Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER IV—CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION
2589 words | Chapter 304
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.
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