Chương Chương 224 · 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 to be

sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal

lines even at the present day.

We shall make the attempt.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to

define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and

which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a

halting-place.

These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to

convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but

repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,

to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great

events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have

seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would

exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. “What

a good little king was he!” We have marched since daybreak, we have

reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first

change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with

Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.

Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which

are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,

what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of

tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same

time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in

their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they

are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,

and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts are

the stewards of the household and fouriers32 who do nothing but prepare

lodgings for principles.

This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:—

At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts

demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to

men.

This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this

is 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 which

gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts

did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a

glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell,

had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed,

and that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House

of Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing,

and that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII.

was merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of

Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should

please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have

felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come

from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an

ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a

trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked

glum. The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried

away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive

that it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not

perceive that 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 roots

of 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 the

throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in

her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,

and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the

Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there had

been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how

should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII.

reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at

the battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes

been so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine

authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension

here below which is called the right of kings denied to such a point

the right from on high.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on the

guarantees “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, supposing

itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that

is to say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on

its plan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself

up before the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested

the collective title and the individual right of the nation to

sovereignty, of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to

the nation that which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which

made him a citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the

ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.

It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to

all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it

alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm

discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur

in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and

strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of

Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon

had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles

X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind

ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the pure

light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and

charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great

principles which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman,

could be seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality

before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of

the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it

proceeded until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization

which broke in the hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but

on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but

without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those

solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it was

neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of

Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and

retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They

lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles

X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut

over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled

etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened

devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their

race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with

weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession

of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,

restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to

law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king

Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and

set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with

sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it

was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her

victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,

before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du

Vair after the day of the Barricades:—

“It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of the

great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an

afflicted fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh

towards their Prince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my

Kings and especially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to

me.”

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we have

just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded

out in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout the

entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, the

others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,

the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, wounded

and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can be

comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution

had hardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty

the honor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the

eyes of despotic governments, who are always interested in having

liberty calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault

of being formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was

attempted or plotted against it. The most discontented, the most

irritated, the most trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our

rancor may be, a mysterious respect springs from events in which we are

sensible of the collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A

thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of

1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being

violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The

fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most

thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and

if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly

destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,

even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of

hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,

let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a

demon, 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, the fact

of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the

presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin

of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with

the humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the

fact and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.