In the spring of 1832, though cholera had chilled people’s minds for three months, Paris had long been ready to explode. A loaded cannon needs only a single spark. In June the spark fell. General Lamarque died.
Under Napoleon, Lamarque had been brave on the battlefield; after the Restoration, he was brave on the speaker’s platform. The people loved him because he welcomed the future, the crowd because he had served the Emperor well. As he died he clasped to his chest a sword that officers of the Hundred Days had presented to him. His death was a loss to the people and a worry to the government.
From the day before the funeral, set for the fifth of June, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the procession’s route, seethed dangerously. Carpenters took the clamps from their workbenches, to break down doors, they said. Asked by a friend where he was off to, one carpenter said he had no weapon and was going to his workshop to fetch his compasses. Where’s your pistol, under my smock, and yours, under my shirt. Talk like that passed back and forth almost in the open.