Where the Revolutionaries Lived

Excerpt from Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, published in 1869

From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes – the Faubourg St. Antoine.  Little, narrow streets; dirty children blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them; filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier’s); other filthy dens where whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy dens where they sold groceries—sold them by the half-pennyworth—five dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all.  Up these little crooked streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the Seine.  And up some other of these streets most of them, I should say— live lorettes.

All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every side. Here the people live who begin the revolutions.  Whenever there is anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready.  They take as much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a throat or shoving a friend into the Seine.  It is these savage-looking ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers’ heads with paving-stones.  Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that.  He is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an arrow—avenues which a cannon ball could traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than the flesh and bones of men—boulevards whose stately edifices will never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented revolution breeders.  Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one ample centre—a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the accommodation of heavy artillery.  The mobs used to riot there, but they must seek another rallying-place in future.  And this ingenious Napoleon paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition of asphaltum and sand.  No more barricades of flagstones—no more assaulting his Majesty’s troops with cobbles.