Paris: The Ragmen's Rebellion

In 1832 Paris was ravaged by a cholera epidemic. Heinrich Heine, one of the most prominent German poets of the nineteenth century, witnessed the epidemic and reported on it in an article written for the German press*. The following is a translation of the passage in which he looks at the protests of the ragmen against the hygiene measures declared mandatory by the Paris authorities. When Heine describes the ragmen here satirically as the natural allies of the monarchists, he is reflecting a nineteenth-century belief that the ragmen, as part of the Lumpenproletariat (rabble), were a counter-revolutionary substratum of society.

Nothing can equal the confusion with which emergency measures were now taken. A commission sanitaire was established, bureaux de secours mushroomed everywhere and the decree concerning salubrité publique was to be put into effect forth with. It was at this point that the first clash occurred with the interests of several thousand individuals who consider public filth their domain-the so-called chiffoniers, who make their living from the refuse which piles up in the gutters in front of the houses during the day. With huge pointed baskets on their backs and crooks in their hands, these pale, filthy figures roam the streets, pulling anything that may still be of use out of the piles of rubbish and selling it. When the police now commissioned the cleaning up of the streets to prevent the waste from piling up, and had the refuse loaded onto carts and transported out of the city immediately, into the fields, where the chiffoniers could rake through it to their hearts' content, the latter complained that while this had not made them exactly penniless, they had certainly suffered a loss of earnings, that their livelihood was a time-honoured right, their property, as it were, which they could not be robbed of arbitrarily.

It is strange that these arguments are exactly those put forward by the country squires, the guild wardens and masters, the tithe proctors, the academics and other privileged groups when the age-old abuses which have always worked to their advantage, the garbage of the Middle Ages, are at last to be done away with to prevent the stinking putrefaction from polluting our life today. When their protests produced no results, the chiffoniers tried to thwart the cleaning reform by violent means. They attempted a smallscale counter-revolution, in conjunction with the revendeuses, old women who had been forbidden to lay out along the banks of the Seine the foul-smelling wares which they buy mainly from the chiffoniers for resale. The most repulsive riots ensued. The new cleaning carts were smashed and thrown into the Seine. The chiffoniers threw up barricades at the Porte St.-Denis. The old women staged street fights at Châtelet, wielding their huge umbrellas. Then the alarm was raised: Casimir Périer had his myrmidons drummed out of their taverns; the throne of the people tottered; [. . .] the monarchists were exultant. At last they had found their natural allies, the rag-and-bone men and the female junk-merchants who were now staking their claim on the same principles - as the upholders of tradition, of hereditary interests in refuse, of putrefaction of every kind.