June 25

No. 29, June 29, 1848  
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.  
* With every day the vehemence, the exasperation, the fury of the struggle increased. The bourgeoisie became more and more fanatical against the insurgents, the less their brutalities immediately attained their object, the more they themselves became exhausted by the fighting, night watches and bivouacking, the nearer they approached their final victory.

The bourgeoisie declared the workers to be not ordinary enemies, who are defeated, but enemies of society, who are destroyed. They spread the absurd assertion that the workers, whom they themselves had driven into insurrection by force, were only out for plunder, arson and murder, that they were a band of robbers who must be shot down like wild beasts. And yet the insurgents had held a large part of the city for three days and behaved most decently. If they had employed the same violent means as the bourgeois and the servants of the bourgeois commanded by Cavaignac, Paris would lie in ruins, but they would have triumphed.

How barbarously the bourgeois themselves behaved in this struggle is evident from all the details. Not to speak of case-shot, shells and incendiary rockets, it is certain that on most of the barricades taken by storm no quarter was given. The bourgeois struck down everything without exception that they found. On the evening of the 24th, in the Allée de l’Observatoire, over 50 captured insurgents were shot without any form of trial. “It is a war of extermination,” cries a correspondent of the *Indépendance Belge*, which is itself a bourgeois paper. On all the barricades the belief prevailed that all insurgents would be massacred without exception. When La Rochejaquelein spoke in the National Assembly of the need to do something to counteract this belief, the bourgeois did not even let him finish speaking, and made such an uproar that the President had to put on his hat and suspend the sitting. When Mr Sénard himself later (see below, sitting of the Assembly) wished to speak a few hypocritical words of clemency and conciliation, the same uproar arose. The bourgeois wanted to hear nothing of mercy. Even at the risk of losing part of their property through a bombardment, they were determined once and for all to make an end of the enemies of order, the plunderers, robbers, arsonists and communists.

At the same time, they did not even possess the heroism that their newspapers strive to attribute to them. It emerges from today’s sitting of the National Assembly that at the outbreak of the uprising the National Guard was stunned with terror; from the reports of all the papers of the most diverse colours it is evident, despite all the pompous phrases, that on the first day the National Guard appeared very weak, that on the second and third days Cavaignac had to fetch them out of their beds and have them led into the fire by a lance-corporal and four men. The fanatical hatred of the bourgeois against the insurgent workers was incapable of overcoming their natural cowardice.

The workers, on the other hand, fought with unparalleled bravery. Ever less able to replace their losses, ever further pushed back by superior numbers, they did not flag for a moment. From the morning of the 25th they had to realise that the chances of victory were turning decisively against them. Mass upon mass of fresh troops arrived from all directions; the National Guard of the banlieue, that of the more distant towns, came to Paris in large detachments. The troops of the line that were fighting amounted on the 25th to over 40,000 men more than the usual garrison; the Mobile Guard added another 20 to 25,000; then the Paris and provincial National Guard. In addition, several thousand men of the Republican Guard. The entire armed force that took the field against the insurrection certainly amounted on the 25th to between 150 and 200,000 men, while the workers were at most one quarter as strong, had less ammunition, no military direction whatsoever, and no serviceable cannon. But they fought silently and desperately against this colossal superior force. Mass upon mass advanced upon the breaches which the heavy artillery had torn in the barricades; without uttering a cry they received the workers, and these fought everywhere to the last man before they let a barricade fall into the hands of the bourgeois. On Montmartre the insurgents called out to the inhabitants: We shall either be cut to pieces or we shall cut the others to pieces; but we will not yield, and pray to God that we win, for otherwise we shall burn down the whole of Montmartre. This threat, which was not even carried out, is naturally regarded as an “abominable project”, while the shells and incendiary rockets of Cavaignac are “skilful military measures which everyone admires!”

On the morning of the 25th the insurgents held the following positions: the Clos Saint-Lazare, the faubourgs St Antoine and du Temple, the Marais and the quarter of Saint Antoine.

The Clos Saint-Lazare (the former convent enclosure) is a large area of ground, partly built over, partly covered only by houses just begun, projected streets, etc. The Gare du Nord lies right in its centre. In this district, which is rich in irregularly situated buildings and also contains a mass of building materials, the insurgents had thrown up a mighty fortress. The Hôpital Louis-Philippe, which was under construction, was their centre; they had raised formidable barricades which eye-witnesses describe as absolutely impregnable. Behind it lay the city’s outer wall, which they had surrounded and occupied. From there their entrenchments extended as far as the Rue Rochechouart or the area of the barriers. The barriers of Montmartre were strongly defended, the whole of Montmartre was occupied by them. Forty cannon, thundering against them for two days, had still not reduced them.

Again the whole day long 40 cannon fired upon these entrenchments; finally at 6 o’clock in the evening the two barricades of the Rue Rochechouart were taken and soon afterwards the Clos Saint-Lazare also fell.

On the Boulevard du Temple the Mobile Guard at 10 o’clock in the morning took several houses from which the insurgents had been sending their bullets into the ranks of the attackers. The “defenders of order” had advanced approximately as far as the Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire. Meanwhile the insurgents in the Faubourg du Temple were driven higher and higher, the Canal Saint-Martin was occupied in places, and from there, as from the boulevard, the broader, straight streets were heavily shelled by artillery. The fighting was extremely fierce. The workers knew very well that they were being attacked here in the heart of their position. They defended themselves like madmen. They even recaptured barricades from which they had already been driven. But after a long struggle they were crushed by superior numbers and arms. One barricade after another fell; by nightfall not only was the Faubourg du Temple taken, but also, by way of the boulevard and the canal, the approaches to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and several barricades in this faubourg had been captured.

At the Hôtel de Ville, General Duvivier made slow but steady progress. From the quays he took the barricades of the Rue Saint-Antoine in flank and at the same time shelled the Île Saint-Louis and the former Île Louviers with heavy artillery. Here too an extremely bitter struggle was fought, of which, however, details are lacking, and of which it is only known that at four o’clock the mairie of the ninth arrondissement, together with the surrounding streets, was taken, that one barricade after another in the Rue Saint-Antoine was carried by storm, and that the Pont Damiette, which gave access to the Île Saint-Louis, was captured. By nightfall the insurgents had been driven out everywhere here and all the approaches to the Place de la Bastille were freed.

Thus the insurgents were beaten in all parts of the city, with the exception of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. This was their strongest position. The numerous approaches to this faubourg, the real hearth of all Paris insurrections, were covered with particular skill. Oblique barricades, mutually covering one another, further strengthened by the cross-fire of the houses, presented a formidable attacking front. A storming of them would have cost an immense number of lives.

In front of these entrenchments the bourgeois, or rather their servants, encamped themselves. The National Guard had done little that day. The troops of the line and the Mobile Guard had done most of the work; the National Guard occupied the quiet and conquered parts of the city.

The Republican Guard and the Mobile Guard behaved the worst. The Republican Guard, newly organised and purged as it was, fought with great exasperation against the workers, on whom it earned its spurs as the Republican Municipal Guard.

The Mobile Guard, which is recruited for the most part from the Paris lumpenproletariat, has already, in the short time of its existence, transformed itself by means of good pay into a praetorian guard of whoever happens to be in power. The organised lumpenproletariat has given battle to the unorganised working proletariat. It has, as was to be expected, placed itself at the disposal of the bourgeoisie, just as the lazzaroni in Naples placed themselves at the disposal of Ferdinand. Only those detachments of the Mobile Guard that consisted of real workers went over to the insurgents.

But how contemptible the whole present state of affairs in Paris appears when one sees how these former beggars, vagabonds, crooks, gamins and petty thieves of the Mobile Guard, whom every bourgeois in March and April described as a band of robbers no longer to be tolerated, roguish, capable of every infamy – when this band of robbers is now petted, praised, rewarded, decorated, because these “young heroes”, these “children of Paris”, whose bravery is incomparable, who scale the barricades with the most brilliant courage, etc. – because these thoughtless barricade fighters of February are now just as thoughtlessly shooting at the working proletariat as they formerly shot at the soldiers, because they have allowed themselves to be bribed, with thirty sous a day, to slaughter their brothers! Honour to these bribed vagabonds, for having shot down, for thirty sous a day, the best, most revolutionary part of the Paris workers!

The bravery with which the workers fought is truly marvellous. Thirty to forty thousand workers, who held out for three full days against more than eighty thousand soldiers and a hundred thousand National Guards, against case-shot, shells and incendiary rockets, against the noble military experience of generals who do not shrink from employing Algerian methods! They were crushed and for the most part massacred. Their dead will not be granted the honours that were bestowed on the dead of July and February; but history will assign them a quite different place, as the victims of the first decisive pitched battle of the proletariat.