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IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?
There exists a very respectable liberal school which does
not hate Waterloo.
We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied
date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an
egg is certainly unexpected.
If one places one's self at the culminating point of view
of the question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary
victory.
It is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and
Vienna against Paris; it is the statu quo against the initiative;
it is the 14th of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March,
1815; it is the monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to
the indomitable French rioting. The final extinction of that vast
people which had been in eruption for twenty-six years--such was
the dream.
The solidarity of the Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs,
the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs with the Bourbons.
Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper.
It is true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom
by the natural reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and
that a constitutional order was the unwilling result of Waterloo,
to the great regret of the conquerors.
It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and that
being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping
up afresh:
before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing the old thrones;
after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and conforming to the
charter.
Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and
a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate
equality; Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration
of the rights of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution
is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the
nature of progress, call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work
irresistibly, and it is already fulfilling it to-day. It always
reaches its goal strangely. It employs Wellington to make of Foy,
who was only a soldier, an orator.
Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune. Thus
does progress proceed.
There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.
It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine
work the man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering
invalid of Father Elysee.
It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the conqueror;
of the conqueror without, of the gouty man within.
Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of European thrones
by the sword, had no other effect than to cause the revolutionary
work to be continued in another direction. The slashers have finished;
it was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was
intended to arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory
was vanquished by liberty.
In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo;
that which smiled in Wellington's rear; that which brought him
all the marshals' staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the
staff of a marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the
barrows full of bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which
triumphantly inscribed on that pedestal the date "June 18,
1815"; that which encouraged Blucher, as he put the flying
army to the sword; that which, from the heights of the plateau
of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over its prey, was
the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution which murmured
that infamous word "dismemberment." On arriving in Paris,
it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which
scorched its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the
stammer of a charter.
Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo.
Of intentional liberty there is none.
The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal, in the same
manner as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was involuntarily
revolutionary.
On the 18th of June, 1815, the mounted Robespierre was hurled
from his saddle.
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