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THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a
thing as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath;
one is in the wrong, the other is in the right.
In democratic states, the only ones which are founded on justice,
it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps; then the whole
rises and the necessary claim of its rights may proceed as far
as resort to arms.
In all questions which result from collective sovereignty,
the war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection; the
attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt; according
as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are justly
or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the populace,
is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire.
Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality; the
Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true.
That which universal suffrage has effected in its liberty
and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the
same in things pertaining purely to civilization; the instinct
of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled to-morrow.
The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray and absurd
when directed against Turgot.
The destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the
breaking of rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of
multitudes, the refusal by the people of justice to progress,
Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland
and stoned,--that is revolt.
Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that
is insurrection.
The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher
Columbus,-- this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?
Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world.
These gifts of a world to civilization are such augmentations
of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable. Sometimes
the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself.
The masses are traitors to the people.
Is there, for example, anything stranger than that long and
bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt, a legitimate chronic
revolt, which, at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation,
at the very hour of popular victory, espouses the throne, turns
into chouannerie, and, from having been an insurrection against,
becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of ignorance!
The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death
to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!"
The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September,
the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the
assassins of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets,
Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of
Brassard,-- behold an uprising.
La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right
in movement is recognizable, it does not always proceed from the
trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked
bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound of bronze.
The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another thing
from the shock of progress.
Show me in what direction you are going.
Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great.
There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.
Any other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards
the rear is a revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence
against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part
of truth; the pavements which the uprising disturbs give forth
the spark of right. These pavements bequeath to the uprising only
their mud. Danton against Louis XIV.
is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.
Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be,
as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be
the most fatal of crimes.
There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection
is often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.
Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in
power. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the
governing powers.
Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.
The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an
absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact
being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated
right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings
with it that protest of which it is capable.
Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was
Juvenal.
The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.
Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also
the man of the Annales.
We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his
part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name
of the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire
and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the
flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.
John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand
him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the
Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.
As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted
to match. The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale;
there must be poured into the channel a concentrated prose which
bites.
Despots count for something in the question of philosophers.
A word that is chained is a terrible word.
The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed
on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a certain
mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals
into bronze. The compression of history produces conciseness in
the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated
prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.
Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which
are augmentations of force.
The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would
be blunted on Caligula.
The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity
in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.
The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.
Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically
superposed upon Caesar.
The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus are
two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously
avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage,
regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus
is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them
to clash with one another.
The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike
too hard and be unjust. God does not will it.
The great wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily
destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into
Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort
of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to let loose upon
the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing Caesar
Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.
Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot
of genius.
There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the
moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such
reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples,
Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply,
in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.
Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.
Under Claudius and under Domitian, there is a deformity of
baseness corresponding to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.
The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot;
a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master
is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences
are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus
it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from
the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor
of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.
Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the
Juvenals; it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator
makes his appearance.
But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like
Dante in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the
multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon.
Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus.
Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster
grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong.
In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds
a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it
remains a riot.
Why?
It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form.
Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck
at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it
the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the
blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why.
The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre
them is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of
the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same
troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult.
In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river
is a torrent.
Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:
revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains
which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right,
formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock
to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is
in a swamp.
All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal
suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in
its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives
it of its arms.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars
on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression.
Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.
However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between
the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking,
knows nothing of such shades.
In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom
must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping,
until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined
vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.
Then the bourgeois shouts:
"Long live the people!"
This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832,
signify, so far as history is concerned?
Is it a revolt?
Is it an insurrection?
It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the
stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial
facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the
form, and insurrection, the foundation.
This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its
melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see
in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with
respect. For them, it is like a relic of 1830.
Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a
day.
A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs undergo
some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain.
There are no Alps without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without
the Asturias.
This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory
of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly
a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A
last word, before we enter on the recital.
The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic
and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for
lack of time and space.
There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,
human tremor.
Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to
speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance
of history.
The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details
of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps
have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.
We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published
peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about
facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the
death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic
scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they
held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able
to say:
"We have seen this." We alter a few names, for history
relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall
paint will be genuine.
In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are
now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and
certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and
the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the
reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are
about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.
THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a
thing as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath;
one is in the wrong, the other is in the right.
In democratic states, the only ones which are founded on justice,
it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps; then the whole
rises and the necessary claim of its rights may proceed as far
as resort to arms.
In all questions which result from collective sovereignty,
the war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection; the
attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt; according
as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are justly
or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the populace,
is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire.
Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality; the
Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true.
That which universal suffrage has effected in its liberty
and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the
same in things pertaining purely to civilization; the instinct
of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled to-morrow.
The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray and absurd
when directed against Turgot.
The destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the
breaking of rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of
multitudes, the refusal by the people of justice to progress,
Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland
and stoned,--that is revolt.
Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that
is insurrection.
The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher
Columbus,-- this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?
Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world.
These gifts of a world to civilization are such augmentations
of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable. Sometimes
the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself.
The masses are traitors to the people.
Is there, for example, anything stranger than that long and
bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt, a legitimate chronic
revolt, which, at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation,
at the very hour of popular victory, espouses the throne, turns
into chouannerie, and, from having been an insurrection against,
becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of ignorance!
The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death
to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!"
The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September,
the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the
assassins of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets,
Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of
Brassard,-- behold an uprising.
La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right
in movement is recognizable, it does not always proceed from the
trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked
bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound of bronze.
The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another thing
from the shock of progress.
Show me in what direction you are going.
Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great.
There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.
Any other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards
the rear is a revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence
against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part
of truth; the pavements which the uprising disturbs give forth
the spark of right. These pavements bequeath to the uprising only
their mud. Danton against Louis XIV.
is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.
Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be,
as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be
the most fatal of crimes.
There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection
is often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.
Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in
power. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the
governing powers.
Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.
The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an
absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact
being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated
right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings
with it that protest of which it is capable.
Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was
Juvenal.
The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.
Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also
the man of the Annales.
We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his
part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name
of the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire
and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the
flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.
John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand
him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the
Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.
As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted
to match. The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale;
there must be poured into the channel a concentrated prose which
bites.
Despots count for something in the question of philosophers.
A word that is chained is a terrible word.
The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed
on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a certain
mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals
into bronze. The compression of history produces conciseness in
the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated
prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.
Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which
are augmentations of force.
The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would
be blunted on Caligula.
The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity
in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.
The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.
Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically
superposed upon Caesar.
The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus are
two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously
avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage,
regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus
is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them
to clash with one another.
The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike
too hard and be unjust. God does not will it.
The great wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily
destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into
Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort
of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to let loose upon
the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing Caesar
Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.
Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot
of genius.
There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the
moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such
reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples,
Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply,
in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.
Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.
Under Claudius and under Domitian, there is a deformity of
baseness corresponding to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.
The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot;
a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master
is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences
are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus
it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from
the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor
of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.
Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the
Juvenals; it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator
makes his appearance.
But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like
Dante in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the
multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon.
Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus.
Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster
grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong.
In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds
a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it
remains a riot.
Why?
It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form.
Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck
at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it
the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the
blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why.
The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre
them is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of
the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same
troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult.
In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river
is a torrent.
Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:
revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains
which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right,
formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock
to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is
in a swamp.
All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal
suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in
its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives
it of its arms.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars
on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression.
Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.
However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between
the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking,
knows nothing of such shades.
In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom
must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping,
until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined
vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.
Then the bourgeois shouts:
"Long live the people!"
This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832,
signify, so far as history is concerned?
Is it a revolt?
Is it an insurrection?
It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the
stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial
facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the
form, and insurrection, the foundation.
This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its
melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see
in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with
respect. For them, it is like a relic of 1830.
Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a
day.
A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs undergo
some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain.
There are no Alps without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without
the Asturias.
This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory
of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly
a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A
last word, before we enter on the recital.
The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic
and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for
lack of time and space.
There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,
human tremor.
Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to
speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance
of history.
The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details
of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps
have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.
We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published
peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about
facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the
death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic
scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they
held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able
to say:
"We have seen this." We alter a few names, for history
relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall
paint will be genuine.
In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are
now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and
certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and
the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the
reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are
about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.
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