CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

The true story of one of nineteenth-century London’s most notorious murderers.

On 8 December 1854, Emmanuel Barthélemy visited 73 Warren Street in the heart of radical London for the very last time. In just half an hour, two innocent men would be dead.

The newspapers of Victorian England were soon in a frenzy. Who was this foreigner come to British shores to slay two upstanding subjects? As Oxford historian, Marc Mulholland, has uncovered, Barthélemy was no ordinary criminal. Rather, here was a dedicated activist fighting for the cause of the oppressed worker, a fugitive shaped by the storms of revolution, counterrevolution and a society in the midst of huge transformation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marc Mulholland is a Professor of Modern History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. He specialises in the development of international socialism, the history of political thought, Revolution and modern Ireland. Marc is from County Antrim in Ireland, one of nine children. As his father was a forester he grew up in the woods at Portglenone. He lives in Oxford with his partner, Victoria.

PREFACE

‘ONE CANNOT IMAGINE¹ how entirely different everything is just across the Channel from what it is in France. London, which is only a few hours distant from Paris, might be on the other side of the globe.’ So wrote Francis Wey, a cultivated French art connoisseur who visited London in the early 1850s. His Paris was a city of eight-storey apartment buildings, each with its own porter or ‘concierge’, fronted by shops. Streets were methodically numbered, odd on one side, even on the other. The sun shone through the faint smoke of wood fires on to lively public entertainments. At night cheerful cafés sparkled with light, while armed troops policed its turbulent streets. The Parisians he knew were vain, chivalrous, loud, demonstrative and fanatical. In London, by contrast, Wey found a sprawling metropolis of sturdy three-storey terraced houses, bustling docks, belching chimneys, and rain blackened by coal soot. The streets brimmed with advertising posters. The few street signs made little sense but policemen would politely offer directions. Rich men dined at home, or in about sixty grand ‘Clubs’, while the poor gathered in dreary and uninviting public houses. Londoners were proud, businesslike, taciturn and discreet. To the French ear, the English language was ‘a mere murmur punctuated by soft, hissing sounds’². Modern readers might be surprised at the differences between the two cities Wey described. Parisians would patiently queue, Londoners would rush and barge. Young Frenchwomen were repressed, their English counterparts flirtatious.

Francis Wey knew Paris and London because he wandered their streets. His pavement-level ‘flâneur’ view of society had become fashionable by the 1840s. The flâneur is the casual wanderer who saunters about, led by no plan other than their own restless curiosity, observing what is happening in streets and alleyways. He sees what most people fail to see because they are rushing by, intent on business.

For Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century poet and essayist, the flâneur was the detached observer, the ‘botanist of the sidewalk’. Baudelaire advises us to take a seat at the pavement café and to watch passers-by. When one particular unknown face piques our interest – perhaps he looks troubled or distracted, or she is a beauty in rags, or his eyes blaze with a criminal intent – we rise and hurl ourselves ‘headlong into the midst of the throng’³ in pursuit of the ‘unknown, half-glimpsed countenance’. We leave the familiar routes of respectable workaday life for the mysterious, overlooked, crowded passageways and haunts of the underworld. Baudelaire certainly appealed to artists and bohemians. As a rule, however, historical writers – a sober lot – prefer to know where they are going. The great English historian of the nineteenth century, Lord Acton, advised scholars to ‘choose a problem’ before beginning their historical researches. This is good advice. But it is also possible to write history as a flâneur. Rather than focusing on a problem, we might choose one character from history – neither a great man nor a great woman – and decide to follow them. What might we then see that otherwise would remain overlooked?

In this book the reader will track the unknown, half-glimpsed Emmanuel Barthélemy: nineteenth-century revolutionary, conspirator, gaol-breaker, duellist, inventor and murderer. In pursuing Barthélemy we not only uncover an extraordinary life, but travel the world through which he moved. This was a world that crossed national borders and its richness is best appreciated from multiple angles. We learn how Barthélemy saw society and how society saw him. As we make our way, we look about ourselves and see a world in transformation, in the midst of revolution and counter-revolution, becoming modern. Much of what we see is surprising and unfamiliar. But we find also much that is strikingly relevant to our own times.

In 1827 an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson⁴, took Paris by storm when she played Ophelia in a touring performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Her Irish accent had not gone down well in London, but the literary ‘Romantics’ of France, first among them the writer Victor Hugo, were entranced. They found in Smithson’s performance and Shakespeare’s art a commingling of tragedy and comedy, violence and lyricism, high politics and low life, which seemed to speak to a dawning age of popular passions. Eighteen years later, Hugo wrote the first draft of his great novel on revolution, Les Misérables. His story of Jean Valjean, the redeemed galley convict and barricade fighter, was interrupted in 1848 by the reality of revolution and counter-revolution. When Hugo, now an exile, returned to his novel⁵ in January 1861, he began in a completely different register, with a meditation on the ‘June Days’, a doomed workers’ rebellion, and its enigmatic leader, Emmanuel Barthélemy. Revolutionary romanticism had come to life. This is a book about that life and the world it reveals.

1

‘THE MAN I NOW SEE IS THE MAN WHO SHOT ME’

WHEN EMMANUEL BARTHÈLEMY visited George Moore for the last time, he was not in a good mood. Perhaps few of us would be: it was a dank, freezing cold, wet night. Barthélemy was footsore and weary, and he had plenty on his mind. In his pocket a ticket for travel to the Continent: his plan, to assassinate the Emperor of the French.

Tying up loose ends in London was proving to be a complex business and Barthélemy had decided to work off his frustration by practising his pistol-shooting at the ‘Gun Tavern’ at Westminster, near Buckingham Palace. But on his way he met with a mysterious woman and between them they concocted a plan to visit George Moore, Barthélemy’s former employer.

When they arrived at Warren Street it was just gone eight in the evening. The overture was playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket and the elegant audience there, ‘glorious with beauties and with riches’, was settling in for the evening’s opera performance. At the same time, in the teeming slum streets, workers emerging from a day’s labour were crowding round shabby stalls and shops. Under the three golden balls identifying the pawnbroker’s establishment they presented their scanty possessions and in return ‘the capitalist’¹ lent them housekeeping money. This is how the rich lived and the poor survived. It was the bustling, energetic, often desperate face of London.

The date was 8 December 1854. England, in alliance with France, had been at war with Russia since March. Florence Nightingale was nursing the diseased British expeditionary force at Scutari on the Crimean peninsula. British public opinion had scorned Napoleon III, ruler of France, as a despotic upstart. But now they celebrated him as a stout and faithful ally. Crude portraits of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his Empress, Eugénie, were on display all over London. For a revolutionary like Barthélemy, vehemently opposed to the Bonapartist dictatorship, this vexed him almost to wildness. Never had he felt more of a foreigner in England.

Only a few years earlier, in 1848, revolution had swept the Continent, and Barthélemy’s dreams had appeared to be on the brink of fulfilment. But now ‘reaction’ was inexorably rolling back the radical wave. Cities across Europe had risen in revolt against their monarchs in 1848, only to be suppressed by armies based on peasant recruitment. Now, in its aftermath, the religious, the conservative, and the revolutionary contended for the ear of the people. As a revolutionary, Barthélemy knew that the influence of his party was diminishing.

Barthélemy stopped at 73 Warren Street, a large townhouse and workplace near the juncture with Tottenham Court Road. He was in Fitzrovia, close to the centre of radical London. Barthélemy knew the area well.

Barthélemy was a familiar figure in London’s radical community, both natives and exiles from European countries. But he was little known outside its ranks. For London was not just a centre of political agitation or a bolthole for revolutionaries. It was, primarily, the beating heart of the most extraordinary economic transformation to date. Only three years earlier the Great Exhibition had showcased Britain’s world-beating industrial might. London’s docks were crowded with commercial shipping and fragranced by cotton, preserved fruits, spices, dyes, spirits, perfumes and drugs, all piled high in warehouses or, if unsold, burnt in a huge furnace known as the ‘Queen’s Pipe’. The railways had tied together the country. In 1829 the first railway passenger service opened between Liverpool and Manchester. By the middle of the century railways criss-crossed the United Kingdom. For The Economist newspaper this was a transformation putting London at the centre of national life as never before:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, London was expanding at a dizzying rate, and new comfortable middle-class houses were springing up. The house of George Moore on Warren Street was in many respects typical of the prosperous middle-class merchant. These were large houses, though as land in London was expensive they were also narrow, with rooms arranged one on top of the other. Steps brought the visitor up to a front door which opened into a hallway. Below this level were the servants’ quarters, where could be found the kitchens, pantries, larders and perhaps a cramped sitting room. The front room was typically a dining room, behind this a study or occasional room. Upstairs on the first floor was a large fine drawing room, the best in the house. Up another flight of stairs was the ‘front bedroom’, occupied by the master and mistress, and another bedroom. The one or two floors above this were shared by children and servants. ‘Pure undiluted gentility³ did not rise above the second floor.’ It was the acme of the ‘class-consciousness house’.

Inside this particular address was its master, George Moore; the maid, Charlotte Bennett; and innocently sleeping upstairs, Moore’s grandson aged eight. At 8.30 p.m., Charlotte heard an impatient knocking and ringing at the door. She hurried to answer. The hallway had no lighting and she carried a tallow candle in a passageway otherwise illuminated only by the glow of street lamps coming through the glass fanlight over the front door. By the dim radiance of the flickering wick she peered at her visitors. Barthélemy was certainly a handsome man, standing five foot seven inches, of lithe and muscular build, with jet-black curling hair over a well-proportioned face. He had high cheekbones, a firm chin, a straight nose, defined lips, and striking, penetrating eyes. Charlotte had met him on previous occasions, when Barthélemy had come to the house to do mechanical work at the factory in the rear, but he had shaved off his large black moustache, and she did not recognise him. A hat, perhaps the common top hat or the recently invented bowler sported by working men, was pulled low over his face.

Barthélemy was accompanied by a woman who Charlotte did not know. She later described the mysterious lady as about thirty years of age, rather shorter than herself, dressed in dark clothing, and upon her head a straw bonnet. Covering her face was a ‘fall’, or a thick veil, and she wore a cloak of dark brown merino cloth, trimmed with black satin ribbon and small black satin buttons. Barthélemy was dressed in a rough blue overcoat with large bell sleeves. Sewn into the lining of his undercoat was a dagger. Also hidden were two pistols, and in his pocket twenty-four cartridges, a quantity of loose firing-caps, and that ticket for the boat to Hamburg.

Barthélemy asked Charlotte if Mr Moore was at home. Charlotte said he was. She walked the visitors down the long hallway to the back parlour. Here George Moore appeared, a large, stout and confident figure, the very model of a successful businessman. He had made a good living by the manufacture of fizzy drinks⁴, for which there was a healthy market. Moore welcomed the visitors as friends, but he brought them into his second-best room. Her duty done, Charlotte left them to it, going through the kitchen and downstairs to her basement quarters.

Barthélemy and the woman followed Moore into the well-appointed parlour of tables, chairs and sideboard: a crowding together of walnut, rosewood and mahogany all richly decorated with carvings; plush curtains, thick carpet, rugs and Staffordshire figurines – the proud furnishings typical of a prosperous early to mid-Victorian gentleman. ‘Hideous solidity was the characteristic,’ as Charles Dickens wrote of such ‘Podsnappery’. ‘Everything was made to look as heavy as it could⁵, and to take up as much room as possible.’ Amid this self-congratulatory display of comfortable living, George Moore and his guests remained together for about twenty minutes.

At first the meeting went well. Moore was proud of his manufactory and his wares were displayed on the sideboard. He took down bottles of carbonated waters, drew chairs around the table and showed off an item of his trade: a kind of mallet used for tapping corks into pressurised bottles. With a corkscrew, Moore opened three bottles. Soda water and lemonade were provided for his guests. Barthélemy and his lady companion sipped at their drinks. Moore poured himself a ginger beer in a third tumbler, drained it, and started on another. He felt himself very much the gregarious patron.

From this congenial beginning, however, the meeting turned sour. The woman took a letter out of her pocket and began to read from it. She had reached nearly the bottom of the first page when Moore rose from his chair in a fury and lunged to snatch the letter out of her hand. Barthélemy jumped from his chair and flung Moore back with his arm. Caught off guard, Moore stumbled and partly fell. Barthélemy snatched up the weighty mallet, and in a fury smashed at a heavy mahogany chair with such force that both mallet and chair disintegrated. He did not, however, draw the dagger he was carrying.

Barthélemy swung at Moore with the mallet handle, dealing him a glancing blow to the head, which whipped back and cracked sharply off the wall. Moore’s blood splashed on the wallpaper, the sofa cushions and the corkscrew. From her room downstairs⁶, the maid heard a voice cry, ‘Murder!’ Moore was a big man, injured but outraged, and in fear for his life. He advanced on his now unwelcome guests, striking at Barthélemy and pushing him towards the door. Behind him he trailed blood through the room.

Charlotte heard the scuffle in the parlour from her servants’ quarters. As she listened, the racket grew in volume and finally she summoned her courage and crept upstairs. Coming in view of the back parlour she saw her master and Barthélemy tumble out of its door, engaged in what appeared to be a deadly struggle in the passage. The mysterious woman followed closely behind. All was confusion and shadows as Charlotte’s small tallow candle, the only light source illuminating the scene, danced and flickered.

As Barthélemy reached the front door, pursued by Moore, he attempted to stop Charlotte calling for help by clamping his hand over her mouth. Charlotte dropped her candle and it guttered out on the floor. Moore was still pushing at Barthélemy. As the two men grappled, Barthélemy swivelled round. Moore had his hand up and fixed on Barthélemy. ‘I do not know⁷ whether he was pushing him or whether he was holding him back – he had his hand upon him, and he was doing either one or the other,’ said Charlotte later. As the two men locked eyes, Barthélemy raised his pistol breast-high and tilted it at Moore’s head. He pulled the trigger and the dark hallway was suddenly lit by a flash. Moore was hit full in the face.

Mr Richard Slaughter Carter, a surgeon who was called to the crime scene later, ‘found a man lying in the passage on his back, quite dead’. With that lack of squeamishness characteristic of Victorian newspapers, the press quoted his report.

The post-mortem examination showed that the bullet had entered the orbit of the eye, completely traversed the brain, and fractured the occipital bone at the back of the skull, from where it had rebounded. It had ended up lodged in the centre of the cerebellum. Death had been instantaneous.

Terrified by the flash and bang of gunfire and by the sight of her collapsed master, Charlotte tore open the front door, calling out in alarm to those gathering out on the pavement. Curious as to the noise, three people had already stopped by the house. Barthélemy and the maid stumbled out together, but Charlotte fell against the iron wicket-gate at the front of the steps, preventing Barthélemy making a quick getaway on to the street. He ran back into the house, slamming and bolting the door behind him. Charlotte was now locked outside.

Barthélemy rushed down the hallway, past the parlour, to the back door. He wrestled down the bar that went across it, and quickly hustled his female companion outside. In the back yard, she collapsed, distraught over Moore’s death, and begged Barthélemy to shoot her too. ‘I had not the heart to do so,’⁹ said Barthélemy later. ‘I was anxious she should escape.’ From the deep pocket of his overcoat he removed his purse, containing a gold sovereign and some silver coins, and pressed it into her hand. The woman had brought with her another cloak and hat. She donned these as a disguise and Barthélemy hoisted her over the wall into the neighbouring back yard, from whence she disappeared into the night. After she was clear, Barthélemy took a different route to draw off any pursuers. With a gun clamped in one hand he climbed up the high back gate and fell into the New Road – the artery renamed the Euston Road a few years later.

At the front of the house¹⁰, meanwhile, someone shouted, ‘Break open the door!’ Charlotte, who had been unable to speak for a few moments, now found her voice and loudly urged the crowd: ‘Go round into the New Road, or he will get out that way.’ Hearing the noise, Charles Collard, a greengrocer aged thirty-six, emerged from his premises at 74 Warren Street. Collard had formerly been a soldier in the service of the East India Company, and then for two or three years a constable in the E (Holborn) Division of the police. He was still well known to the force, having a contract to supply a number of police stations with vegetables. With a passing house painter, William Moseley, bringing up the rear, Collard dashed to the back of the Moore residence. The two men came round the other side to see Barthélemy falling from railings some six foot high. Collard was also joined by William Beetleson, a waterman at the hackney coach stand on the New Road. Beetleson had been alerted, he recalled, by ‘a person [coming] towards me crying “Police!” and “Murder!”’ He saw Barthélemy ‘falling from the palings’ as ‘his hat fell off and bounded on the pavement’.

Collard and Beetleson closed in on Barthélemy. Moseley saw confused grappling in the night and heard Collard cry out, ‘For God’s sake lay hold of him, as he has something in his hand. Take care, or he will shoot someone!’ The two men pinioned Barthélemy in a stooping position, Moseley holding his right arm and Collard his left. Suddenly Barthélemy’s pistol went off. Collard fell to the ground, crying out, ‘Good God, I am shot!’ Beetleson wrested the remains of the shattered mallet from Barthélemy’s hands, but Barthélemy used his pistol to land a blow on his head. As Beetleson reeled back, Barthélemy broke free, stumbled over a low wall and was set upon by another man attracted by the furore. William Henry Madden, a woodcarver living on Tottenham Court Road, was returning home from work and passing by the back premises of Moore’s soda-water manufactory. He spied the scuffle and chased Barthélemy for nearly a hundred yards. Barthélemy stopped running, spun round, switched his pistol from one hand to the other, and struck Madden twice on the head, knocking his hat off, cutting through his left eyelid, slicing a piece off his ear, and tearing through to the bone behind his left ear.

Having gouged Madden in the face, Barthélemy dropped his pistol behind him. Once again he broke free and ran a further twenty or thirty yards. But his furious flight was nearing its end. He was finally brought down¹¹ by George Cope, an organ-pipe maker, who had seen a man running with a group of persons following him, and heard a cry of ‘Stop him!’ Cope was a strong and powerful young man, and as he intercepted Barthélemy he threw him violently against a garden wall. Then seizing Barthélemy, he wrestled him to the ground. Men gathered around him and pummelled his hunched body. Exhausted, Barthélemy put up no more resistance. (Madden was afterwards hailed as a hero¹², and awarded £10. The unfortunate George Cope received nothing, and over the next three years peppered the press with letters of complaint.) Police Constable John Mundy¹³ – carrying his truncheon, lamp and rattle – presently reached the scene. Moseley said to him, ‘Take him in charge, he has shot a man further down.’ Barthélemy was now a prisoner.

Barthélemy refused to answer any questions from his captors. As he was being marched to the police station on Tottenham Court Road, he and his escort were followed by a crowd hooting the captive. Fearful that he was about to be lynched, Barthélemy asked for a transport to bring him in safety. Mundy suspected a ruse: ‘He asked me if I would let him have a cab¹⁴; I said “No, there is no cab allowed for you”.’ Once arrived at the station, Barthélemy was searched.

Collard, who had been shot in the struggle outside Moore’s house, was brought into University College Hospital at about 8.45 p.m. He was suffering great pain. The house surgeon, Mr Henry Kiallmark, found a circular wound on the wall of the belly at the left side of the navel. Collard complained of numbness in the left thigh and leg. Kiallmark concluded that his spine had been damaged. The bullet was lodged just beneath the skin, and he cut it out. He called for Mr John Erichsen, the hospital surgeon, who on his arrival expressed no hopes for Collard’s recovery. ‘My good man,’¹⁵ he told Collard, ‘you are in a dying state.’

Barthélemy was brought into Collard’s presence. The stricken man, though too weak to point at him, immediately identified Barthélemy as his killer: ‘That is the man who shot me,’ he whispered through his pain. Barthélemy made no reply and showed no emotion. The wounded Collard turned away, saying, ‘Oh, you cruel man!’¹⁶

Collard was able to make a sworn statement to Inspector Checkley of the E Division:

All the time Barthélemy looked on expressionless, unmoving and seemingly unmoved.

The immediate cause of Collard’s death, which came after several hours of extreme agony, was inflammation. He left behind him two children and a pregnant widow. Barthélemy, when told of Collard’s death¹⁸, ‘wept bitterly, wrung his hands, and stated that, bearing no ill will to Collard, he never intended to do him any injury’.

What was in the letter that so enraged George Moore and led to his death? Who was the mysterious woman? What had Emmanuel Barthélemy intended to do that night? Who was this ‘cruel man’ – this murderer of Warren Street – and why was he there? Why did he plan to assassinate Napoleon III? To find out we must travel to France, and to the revolutionary Paris that shaped him.

2

THE CRIME OF BEING A KING

EMMANUEL BARTHÈLEMY WAS born in 1823, eight years after the restoration of the French monarchy, and thirty-four years after the outbreak of the French Revolution. It is clear that his family was of no great elevated position, but we know little else of his forebears. His father, François, was described as a ‘very honest, obliging and worthy man’¹. From what Barthélemy told people later in life, he was the son of poor parents and was himself ‘a simple worker from hot-blooded Marseille’². In 1839 his birthplace was given as Sceaux, a town just south of Paris. It may be that his family had moved from Marseille in the far south. At any rate, Barthélemy’s people hailed from that part of France where religious observance was low and anti-clericalism strong³.

A leading militant in Marseille during the turmoil of the French Revolution had been one Louis Barthélemy. Louis, who worked as a foreman in a soap manufactory, was poorly educated but ‘with a strong mind and fiery speech’. For him, popular violence was a regrettable necessity, not to be celebrated, but not to be ducked either. ‘The people will rise up⁴ in a terrible way,’ he had said when criticised for his incendiary attacks on the wealthy. ‘What saddens me is that many innocent people will die.’ There was no doubt that Louis was prepared to countenance such innocent deaths as a price well worth paying for the greater good. When the moderate local government of Marseille rose in rebellion against the radical dictatorship of Paris, Louis Barthélemy was arrested, accused of inciting violence and sentenced to death by guillotine. It was recorded that he strode out firmly on to the scaffold, acknowledged the crowd and addressed his guards: ‘I die for our country.’⁵ Then he kissed the revolutionary tricolour flag and gave himself up to the executioner. He ‘died an atheist … with unmatched fearlessness’. Marseille was reconquered by the central government shortly afterwards, just too late to save his life. Was Louis Barthélemy an ancestor of Emmanuel? We cannot know for sure, but it seems likely. At any rate, as a local legend it is easy to see how his ideals and honour could have influenced a young Emmanuel Barthélemy.

Barthélemy’s family migrated from Sceaux to Paris in about 1833, when Barthélemy was aged nine. The great writer Honoré de Balzac remarked that the rustic scenery of Sceaux was much admired, perhaps beyond its merits, by city folk buried in their ‘stony abyss’⁶. It could certainly be a shock for anyone migrating to swollen Paris from the countryside. ‘How ugly Paris seems⁷ after one has been away for a year,’ exclaimed an aristocrat, the Vicomte de Launay, in the 1830s. ‘How one stifles in those dark, damp, narrow corridors which you are pleased to call the streets of Paris! One would think this is an underground city, so sluggish is the air … And the thousands of people live, bustle, throng in the liquid darkness, like reptiles in a marsh.’ Paris, with a population approaching 900,000, was the second largest city in Europe, though much smaller than London where over 2.5 million people would be living by the early 1850s. No doubt the cram and busy activity of Parisians was head-spinning for new arrivals. But the capital was also a place of excitement and adventure for the newcomer, as Frances Trollope, the English travel writer, found:

The wide rivers, magnificent bridges, extensive trottoirs (pavements) and noble hôtels were interlaced, however, with the world of the ‘dangerous class’, those living in crowded tenements barely eking out a life in the shadow of crime. As the city had yet to become residentially segregated, the ‘dangerous classes’⁹ were ‘scattered more or less in all quarters of Paris’, wrote H. A. Frégier, a political economist and civil servant. ‘The richest and most thickly populated are not exempt, since it is rare for even the handsomest quarters not to contain some narrow alley, lined with old houses, ill-looking and badly kept. It is in such places that the doss houses are set up, and the prostitutes, pimps, thieves and rogues congregate. Around them collect the gamblers, vagabonds, and all the rest who have no means of livelihood.’ In 1840 there were at least 85,000 residents of Paris subsisting on meagre relief.

Life was a struggle too for the working poor. A carpenter’s family of four, for example, could earn 1,200 francs if they were able to find work for 300 days in the year. It required 1,050 to 1,300 francs for a family to live decently¹⁰. Barthélemy’s father was one of these working poor, and ultimately he took up employment as a concierge at a business establishment. The concierge, a Paris institution, was a door porter, security guard, receptionist and general dogsbody, rolled into one, usually housed in a small apartment on the ground floor, called la loge. It was a somewhat anomalous position, being of the working class but in close contact with the wealthy. ‘Paris porters have a knowing eye,’¹¹ wrote Balzac. ‘They do not stop men who wear a decoration, are dressed in a blue uniform, and have a heavy gait. In short, they recognise the rich.’ Concierges were generally distrusted by radicals as being servile to the elites, and they were a fruitful source of information for the police. It was just as possible, however, for those in close contact with the privileged to grow contemptuous.

Barthélemy was sent for some time to an ‘École d’enseignement mutuel’ – a school of mutual instruction. This was one of about 2,000 non-denominational schools for the children of the poor. Large numbers of pupils – often more than 800 – would be accommodated in one building run by a single schoolmaster. Pupils would be seated in groups of ten to a dozen at large desks. As the name suggests, education was mostly conveyed by older pupils, who acted as monitors. This was education on the cheap, but it also may well have fostered Barthélemy’s confidence that roughly egalitarian enterprises could run quite as well as hierarchical institutions while allowing more freedom and autonomy for the ordinary people who comprised them. They were, in many respects, models of the ‘social workshops’ dreamt of by French socialists in the 1830s. They were certainly identified with socialist ideas¹², and specifically with those of the famous Welsh socialist, Robert Owen.

Owen, who never suffered from self-doubt, tirelessly promoted his ideas which caused a stir in England and made their way over to France. He was convinced that human nature was entirely malleable. If industrial workers were treated brutally, as nothing more than ‘work hands’, it was no surprise if they turned out to be a degenerate, demoralised and violent class. Instead Owen wished for pleasant, clean, well-paying enterprises that could mould upstanding and respectable workers. He had a paternalistic theory of human psychology, believing that close direction could radically reshape human nature: ‘Man may be trained to acquire any sentiments¹³ and habits, or any character.’ For young men like Barthélemy, who saw so many of their class sink into despair and degradation, it was a resonant message.

The desire for learning was strong in France’s urban working class¹⁴. Yet Barthélemy’s own formal education was brief. He was taken out of school by his father so he could contribute to family income from home. Here his father taught him to make what were known as ‘Chaussons de lisière’: slippers fashioned from strips of cloth torn from old bed sheets and hangings. This was the most unskilled of labour, considered to be a fit occupation only for gaol inmates or residents of institutions for the blind. Emmanuel was a quick learner, however, and his dexterity was evident. He was already forming these simple objects in accordance with a certain idea of beauty. He had a craft sensibility, in which skill, dexterity and imagination impressed themselves on raw materials. Seeing potential, his father found for his son a position as an apprentice with artisan carpenters. Here he was to learn a trade. But Barthélemy was showing his ornery streak. Without seeking permission, he walked out of the job and took employment in a ‘sertisseur’ workshop, at 34 rue de la Marche, ‘because I found it the more convenient position¹⁵, less painful and more lucrative’.

This street was in the heart of the Marais, the old and gloomy area of ancient Paris on the Right Bank of the Seine. Historically, this district had been the aristocratic centre of the city and highly skilled craftworkers had gathered¹⁶ there to produce and sell luxury goods. As the aristocrats moved away, to follow the court or flee revolution, many of their private mansions were taken over by the master craftsmen who divided and subdivided them into small workshops. They employed often migrant labour from the provinces and abroad. The jewellers’ craft was increasingly ‘proletarianised’: masters would subcontract jobs to multiple competing workshops, and artisans were given specific and limited tasks. The goldsmith and the chiseller could expect to earn about 4 francs a day, the jeweller and the engraver 5 francs, and the gem-setter (sertisseur) 6 francs. The Marais became crowded, with workshops on every floor from basement to attic. It was bordered on the west by Les Halles¹⁷, the infamously raucous food market, and on the east by the Faubourgs Temple and Saint-Antoine, where hand-loom workers wove textiles and craftsmen carved and assembled furniture.

In these decades before the 1848 revolution, Paris became ‘the world’s greatest manufacturing city’¹⁸. But though there was some heavy industry beginning in the 1840s, most manufactories remained small-scale, especially those along the River Bièvre, the industrial artery of Paris since the Middle Ages. By 1847, there were some 330,000 industrial workers of Paris¹⁹ mostly scattered in small workshops: some 89 per cent of firms employed fewer than ten workers. Barthélemy, therefore, was a typical French industrial worker, carrying out skilled labour for wages in an artisanal manufactory. Yet his extraordinary aptitude soon caught the eye. From early youth he showed ample evidence of being ‘endowed with a very remarkable mechanical genius’²⁰.

Barthélemy would have been trained up by his fellow workers. In France, the characteristic workshop was a tall room with windows high on the walls, or on the roof, to let in light. Those inside could see little outside other than a patch of sky and the tops of poplar trees. Men, women and children worked at tables and tools. It was human-sized, and massive machinery was uncommon. Capitalists provided little actual direction to the workshop. A carpenter called Agricol Perdiguier, who wrote a memoir of his working life in the 1820s and 1830s, recalled how his employer ‘never taught me to lay out or assemble²¹; I never had any theoretical or practical training. Nevertheless I did all the work that was given to me without any trouble.’ Employees thought of the workplace as belonging to them, not to the boss. Paris tailors, when they went on strike in 1833²², demanded the right to smoke, to read newspapers, and for masters to take their hats off when entering the workshop. As the boss was probably a subcontractor, the capitalist financer of the enterprise would have seemed even more distant from the workshop.

A particular mode of capitalism produces its own mode of socialism. Most workplaces and communities were contained and the workers knew each other well. Association, cooperation and ‘harmony’ were not romantically abstract concepts, but ‘derived directly from the actual experiences of men in small-scale groups’²³. A rather moderate working-class journal of the early 1840s, L’Atelier, gave advice on how workers might advance:

Not every socialist would agree with this in detail, but it encapsulates the socialism of the small workshop characteristic of the period. The ideal was not state ownership of the means of production, nor even state welfarism, but the cooperative workshop and the division of people into self-governing communes. Indeed, the very concept of socialist republicanism implied a free workshop. ‘The socialism which would make the State²⁵ … the director and dictator of labour … such socialism would not be republican,’ English radicals wrote in the same period. That Barthélemy, himself employed in one of many small metalworking shops, was attracted to such ideals should not surprise us. It would be wrong to say that Barthélemy was typical of his working-class background, but he was certainly characteristic of it.

This was not an age of large factories, which would only really characterise capitalist society from the time of the First World War to the 1960s. In many respects the emergent capitalist society of the 1830s and 1840s was rather closer to our own: a ‘gig economy’ based upon plutocratic providers of capital contracting out business to quite small enterprises and taking as little responsibility as possible for the workers at the point of production.

Barthélemy’s work as a sertisseur suited his personality – intelligent, precise but single-minded. It also gave him an opportunity to focus on his burgeoning politics. Having got hold of an old medal struck to commemorate the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, celebrating the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, he decorated it with an emerald-coloured stone. Working on his medal, carefully fixing green translucence in finely wrought filigree, it may well be that Barthélemy’s young mind escaped the rigid class order of 1830s France, returning to the myths and glory of the revolutionary era a generation before his own. Only in France could men of Barthélemy’s humble station feel that they, once, had stormed heaven, burst the bounds of servitude immemorial, and made world history.

In 1789, an ‘estates general’, a kind of parliament representing aristocracy, clergy and everyone else – the ‘third estate’ – had been called to Paris by King Louis XVI in an attempt to generate support for reforms to save the state from bankruptcy. The ‘third estate’ insisted that they represented the true will of the nation. Defying the King, they established a National Assembly and demanded government responsible to the representatives of the people. The armed forces of the Crown began manoeuvring in order to strike back. It was feared that the Bastille, a huge prison and arms depot in Paris, would form the pivot of a military counter-revolution. This was a building of eight towers linked by walls eighty feet high. Inside was a meagre garrison of only 114 soldiers. An enormous crowd surged outside, loudly demanding to be allowed in. A small party clambered over the rampart wall, dashed into the guardhouse and cut the ropes holding the drawbridge. It crashed down, crushing one of the besiegers. Masses of people, waving muskets and pikes, swarmed into the outer courtyard. The defenders began firing from the towers, and a deafening battle was soon raging. Only after the crowd dragged cannon into the courtyard did the garrison surrender. About a hundred had died in the battle.

The storming of the Bastille in July 1789, predominantly by artisans – particularly furniture workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine – pinched out the immediate threat of a coup d’état, but triggered five years of acute turmoil. These artisan ‘sans-culottes’ became revolutionary legends in their own time, and for the generations that followed.

The National Assembly was dominated by bourgeois lawyers and officials, but they relied upon the sans-culottes – small masters, tradesmen, apprentices and wage-earning journeymen in workshops – as a militant and popular force to keep the threat of counter-revolution in check. Gwyn A. Williams, a historian of popular passions, remarked that ‘a central feature of sans-culottes psychology²⁶ was its permanent anticipation of betrayal and treachery’. This is true, but this mentality also gave them great energy.

Again and again, the labouring people of Paris rose up in insurrection to prevent counter-revolutionary backsliding. The workmen of the faubourgs – ‘covered with rags’²⁷, carrying guns, pikes, axes and knives, and followed by female ‘furies’ – would march behind banners emblazoned with the words, ‘Tremble tyrants! The sans-culottes are here!’ They would burst into the Tuileries Palace, where the nation’s elected representatives sat in deliberation, and ‘show them these pikes²⁸ which overthrew the Bastille’, as one of their leaders put it. This was mass intimidation with the aim of dictating to the government: a kind of ‘popular sovereignty’ by riot. These ‘journées’ – or days of insurrection – were inscribed on the memory of all subsequent nineteenth-century revolutionaries.

Prussian and Austrian armies invaded France with the aim of overthrowing the revolution: they declared their opponents not to be soldiers but rebels against rightful authority liable to summary execution. By August 1792, they were rapidly closing in on the capital. The ‘sections’ of the city dominated by the sans-culottes seized control of Paris, and raised the red flag. Until this point, the crimson flag had been flown by authority to show that martial law had been declared. The sans-culottes’ red flag declared a people’s martial law, a seizure of legal right into revolutionary hands. So began the long history of the red flag as the standard of revolution. The royal family, conspiring with the counter-revolutionary armies of invasion, were taken into custody and the Republic was declared.

A murderous suspicion grew in the popular masses. What if foreign armies reached Paris and opened the prisons to unleash the recently incarcerated royalists and brutalised criminals upon the sans-culottes? In September 1792, fanatical crowds descended upon the Parisian gaols, dragging out royalist and Catholic clerical prisoners, and slaughtering them. About 3,000 were killed, many with brutal indignity before jeering onlookers. It was a horrible outrage, but the revolutionary leaders held aloof, refusing to intervene. Marie-Victoire Monnard, then a thirteen-year-old apprentice, in retrospect captured the complex psychology of the mob. ‘Like everybody else, I was shaking with terror²⁹ lest royalists be permitted to escape from prisons and arrive to murder me for having no holy pictures to show them …. While shuddering with horror, we regarded the deeds as more or less justified.’

A new revolutionary parliament, or Convention, debated what to do with the deposed king. The youngest member of the Convention was Antoine Saint-Just, a leader of the radical ‘Jacobin’ faction committed to waging war to the knife against any threat to the revolution. In his youth, his determination, and his cold-bloodedness, Barthélemy would later often be compared to Saint-Just. Both men prided themselves on their spartan simplicity³⁰ and terse realism. Having read deeply of the ancient Greek Tacitus and the eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu – both exemplars of clarity in prose – Saint-Just adopted their epigrammatic, economical style. Grandiloquence and verbosity he condemned as aristocratic inauthenticity and obfuscation. ‘Republican children must be strictly trained to speak laconically³¹, which suits the nature of the French language,’ he wrote. Barthélemy too would later be noted for his precise and clear language. Saint-Just dressed with neat precision, eschewed flamboyance, and bore himself with steadfast control. He carried his head like a ‘sacred sacrament’³². Barthélemy was likewise always neatly dressed and strove to maintain an implacable self-possession.

For Saint-Just, the aim of a virtuous Republic warranted violence and terror against its enemies. In the Convention debates, on 13 November 1791, he argued for immediate execution rather than a trial for Louis XVI. The King’s very existence, he argued with a remorseless logic, was itself a threat to liberty. A monarch could not be allowed to benefit from the normal processes of law.

With clinical certitude Saint-Just argued that lethal force against kings was legitimate at all times and in all circumstances. Barthélemy would come to think in very similar terms. But in 1792 most revolutionaries baulked at Saint-Just’s merciless reasoning. They wanted to justify themselves to history³⁴, and for the former king to be made an example of. This was all the more tempting when they found a mass of correspondence incriminating him hidden in an iron box. Louis Capet was placed on trial for treason and, his guilt hardly in doubt, he was guillotined on 21 January 1793.