They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising _coup d’état_ of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of the _Quartier_. The students invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café, _crèmerie_ after _crèmerie_. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives.”
The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by _Les Propos de Labienus_, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.
It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.
In 1866, at the _Café de la Renaissance Hellénique_, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and a _rentier_,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier’s _La Contagion_ at the _Odéon_. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at the _Café Serpente_, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.
“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in his _Cafés Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris_, “had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as they met on the green cushions. _Etudiantes_ accompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics.”