Chapter 9: The Unimagined Path (Part I)
Louis Philippe had three generals under his command, namely the Paris Police Inspector General Le Salle, the commander of the Paris garrison, General Sebastian, and the commander of the National Guard, Jacmino, with a total of 60,000 troops.
It was because of such a strong force that Louis Philippe felt that everything was under his control, and of course General Sebastian lied about the army.
In fact, this is also due to the police chief Le Cell, who has the least number of troops under his command, but is all elite.
At that time, the police in Paris were the most elite troops in Paris, and these people were selected from the experienced and strong soldiers.
They have the best equipment, the best training, and the best treatment in France, so they are extremely loyal and disciplined.
It was precisely because of this that Lessell wanted to take the credit for this achievement, and he did not pay attention to General Sebastian's garrison, but chose to send cavalry directly to disperse the crowd.
That's right! At that time, the police in the city of Paris had a cavalry system, and as the defenders of the dynastic order and those who exercised police functions, they inevitably had some conflicts with ordinary people.
This long-term and protracted conflict led to hatred between the two sides, and some of the Parisian police officers came to the police in the line of duty.
Someone had a few broken bones by the Paris police, and some hapless people fell in a shove and were trampled to death.
This may not have been a big deal in normal times, but by this time the anger of the people of Paris had been ignited. And those university students and nationalists are not going to be kneaded by the Paris police like ordinary people.
"The Paris police have killed someone!"
The Paris police have long been accustomed to this kind of talk, but today it was an order from the superintendent, and there was the king's backing behind them, so they became more and more ruthless.
The strong sense of resistance of the people of Paris, as an old district, and the fact that nationalists and student parties took the lead, soon turned the conflict into a fight.
The first shot of gunfire was a sign that the conflict was out of control, and when General Sebastian and his Paris garrison arrived, they were confronted with heavily armed civilians and barricades everywhere.
The populace began to attack weapons shops and lone gendarmes in order to obtain weapons, and the result was that the scale of the chaos became more and more uncontrollable.
Faced with such a chaotic situation, both Le Sail and General Sebastian had no idea, and they wanted to ask the old marshal Sirt to come out of the mountain.
However, the veteran prime minister, who was retiring in a few months, chose to resign at the speed of light, and he did not want to be involved in the maelstrom of the French revolution again.
Paper could not contain the fire, and Baron Pasquière reported to Louis Philippe what had happened in the outside world.
However, the former chose to twist the facts in favor of his colleagues, much to the latter's shock, but Louis Philippe felt that he still had a hole card, and that was the National Guard.
The National Guard was in fact a bourgeois army of taxpayers, and Louis Philippe felt that he and the bourgeoisie of the Orleans faction were one and the same in weal and woe.
The National Guard had a total strength of more than 35,000 men and was headed by Jacquemino, one of Louis Philippe's most trusted ministers.
But trading at a loss was not something that businessmen would do, and almost all of the National Guard ignored Jacmino's orders.
In the end, Jacmino gathered less than a thousand men, who were a drop in the bucket for the situation in Paris at the moment.
And soon these people also shouted "Long live reform" and joined the opposing camp.
The resignation of the prime minister (desertion), the mutiny of the army, nothing could be worse, and if there was, then it must be the situation in Paris at this time.
After Jacmino became the commander of the light pole, he immediately led his family on a cruise to the United States.
Lessail and his police force were besieged by the Parisians, and after a day of fierce fighting, the Parisian police surrendered, and Lessail was lynched, his body dismembered into numerous pieces, and only his head hung in front of the Palais Bourbon.
While Le Saille and his police forces were under siege, General Sebastian and his garrison plunged headlong into the barricades.
The general, apparently lacking experience and courage in actual combat, did not uproot a barricade after 30 hours of attacking.
At this time, Louis Philippe had no choice but to sacrifice his ministers, and he first deposed General Sebastian, the commander of the garrison of Paris, but the people of Paris were clearly not satisfied, and then he removed a dozen ministers in a row to the satisfaction of the popular representatives.
Night, February 23, 1848.
The streets of Paris are lit up as if to welcome the New Year, and crowds of people waving tricolor flags and singing "La Marseillaise" through the streets of Paris.
However, the Parisian garrison and the personal bodyguards of the bigwigs did not let their guard down, as in the historical events of La Fontaine, when a procession passed near the mansion of a certain magnitude when a mysterious gunshot broke the joyous atmosphere.
Frightened by the gunfire, the guards instinctively fired back into the crowd, and gunfire rang out one after another, eventually killing or wounding dozens of people, wailing, crying, and cursing.
After the riots subsided, the light of the torches saw the appearance of the dead, including a young woman with a beautiful face, who had been shot twice in the body, and the clothes on her chest were torn, revealing a large white greasy with a bright red blood.
The anger of the people was ignited again, and the people returned to the barricades and vowed to fight the Orleans to the end.
Louis Philippe tried to make greater concessions, and on the other hand, he reinstated Thiers, who had been deposed for the Turkish-Egyptian war, and Odillon Barrow, who had courted the dynasty.
At this time, Barrow was still trying to persuade the people to give up the war, but he had lost any appeal at this time.
Thiers, on the other hand, continued his usual hard-line style, and he immediately ordered the "butcher" Bijo to take charge of all military affairs in Paris.
Thomas Robert Bijjo de Rabigunli was the aforementioned governor who pursued a policy of massacres in Algeria.
He was also unrelenting to the French, and as soon as he took over, he ordered his soldiers to bombard the barricades with artillery, and thirty minutes later the "butcher" Bijo used the most brutal and efficient way to conquer the barricades that General Sebastian had not been able to conquer in thirty hours.
However, at this time Louis Philippe panicked, he was afraid of a repeat of the tragedy, so he forced Bi Ruo to treat the French people in a more reasonable and gentle way, and he must give the other side a chance to negotiate.
Louis Philippe's behavior directly shook the morale of the army, because the soldiers at the grassroots level clearly felt that the top brass was not determined.
Even a famous general could not lead a team that had lost its morale, so the Parisian government army began to retreat.
Seeing that the tide was turning, Thiers demanded that Louis Philippe immediately withdraw from Paris and take refuge in Orleans, so as not to repeat the mistakes of Louis XVI, while he mobilized a large army from the rest of France to quell the rebellion.
However, at the critical moment, Louis Philippe once again backed down, and at the same time Odilon Barrow also opposed his strategy.
In desperation, Thiers took out the letter that Franz had written to him and fled to Alsace-Lorraine with Louis Philippe's family.