Chương Chương 227 · CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION

At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of

penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop

the beginning of Louis Philippe’s reign, it was necessary that there

should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should

offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority

without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a

revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the

Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d’Orléans, exercised no personal

initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have

been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had

not taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it;

convinced, wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the

offer was in accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in

accordance with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we

say it in good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in

perfect good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its

attack, the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs

neither on the King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles

resembles a clash of elements. The ocean defends the water, the

hurricane defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy

defends the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the

absolute, which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but

that which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety

later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one

of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the

Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one foot on the

republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible, and all on one side;

but those who are in error are so sincerely; a blind man is no more a

criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the

fatality of things alone these formidable collisions. Whatever the

nature of these tempests may be, human irresponsibility is mingled with

them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it

was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague

movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so

lacking in solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the

preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and

from being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of

France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have

said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text

written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of

it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of

nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most

sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when

they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed; there

are already twenty translations on the public place. From each

remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation a faction;

and each party thinks that it alone has the true text, and each faction

thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they

are the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think

that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the

right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one

who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely

the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,

contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists

sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives

even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A

revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because

it must be that it is.

Nonetheless did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of

1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors

make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable

spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this

revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: “Revolution, why this

king?” Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from them,

this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was

clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.

The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the

establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at

loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the

other hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and

had become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all

Europe. To keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony

established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. From

this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born

armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the

harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself. The Royalty

of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the

harness of European cabinets. Metternich would gladly have put it in

kicking-straps. Pushed on in France by progress, it pushed on the

monarchies, those loiterers in Europe. After having been towed, it

undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education,

penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery,

production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights

of capital, the rights of labor,—all these questions were multiplied

above society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement

became manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic

fermentation. The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another

manner, but quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,

traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with

indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,

others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social

questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who

tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly

disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught

glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this

agitated epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights, they

occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from

society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,

of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such

as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal

by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a

manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,

patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. These

men who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may

all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to

pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of

human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works

embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French

Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not

here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view,

the questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves to indicating

them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic

visions, reverie and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two

principal problems.

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must

be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without, individual

happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation

great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth

admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one

side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence,

monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the

rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,

feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation,

which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the

State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur

in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral

element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.

They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition

abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by

the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore

impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is

not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The

two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will

be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like

England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will

die by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England

will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely

selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a

virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we

designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies

superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations

always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will

live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the

nation, is immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,

suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by

the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is

making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,

mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and

compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science

the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one

and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render

property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,

so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an

easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to

produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once

moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself

France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have

gone astray; that is what it sought in facts, that is what it sketched

out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen

necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, confused

evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system of politics to be

created, which shall be in accord with the old world without too much

disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal, a situation in which it

became necessary to use Lafayette to defend Polignac, the intuition of

progress transparent beneath the revolt, the chambers and streets, the

competitions to be brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in

the Revolution, perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the

vague acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain

of his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people,

his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully, and there

were moments when strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed

by the difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,

nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually

drawing nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over

ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had

been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. At times the conscience

of the honest man resumed its breathing, so great was the discomfort of

that air in which sophisms were intermingled with truths. Spirits

trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm.

The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first

comer, a stranger, brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in

again. At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be

formed as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July, the year

1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince

de Condé engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as

Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince and

giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas,

behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in

Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand

over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North

no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her

coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe,

England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was

tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage

sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the

fleurs-de-lys erased from the King’s carriage, the cross torn from

Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead

in indigence, Casimir Périer dead in the exhaustion of his power;

political and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two

capitals of the kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in

the city of toil; at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two

cities, the same glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the

brow of the people; the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the

Duchesse de Berry in la Vendée, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,

added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.