le
people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
mysterious saying: "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"--the dregs of the city, the
law of the earth.

The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups
d'etat and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something
which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding
further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though
satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a
pain at the heart.

June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes
a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.

Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the
two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
characterized this insurrection.

One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these
two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the
brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,
that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged,
cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles
that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there,
powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. N