The Vanishing Children of Paris, by Anna Mazzola

May, 1750. Children have been disappearing from the streets of Paris. A lawyer named Barbier writes in his diary: 'For a week now people have been saying that police constables in disguise are roaming around various quarters of Paris, abducting children, boys and girls from five or six years old to ten or more, and loading them into the carriages which they have ready waiting nearby.’

Some said the children were being sent off to the colonies or to the wars. Some believed the police were using them to extract ransom money. But others thought something far darker was at work. Barbier noted the belief that the kidnappers were agents of 

‘a leprous prince whose cure required a bath in human blood, and there being no blood purer than that of children, these were seized so as to be bled from all their limbs’. 

And some said this prince was in fact their King.

Louis XV by Hyacinthe Rigaud

‘The wicked people … are calling me a Herod,’ whined Louis XV, the so-called ‘Well-Beloved’ whose popularity was rapidly dwindling. But with no official explanation forthcoming, the panic continued to mount. School-masters placed posters on walls warning parents ‘not to allow their children to go to school alone but to accompany them and collect them for we can take no responsibility for the consequences.’ Parisian glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra later remembered being met from his primary school by his father, along with ‘seven strong cooper lads each carrying a crowbar over his shoulder’.

The riots begin 

On 22 May, street-fighting broke out in six different quarters of Paris. Crowds numbering four of five thousand people, women prominent among them, broke windows, forced down doors, stoned public buildings and looted shops for weapons with which to fight. The revolt flared up again, stronger, the following day after a constable called Labbé was seen trying to grab an eleven-year old boy from the Pont Marie. A crowd rushed to the scene, liberated the boy, then chased Labbé through the city. Despite the intervention of the Watch and exchange of gunfire, the furious crowd managed to drag Labbé away from his guards and beat him to death in the street. He was not the only casualty. Over the course of the revolt, at least twenty rioters were killed, and an unknown number injured on both sides. 

An official inquiry was instigated. The police, speculating wildly, blamed the riots on a variety of sources: organised criminals, bands of disreputables, mysterious men in black who mingled with the crowds and whipped up trouble.

Policemen of the Guet, 1745, Étienne Jeaurat 

'A hard, haughty, cruel man' 

But it was in fact with the police that the trouble had begun. Specifically, it was with the Lieutenant General of Police, Berryer, one of the appointees installed by Louis XV’s mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. According to Tocqueville, Berryer was 'a hard, haughty, cruel man, with much ignorance and even more presumption and stubbornness'. In November, 1749, an edict had been issued that:

 ‘all beggars and vagrants found in the streets of Paris…of whatever age or sex, shall be arrested and taken to prison, there to be detained for as long as shall be deemed necessary.’ 

Berryer was the man in charge of enforcing the edict and he wanted instant, tangible results. Rather than pay his officers a flat rate, he decided to reward them according to the number of arrests they made. He also ordered that those arrested be taken immediately to prison, without first going to the commissioner, and he sanctioned the arrest of ‘all children of workers and bourgeois alike caught gambling in the squares and market places along with other little rascals and vagabonds’. This was why not just ‘vagabonds’, but the sons and daughters of tradespeople running errands, and children playing in the street, had been carted off in shuttered carriages and left in Paris’ bleak houses of detention until their parents could find them and pay for them to be released. 

Tour du Temple, circa 1795

No justice, no peace

The inquiry sentenced three constables to a symbolic punishment, but Berryer himself was never explicitly criticised. The real role of the inquiry was not to investigate the causes of the vanishings, but to punish insurrection against authority. Three young rioters were condemned to the gallows, the youngest only sixteen years old. At the hour of their execution, the crowd rose up again to try to save the condemned men, but they were pushed back. 

The people dispersed, but they did not forget. And their discontent crystallised on the figure of Louis XV. This, it was said, was the summer when it was discovered that the people of France no longer loved their King.

Further reading:

The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumour and Politics before the French Revolution, by Arlette Farge, Jacques Revel, Claudia Mieville.

Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-century Paris, by Arlette Farge.

MANCHESTER JUNE 15th, 1996 by Adèle Geras

  Twenty years ago....a long time ago...once upon a time...back in the day, terrorists had much better manners.  On the morning of June 15th (a most beautiful, sunny day in Manchester) the IRA rang up the police and gave them notice that there would be a bomb in the city centre.  Remember that: the police had notice of the bomb. They sent in robots to find it, and they had time to evacuate the 80, 000 people working in shops and office in the area.

       Meanwhile, four  miles down the road, in leafy West Didsbury, I was getting ready to go to town. I was in search of a wedding present and I intended to go to Debenham's to look around their rather good cookery store. 

I took the 42 bus and as this was long, long ago in the days when most people still didn't have mobile phones, I gazed out of the window at Manchester looking rather lovely. As I say, the sun was shining. There was a some exciting sporting event going on...was it the Olympics? European Cup? In any case, there was something happening that was lifting this normally vibrant city to even more vibrant heights.

I didn't think anything of it when I got off the bus at Piccadilly Gardens and saw crowds filling the space. I was pondering jugs, possibly lovely glasses, or maybe even some kind of coffee pot for my friends who were getting married. I crossed the square to get to Debenham's, making my way through lots of (now I'm remembering) very quiet people. On the pavement in front of Debenham's stood a policeman. Behind him, the street was cordoned off. There was no traffic, I noticed,  on Market Street. I said to the policeman: "Can I go into Debenham's, please?"
 "No, sorry," said the policeman. "The whole area's cordoned off. We've just had a bomb threat."

In that instant, the bomb went off.  A huge, loud, fiery explosion which shook the ground and hurt the ears and which I could see, rising above the buildings. I saw it. I was standing about three minute's walk from where it detonated. Smoke, and alarms going off and everyone in the square still not saying a thing, and not moving. I will never forget it. The policeman didn't bat an eyelid. Cool doesn't begin to cover it.
 "You'd better go and stand over there with the others," he said. And so I did.

I went to stand with everyone else. There were suddenly lots of police everywhere. People from Debenham's and other shops nearby, still in their shop uniforms, were standing in tight groups. Buses appeared: lots and lots of buses, and someone from the police guided  thousands and thousands of us towards them as they left  Piccadilly Gardens going south. They didn't charge anyone for the ride.  People lined up at the bus stops. There wasn't one person I saw who pushed, or shoved or made any fuss of any kind. They simply lined up and got on the buses. There were long, long queues at the phone boxes. One at a time, everyone stood there, waiting to phone someone to tell them they were okay and not to worry. I didn't see a mobile phone that day, though I guess there must have been some early ones around. 80,000 people were behaving as well as any group of people I've ever seen has ever behaved. Calm police persons, calm bus drivers, silent passengers looking over their shoulders, back at the centre of town, which was now changed forever. Every pane of glass within a very wide radius was shattered. The hundred or so injured people were hurt by broken glass.  Not one single person was killed. That's worth saying again: NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON WAS KILLED. And that's because terrorists in those days behaved differently  from today's killers. A phone call made the difference.

When I got home, my husband, who'd heard the noise of the explosion from four miles away, dismissed it as a lorry backfiring or something. He'd been reading. There was no Twitter, nor  any internet  connection to tell him the news. We turned on the tv and watched the reports. We listened to the radio. We read the newspapers.  And that was it.

A short while later, we went into town to see the damage for ourselves. I remember a pub with a big chalkboard in front of it and on it in big letters was the legend: F*** YOU, IRA! We're open!" That was the attitude of the whole city. The centre was rebuilt to be even better than it was before, and there were jokers who persisted in saying that the IRA had done us a favour.  Nevertheless, I can still remember how I felt that night as we walked around in streets full of broken windows and twisted traffic lights: bereft. Sadder than I thought it was  possible to be about the physical fabric of the city. To see the buildings destroyed hurt me in a way I'd never have thought possible. "No one was killed," I kept telling myself. "This can be rebuilt." As indeed it was, and in record time, but the wounds to bricks and mortar were very sore that night and I can recall how it felt whenever I see pictures of war zones, so much, much worse than anything Manchester suffered.

There are many clips on Youtube which show film of what I've been describing. Just put in Manchester IRA Bomb on the site and that'll get you there.  But what these clips of film can't describe is the people, who were amazing and brave and in every way admirable.  And that's one thing that hasn't changed in the twenty intervening years. For the most part, people behave admirably when things get tough.