By Casey Harison

The violence directed by police toward citizens that has been captured on video has rocked societies across the Atlantic in recent years. A drawing by the nineteenth-century French artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) offers insights and historical context for this critical contemporary issue.

Since their widespread adoption beginning in the early 2000s, smartphone cameras held by citizens and cameras attached to police gear have revealed the disturbing violence that police sometimes use against ordinary people. Would we have ever known the terrible details of George Floyd’s 2020 murder or witnessed the arrest of the officer responsible for his death without the videos taken by witnesses at the scene? Would the subsequent social movement that brought crowds into the streets across the United States, and more recently in France following the death of Nahel Merzouk, also at the hands of police, have happened without video evidence?

The deaths of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk are not the first times that disturbing images of violence by authorities against ordinary citizens have galvanized the public. Honoré Daumier’s lithograph of a police “massacre” on Paris’ Rue Transnonain in 1834 is another famous representation of an infamous event. Daumier is best known as the discerning, often humorous caricaturist of the nineteenth-century French middle class, but he also sometimes turned a keen eye to politics, foreign policy, and civil strife, including what became known as the “Massacre on the Rue Transnonain”—a tragic killing of civilians by soldiers in the immediate aftermath of a rebellion.^[1]

Though small by Parisian standards, the rebellion was symptomatic of the times. It happened a few years after Louis-Philippe came to power in the Revolution of 1830. The narrow, middle-class policies of Louis-Philippe’s “July Monarchy” left the Parisian working class, which had been crucial in making the revolution, deeply dissatisfied. Opposition quickly emerged among workers and radicals who hoped to replace the monarchy with a republic. In June 1832, there was a large, failed rebellion — subsequently well-known from the chapter Victor Hugo devoted to it in Les Misérables — and then the smaller affair of 1834. The latter began on the afternoon of April 13 when crowds gathered and shots were fired. Barricades —first introduced on a large scale in 1830 — sprouted across the eastern, mostly working-class sections of the city. The government, following routine procedures, dispatched regular soldiers, National Guard, and police. By the following day, the rebellion was put down and its leadership in custody. About 70 persons were dead and more than a thousand arrested. Noncombatants — ordinary people — were among those killed or wounded by soldiers searching house-to-house for rebels. Soldiers committed two mass killings, both in the neighborhood of what is today the Pompidou Center.

The event that Daumier made famous (the other occurred on the nearby Rue Beaubourg) happened at a building on the Rue Transnonain. Like many streets in central Paris, the Rue Transnonain had changed little since the Middle Ages: dark, damp, narrow, and lined with the cramped storefronts and small apartments bundled into the five-and-six story structures typical of Paris before it was rebuilt and modernized under the prefect Georges Haussmann beginning in the 1850s. Working-class families and seasonal migrants lived there, along with the petit bourgeois shop owners who mostly resided on the bottom floors. On the morning of April 14, twelve residents of the building at no. 12 Rue Transnonain, hoping to be saved from the fighting that had gone on since the previous night, were shot or bayoneted in a frenzy of violence by soldiers who claimed they had been fired on (the gunshots were never proven). The youngest to die was 20 years old (Daumier’s lithograph incorrectly shows a dead infant), the oldest 58.

The killings on Rue Transnonain probably would have remained as anonymous as those on Rue Beaubourg except for reports that showed up in newspapers, and then the publication of a pamphlet by the lawyer and activist Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874) based upon his interviews with survivors who directly disputed the government’s suppressed version of what had happened. Daumier drew upon these sources to render his depiction of the tragedy. The lithograph, completed in July 1834 and titled “Rue Transnonain, 15 avril 1834,” was shown at a prominent Parisian gallery, reprinted and quickly became known throughout France and Europe. 

Because French soldiers and police benefited from an accommodating legal system and a reluctance by authorities to challenge their actions, none of those involved in the killings were prosecuted. Yet the event, Daumier’s depiction of it now the revealed truth of what had actually happened, stained the reputation of Louis-Philippe’s government and army. The massacre would linger as a collective memory to be evoked in future French rebellions and social movements. Soon, contemporary accounts, including those by the early socialist writer Louis Blanc and the politician François Guizot, were reciting the tragic story; a few years later the novelist Gustave Flaubert drew upon memory of the Rue Transnonain for his Sentimental Education.^[2]To this day, Daumier’s drawing shows up frequently in histories of the nineteenth century. The prefect Haussmann, recognizing the power of the image and fearful that it could serve as a spark for more rebellion, had the Rue Transnonain — the very street itself — destroyed when Paris underwent massive urban renewal during the Second Empire (1852-70).^[3] But while the physical street was erased, Daumier’s potent message about the brutality that the state’s armed forces could wield toward civilians endured.

The killings of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk, and the “Massacre on the Rue Transnonain,” occurring almost two centuries apart, are not perfectly parallel events. History rarely works that way. In the two recent events, it was police, not soldiers, who perpetrated the violence. There was a racial and class dimension to the deaths of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk, but race did not play a role on the Rue Transnonain. Nor did the July Monarchy witness a spontaneous social eruption in response to the massacre or Daumier’s depiction of it. This may have been because it took some time for the details to be revealed and because Louis-Philippe’s government cracked down hard by arresting people, restraining the press, and passing laws forbidding people to gather. There was no corresponding effort in nineteenth-century France to “defund” the military as there was for police departments in the United States in 2020.

Still, Daumier’s depiction of the 1834 massacre made an impact. The government, recognizing the problem, initiated reforms so that police, rather than soldiers, might defuse future episodes. In the end, this would not prove entirely successful since Paris continued to be Europe’s “Capital of Revolution” through the Commune of 1871. Furthermore, it would be something akin to poetic justice when Louis-Philippe, who had come to power in the Revolution of 1830, was overthrown in the Revolution of 1848, with Daumier’s unflattering portraits of the king and his regime, including “Rue Transnonain,” playing a role in his downfall.

Where the videos of the killings of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk especially echo Daumier’s “Rue Transnonain” is in the empathy we feel for victims who did not deserve to die at the hands of the police and soldiers in whom we tend to place our trust and to whom we grant the legal right to use deadly force — and then the dismay and righteous anger we feel when that trust is so violently betrayed. Minus Ledru-Rollin and the Parisian gallery that brought Daumier’s depiction to the public, and minus the smartphone technology and news outlets that did the same for the deaths of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk, it is hard to imagine the state’s armed forces reforming themselves or governments summoning the will to make the changes necessary to prevent terrible events like these recent killings and the “Massacre on the Rue Transnonain” from happening.

---

Casey Harison is a historian and the author of Paris in Modern Times (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Title Image: Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, 15 April, 1834 (1834). Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

Further Reading:

Beck, Peter J. “Pages of History: Daumier’s Political Eye.” History Today 59 (Dec. 2008): 34-41.

Blanc, Louis. History of Ten Years, 1830-1840. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1845.

Guizot, François. The History of France from the Earliest Times to 1848, 8 vols. Tr. Robert Black. New York: Hurst and Company, 1889.

Harsin, Jill. Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Jordan, David P. Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Moran, Claire. “Baudelaire, Daumier, and the Reinvention of History Painting,” Dix-Neuf 16 (March 2012): 49-61.

Endnotes:

^[1] Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 90-100. On Daumier, see Peter J. Beck, “Pages of History: Daumier’s Political Eye,” History Today 59 (Dec. 2008): 34-41 and Claire Moran, “Baudelaire, Daumier, and the Reinvention of History Painting,” Dix-Neuf 16 (March 2012): 49-61.

^[2] Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840. 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), vol. 1, 279; Guizot, The History of France from the Earliest Times to 1848, 8 vols. Tr. Robert Black (New York: Hurst and Company, 1889), vol. 8, 318.

^[3] David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995), 189.