Au Citoyen Guizot

See the entry for this song about the fall and flight of Guizot, the Prime Minister and chair of the Council in 1848.

Full details, including the lyrics of the song and a full French text are aviabble on the Item Page.

The aftermath of revolution: following the three glorious days of February 1848, the young Parisian songwriter, Eugène Baillet made his voice heard by producing a text, designed to be read, but above all, to be sung.

Baillet was born on 20 October 1829 into the craft industry. He left school at 10 and two years later completed his apprenticeship with a jeweler, becoming a jewelry worker.  Early on he frequented goguettes (see the entry “Les Goguettes” on these singing and drinking clubs), in particular Les Enfants du Temple, where he became friends with many of the main popular songwriters of the period.  These included, in particular, Charles Gille, his oldest acquaintance and the leader of the militantly oppositionist goguette who had already achieved much popular success (see also ‘Charles Gille et la Goguette des animaux’).  Baillet’s first song was entitled Les héros de la Bastille which it appears was circulating in 1847 as street ballad.

Baillet was eighteen years old in 1848, when he took up the cause of revolution and the republic. Au Citoyen Guizot and other songs signed by him (Le cri des Français and Ventôse) bear witness to his fervour.  In a tone that is both mocking and vindictive, Au Citoyen Guizot, narrates the causes and characteristics of the overthrow of the July monarchy.

Baillet’s main target was Francois Guizot, the President of the Council who was now on the road to exile.  In the second verse, the text also target’s Guizot’s “old friend”, Pierre-Sylvain Dumon, the Minister of Finance and the executor of the policies of the President and the Council on a range of sensitive issues – including postal rates, the tax on salt, and annuities, between May 1847 and 23 February 1848.  Of course, Citizen Guizot, also took aim at the deposed king Louis Philippe I, who had been forced to flee the Tuileries palace.  In the song, each of these three central characters in the July monarchy is mocked by the people, in a carnival reversal of political roles, with the fall of the king and his entourage, and the rise of the sovereignty of the people.  The people is the people of the February days, but also those of the July days of the 1830 revolution; the throne is burnt at the foot of the “Column” celebrating the February days.  Throughout Baillet, adopts the familiarity of tone that marked popular poetry, (« On parle qu’on va nous le rendre »), “tutoi-ing” Guizot, and renaming the king “Philippe”.

In denouncing Guizot and his family, Baillet evokes from the start the “affairs” in politics, economics and morality that have poisoned the last years of the July Monarchy.  He exposes the confusion of public and private affairs in the monarchy, with the people entering the Tuileries to discover the luxurious intimacy of the king’s apartments and cellars.  Through the revolution, France (a term used in both the opening and concluding verses) is revealed as resuming its rights and taking back its own.

In the fifth verse of Au Citoyen Guizot there is a resonant reference to la Marseillaise, underlining that these verses were meant to be sung.  In the tradition of vaudeville, Eugène Baillet uses the practice of timbre -  the re-using of old tunes and airs, adapted to new words – as described by Romain Benini.  When sung to a well-known and well-paced tune, the text circulated more powerfully and resonantly.  At the same time, the original lyrics also play a role here. The aria “Les anguilles et les jeunes filles” (“The eels and young girls”) refers to a work from the end of the Restoration monarchy of Charles X in 1827 entitled “Masaniello, or the Neopolitan Fisherman”.  The fisherman Matteo sings

“The fishermen of all our harbours

Are lowering the flag in front of me

Of my talent, dear comrades,/ you see a sample:

Salmon, turbot, fine eels,/ In turn fall into my nets,

And even young girls,/ I take everything in my nets.”

Matteo is the brother of Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello), a Neopolitan fisherman who rose to power in in 1647 through a popular uprising, but was then seen as pursuing his own advantage, and was overthrown by the people.  Drawing on the work of Romain Benini we can recognize Baillet is relying on parallels between Guizot’s behaviour and that of Matteo: the ex-president of the Council is “a talker and a thief” and each verse taunts the speaker about an element of the monarchical splendour that is being taken away from him. Moreover, the common and stereotypical representation of Guizot in the aftermath of February is as a thief in the night or an accomplice in the thieving of his patron Louis Philippe.  As Benini concludes, in this way, Baillet accentuates the subversive and sarcastic meaning of his song.’

After writing Au Citoyen Guizot, Baillet continued in his career as a ‘républicain chansonnier’: he became a delegate to the National Workshops established in March 1848 and he founded the goguette “Au minstrel Républicain.”  In the aftermath of the June Days in 1848, he became concerned that the Republic that had so inspired him was taking a more and more conservative direction.  Under the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon he continued to compose and to frequent goguettes.  He also changed profession, becoming a traveling photographer.  He remained faithful to the world of the goguettes under the Third Republic, and to the legacy of Charles Gille.   He died in Paris on March 20, 1906.