Les Misérables, page 232
CHAPTER I--WELL CUT
1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there.
This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning tobe sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principallines even at the present day.
We shall make the attempt.
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard todefine, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult,and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at ahalting-place.
These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire toconvert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing butrepose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of greatevents, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, wehave seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We wouldexchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "Whata good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we havereached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our firstchange with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third withBonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.
Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions whichare sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, oftranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the sametime certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door intheir turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, theyare, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts arethe stewards of the household and fouriers32 who do nothing but preparelodgings for principles.
This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demandguarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; thisis what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things whichgives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuartsdid not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain aglimpse of in 1814.
The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, hadthe fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, andthat what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House ofBourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, andthat the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. wasmerely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House ofBourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it shouldplease the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should havefelt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not comefrom it.
This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on anill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of atrivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it lookedglum. The people saw this.
It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carriedaway before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive thatit had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceivethat it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.
It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The rootsof French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under thethrone.
The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot inher history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without theBourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; therehad been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And howshould they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reignedon the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at thebattle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes beenso blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authoritywhich facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here belowwhich is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right fromon high.
A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on theguarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them.Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions were our conquests;what it termed our encroachments were our rights.
When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration, supposingitself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that isto say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on itsplan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself upbefore the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested thecollective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty,of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to the nationthat which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which made him acitizen.
This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called theordinances of July. The Restoration fell.
It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile toall forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with italongside.
Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calmdiscussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeurin peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free andstrong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples ofEurope. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannonhad had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and CharlesX. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The windceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, thepure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, andcharming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principleswhich are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could beseen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before thelaw, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, theaccessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in thehands of Providence.
The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, buton the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, butwithout authority; their descent into the night was not one of thosesolemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; itwas neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream ofNapoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, andretained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. Theylacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. CharlesX. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cutover into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilledetiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddeneddevoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored theirrace. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning withweapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possessionof so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government tolaw, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old kingCharles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. andset him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only withsadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, itwas France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with hervictory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume duVair after the day of the Barricades:--
"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of thegreat, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an afflictedfortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh towards theirPrince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my Kings andespecially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to me."
The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we havejust stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded outin the horizon.
The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout theentire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, theothers turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, woundedand stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can becomprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution hadhardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty thehonor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the eyesof despotic governments, who are always interested in having libertycalumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of beingformidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted orplotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the mosttrembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, amysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of thecollaboration of some one who is working above man.
The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. Athing which is full of splendor.
Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of beingviolent.
Right is the just and the true.
The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. Thefact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when mostthoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, andif it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infalliblydestined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree ofhideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor ademon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, thefact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in thepresence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.
This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the originof society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with thehumane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the factand the fact into right, that is the task of sages.
