Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER III—LOUIS PHILIPPE
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