Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

CHAPTER XLIV.
THE BARRIERS – PARISIAN CRIME

The Approaches to Paris – The French Railway System – The St. Germain Railway – The Erection of the Barriers – Some of the most famous Barriers – Parisian Crime – Its Special Characteristics

PASSING along the left bank of the Seine, in the direction of St. Germain, arrested at every step by some historical association or some interesting object of our own time, we at last quit Paris and find ourselves on the highway to the nearest important suburb.

From the aristocratic Faubourg St. Germain to St. Germain itself was, in the days of Mme. de Sévigné, an easy walk or a pleasant drive. After 1837 St. Germain and the faubourg of the same name were separated only by a brief railway journey. On the 24th of August in the year just named, the railway from Paris to St. Germain was first opened, at a time when the miles of railways constructed in England amounted to some two thousand. The year previously a French statesman had visited the railway from Manchester to Liverpool, and, on his return, declared in the Chamber that railways were only toys to amuse idle persons. “People should see the reality,” he added; “for, even if railways proved a genuine success, their development would not be anything like what has been supposed. If I were to be assured that in France five leagues of railway would be made every year, I should consider that a great deal.” A French scientist declared about the same time that the diminution of temperature experienced on entering the tunnels would be such that in the sudden passage from hot to cold, susceptible persons would get inflammation of the lungs, pleurisy, and catarrh.

When the railway to St. Germain was opened, a military band occupied one of the carriages, joyful airs were played, enthusiastic speeches were delivered, the locomotive did not blow up, the carriages did not come off the rails, and, though two tunnels had to be passed through, no one caught cold. Seven principal railways were now decided on, the privilege of constructing the lines being granted by the State on certain conditions. In England railways were being laid down by permission of the State, but not in such a way as to secure to any one of the companies a monopoly. The French legislation on the subject of railways compels the companies to extend their lines to the most remote and least populous regions. Thus, in the public interest, they have to maintain railway extensions on which the losses not infrequently eat up a serious proportion of the profits realised on the more frequented sections of the system.

The great railway centre of France is, of course, the capital. “Paris,” says a French writer on the subject, “being the heart, life is carried to the extremities of France by main lines, which are the arteries; by secondary lines, which are the veins; and by routes communicating with the iron road, which are the capillary vessels; in this fashion the circulation is complete. That is a boon which must be constantly borne in mind, and which makes our railways an absolutely democratic institution. It is due to the intervention of the State. In England, where private enterprise alone has been entrusted with the construction of railways, the case is different. The companies have laid their lines wherever they pleased; guided solely by their own interest, they have above all sought to realise immense profits. They have built railways between the great centres, rich or industrial, while neglecting the secondary routes, which only offered them slender gains; they present an organisation purely aristocratic. If in France, as among our neighbours across the Channel, private industry had been left, without control, sovereign mistress of the land, only the great lines would now be in existence, and the diligence would still be rolling along nearly all our roads.”

Soon after the construction of the St. Germain railway, an “iron road” was made from Paris to Versailles, and it was on this line, close to Bellevue, that the first accident took place. On the 18th of May, 1842, it had been announced that the great fountains of Versailles would play, and a train of eighteen carriages, drawn by two locomotives, with a third in the rear, was returning to Paris crowded with travellers. A little below Bellevue, at a place where there is a slight curve, the first locomotive broke its axle-tree. The second engine, suddenly checked in its progress, fell upon the first, and the third engine behind, by continuing to push the train, doubled it up, sending the middle portion of it into the air. The carriages, thanks to the excessive prudence of the guards, were all locked, and some of them, upset in the close vicinity of one of the engines, caught fire from the glowing coals of the damaged furnace. There was then a terrible scene. The passengers endeavoured to force their way through the narrow windows, and in doing so fought, and in many cases were seized by the flames. Seventy-three corpses were afterwards picked up, and there were numbers of wounded. This accident, terrible in itself, had a disastrous effect upon the railway system of France. Railway travelling was looked upon as dangerous – suicidal. The receipts from all the lines fell heavily, and the railway to Versailles was absolutely abandoned. In the general fright, locomotives got to be looked upon as so difficult to guide, so sure, sooner or later, to explode, that it was seriously proposed, on lines about to be opened from Paris to Rouen and from Paris to Orleans, to replace mechanical traction by horses. The terror excited by the accident gradually passed away. A sort of expiatory chapel was erected by the railway company at the scene of the disaster, under the designation of Notre Dame des Flammes; but after a time even the existence of the chapel, surrounded and at last concealed by trees, came to be forgotten.

Paris is now, like London, surrounded by railway stations, and to occupy the terminal points of the lines leading to the capital would be for a time to stop its supply of provisions even more effectually than this was done during the siege of 1870 by taking possession of the ordinary roads. The railways have destroyed the importance of the ancient “Barriers,” which marked, and still mark, points in a line encircling the capital. The geographical history of Paris consists in the constant pushing back of these Barriers, surrounding as they did a city which was steadily expanding. Gates which, when first constructed, stood outside the city, were gradually included within its circumference, new Barriers being erected at a greater distance from the centre. More than a century ago, in 1765, a royal edict forbade the construction of any more houses outside the limits of Paris as then fixed. This order could not, of course, be obeyed. As well try to check the rising tide as to stop the growth of Paris, and in 1784, five years before the Revolution, we find Louis XVI.’s Minister, Calonne, obtaining a royal authorisation to surround Paris with a new and enlarged girdle. Nineteen “Barriers” were now established around Paris, at each of which a duty, known as the “octroi,” was levied on everything brought into the city. The measure was a most unpopular one, and the Farmers-General, who purchased the right of levying the tax, became the objects of popular detestation. A line which has become historical, expressed, by an ingenious verbal equivoque, the general feeling on the subject —

“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant”

ran the verse, which was repeated from mouth to mouth throughout Paris. Another epigram, which, being longer, became less popular, was as follows: —

 
“Pour augmenter son numéraire
Et raccourcir notre horizon,
La ferme a jugé nécessaire
De mettre Paris en prison.”⁶
 
 
“To increase its revenue
And draw closer our horizon,
The farm has deemed it necessary
To put Paris in prison.”
 

All this might be very witty, but the Minister cared little about it. He doubtless said to himself, like his famous predecessor, Mazarin, “They sing: then they will pay.” He was right: they paid. It occurred to the architect Ledoux, who had been instructed to erect offices for the reception of the dues, that the buildings might as well be fortified, and Paris thus became surrounded by a line of not very effective defences. Petitions were addressed to the king requesting the abolition of the Barriers, and M. de Calonne’s successor declared that he would have them knocked down and the fragments sold as building-materials. Things had arrived at this point when the Revolution of ‘89 broke out. The populace then set fire to some of the Barriers and knocked holes through the walls in several places, but did not touch the buildings, concerning which the National Convention subsequently issued the following decree: —

“The national buildings designated under the name of ‘Barriers’ are erected in Paris as public monuments. The various epochs of the Revolution and the victories gained by the revolutionary armies over tyrants are engraved upon them in characters of bronze. The Committee of Public Safety is authorised to take every possible measure for the prompt execution of the present decree, while inviting men of letters and artists to co-operate and to compose inscriptions.”

At this period, however, there were many obstacles between the publication of a decree and its execution, and it was not therefore astonishing that the famous buildings were for a time forgotten. The octroi had now been suspended, and it was not till the fifth year of the Republic that the Directory instituted a “municipal octroi of beneficence,” the product of which was intended for the hospitals. The Barriers were thereupon repaired, and the taxation clerks re-established in their offices on the city boundaries. “The architect Ledoux,” says Dulaure, in his History of Paris, “in his desire to exhibit proofs of the fecundity of his genius, has frequently shown nothing but aberration. The luxury which he lavished upon all his architectural productions outrage all artistic propriety. People saw, with discontent and murmuring, pompous edifices consecrated to a taxation oppressive to all classes of society, and very galling to commerce. This was to whiten sepulchres, – to hold instruments of oppression up to admiration.”

At the end of the Empire no less than sixty Barriers existed round Paris. Five of these were suppressed under the Restoration, though only to be reopened later on. Thenceforward, until 1860, when the barriers were demolished, few changes occurred. It was at the end of 1859 that the Imperial Government, after having appointed a commission of inquiry, formulated a project, which was adopted by the legislative body and the Senate, and which, incorporating eleven communes of the department of the Seine, ordered the demolition of the octroi wall, and of the famous buildings with which Ledoux had so elaborately decorated the Barriers of Paris. The Barriers have not, however, completely disappeared. They are sufficiently numerous in the present day, though they have been put back as far as the fortifications and received the name of gates.

Of the Barriers which figure most largely in history, that of Clichy stands foremost. Here, under the Revolution, the members of the Clichy Club assembled, and here in 1814 the last act of the French military and political drama was played.

The Barrière de l’Étoile is famous as the one by which, on the 15th of December, 1840, the Emperor Napoleon – dead, but living in the memory of all – re-entered Paris to be re-interred at the Invalides. It was a memorable day for the Parisians, who never forgot the splendour of the cortège or the frigid weather which prevailed at the time, and which was so rigorous that the companions of the great captain could have fancied that they were once more on the road to Moscow. Eighteen months later, a four-wheeled cabriolet might have been seen rapidly passing this same barrier. Having reached La Porte Maillot, the equipage redoubled its pace, moving in the direction of the Avenue de la Révolte. The horses had bolted, and a man sprang out of the carriage – he fell. It was the Prince-Royal, the Duke of Orleans, who expired in a grocer’s shop on the 13th of July, 1842, at half-past four in the afternoon.

It was at the Barrière de la Villette, on the 30th of March, 1814, that the capitulation of Paris was signed, the first article of which provided that the French troops, under the orders of the Ducs de Trévise and de Raguse, should evacuate the capital, while the last article recommended the town of Paris to the generosity of the Allied Powers.

Scarcely more than a month later, on the 3rd of May, it was by the Barrière de la Chapelle that Louis XVIII. entered Paris, after having put his signature to the famous declaration at the Château of St. Ouen. On his arrival before this barrier, the édiles presented him with the keys of the city. In 1815 he quitted Paris by the Barrière de Clichy, to enter it once more the same year, without ceremonial, by the same Barrier.

More than one of the Barriers has been the scene of executions and assassinations, and plays a lugubrious part in the history of the capital. The sombre pictures, however, which they conjure up are relieved by many of a picturesque and festive character. On Sundays, especially before the establishment of railways, the Barriers of Paris were invaded by a noisy troop of promenaders. The workman was an assiduous guest at the taverns and tea-gardens which swarmed on the outskirts; and even to-day a large proportion of toilers make their way on the Sabbath towards Belleville or Ménilmontant, singing this refrain of a popular song:

 
“Pour rigoler montons,
Montons à la barrière.”⁷
 

There used to be a good deal of deep drinking at the Barriers, and violent quarrels not infrequently marked the close of the festive day. Sometimes a drunkard would roll down and lie at full length along the octroi wall. In the ordinary way he would have gone to sleep and woke up comparatively sober. But one of a class of pickpockets who haunted the Barriers was sure to approach him, and, under pretext of lifting him on to his feet, carefully relieve the bewildered victim of the few sous which remained to him. These thieves, who passed their days and nights on the confines of the city, and who, detesting work, lived at the expense of their honest neighbours, were often inveterate malefactors of the worst kind, and the abolition of the Barriers had the highly desirable effect of exterminating them as a class.

It may not be inopportune, at this point, to take a view of the criminal population of Paris in general. They afford a study which excites no small degree of combined interest and regret. The number is large in Paris of those who, having repudiated all restraint and banished the last vestige of self-respect, live aloof from society and never touch it except for purposes of injury. Despite the incessant surveillance of which they are the object, despite the laws which hedge them about, accuse and punish them, they remain in the great capital, like an unsubdued tribe, always in revolt, bent upon evil, and often accomplishing it with audacity. They seem to float over civilisation like scum, or to lie at the bottom of it like dregs of a liquid.

Idleness, or at least the instinctive hatred of all regular occupation, desperate want, and a passion for gross pleasures, are among the causes of that vagabondage in Paris which is characterised by defiance of the law, theft, and sometimes murder. Stupidity and irreflection may often have a good deal to do with the matter; but as a rule the Parisian rascal, subsisting by fraud and larceny, expends more ingenuity and energy in the conception and execution of his schemes than would be necessary to make him prosper in some lucrative trade.

The existence of these wretches is sufficiently unenjoyable. At once hunters and game, with their ears bent to catch the slightest sound, always on the alert, never sleeping without one eye open, devouring their meals whenever they can get any, tormented as much by their passions as by their fears, they feel, whilst pursuing their sinister projects, that the police are dogging their steps, that hounds of terribly keen scent are busy upon their track. This life of stratagem and law-breaking is said to have its charms – and justly, perhaps, since so many men voluntarily choose it; but if the excitement of the constant hazard they run, combined with the chance of spoil, exhilarates youthful malefactors, many an old thief, on the other hand, disgusted, sickened by incessantly playing the part of a stag at bay, has gone to the Préfecture of Police and said: “I am the man. Arrest me. I can’t stand this sort of life.”

Semi-starvation is the fate of a large proportion of these criminals. Many of them for years together have slept on rude couches lit only by the stars – under bridges, in half-built boats or houses, or squares: many of them do not know what daily bread is. “Do you like being here?” said an official to a little girl of twelve who was temporarily lodged in the “depôt,” her father and mother both having been arrested for crime. “Oh, yes,” was the reply, “we have something to eat here every day.”

It would be difficult to fix, even approximatively, the number of persons who in Paris give themselves up to theft. The ticket-of-leave men, notorious vagabonds and others, are well known to the police. But there are numbers of persons, in a town so populous as Paris, who become thieves through circumstances: from finding themselves in a difficult position, or from a sudden temptation.

In this connection M. Maxime Ducamp may once more be cited. “There is an incontrovertible fact,” he says, “which natural history explains. Criminals – those, I mean, who live by crime – are always the same to whatever class of society they may belong. They are actuated by the same passions, the same wants, the same appetites. Whatever certain philosophers may have said on the subject, a man steals very rarely to get bread. The three great tempting causes are women, cards, and drink.” There are exceptions, however, which writers on the subject have duly noted. Rafinat, who was mixed up with the robbery of medals from the Bibliothèque Royale, used to send home to his family the product of what he himself called his “expeditions.” For one, however, of this kind there are ten thousand who steal only to satisfy their brutal tastes. An old proverb says, “Generous as a thief,” and the proverb is right. The thief who saves the produce of his robberies is an anomaly only to be met with among certain “receivers” of Jewish race.

As soon as the thief has made a good stroke, he gives away money right and left, pays his debts, lends to anyone who happens to be in need, and invites everyone to share his good fortune. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and can refuse nothing to anyone. Being constantly watched, thieves denounce themselves by their excessive expenditure, which seems to be one of their invincible needs; and they then fall promptly into the hands of the police. They know that they are pursued; the theft committed one day may cause their arrest the day afterwards. They wish, therefore, to enjoy themselves, and they spend in debauchery the time still left at their disposal. So the pig in a shipwreck will devour food at the very moment when the vessel is sinking.

“Bad roads end in pitfalls,” say the French peasants. Criminals know this, and the road they follow leads invariably to prison, the galleys, the penal colonies, the scaffold. Those who by cunning or good luck succeed in escaping the police, which is on the watch for them, and Justice, which claims them as her own, are singularly rare, and amongst them may be cited a man of a certain celebrity, who flourished some forty or fifty years ago. His name was Piednoir. He was not an assassin; he knew the Code, and never risked his head. He was content to commit robbery by means of false keys. But he was a past-master in his art, and from 1834 until 1843 escaped from the consequences of twenty-one different warrants of arrest. He had excellent manners, led an elegant life, and bitterly regretted having had his ears pierced in his childhood, which, he said, gave him rather a common air. He employed ordinary thieves to prepare an affair, and when everything was ready took charge of its execution. He then divided the plunder into shares, reserving the lion’s part for himself. When his accomplices were brought to trial they behaved towards him with wonderful devotion. One of them, however, admitted that he had been twice in relations with Piednoir; on one occasion, when Piednoir met him in the disguise of a rag-picker, a second time when, dressed as a man of fashion and driving a tilbury, he pulled up in front of the Café de Paris and threw the witness a two-sous piece wrapped up in a scrap of paper which contained written instructions concerning a projected robbery. Piednoir was condemned in his absence to twenty years’ hard labour. He was living at the time luxuriously in Holland on the products of his industry as a thief. Most of these melancholy personages have, according to M. Maxime Ducamp, to whom no side of Paris life, no class of the Paris population, is unfamiliar, a common, contemptible appearance, though some few of them have a certain distinction, natural or acquired, which renders them more and more redoubtable. Mitifiau, who took the title of Count de Belair, and claimed to be the son of a general who died under the first Empire, was a man of irreproachable manners. He went into society – the very best society, to which none but well-bred persons are supposed to be admitted – and lived by swindling, by clever thefts, and by card-sharping. He was arrested as he was committing a robbery by means of false keys.

Some of these malefactors would seem to be separated for ever from crime by the elevated tastes they profess and the intellectual occupations in which they are apparently absorbed. But their evil instincts are too much for them. Thus it once happened that a mathematician, versed in the highest sciences, and dreaming only of abstract speculation, was condemned to seven years’ imprisonment for stealing from a shop. But for the extraordinary sagacity and entire absence of illusions on the part of the police, many a malefactor would succeed in concealing his true character. Some years ago a certain Toutpriant, living at No. 28, Rue Vert, had eight horses in his stables, besides carriages from the best makers. He was a retired clerk, who planned robberies on a large scale, training and directing a number of young brigands to that end, and himself living under a false name either on his own estate, where he had excellent shooting, or at fashionable watering-places. “There are some families,” says M. Ducamp, “which, by a wretched tradition, seem given up to theft from generation to generation. The grandfather was a thief; the father stole, the son steals, the grandson will steal. The child is taught his trade from the earliest years. He learns to step without making a sound, to see without appearing to look, to open a lock with a nail, to hide what he has stolen, and to cry out ‘Stop thief!’ when he is pursued. The families of Piednoir, Cœur-de-Roy, and Nathan drove the police to despair and tired out the tribunals. The periods of imprisonment to which the Nathans, father, mother, brothers, and sons-in-law, altogether fourteen persons, were condemned, represent a total of 209 years.”

The thieves of Jewish race are, according to M. Ducamp, those among whom handkerchief-stealing descends from father to son. They are formidable not for their audacity, for they scarcely ever commit murder, but by their persistence in a criminal career, by the inviolable secrecy maintained among them, their marvellous patience, and the facilities they possess for concealing themselves in the houses of their co-religionists. Jewish thieves are hardly ever at open war with society. They maintain a secret, subtle struggle. They seem to be taking a silent revenge, and it might be said that they have right on their side and that they are only taking back – as the opportunity presents itself – the property of which their ancestors had been so often, so violently, and so unjustly deprived by ours. Sometimes they form associations and rob wholesale. They have their correspondents, their depots, their purchasers, their account-books. Everything that is brought to them can be turned to account, from the lead of the house-pipes to a lady’s feather. The chief calls himself a commission agent and sends goods to South America, Germany, and Russia. The German-Jewish jargon which they speak among themselves is incomprehensible to the rest of the world and helps to save them from detection. Concealing their secret actions behind an ostensibly honest trade, they are the first deceivers in the world. There are numbers of criminals, however, who, whatever instincts they may have inherited, have not been trained to crime. “A child,” says the writer already cited on this subject, which he has studied so thoroughly, “stops away from school. He acquires idle habits and, coming home late, is beaten by his father. The effect of the lesson lasts a little while; but he has tasted the liberty he loves, he has experienced the pleasure of keeping away from books – the books he hates; and fearing the paternal correction, he takes care the next time he plays truant not to return home. He sleeps beneath an archway, and if he escapes the attention of the police wakes up the next morning to find himself on the pavement of the great city without a sou in his pocket. Being very hungry, he contrives to steal a sausage. The first step has now been taken. Young as he is, he has acquired a fatal knowledge. He has learned how to live without working, and he is now almost certainly lost. Vice has taken possession of him; crime awaits him. As he gets older he is urged on by all the passions of the young man. He steals some money from his father, from his employer: wherever the chance presents itself. If he is taken, he is condemned by a compassionate judge to a brief term of imprisonment, during which he lives among the vilest. He hears nothing but the boasts of criminals, who pride themselves on their atrocious actions and inspire him with a desire to imitate them. On leaving gaol he meets some of his prison companions. His timid operations of former days are turned into ridicule. The talk is now of burglary, of affairs which involve some risk but return handsome profits. The crime is resolved upon. An imprudent person happens to witness its commission, calls for the police, and is killed. The little vagabond of other days has become an assassin, and will end his career on the scaffold. Physical energy and moral weakness: such are the two principal features in the character of nearly all criminals. Some of them affect to be at war with a society in which the poor man, according to them, has no place. Mere nonsense. In a society so profoundly democratic as ours, in which waiters have become kings, the sons of innkeepers prime ministers, and foundlings illustrious men of science, there is a place for everyone.”