The text which follows is a summary by the grande dame of historical and rhetorical ethnography, Professor Maïté Bouyssy, of her monumental work on a major event in 19th Century French popular politics, the Massacre of Rue Transnonain (Rue Transnonain, 14 avril 1834. Un massacre à la française, Lambert-Lucas, 2024). “Rhetorical” in so far as Maïté Bouyssy is a follower of Marc Fumaroli who saw, in the militant, activist, feminist young scholar’s approach, an extraordinary way to handle politics differently, that is in being studiously aware of arguments made by documents. Historians see documents as facts, a rhetorical historian sees them as moments of persuasion.
An engraving, Massacre of Rue Transnonain, still as it were dripping from the blood of the massacred populace, propelled graphic artist Daumier to European fame. Daumier’s famous engraving had the same impact as, later, Zola’s J’accuse would have in the Dreyfus affair. The massacre took place in Paris, in 1834, four years after the installation of the so-called July monarchy, upon the fall of the Bourbon dynasty. The reign, and usurpation, of constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe saw the rise and consolidation of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but it was recurrently shaken by working class revolts, in Paris and Lyons. The “bourgeois king” never hesitated to use brutal force against the new working class, and the pauperized urban class. The massacre was committed by some of the 40,000 troops under Marshall Bugeaud, in that narrow street now better known by tourists as Rue Beaubourg, where stands the Beaubourg Pompidou Museum. Little do they know they walk on the remains of a working class holocaust.
The repression by the army (“la Ligne,” i.e., the infantry) of popular opposition to a centrist king, portrayed as an avuncular pater familias by official propaganda, left deep scars, and led to the 1848 revolution—and to socialism as an effective political force.
Some French historians have described how “centrism” in France is a form of extremism: it speaks in dulcet tones, it preaches common ground, it derides softly the “extremes” for their lack of political realism—and when popular resentment swells to a revolt, it strikes. With as much violence as any tyrannical regime. The brutal repression by special forces of the Gilets Jaunes is a recent example, and not the only one in the past ten years in France. There is a long link, across two centuries, of the tyranny of the Centre. The calm and collected July monarchy invented brutal crowd control in urban revolts.
Maïté Bouyssy had already charted in a previous study how Bugeaud, drawing a military (not human) lesson from the massacre and its counterproductive political impact, wrote (around 1848) a field manual by applying some of the military tactics he had used in the “pacification” of Algeria, to the urban deployment of troops (La guerre des rues et des maisons, ed. M. Bouyssy, 1997). No one before him had sought of treating the urban populace like an enemy, and streets as a theatre of operations. Bugeaud became the first military writer in a French tradition concerned with counter-terrorism studies, and repression in an urban setting, and surveillance: in an urban warfare, he told his troops, “We must watch over everything, we must observe everything, we must get intelligence on everything, and I do declare, I would very much prefer an open warfare between society and its demolishers.” Needless to point out that Baron Hausmann’s grand redesign of Paris and the destruction of what was left of the medieval inner city with its narrow streets, where the infantry cannot manoeuvre to quell unrest, was an outcome of it all. German invaders in 1940 found the large avenues quite useful—and it is noteworthy that most of the inner city Resistance took place in the labyrinthine remains of the Marais district which borders indeed Transnonain. Cities have a fatality of their own. The very people heroically depicted by Eugène Delacroix in his La Liberté guidant le peuple on the barricades of 1830 are those who were massacred in 1834.
Madame Bouyssy, a Panthéon-Sorbonne professor, lived in that district and, when in the 1970s a new destruction took place, after erasing the glorious Halles, to erect Beaubourg, she led a grass-root revolt against the plan. Thanks to her, archives were preserved, biographies kept, and so the memory of how the Parisian working class lived, and died.
Apparently President Pompidou, echoing minister Thiers telling Bugeaud, “Kill them all!” told the prefect of police: “Please, don’t kill Maïté.” Pompidou and Bouyssy both hail from Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Maïté Bouyssy, Rue Transnonain, 14 avril 1834. Un massacre à la française, an extract.
The aim of this book is to understand a very Parisian event. Why, on April 14, 1834, did the massacre at 12 Rue Transnonain (now Rue Beaubourg) haunt the national and republican memory so much more than the Lyonnais from the Vaise suburbs, who were crushed at the same time for having tried to establish the first mutualism?
Daumier’s famous lithograph inscribed the event with a rhetorical quality. Its “realism” is not stylistic, it is political. His corpse gives us a glimpse of the people, but dead.
After Lyon in 1831, then Lyon and Grenoble in 1832, where a carnival masquerade had ridiculed the government at the peril of three months of unrest in the city, the exasperation of the camps that wanted to fight back raised the question of personal safety, at least in metropolitan France, while at the same time establishing “gangrene in the monarchy” in Algiers with its practices of violence and rapine.
It simply states that there is “nothing more to see.” All the more reason to question the judicial investigation and its counter-investigation which, without establishing anything about the factuality of a shooting that would have led to reprisals, reveal the particularity of the building targeted. The building was home to the so-called “bourgeois” theater of amateurs, set amidst workshops that fed Parisian luxury. The Centre Pompidou has finished eradicating this active, not-miserable Paris, which on a day of rioting limited to the small perimeter between Rue Chapon and Rue Saint-Merri, and Rue Saint-Martin and Rue du Temple, became the receptacle of all political tensions and the authoritarian turn of Orleanism—liberals versus supporters of a muscular Order. After Lyon in 1831 and again Lyon and Grenoble in 1832, where a carnival masquerade had ridiculed the government that led to three months of unrest in the city, the exasperation of the opposing sides raised the question of personal safety, at least in metropolitan France, while at the same time introducing “gangrene in the monarchy” in Algiers, with its practices of violence and rapine.
1834 was a year of multiple reckonings. All the actors of this moment in history, the young Ledru-Rollin, a lawyer up against the leaders of the day, Thiers, Bugeaud and Soult, in addition to the names that we want to get acquainted with, who, although less remembered, were no less active, and who all found themselves in the middle of uprisings during the “century of revolutions,” from insurrections to intimidation operations.
A Success of Memory
Beyond Daumier’s famous engraving, the story of the Rue Transnonain massacre is not just a story of a very Parisian neighborhood, that of Beaubourg, it also involves the fundamentals of French republican culture. This case of a dozen Parisian bourgeois killed in the early hours of the morning, just as they were getting out of bed, has become part of national French memory, as a muted counterpoint to the “Les Trois Glorieuses,” the three glorious days of the Revolution of 1830. Such contingent episodes, deciphered as significant, work in the form of diffuse reminiscence, outside any commemoration, without institutional mobilization. They are not memorable, here as a blunder, but as the chain of objective complicities and probable settling of scores within the government and the army. And yet, the piles of paper from a high-profile trial that covers it will allow nothing to emerge. Nothing is known or will be known for sure. The blankness of the text resonated so strongly that the persistent zones of obscurity became the truth of the regime that established them.
One might think that the beginning was Daumier’s lithograph, Rue Transnonain, April 15. No, the beginning is a complex matter. It is not just an image, given the Republicans’ fear of violent repression of civilian populations since the first “African” expeditions, which led to mass slaughter in Algeria (still called “Africa”). In the absence of anti-colonial sentiment, the first capture of Blidah in November 1830—a backhanded attack on the population, followed by a mass massacre—had set an atrocious precedent for the troops who, back in France, had engaged in a variety of intimidation and reprisal tactics in Nîmes and Grenoble, including pincer maneuvers. It was the encounter between these troops and prefects willing to “exercise authority” to consolidate their return to office in 1830, after having been eliminated under the Restoration, that gave the Rue Transnonain blunder its particular character. That is why the backgrounds of the protagonists led to local investigations, and then to a trial that was as well-informed as it was laconic—the aim was to get the case dismissed, and not to reveal any of the intertwined implications. In the heat of the controversy, attempts were made to establish the innocence of the protagonists on both sides, the victims and the military troops.
Nevertheless, entering a building for the purpose of “mopping up”—a term that had a bright future—is never accidental. In political matters, things are more often judged than known, especially when, as here, the troops who acted were on the radar of the Republicans since the savage seizure of Blidah in 1830 and the semi-insurrectionary spring in Grenoble in 1832.
This story has escaped historiography; but in the beginning, there were stories, and it is the narrative justification of the investigations involved which indirectly establishes the unfolding of this murky affair. There is nothing to be gained in terms of establishing the details of the facts, but the affair was nonetheless a decisive event. The very next month, Stendhal began work on his Lucien Leuwen, and the young hero, highly privileged by birth and fortune, carelessly retorts to his father that he refused to become the henchman of ministers and prefects in search of a “Rue Transnonain” that will make their careers. The novel, which remained unfinished, vilifies the political underbelly of the July monarchy. The news item that stirred the political emotion of those times are not just a matter of righteous indignation. The micro-historical investigation shows the variety of protagonists involved. The media of memory are multiplied, far from any institutional attachment, which is a flaw as much as a strength, because this multiplicity of voices spreads convictions on the margins of the great story. Suspected but unresolved responsibilities do not just give rise to rumors; the system we have glimpsed ends up providing a better insight into a situation than the facts themselves—this unfortunate massacre. Hence, a textbook case for defining a regime, but also the French tropism that covers all suspicions with the veil of state security.
This cultural history of politics looks at the understanding of facts through the practices of the time and their imaginations. In addition, Daumier’s famous lithograph, Rue Transnonain, April 15, provides a memorial that is not insignificant. The artist had already denounced many crimes and practiced insolence to the point of imprisonment, but the reasons for his earlier incarcerations have been forgotten. In the case of rue Transnonain, he was not overly bothered, because the incised stone was destroyed, and historians and the informed public usually stick to the supposed facts—from No. 12, now 62 Rue Beaubourg, at the corner of Rue de Montmorency, a shot was allegedly fired at troops from one of the building’s windows. This was followed by a “droit de suite,” the practice of immediately pursuing any combatant, civilian or otherwise, on the simple responsibility of the highest-ranking man in the field, as in wartime (civil or otherwise). In the event of an error, there is no longer a blunder, but simply “collateral damage,” as our contemporary experts would say.
In 1830, euphemism meant an uphill battle to determine what was known and what was not. The controversy and its repercussions were then out of all proportion to those of an infinitely harsher massacre, two years earlier, in the same district, at the Saint-Merri cloister, the final stage of the uprising that accompanied the funeral of General Lamarque. The unconscious and emotion do not encrypt, we know, and it follows that the codes of indignation are deciphered differently. Half a century later, the “new strata” to whom Gambetta addressed himself, the petit-bourgeois who had become opportunist republicans, had more empathy for peaceful citizens surprised at home, than for men killed in action and too numerous to count. And so, at Beaubourg, yesterday’s victims became tomorrow’s victors, in a process inherent to political history, which feeds on reconstructed memory.
Admittedly, Daumier’s image of horror has the virtue of the “image-making operation” as defined by Marie-José Mondzain, the one that endangers and breaks with the known, the agreed-upon, for there is nothing romantic about Daumier’s work in the manner of Les Misérables, which thirty years later, in 1862, took up the story of 1832. Daumier’s “realism” is redefined in terms of how it works. The image ignores Victor Hugo’s customary splice-and-dice—in the face of the silence of the authorities, Daumier imposes an image and an irrefutable silence, that of death. Death has sliced through a petty-bourgeois building, in time for the greater glory of a republican memory that obliterates the simultaneous uprising of the “industrials,” workers and workshop managers who at the same time, in Lyon, were fighting for their lives.
In 1834, the debate centered on the shot(s) possibly fired from the windows of the massacre victims’ house, No. 12 Rue Transnonain. However, nothing was really proven, despite the enormous investigation of the trial in the Court of Peers, the highest court, since one of the senior officers of the troops accused was none other than Lascours, himself a Peer. Duly investigated but slow and inconclusive, the case remained opaque so as not to punish anyone. The killing was said to be in retaliation. Thus, there was no trace beyond ordinary documents (recently sold at auction). The troops responded “with confusion and frustration of soldiers,” says the official report. A number of concrete details became known, thanks to the accounts of the tenants solicited by Charles Breffort, brother and son of two of the victims, and even of three of them if we consider the only woman massacred as his mother-in-law. It was he who appealed to Ledru-Rollin, a young republican lawyer, whom he said was his friend, who also said he was his client and friend. This man, Charles Breffort, claimed to “enlighten the country” no less than “appease the outraged spirits” of a private affair. And so, in arguing about “violence,” the counter-inquiry gave status to the event, no less than the lithograph, and moreover in a game of precise cross-references that we will establish. Henceforth, there was be no journalist who did not see in it the quintessence of army practice, from Michelet, who in 1848 feared a “new massacre on Rue Transnonain,” to the very un-Republican Jacques Bainville, who alluded to it in his 1924 Histoire de France.
The price of notoriety was that the case was more often cited than studied for itself, to the point of losing the theatrical background—the crime scene, the theater and the theatricality of the actors, the way the protagonists behaved on the ground. This was never examined, despite the fact that an entire milieu of theater-goers and artists living in the heart of Paris was affected. The finale even took place on the stage of the Théâtre Transnonain, which was located upstairs, and everyone—soldiers and occasional actors alike—knew their role, whether they were used to stage games or not, and all played and overplayed their part, except that in the end the dead did not rise to take a bow.
It is not a question of reopening the issue to pit fierce supporters of the Order against supposedly peaceful republicans. French society was rife with the false allegations of a real dispute, from suspicions to comminatory remarks, from desires for revenge to multiple exasperations. The construction of the regime born of the 1830 Revolution in its future options and orientations depended on the imminent legislative elections, since the Chamber that had emerged from the July 1830 elections, the one that had voted against the liberticidal ordinances of Charles X, had also endorsed the change of dynasty without going back to the electorate. Consequently, in the spring of 1834, everyone hardened their positions. The Resistance (the party of Order before the emergence of the term) wanted to put an end to the Movement that had hoped for a progressive monarchy in 1830, capable of assuming the freedoms promised and enshrined in the Charter. Their defense had fueled the “Trois Glorieuses,” the revolutionary days of July. The horizon of expectations was confused, but the struggle to take over the public arena was incessant. From minor provocations to deadly duels, everything escalated and became more dramatic. The face-off with the government was permanent, and the tension created a climate no less “frenetic” in politics than in popular melodrama, where the impending catastrophe drove the action; everyone hoped for unforeseen reversals of fortune.
The memory of the great days of the Revolution, when regimes were overthrown or changed, was fading, and so elections became a priority, even if only the “able,” the citizen-owners, voted—the government distrusted them and intended to contain the situation. The forthcoming ballot was seen as uncertain but decisive. Subsequently, all the networks were in turmoil, from the army in Algiers to the prefects reinstated by 1830. In this permanent game of musical chairs, everything remained in flux, and the movement of men was no less rapid than that of ideas, from Paris to Blidah and from Grenoble to the Vendée, via Nîmes and Lyon. The context was therefore national and sufficiently tense for the call for urgency to become the modus operandi of the moment.
One wonders about the memorial success of these dozen unfortunates, who are not heroes and did nothing remarkable, so much so that no one ever tried to glorify them, or even remember their names. How could the authorities associate them with the idea of a major danger? What is more, these people were no strangers to their neighborhoods and boroughs. In fact, it was this that proved fatal for them, since, without really knowing whether a shot had been fired from the windows of this building, it was attacked by pointing to it by name. Official silence covered up the tragedy; academic silence followed; and later political scientists refrained from using pathos, that “forbidden means,” as Paul Valéry put it. The case became a mere textbook case, but nothing is more complex than a trace linked to lost codes. From then on, it is through the logic of event construction that we can return to the action itself. The starting point is the verisimilitude and veracity of statements that are difficult to elucidate.
This very Parisian fact, typical of the fleeting agitations that historians of the Annales castigated, is not merely anecdotal. Woven with the contradictions and ambitions that make it the political detective story of the moment, it goes beyond the official reports of Martin du Nord and A. L. G. Girod de l’Ain, whose summary, in eleven large quarto volumes, was given to the Peers for these “affairs of Paris and Lyon.” The counter-inquiry, no less woven from prejudice and no less driven by the illusion of veracity, increased the paper tomb of 1834. All built an arsenal of evidence. The plausible commands a spiral of pre-constructed discursive rationales. Each group speaks the truth of an urban and political anthropology, no less elaborate than that accorded by Alain Dewerpe to the characters in his Charonne, February 8 1962.
A Frenetic Political Moment in Paris, the Great City
All the ingredients for a fateful day were present: a Parisian riot that was undoubtedly less well prepared than its suppression. On both sides, anxious or confused anticipation, the climax of the events, then, the very next day, resounding contradictory designations of those responsible and co-responsible. In this way, tragedy organized a long web of justifications and reproaches, designed to signify something beyond the precise event. We know the litany of major or incipient urban riots, always crushed with the exception of July 1830 and February 1848—those of 1827, 1832, 1834, June 1848 and 1871. In 1834, on April 13, a Sunday, Parisian solidarity with the Lyonnais struggling to defend mutualism was rather uncertain, the instructions of republican organizations unclear or contradictory; but many of the obscure and downtrodden who had hoped in 1830 refused to give up. The time of the imperial wars had passed, and enthusiasm no longer carried the few who had volunteered in the hope of ending up with a marshal’s baton. Only the young men who supported Hernani imagined all the possibilities. The novel fed off them. The younger generation was “ardent, pale, nervous,” as Musset put it. It reversed the romantic exaltation of the ego, or the despair of the individual in political “presentism,” as defined by François Hartog. Although there are no heroes like the Baras and Vialas, those young men of the Revolution whose self-sacrifice saved the fatherland, or even barrack uprisings like those in Spain. Nostalgia did exist.
Voluntary servitude and passive submission no longer govern Shelley’s Prometheus Unchained. A sense of urgency pervaded the actors, for want of being able to think of politics as the field of “misunderstanding” and for want of conceiving a parliamentary system capable of managing contradictions, alternations and an opposition that would not boil down to rival personalities. Even if political emotion in the old sense of riot and agitation waned after the days of the barricades, the notion of morality and justice became weapons, and emotion in politics, a cog in the wheel of legitimacy in the conquest of opinion. One person’s hope sharpened another’s desire for control. Under the Restoration, even circles of presumed liberal merchants were banned in certain supposedly ill-considered neighborhoods, such as the Rue des Bourdonnais, the Quartier des Marchés and the bankers who, with Laffitte, wanted to be housed on Rue Saint-Marc in the same building as the Journal des Débats. From then on, it was the theater that became the object of all suspicion.
Censorship was abolished, as promised in 1830. Shows costing 4 or 5 sous (20 or 25 centimes) were accessible to all, and people believed in their acculturation powers. Much more than books, which assumed the competence of easy reading, and whose price remained high when 10 francs represented more than a week’s wage, not to mention newspapers at 80 francs a year, “the general public” rushed to the theater. Women, young people and the poor mingled there; they were the Children of Paradise. The amateur theater grew, and it was all the rage of the moment, a shared passion, the place for new freedoms. No one wanted to be subjected to the slightest restriction, especially in private circles.
As a true medium of the time, the theater produced more than just co-presence effects, with tumultuous approvals and enthusiastic affectation to Tartuffe’s lines. Odile Krakovitch has already highlighted the concerns of censors in her article, “Robert Macaire ou la grande peur des censeurs” (“Robert Macaire or the censors’ great fear”); but in the theater de société, devoid of cash registers and legal controls, the stakes were not just textual—the acting created a complicity that said much more. As in fairground theater, the right words were underlined with mimicry and drum rolls. These irreverent tips flourished on the Boulevard du Crime, the Boulevard du Temple where one small establishment followed another. Everyone knew how allusions, insinuations, silences and innuendoes welded together an audience. On Rue Transnonain, the inter-recognition of the neighborhood gave consistency to this public, which frightened the supporters of the Order.
For this public, any attack on the freedoms of the press, assembly or association was seen as an attack on the pact of 1830, which led them to believe that these freedoms had been acquired. By 1834, hope was fading. For the authorities, Paris, the seat of government and capital of the monarch, raised fears of the popular days that had made the Revolution, the other revolutions and the various coups d’état past and yet to come. After the repressions of 1832 in Lyon and Grenoble, the liberticidal measures of the winter of 1834 followed one another. They affected not only Daumier and Charles Philipon’s team, who sold disillusioned productions on the Passage Véro-Dodat. With the Movement and its emblem, La Fayette, about to die on May 20, 1834, Orleanism felt free of any opposition, and even of a possible third party. It was aware of its own stability: politics, like literature, wanted to be realistic. It prided itself on its pragmatism, and mourned the romanticism of the dreamers. From Curmer to Balzac, the opportunism and unbridled upward mobility of legendary “lions” and “lionesses” were celebrated, with their perfume of villainy spicing up the dailies. Terrifying expectations spread like melodrama.
The theater on Rue Transnonain was immersed in this culture, which proved fatal. It disappeared, as did the name of the street absorbed by its neighbor, the Rue Beaubourg, which was subsequently widened by the destruction of its even-numbered side in 1877, the painful part of the Rue Transnonain disappeared by the enlargement of the roadway on the east side, which belonged to the VIIth Arrondissement. The case no longer had an odonymic anchor and was based on a void, amplified after 1900 by the immense Arts-et-Métiers crossroads, which disemboweled the sector without being able to redistribute the traffic, for lack of outlets. The nursery school built between the two world wars, on the site of the former theater at Nos. 62 and 66 Rue des Arts-et-Métiers, simply bears the plaque that was affixed to Parisian schools as a reminder that Jewish children were sent to the extermination camps; but there is no mention of the events of 1834. Nor is there any trace of the forms of struggle represented by the associations located on Rue Michel-le-Comte, then known as “Rue Michel” and very much alive before the opening of its parallel, Rue Rambuteau.
For one hundred and fifty years of hygienic urban planning, the memory of the poor and of the insurrection, of misery and cholera, which had wreaked such havoc in 1832, was consistently eradicated. They blamed the air, the water; the sewers were razed or covered, and the sinister Rue Sainte-Avoye sewer was reopened and refurbished, and it too disappeared, giving Rue du Temple its first one hundred numbers. Its parallel, Rue Saint-Martin, also absorbed its neighbor, Rue des Arcis. The all-too-vigilant Paris of dereliction was to disappear. Haussmann’s new road system erased all vestiges of the past. Haussmann prided himself on being a “demolition artist.” If the memory of the Saint-Merri cloister has been preserved, it is due to the monumentality of the church and the cloister’s right-of-way, which perpetuates its name. Having belonged to the Lazaristes since 1644, the property survived through a school known as “Saint-Merri.” The Tinguely-Niki de Saint-Phalle fountain, whether by chance or chance encounter, continued to wash away the blood of the 1832 massacre. The stigma of this past was lost; but the urban dynamic maintained a certain logic. Theater was back, first with the well-known Café de la Gare and then with the Théâtre du Roseau, 12 Rue du Renard, which for a time was housed in L’Épicerie Française, the Art Nouveau building whose post-Haussmann façade proudly bears the old mutualist motto “Un pour tous, Tous pour un” (“One for all, all for one”). For many years, this room was used for meetings of associations, from condominiums to political parties, in keeping with the principles of mutual emancipation. In 1820, critics derided Transnonain’s troupe as a “reed,” compared to its antonym, the “oak tree” of the Comédie Française. Despite the current discrediting of all localism as unseemly or detestable archaism, places do have a memory.
From Lithograph to Court Case
Daumier’s lithograph in no way depicts the action on Rue Transnonain. The artist, the republican, the neighbor, gives us nothing more to see than to imagine. He assigns us the simple role of witness, of the one who knows and cannot forget the corpses, the only irrefutable point. Daumier thus built the memoria of the rhetoricians. After the fact, in July 1834, the image intervened to re-launch the plot, with an error on the date, since April 15 is the date of the press, which reported it the day after the massacre, which had taken place in the early hours of the 14th. Daumier proves nothing, and explains even less, but he forever forbids us to ignore the death that took place here, which he places under the democratic modality of publicity. This device belongs to Ledru-Rollin’s counter-inquiry, but it is Daumier who sets silence against silence. The silences of the official word are countered by astonishment. No pity, the most impolitic of passions, says Hannah Arendt. Yet Daumier’s lithograph places the facts in the saga of the soldiers’ victims, which is not enough to make it a marker of republican education fifty years later. In the meantime, public opinion had become accustomed to the compassionate components of democratic mass culture, and in time, a close-up of the central part of the image appeared in high-school history textbooks, “the” Malet and Isaac of state-run lycées, which did not shine for its profusion of illustrations. Jean Lacouture, who did not come from the secular lycées of yesteryear, included it in his Histoire de France en 100 tableaux (Hazan 1996), so much so that it belongs to the baggage of French progressivism.
At the time, only Germany on the road to unity had immediately considered minor genres to be important, thanks to the theoreticians of the Hegelian left, and turned them into a symbol of France on the move (as opposed to “sleeping” Germania). These approximate parallels were maintained throughout Daumier exhibitions, whose catalogs included reproductions of Rue Transnonain, even though its original copies are rare and particularly well preserved, since they can only be proofs that were never seen in their time.
This lithograph originally belonged to issue 24 of L’Association mensuelle, one of the many creations of the inventive Philipon, who hoped in this way to pay for the fines from his various publications. It was sold piecemeal at Gabriel Aubert’s, between the still-vibrant Palais-Royal and the Messageries that led to the right bank. The sheets were displayed for the eyes of travelers taking the stagecoach, who could stock up before heading back abroad or to the rich French-speaking provinces of Northern France. This minor genre conquered its market from Paris, which was considered “the capital of Europe.” Despite lawsuits and repressive legislation, sales kept the system going until September 1834, when the accumulation of fines put an end to the business. The young Daumier was in full swing at the age of 26, with talent and daring—not enough to sustain even the best conceived enterprise. The date of the lithograph, July 24, 1834, gives an indication of its logic: to parallel or accompany Ledru-Rollin’s memoir, dated July 23. In my opinion, the simultaneity of two undertakings proves the image’s integration into a highly constructed discursive system. These two practices and actions can and should be seen as a diptych, even if, as Ségolène Le Men points out, the litho did not really come out until October.
In the beginning was Daumier, we believe, but in the beginning was the fact, or rather, the facts, a skein of facts entwined as they are whenever trials and raison d’État intersect. As for the massacre of these civilians, they verify that street warfare “always costs humanity some pain,” according to one of Bugeaud’s litotes. The reality of the massacre unfolded at different times and on different floors of this building, which had a so-called bourgeois theater where actors, occasional or otherwise, brought into focus the malevolent attention of the paragons of the Order. The latter wanted to put an end to the 1830s. Agitation clashed with petty repression. Legislative guerrilla warfare harassed the Movement in all its forms, before the repression turned bloody in Lyon, where the fighting really got going. It was here that the overwhelmed Marceline Desbordes-Valmore wrote: “Quand le sang inondait cette ville éperdue… J’étais là” (When blood flooded this distraught city… I was there). The Parisian affair was therefore not just the epigone of a real uprising, but a massacre foretold by proponents of the strong-arm. Considered fortuitous, even if it condensed a formidable plot with various branches, this massacre can also be read as a settling of scores that can raise the qualification of crime and assassination, if we look at the context and the place, the time and the building.
The lithograph that focused our gaze cannot capture all that was played out politically and practically that day, but the image indicates what is only absence: the violence, the massacre. The close-up even allows us to forget the overwhelming space of a theater and the successive scenes. Yet everything was theatrical: the target, the location of the denouement, the theater, the actors’ gestures and the unremitting tragedy of a street battle that continued into the houses. The fact that the tenants knew each other allowed them to tell precise stories, and to know the fatal gestures from landing to landing. As for the theater, it was so clearly targeted that the building’s other stairwell was not even touched. The configuration of the premises was indeed singular: access to the theater on the third and fourth floors was via an internal staircase in the heart of a bourgeois tenement house, partly taken over from a former convent. Suspicion stemmed largely from this invisibility: a porte bâtarde that opened even less than a porte cochère, and this secrecy was reinforced by the multiplicity of commercial activities housed in the building. The buyer, the artist, the craftsman, the worker, the theatergoer came and went, producing an overexposure (more politico-fantastical than police work) of the animators of the former Troupe de l’Émancipation, a troupe born during the Revolution on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, in the shadow of the Boulevard du Crime. Now known as the Théâtre de Doyen, after its indefatigable host who knew how to weather the regimes; this modest theater, where it seems people had a lot of fun, gathered a small world of regulars, at best two or three times a week in its heyday. Barely tolerated after the reorganization of theaters under the Empire in 1807, the troupe was able to get by, though it was not paid, since only theatrical contractors in official theaters were allowed to operate a cash desk at the door.
However, the private status of these so-called “bourgeois” theaters exempted them from prior censorship, which was abolished in 1830. These theaters were open to the public by invitation, and in this case in the midst of various trades and businesses with workshops and stores. Two jewelry workshops and a “laboratory”—an eminently modern term for a place where fine materials (in this case, wallpaper) were produced—a business that was booming at the time, and attracted a constant stream of people devoted to fashionable luxury decoration. Networks, corporate names and business interests combined within the building, and this mingled Paris made society. These industrious people reinforced the suspicious mood of the regime’s hawkishness, for their modernity, their know-how and their way of life ignored the ingenuities of constraint. Their autonomy and individualism, in the face of the established order, make them contemporaries of the future.
Featured: Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834, lithograph (1834).
