the National Assembly, not a word of pity, of reconciliation, no sentimentality of any kind, but rather a violently erupting hatred, a cold fury against the insurgent workers. The bourgeoisie is waging a war of extermination against them with clear consciousness. Whether it wins momentarily or whether it is just now defeated, the workers will take a terrible revenge upon it. After such a struggle as that of the three June days, only terrorism is still possible, whether it is exercised by one party or the other.

We further communicate some passages from a letter from a captain of the Republican Guard on the events of the 23rd and 24th. “I am writing to you amidst the crackle of musketry, the roar of cannon. At 2 o’clock we took three barricades at the head of the Pont Notre-Dame; afterwards we advanced to the Rue Saint Martin and traversed it from end to end. When we reach the boulevard, we see that it is deserted and empty, as at 2 o’clock in the morning. We go up the Faubourg du Temple; before we reach the barracks, we halt. Two hundred paces further on a formidable barricade rises, supported by several others, defended by about 2,000 men. We parley with them for two hours. In vain. At last, at about 6 o’clock, the artillery comes up; thereupon the insurgents open fire first.
The cannon replied, and until 9 o’clock windows and tiles were shattered by the thunder of the guns; it is a frightful fire. Blood streams in torrents, while at the same time a terrible thunderstorm breaks. As far as one can see, the street paving is red with blood. My men fall under the insurgents’ bullets; they defend themselves like lions. Twenty times we storm, twenty times we are beaten back. The number of dead is immense, the number of wounded far greater. At 9 o’clock we took the barricade with the bayonet. Today (June 24) at 3 o’clock in the morning we are still on our feet. The guns keep thundering. The Panthéon is the centre. I am in the barracks. We are guarding the prisoners who are brought in every moment. There are many wounded among them. Some are shot at once. Of my 112 men I have lost 53.”