الفصل الفصل 268 · THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as

insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the

wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones

which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction

usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may

proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from

collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is

insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;

according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are

justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the

populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of

Vendémiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;

the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which

universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty

cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining

purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted

to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when

directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The

destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of

rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the

refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by

students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,—that is

revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against

Cicero,—that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,—that is

insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against

Christopher Columbus,—this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?

Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which

Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander

like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to

civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in

that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to

itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,

anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in

contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive

moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,

espouses the throne, turns into _chouannerie_, and, from having been an

insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of

ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and

with a rope’s end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. “Death to

the salt duties,” brings forth, “Long live the King!” The assassins of

Saint-Barthélemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of

Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the

assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of

Jéhu, the chevaliers of Brassard,—behold an uprising. La Vendée is a

grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is

recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited

masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do

not give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances

is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what

direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may

grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any

other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a

revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human

race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements

which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These

pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis

XIV. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as

Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most

fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is

often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.

Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing

powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely

modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space

of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering

of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which

it is capable. Under the Cæsars, there was no insurrection, but there

was Juvenal.

The _facit indignatio_ replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Cæsars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of

the _Annales_. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on

his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of

the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts

on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection

of the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we

may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who

writes the _Annales_ is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a

Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The

work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured

into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word

that is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his

style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this

silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into

thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history

produces conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and

such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the

tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are

augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed

for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in

the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his

might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,

overwhelms as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed

upon Cæsar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are

two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be

mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the

stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Cæsar is great, Tacitus

is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to

clash with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Cæsar,

might strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great

wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization

introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,—all this glory

covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine

justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the

formidable historian, sparing Cæsar Tacitus, and according extenuating

circumstances to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of

genius. There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the

moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such

reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus

as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face,

more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and

under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the

repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product

of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein

the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;

consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under

Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus,

while, from the Roman Senate, under Cæsar, there comes nothing but the

odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;

it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his

appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in

the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which

is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;

insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;

insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the

stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always

in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzançais, for example,

holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it

remains a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in

form. Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at

random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses

of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of

inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment

of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of

August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before

the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning,

the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it

ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those

lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom,

reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall

from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency

and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,

insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a

swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal

suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its

inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of

its arms. The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars

on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day

may be, To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the

former and the latter,—the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing

of such shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and

simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite

whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping,

until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined

vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: “Long live the people!”

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,

so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to

say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,

and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and

insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy

extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an

uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it

is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be

calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs

undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a

mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,

nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of

Parisians calls “the epoch of the riots,” is certainly a characteristic

hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we

enter on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and

living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time

and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life,

palpitation, human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already

said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in

the distance of history. The epoch, surnamed “of the riots,” abounds in

details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and

perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.

We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published

peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts

over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of

others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have

disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace;

but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: “We have seen

this.” We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform

against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In

accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we

shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least

known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but

we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse,

beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of

this frightful public adventure.