





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 Cæsar 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 fouriers32 who do nothing but prepare
lodgings for principles.

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.






But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to
prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title of
Statesmen; so that this word, _statesmen_, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that
wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To
say “the skilful” amounts to saying “the mediocre.”


In the same way, to say “statesmen” is sometimes equivalent to saying
“traitors.” If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like
the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is
indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. Also,
right once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. Liberty once
assured, attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful, but they
begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the first place,
what is power? In the second, whence comes it? The skilful do not seem
to hear the murmured objection, and they continue their manœuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the mask of
necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement of a people
after a revolution, when this people forms part of a monarchical
continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. In this way, say they,
peace, that is to say, time to dress our wounds, and to repair the
house, can be had after a revolution. The dynasty conceals the
scaffolding and covers the ambulance. Now, it is not always easy to
procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the
first man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing
of a king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second,
Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make a
dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity
in a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the “statesmen,” after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his own
person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it, that
he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein,
that he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to
say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed, but by
reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past and be
historic; be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves with
finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely
insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick or the House of
Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success the
sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may tremble
from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken, to augment
the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress, to dull
that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to
cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to
envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very
speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on
the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the
expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar
thinned out with a potion, to take one’s precautions against too much
success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right.
Now, logic knows not the “almost,” absolutely as the sun knows not the
candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be
satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the
bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the
people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair
is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very
march of the human race. This has often been the fault of the
bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is
not one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which that part
of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock
of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and
laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber
which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it
was the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double and almost contradictory
sense: a troop on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is
to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on the
alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels and holds
itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of
to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man who
should express this word Halt. An Although-Because. A composite
individuality, signifying revolution and signifying stability, in other
terms, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the
past with the future.

This man was “already found.” His name was Louis Philippe d’Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it _the best of republics_. The town-hall of Paris took the
place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was “the work of
1830.”


When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their solution
became apparent. All this had been accomplished outside the bounds of
absolute right. Absolute right cried: “I protest!” then, terrible to
say, it retired into the darkness.






Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly
and choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced
to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they
nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them
from falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be
deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the
establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been
cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a
rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of
blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful
of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing
the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober,
serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with
his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of
showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the
regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former
illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of
Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and
speaking them; an admirable representative of the “middle class,” but
outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent
sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting
most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,
very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly
the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene
Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in
public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at
bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own
fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a
gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his
family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived
statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always
governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude,
making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in
getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious
unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes
imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that
imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making
France fear Europe and Europe France! Incontestably fond of his
country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than
authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this
unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits
of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this
valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the
state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct,
vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at
times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona,
obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off
Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to
despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the
ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimæras, to wrath, to
vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a
general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by
regicides and always smiling. Brave as a grenadier, courageous as a
thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking
up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk
his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order
that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;
endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to
minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to
judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy
speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only
point of resemblance with Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing
deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies,
passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations,
the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be
designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the
surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating
himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own
first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities
an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative
faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable
spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a
dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney;
in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to
create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in
spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe will be classed among
the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most
illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and
if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the
feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained
graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the
masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he
wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a
mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis
Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient
pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed at the
service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote
_les Polonois_, and he pronounced _les Hongrais_. He wore the uniform
of the national guard, like Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of
Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the
opera. Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;
this made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went
out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a
part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener,
something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his
horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did
Henri IV. without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous
king, the first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be
made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the
reign, that which accuses the King; three columns which all give
different totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a
matter of secondary interest, the protests of the street violently
repressed, military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over
by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of
the real country by the legal country, on half shares with three
hundred thousand privileged persons,—these are the deeds of royalty;
Belgium refused, Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of
India by the English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach
of faith, to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,—these
are the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than
national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King’s
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of
everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,
which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their
civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his family
was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of
admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis
Philippe’s daughters, Marie d’Orleans, placed the name of her race
among artists, as Charles d’Orleans had placed it among poets. She made
of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d’Arc. Two of Louis
Philippe’s daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: “They are
young people such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never
seen.”


This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is
the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of
the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of
the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein
lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more
complete adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the
other, and the incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man.
Moreover, he had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne,
exile. He had been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his
own labor. In Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in
France had sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he
gave lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work
and sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the
bourgeoisie enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the
iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI., and used by Louis
XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins’ club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the
shoulder; Danton had said to him: “Young man!” At the age of four and
twenty, in ’93, being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the
depth of a box, the trial of Louis XVI., so well named _that poor
tyrant_. The blind clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in
the King and the King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the
man in the fierce crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the
Assembly-Tribunal, the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing
what to reply, the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head
beneath that sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that
catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,—he
had looked on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had
seen the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he
had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made
responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the
shadows; and there had lingered in his soul the respectful fear of
these immense justices of the populace, which are almost as impersonal
as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was
like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,
in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he
rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical
list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the
press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.
The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the
gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the
light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as
yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has
not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a
definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian
Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis
Philippe was elected by those two _almosts_ which are called the 221
and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution;
and in any case, from the superior point of view where philosophy must
place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above,
except with certain reservations in the name of the absolute democratic
principle; in the eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the
right of man in the first place, the right of the people in the second,
all is usurpation; but what we can say, even at the present day, that
after making these reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in
whatever manner he is considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and
from the point of view of human goodness, will remain, to use the
antique language of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever
sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of
the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took
a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He
obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he
disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown
attorneys, those _chatterers of the law_, as he called them. Sometimes
the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was
anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he
said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred: “I won
seven last night.” During the early years of his reign, the death
penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a
violence committed against the King. The Grève having disappeared with
the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under
the name of the Barrière-Saint-Jacques; “practical men” felt the
necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the
victories of Casimir Périer, who represented the narrow sides of the
bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides.
Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi
machine, he exclaimed: “What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I
might have pardoned!” On another occasion, alluding to the resistance
offered by his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political
criminal, who is one of the most generous figures of our day: “His
pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it.” Louis Philippe
was as gentle as Louis IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the
present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor
before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently
and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a
dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing
of the same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly
to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: “This one
flattered the other.”







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’Orléans, 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.

Nonetheless 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, reverie 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 Condé 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 Périer 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 Vendée, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,
added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.






Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The
fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial
revolts had been going on here and there, which were quickly
suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast
underlying conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation.
Glimpses could be caught of the features still indistinct and
imperfectly lighted, of a possible revolution. France kept an eye on
Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning its
ebullition.

[Illustration: A Street Orator]

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union of the
two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops, grave and
stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question. There
people publicly discussed the _question of fighting or of keeping
quiet_. There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that
they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and “that
they would fight without counting the number of the enemy.” This
engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop “assumed a sonorous tone,” and said, “You understand! You
have sworn!”


Sometimes they went upstairs, to a private room on the first floor, and
there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the
initiated take oaths _to render service to himself as well as to the
fathers of families_. That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, “subversive” pamphlets were read. _They treated the
government with contempt_, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:—

“I don’t know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not know the day
until two hours beforehand.” One workman said: “There are three hundred
of us, let each contribute ten sous, that will make one hundred and
fifty francs with which to procure powder and shot.”


Another said: “I don’t ask for six months, I don’t ask for even two. In
less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. With
twenty-five thousand men we can face them.” Another said: “I don’t
sleep at night, because I make cartridges all night.” From time to
time, men “of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats” came and “caused
embarrassment,” and with the air of “command,” shook hands with _the
most important_, and then went away. They never stayed more than ten
minutes. Significant remarks were exchanged in a low tone: “The plot is
ripe, the matter is arranged.” “It was murmured by all who were there,”
to borrow the very expression of one of those who were present. The
exaltation was such that one day, a workingman exclaimed, before the
whole wine-shop: “We have no arms!” One of his comrades replied: “The
soldiers have!” thus parodying without being aware of the fact,
Bonaparte’s proclamation to the army in Italy: “When they had anything
of a more secret nature on hand,” adds one report, “they did not
communicate it to each other.” It is not easy to understand what they
could conceal after what they said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them,
there were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they were
always the same. In others, any one entered who wished, and the room
was so full that they were forced to stand. Some went thither through
enthusiasm and passion; others because it _was on their way to their
work_. As during the Revolution, there were patriotic women in some of
these wine-shops who embraced newcomers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
“Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you.”


Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue de
Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons in the
Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of wooden
broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons were removed
from the foils.

A workman said: “There are twenty-five of us, but they don’t count on
me, because I am looked upon as a machine.” Later on, that machine
became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said to
another woman: “For a long time, there has been a strong force busy
making cartridges.” In the open street, proclamation could be seen
addressed to the National Guard in the departments. One of these
proclamations was signed: _Burtot, wine-merchant_.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the
Marché Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to
emanate from an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down. “—Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our
bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison.”—“The breakdown
which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many
mediums.”—“The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure
ranks.”—“Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or
counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in
inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is
the question. There is no other.”—“On the day when we cease to suit
you, break us, but up to that day, help us to march on.” All this in
broad daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a
passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the
Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: “I am a Babouvist!” But beneath
Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:—

“Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and
treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches
revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and
royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts
with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring
classes.”


“Silence, citizen spy!” cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a “very well
dressed man,” who said to him: “Whither are you bound, citizen?” “Sir,”
replied the workingman, “I have not the honor of your acquaintance.” “I
know you very well, however.” And the man added: “Don’t be alarmed, I
am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite
faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed
on you.” Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying:
“We shall meet again soon.”


The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not
only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

“Get yourself received very soon,” said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

“Why?”


“There is going to be a shot to fire.”


Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with
evident Jacquerie:—

“Who governs us?”


“M. Philippe.”


“No, it is the bourgeoisie.”


The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word _Jacquerie_
in a bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by: “We have a good plan of attack.”


Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four
men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barrière du
Trône:—

“Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris
any more.”


Who was the _he?_ Menacing obscurity.

“The principal leaders,” as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug—, chief of the Society aid
for tailors, Rue Mondétour, had the reputation of serving as
intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these
leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of
this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:—

“Who was your leader?”


_“I knew of none and I recognized none.”_

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle
reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground on
which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly
found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still
legible the following lines:—

The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections
for the different societies.

And, as a postscript:—

We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du
Faubourg-Poissonnière, No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six
thousand, in the house of a gunsmith in that court. The section owns no
arms.

What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up
another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of
which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest
attaching to these strange documents:—

[Illustration]

+——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————+
| Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.  After so doing            |
| | | | | | you will tear it up.  The men admitted will do the same    |
| | | | | | when you have transmitted their orders to them. Health and |
| | | | | | Fraternity, u og a’ fe L.                                  |
+——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————+

It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this
find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital
letters: _quinturions, centurions, decurions, éclaireurs_ [scouts], and
the sense of the letters: _u og a’ fe_, which was a date, and meant
April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names
followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. _Bannerel_. 8 guns, 83
cartridges. A safe man.—C. _Boubière_. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.—D.
_Rollet_. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.—E. _Tessier_. 1 sword, 1
cartridge-box. Exact.— _Terreur_. 8 guns. Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third
paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of
enigmatical list:—

Unité:  Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
Barra.  Soize.  Salle-au-Comte.
Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
J. J. R.
Caius Gracchus.
Right of revision.  Dufond.  Four.
Fall of the Girondists.  Derbac.  Maubuée.
Washington.  Pinson.  1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
Marseillaise.
Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
Hoche.
Marceau.  Plato.  Arbre-Sec.
Warsaw.  Tilly, crier of the Populaire.


The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its
significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature
of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the
Rights of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections.
To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than
history, we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation
of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the
date when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written
notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-à-brac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise and
in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same gray
paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was
written the following:—

Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . .  12 ounces.
Sulphur   . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.
Charcoal  . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces and a half.
Water     . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.


The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell
of powder.

A mason returning from his day’s work, left behind him a little package
on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to the
police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed
dialogues, signed _Lahautière_, a song entitled: “Workmen, band
together,” and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how
warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Père-Lachaise and the Barrière du
Trône, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a bag
containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of
cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of
hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented
evident traces of melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o’clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who was
afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself
killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his
bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of
preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barrière Picpus and the Barrière Charenton in a little lane
between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a “Jeu
de Siam.”33 One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to
the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the
perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the
pistol and added more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the
two men parted.

A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair
of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and
twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On the
following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The
remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a
single one.

An intercepted letter read: “The day is not far distant when, within
four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms.”


All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The
approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of
the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean
crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably
to the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: “How is
the rising coming along?” in the same tone in which they would have
said: “How is your wife?”


A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: “Well, when are you
going to make the attack?”


Another shop-keeper said:—

“The attack will be made soon.”


“I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there
are twenty-five thousand.” He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a
small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor
in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like
those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the
human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over
the country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which
was at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the
Rights of Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day:
_Pluviôse, Year 40 of the republican era_, which was destined to
survive even the mandate of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its
dissolution, and which did not hesitate to bestow on its sections
significant names like the following:—

Pikes.
Tocsin.
Signal cannon.
Phrygian cap.
January 21.
The beggars.
The vagabonds.
Forward march.
Robespierre.
Level.
Ça Ira.


The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action.
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead.
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother
societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn
asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of
the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press,
for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against
indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided
into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.
Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a
military footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant,
twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never
more than five men who knew each other. Creation where precaution is
combined with audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of
Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society
of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced and
repudiated there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities,
Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the
Rights of Man, the Charbonnière, and The Free Men. All had a
revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde. We have already
mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the
faubourgs. A café in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the
_Seven Billiards_, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying
points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A B C
affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the Cougourde of Aix,
met, as we have seen, in the Café Musain. These same young men
assembled also, as we have stated already, in a restaurant wine-shop of
the Rue Mondétour which was called Corinthe. These meetings were
secret. Others were as public as possible, and the reader can judge of
their boldness from these fragments of an interrogatory undergone in
one of the ulterior prosecutions: “Where was this meeting held?” “In
the Rue de la Paix.” “At whose house?” “In the street.” “What sections
were there?” “Only one.” “Which?” “The Manuel section.” “Who was its
leader?” “I.” “You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold
course of attacking the government. Where did your instructions come
from?” “From the central committee.”


The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Béford, Luneville, and Épinard. They
counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth, on
the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. In Burgundy and
in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree; that is to say, a
pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the
population, as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation
and made it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled
like an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees,
was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult.
Everything was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption,
however, of the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea of
this lively yet sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists poignant
distress hidden under attic roofs; there also exist rare and ardent
minds. It is particularly in the matter of distress and intelligence
that it is dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it
received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes,
slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. In times
of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals
rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the
highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to
explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the
fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased by
the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very
gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the _Faubourg Antoine_, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused, possess
historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow intoxicated there
more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and an afflatus
of the future circulates there, swelling hearts and enlarging souls.
The cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine resemble those taverns of
Mont Aventine erected on the cave of the Sibyl and communicating with
the profound and sacred breath; taverns where the tables were almost
tripods, and where was drunk what Ennius calls the _sibylline wine_.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary
agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular
sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil; it can be mistaken like any
other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. We may say of it as
of the blind cyclops, _Ingens_.

In ’93, according as the idea which was floating about was good or
evil, according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm, there
leaped forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions, now
heroic bands.

Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the
early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with
uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris
in an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an
end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the
child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity,
bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress;
and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in
terrible wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in
fist, a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages
of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with fear
and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed
barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask
of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but
ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling,
embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white
plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on
a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on
demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of
divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death
penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the
sword, the stake, and the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to
make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized
men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle
slope.

God takes care of that. God’s whole policy consists in rendering slopes
less steep.






It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible
catastrophe, instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Café Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical but
significant metaphors:—

“It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we may
count. If combatants are required, they must be provided. It can do no
harm to have something with which to strike. Passers-by always have
more chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when
there are none. Let us, therefore, reckon a little on the herd. How
many of us are there? There is no question of postponing this task
until to-morrow. Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has
no time to lose. Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught
unprepared. We must go over all the seams that we have made and see
whether they hold fast. This business ought to be concluded to-day.
Courfeyrac, you will see the polytechnic students. It is their day to
go out. To-day is Wednesday. Feuilly, you will see those of the
Glacière, will you not? Combeferre has promised me to go to Picpus.
There is a perfect swarm and an excellent one there. Bahorel will visit
the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm; you will
bring us news from the lodge of the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré. Joly
will go to Dupuytren’s clinical lecture, and feel the pulse of the
medical school. Bossuet will take a little turn in the court and talk
with the young law licentiates. I will take charge of the Cougourde
myself.”


“That arranges everything,” said Courfeyrac.

“No.”


“What else is there?”


“A very important thing.”


“What is that?” asked Courfeyrac.

“The Barrière du Maine,” replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then
he resumed:—

“At the Barrière du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and
journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic
family, but liable to cool off. I don’t know what has been the matter
with them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They
are becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There
is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but
with firmness. They meet at Richefeu’s. They are to be found there
between twelve and one o’clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.
For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good
fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. I need some one for
the Barrière du Maine. I have no one.”


“What about me?” said Grantaire. “Here am I.”


“You?”


“I.”


“You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold
in the name of principle!”


“Why not?”


“Are you good for anything?”


“I have a vague ambition in that direction,” said Grantaire.

“You do not believe in everything.”


“I believe in you.”


“Grantaire will you do me a service?”


“Anything. I’ll black your boots.”


“Well, don’t meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your
absinthe.”


“You are an ingrate, Enjolras.”


“You the man to go to the Barrière du Maine! You capable of it!”


“I am capable of descending the Rue de Grès, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the
Rue d’Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me
the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vieilles-Tuileries, of
striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussée du Maine, of
passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu’s. I am capable of that. My
shoes are capable of that.”


“Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu’s?”


“Not much. We only address each other as _thou_.”


“What will you say to them?”


“I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles.”


“You?”


“I. But I don’t receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I
have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution
of the year Two by heart. ‘The liberty of one citizen ends where the
liberty of another citizen begins.’ Do you take me for a brute? I have
an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the
sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I
can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in
hand.”


“Be serious,” said Enjolras.

“I am wild,” replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who
has taken a resolution.

“Grantaire,” he said gravely, “I consent to try you. You shall go to
the Barrière du Maine.”


Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Café Musain. He
went out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put
on a Robespierre waistcoat.

“Red,” said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then,
with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of
the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:—

“Be easy.”


He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Café Musain was
deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own
direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved the
Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the
plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous
in that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation in
review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident. When
facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily,
the slightest complication stops and entangles them. A phenomenon
whence arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried a luminous
uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. Who knows? Perhaps
the moment was at hand. The people were again taking possession of
right, and what a fine spectacle! The revolution was again majestically
taking possession of France and saying to the world: “The sequel
to-morrow!” Enjolras was content. The furnace was being heated. He had
at that moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris. He
composed, in his own mind, with Combeferre’s philosophical and
penetrating eloquence, Feuilly’s cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac’s
dash, Bahorel’s smile, Jean Prouvaire’s melancholy, Joly’s science,
Bossuet’s sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly
everywhere at once. All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer
to the effort. This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

“Hold,” said he to himself, “the Barrière du Maine will not take me far
out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu’s? Let us
have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on.”


One o’clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door
fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with
tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another
voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:—

“Double-six.”


“Fours.”


“The pig! I have no more.”


“You are dead. A two.”


“Six.”


“Three.”


“One.”


“It’s my move.”


“Four points.”


“Not much.”


“It’s your turn.”


“I have made an enormous mistake.”


“You are doing well.”


“Fifteen.”


“Seven more.”


“That makes me twenty-two.” [Thoughtfully, “Twenty-two!”]

“You weren’t expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the
beginning, the whole play would have been changed.”


“A two again.”


“One.”


“One! Well, five.”


“I haven’t any.”


“It was your play, I believe?”


“Yes.”


“Blank.”


“What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long reverie.] Two.”


“One.”


“Neither five nor one. That’s bad for you.”


“Domino.”


“Plague take it!”





