________________________________________________
_ 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. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK FIRST - A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY: CHAPTER V. Facts whence History springs and which History ignores
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK FIRST - A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY: CHAPTER III. Louis Philippe
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