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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'Orleans, 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.
None the less 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, revery 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 Conde 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 Perier 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 Vendee, plots,
conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar of tumult
of events to the sombre roar of ideas.
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