Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER II—THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
2302 words | Chapter 346
There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as
insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the
wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones
which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction
usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may
proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from
collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is
insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;
according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are
justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the
populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of
Vendémiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;
the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which
universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty
cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining
purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted
to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when
directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The
destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of
rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the
refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by
students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,—that is
revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,—that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,—that is
insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against
Christopher Columbus,—this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?
Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to
civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in
that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to
itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,
anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in
contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive
moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into _chouannerie_, and, from having been an
insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of
ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope’s end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. “Death to
the salt duties,” brings forth, “Long live the King!” The assassins of
Saint-Barthélemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of
Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the
assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of
Jéhu, the chevaliers of Brassard,—behold an uprising. La Vendée is a
grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is
recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited
masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do
not give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances
is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what
direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may
grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any
other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a
revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human
race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These
pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis
XIV. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is revolt.
Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as
Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most
fatal of crimes.
There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.
Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing
powers.
Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.
The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering
of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which
it is capable. Under the Cæsars, there was no insurrection, but there
was Juvenal.
The _facit indignatio_ replaces the Gracchi.
Under the Cæsars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
the _Annales_. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on
his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of
the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts
on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection
of the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we
may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who
writes the _Annales_ is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a
Roman.
As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.
Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word
that is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his
style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this
silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into
thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history
produces conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and
such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the
tyrant.
Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
might.
The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.
Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
upon Cæsar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are
two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be
mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the
stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Cæsar is great, Tacitus
is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to
clash with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Cæsar,
might strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great
wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization
introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,—all this glory
covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine
justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the
formidable historian, sparing Cæsar Tacitus, and according extenuating
circumstances to genius.
Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of
genius. There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the
moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such
reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus
as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face,
more usefully in the presence of all humanity.
Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and
under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product
of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein
the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;
consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under
Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus,
while, from the Roman Senate, under Cæsar, there comes nothing but the
odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.
Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his
appearance.
But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in
the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which
is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the
stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always
in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzançais, for example,
holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it
remains a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in
form. Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at
random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses
of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of
inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment
of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning,
the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it
ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those
lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom,
reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall
from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency
and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
swamp.
All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal
suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its
inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of
its arms. The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars
on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day
may be, To-morrow will be peace.
However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the
former and the latter,—the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing
of such shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and
simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite
whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping,
until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined
vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.
Then the bourgeois shouts: “Long live the people!”
This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?
It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and
insurrection, the foundation.
This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy
extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an
uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it
is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be
calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs
undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,
nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.
This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of
Parisians calls “the epoch of the riots,” is certainly a characteristic
hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we
enter on the recital.
The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time
and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life,
palpitation, human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already
said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in
the distance of history. The epoch, surnamed “of the riots,” abounds in
details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and
perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.
We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published
peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts
over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of
others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have
disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace;
but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: “We have seen
this.” We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform
against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In
accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we
shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least
known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but
we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse,
beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of
this frightful public adventure.
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