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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 Caesar 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 fouriers[32]
who do nothing but prepare lodgings for principles.
[32] In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.
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.
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