“Insurgents began uprooting the saplings planted to replace the larger trees cut down during the July Days. The cry “To the barricades!” resounded through the streets. The insurrection affected both sides of the Seine, but the flash points were here, on the right bank.ĭragoons had been under orders to refrain from the use of deadly force, but when a shot rang out from somewhere, the crowd began to throw stones at the military. Traugott’s map of the insurrection shows that Lamarque’s funerary procession made a wide arc around the city’s right bank. I had to make the journey vicariously, later, through Mark Traugott‘s The Insurgent Barricade(University of California Press). Alas, my trip was too brief, and I couldn’t quite figure out what had happened, and where, on my Paris map. I had hoped to visit some of the route during my recent visit to France. For a quarter of an hour, bullets flew both ways.” Three decades later, he would write about the unforgettable experience in Les Misérables.

Hugo was surrounded by barricades and flung himself against a wall, as all the shops and stores had been closed for some time. According to Wikipedia, Hugo headed north up the Rue Montmartre, then turned right onto the Passage du Saumon, finally turning before the Rue du Bout du Monde (if this street still exists, it has a different name now): “Halfway down the alley, the grilles at either end were slammed shut. He was unaware that the mob had taken half of Paris, and the barricades were everywhere in Les Halles. Instead of going home to safety, he followed the sounds of gunfire through the deserted streets. Then he heard gunfire from the direction of Les Halles. The 30-year-old Victor Hugo was nearby, in the Tuileries Gardens, writing a play. Those mourning and those with a political agenda merged into a mob that numbered in the tens of thousands – some witnesses claimed it eventually grew to 100,000. The crowd had hoped to accompany Lamarque’s hearse before it took the general home to his native district in the southwest of France.

The immediate trigger was the death of General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who had been a friend to the poor and downtrodden. In the early morning hours of June 5, crowds of workers, students, and others gathered in the streets of Paris.

Les miserables in french book