Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I—WELL CUT
2126 words | Chapter 301
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.
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