Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and despair in prose, in a journal called _L’Ennemi du Peuple_. His journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of significant poetical productiveness are over.
Montmartre participated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the seat of the _Club de la Montagne_ in that of 1848. Of the period immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes: “There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all.” It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which the _Gardes Nationaux_ had transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas were executed.
Louise Michel—and who should know better?—in her fascinating _Mémoires_ testifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She says, referring to the siege of Paris:—
“The Eighteenth Arrondissement was the terror of the selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was rumoured, ‘Montmartre is coming down’ (‘_Montmartre va descendre_’), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was starving to death.”
Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the insurrection, she writes:—
“The four _citoyens_, Th. Ferré, Avronsart, Burlot, and Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. At the first word of this phrase,—terror of the reaction,—‘Montmartre is coming down,’ I was given into their hands.”
Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from exile:—
“I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is with Montmartre I march to-day.”
It was to the Montmartre of the _indigènes_, the Montmartre of the workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which was known as le _cratère de la révolution_, that Louise Michel paid these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of arts and letters, who hold the _Vache Enragée_ above the Golden Calf, far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the Butte, has strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the “selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed,” quake more than ever.